The authors of the impressive collection of essays in Critical Approaches to Science and Religion (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023) share a conviction that the conventional paradigms for understanding the relationship between science and religions, those of conflict and complexity, need further critical reflection. The paradigm of conflict and its converse, that of Stephen Jay Gould’s nonoverlapping magisteria, regard science and religion as essentially different domains of knowledge based on the opposite sides of the fact/value distinction. Science deals with the empirical world, and religion deals with values and meanings. The paradigm of complexity demonstrates how the absolute distinction between science and religion, or the production of facts and values, is historically and intellectually untenable. An examination of how science and religion are in fact socially produced reveals a set of entanglements, or overlapping social forces, that show how “science” and “religion” are mutually implicated. As Jason Storm (2023, 150) writes in his essay Dark Gods in the Age of Light, “the histories of religion and science are not two independent narratives but rather the tale of conjoined twins born late and in the moment of their mutual contrastive self-definition.” Rather than viewing the categories of science and religion as “ahistorical abstractions,” we should view them as “historically conditioned, unfolding processes” (Storm 2023, 150).

But as the editors of this volume note, the mere acknowledgment of complexity, of noting that “science” and “religion” are terms by which modernity denominates and ascribes value to certain social processes, is not enough. A critical approach to this complex entanglement “reveals how science and religion emerged alongside—and, indeed, constitute—modern power structures and identities, and, in turn, undergirded the emergence of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality in the modern world” (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 2). Just to make the point more explicit, we should go one step further and clarify that the power structures and identities produced by the dualisms of the ideology of modernity are those that enable white supremacy, patriarchy, colonization, and genocide. Delineating how, historically and theoretically, the production of science and religion as mutually entangled categories both contributed to and was enabled by the social construction of racism, etc. is the significant achievement of the essays in this book.

For more than thirty years since Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Western thought has been digesting the culturally constructed nature of the chief dualisms of modernity such as nature/culture. More recently, we have been aware that the hierarchical nature of these dualisms and the universalization of these hierarchies has produced, as Terence Keel notes, “the history and values that established what [Sylvia Winter] calls ‘the overrepresentation’ of the white European as the universal ‘Man’” (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 45). Man, science, reason, white, etc. are deemed to be universals, while their corollaries are local, transitory, or ephemeral.

This produces a chief distinction between Western science and what Eli Nelson describes in his chapter as “Native science.” In his comparison of Indigenous and European geographies, he quotes David A. Chang: “Kānaka understood geography from points of view. Kānaka did not describe the world as an abstract truth but as a world seen from a perspective” (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 288). Where Western geography sought an Archimedean vantage point from which to order all knowledge, Indigenous science produced knowledge from the context of the particular relationship between people, places, and things. As a result, “universal science” presumed the right to order the world for everyone and thus “overran” Indigenous science without even realizing what it had done.

But to what end this critique? In his essay, Keel quotes Cornel West’s criticism of contemporary postmodern American philosophy as a “culturally lifeless rhetoric mirroring a culture (or civilization) permeated by the scientific ethos, regulated by racist, patriarchal, capitalist norms and pervaded by a debris of decay” (Perez Sheldon, Ragab, and Keel 2023, 55). The danger is that the critique of the categories has the paradoxical effect of continuing to inscribe them within our apprehension of the world rather than managing to subvert or transcend them. Critique as it has been developed within contemporary philosophy has been largely an internal process, that is to say, reflecting critically on the categories modernity has produced. Modern Europeans produced the categories of race and gender that have enabled the colonial construction of science and religion (and vice versa), and the solution to this problem, as presented in this volume, is to attempt to undo this from within.

But what if we think about knowledge not from the perspective of these dualisms? What I would like to present is a complementary strategy to the internal critique of the construction of science and religion, which is to propose a critique from without, namely, a critique from the perspective of the Chinese engagement with modernity.

China ought to be an important voice in the discussion of the production of science and religion, not least because it was never subject to a complete colonization by the West. As such, it retains a strong cultural identity difficult for Europeans and Americans to digest. China does not fit neatly into the category of colonial power or colonized subaltern. China is difficult to read because the West has consistently and to this day been unable, despite its best efforts, to bring it to heel, to subject China to the West’s privileged claim to universal orderings. Science functions differently in China. Religion functions differently in China. The internet functions differently in China. Economics functions differently. And as much as we in the West try to bring China into view using our own theoretical lenses and cultural critiques, we are continuously obstructed by China’s refusal to defer to our systems of meaning.

It is beyond the scope of this short reflection to articulate in full what an engagement with Chinese views of science and religion might contribute to the ideas voiced in Critical Approaches to Science and Religion, but I would like to point to a theoretical issue regarding the question of borders, or boundaries between categories, an issue very well explored in section two of the book.

