Learning Through Peculiar Things: Knowledge and Worldview in 16-18th Century China

Abstract

This dissertation examines a mode of seeing, studying, thinking, and explaining the natural world in late imperial China from the late sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. Through Ming and Qing writings on cosmology, natural history, and strange creatures and phenomena, it explores where early modern Chinese looked for knowledge about the external world of heaven and earth (ch. tiandi 天地), and how they produced such knowledge. This dissertation argues that by the late sixteenth century, people in China came to see and explain the world in increasingly concrete and material terms. What is meant by this “material turn” in a cultural-intellectual, and epistemological sense is revealed through an analysis of the changes in sixteenth-century discussions of qi 氣 (“substantial particles” in this specific historical context) and “things (ch. wu 物).” I argue that “things” in particular gained an unprecedented cultural and intellectual prominence as the primary object of study that could be reliably examined in order to gain knowledge about how the universe is and works. A close examination of the theoretical underpinnings of late imperial literati who argued for the critical necessity of engaging in empirical studies of the concrete and individual cases of things and events reveals a blend of empiricism, ideas on truth and reality, and the conceptualization of the “natural world” or heaven-and-earth peculiar to late imperial China. The blend of empiricism observed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to produce lively discourses about things and events in heaven and earth well into the eighteenth century. To modern eyes, these discourses seem at times too literally empirical, and at other times a confusing jumble of natural science and fantastic imagination. To reconcile such an apparent dissonance and to paint a complete picture of a way of seeing and thinking about the world, I bring together the two seemingly antithetical traditions: Neo-Confucian learning surrounding coherent pattern of the universe (ch. li 理) and substantial qi, and discourses on the strange anomalies (ch. qi 奇). In doing so, this dissertation uncovers a worldview distinct to early modern China, where the scientific and the fantastic intersected and coexisted in the same natural world, sometimes in harmony, and sometimes in discord.