이 연구는 과학과 기술, 또는 과학기술을 핵심으로 동양과 서양, 발전한 곳과 그렇지 않은 곳의 현재에 이르는 원인을 찾고자 하는 두 질문으로부터 시작한다. 첫 번째 질문은 영국인 과학자 조지프 니덤(Joseph Needham)은 고대로부터 15세기에 이르는 위대한 중국의 과학이 16세기 이후 서구의 근대과학과 같은 발전으로 이어지지 않았는가를 묻는다. 두 번째 질문은 1997년 『총균쇠』로 잘 알려져 있다. 미국인 진화과학자 재러드 다이아몬드(Jered Mason Diamond, 1937~)는 뉴기니 젊은 정치인의 “왜 우리 흑인들은 백인들처럼 그런 ‘화물’을 만들지 못한 것인가?”에 답한 바 있다. 여기에서는 두 질문 속 핵심이라고 할 수 있는 과학과 기술의 기의(signifié)를 자세히 살펴보고자 했다. 이를 위해 19세기 근대국가가 구성되는 시기 서유럽의 교육, 특히, 국가적 필요에 기반한 교육 체계의 변화 과정을 통해 고찰한다. 대혁명 이후 나폴레옹의 제국 건설 과정에서 프랑스가 도입하는 국가 교육 체계는 과학, 공학, 엘리트주의와 군사 또는 국방이 융합하는 과정을 보여준다. 니덤의 ‘정치적 지배를 포함’한 의미의 근대 과학은 그가 사용하고자 한 의미와 상반됨에도 불구하고 정복과 전쟁의 과정이 중화되어 있다. 한편, 다이아몬드는 지배와 정복으로부터 인류 문명사의 시작을 다루고 있지만, 지리적 조건의 한계를 ‘우회’(circumvention)함으로 ‘화물’을 가진 세계의 주체는 공간화되어 있다. ‘동양사상과 과학기술’이라는 교양 교과목을 풀어가는
This study explores the contemporary meaning of “science and technology” through two seminal questions concerning the divergence in scientific and technological development between East and West. Taking as its point of departure the perspectives of Western Europe and North America as global hegemonic centers of science and technology, the study examines how the “East” has been conceptualized through specific civilizational entry points articulated by Western scientists. The British scientist Joseph Needham questioned why the remarkable scientific achievements of China from antiquity through the fifteenth century did not lead to the emergence of modern science comparable to that of Europe after the sixteenth century. Similarly, in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), the American evolutionary biologist Jared Mason Diamond responded to a question posed by a young New Guinean politician: why non-Western societies did not produce the material “cargo” associated with Western power. This study argues that these two questions share a common core: the implicit meanings (signifiés) embedded in “science” and “technology,” which are examined here through the transformation of Western European education systems during the formation of the nineteenth-century modern nation-state. Focusing on post-Revolutionary France and the Napoleonic Empire, the study shows how national education systems institutionalized the convergence of science, engineering, elitism, and military imperatives. Although Needham sought to exclude “political domination” from his conception of modern science, his framework nonetheless neutralizes conquest and warfare as constitutive forces of scientific development. Diamond, while explicitly addressing domination and conquest in human history, spatializes agency by proposing the circumvention of geographic constraints, thereby positioning “cargo-bearing societies” as historical subjects. By adopting these two questions as pedagogical and analytical tools in the liberal arts course Eastern Thought and Science & Technology, this study examines how distinctions between East and West, and between cargo-bearing and non-cargo-bearing worlds, are structured around science as “the totality of systematic knowledge of the universe in the form of testable predictions,” and around cargo as a connotative symbol of progress and a better world. The study argues that both Needham’s East-West distinction and Diamond’s division between cargo-bearing and non-cargo-bearing worlds function as historically situated “entry points” constructed within a Western temporal framework of civilization and the history of science. In the twenty-first century, global scientific advancement is increasingly driven by East Asia, including developments centered in mainland China and technological leadership such as Japan’s semiconductor industry. This raises critical questions: Is “world science” now emerging from the East through the circulation of externally introduced cargo? Will the East be redefined in the twenty-first century? The study argues that unless the foundational entry point-one that evaluates science and technology from the standpoint of resultant dominance and material possession-is fundamentally reconfigured, science and technology will continue to serve as instruments of domination in the century to come.
This study acknowledges its limitations in fully addressing comparative histories of science, Orientalism, and East-West philosophies of science and technology. It concludes by calling for the establishment of a new entry point for science and technology in the twenty-first century, leaving further discussion to future research.