The Chinese approach to knowledge production has not proceeded in ways readily digestible by Western approaches to knowledge production. This gap was famously described in the preface of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. Here, he presents a passage from Jorge Luis Borges’s (1984, xv) Ficciones that cites “‘a certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a very long way off look like flies.’” The categories in the fictional Chinese encyclopedia are not simply different from how we imagine knowledge to be ordered in the West but rather defy logic. By what sense can “frenzied” and “drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush” be considered the same category of thing such that they could be placed in a series? Though humorous and fictional, Foucault, via Borges, makes the point that taxonomies of knowledge create different perceptions of reality that combine to render one culture illegible to another. Although universal science was capable of overrunning Indigenous knowledges in the lands conquered by European empires, this process of colonial erasure did not fully take hold in China.

To give a concrete example from contemporary China, let us consider the case of what is called “traditional Chinese medicine,” or TCM. TCM functions in China as a hybrid between what actually was Chinese medicine and modern scientific biomedicine. Chinese medicine, as a category of knowledge production about the human body and practical treatments for disease, in principle defies universalization. The basic principle of Chinese medicine is that the whole body should be treated as a system, and treatment for one person’s symptoms might not be the same as treatment for another person’s symptoms, given the holistic understanding of that individual’s body. For this reason, Chinese medicine cannot in principle be subjected to the double-blind, randomized trials that are the foundation of modern biomedicine.

At the same time, Chinese medical theory in its classical form is based on a series of correlations between categories. Seasons, flavors, colors, and times of day all interact to produce a constellation of effects within the body. Ailments are to be treated with regard to all these correlations. Scientific biomedicine, on the other hand, is based on the principle of linear causation. It should not matter for controlling a virus whether the season is humid or one eats sour foods. These correlative factors should have nothing to do with scientific causation. But these factors are taken seriously in Chinese medicine diagnosis and treatment.

In twentieth-century China, the status of Chinese medicine was hotly debated because of its association with traditional culture and its apparent incompatibility with modern science. A compromise arose with the creation of what is known today as TCM, in which the methods and principles of Chinese medicine continue, but subject to a process of rationalization and scientization. It is difficult for me as an outsider to appreciate on a theoretical level how and why this hybrid form of medicine exists and functions well in China today, but it does. The fact that TCM functions in China alongside scientific biomedicine is testament to the power of Chinese category thinking to hold apparent contradictions in tension without the overwhelming need to collapse a tension into a singularity.

A second example of the different nature of Chinese cultural thought lies in its ability to tolerate difference at different levels of sociopolitical reality. Confucian thought imagines the sociopolitical context as a series of concentric circles radiating from the self to the family, the broader community, the nation, and the totality of human polity, understood as “all under heaven” (tianxia 天下). What I think is difficult us to appreciate about Chinese polity is that these layers are not to be understood as isomorphic copies of each other, like Matryoshka dolls. Things may function one way at the family level and in a different way at the community level. Although the smaller realities are inscribed within the larger realities and subject to downward pressures from those larger contexts, there is no sense that the absolute identity between these levels is an ideal to be aimed for. This is why, for example, a directive issued at a national level may be implemented in different ways in different locations in China. Higher levels of government do not generally prescribe the ways lower levels of government should implement the policy directives they issue. This even applies to issues such as national security or border controls, where policies and processes may differ in different cities in China (see Donaldson 2017). This is quite different from the federal political model, where federal governments and state governments have clearly demarcated and different areas of responsibility.

The relevance of this polity issue for the science–religion discussion concerns the relationship between the categories whereby we organize knowledge and society. The logic of modernity is predicated on dualisms that are “either/or.” Critical theory seeks to demonstrate how the dualisms of modernity function as hierarchies in which one element seeks to dominate and even negate the other: mind/body; male/female; universal/local; science/religion, etc. Chinese thought is based on a different set of logical processes in which, famously, “a white horse is not a horse” (白马非马也), and yin and yang do not dominate, erase, or contradict each other but function codependently as a process of transformation.

This is all to make the relatively straightforward point that cultures do not vary based on how they instantiate a set of universal categories (gender, race, class, etc.) but rather on the way their different taxonomies function, so as to create different epistemological realities. Criticism, therefore, does not only have to operate by means of showing the outworkings of the racist and patriarchal logics of colonialism. It can also operate by means of engaging the alternative category formations that exist in cultures, like China, that have not been completely dominated by the logics of Western modernity.

The terms “science” (kexue 科学) and “religion” (zongjiao 宗教) did not exist in China before they were created in the nineteenth century engagement with Western thought, but this does not mean science and religion did not exist; it was just that they were not conceptualized via the dualistic framework of modernity. There is a plausible argument to be made that “by conventional intellectual criteria, China had its own scientific revolution in the seventeenth century,” though it was not categorized by Chinese people as such (Sivin 1982, 46). This historical question, however, is almost impossible to answer, given the fact that we are attempting to make judgments about the development of Chinese history based on a set of categories that are alien to it. “Science” and “religion” or “civilization” are not explanatory categories but rather the “ideologies of the historical protagonists” (Hart 1999, 109). While China has wholeheartedly embraced “science” and dismissed “religion” in its quest for modernization, this does not mean Chinese society is conforming to the logics of European modernity. Chinese medicine, Confucian mores, and popular superstitions continue to resist the project of Western scientific and political coloniality through the continued articulation of Chinese categories of knowledge, even as China rushes headlong to create the most technologically advanced society in the world.

References