Hello Friends,
Today, I would like to share with you another short excerpt from my forthcoming book The Resonant Body: Anatomy, Perception, and the Phenomenology of Chinese Medicine. This book has been in the works for quite some time and I am really excited to finally share it with the world in the coming weeks. The book explores various topics relating to the way the Chinese medical view of the body differs from the anatomical perspective that characterizes Western medicine. Due to its radically different understanding of embodiment, many people today find it hard to take the Chinese medical paradigm seriously. In this book I explain that the Chinese medical view actually has its roots in direct lived experience, and in this sense is deeply empirical. Rather than something that was simply "primitive," "made up," or "superstitious," Chinese medicine is based on a profound depth of insight into embodied existence.
Here is a short piece discussing some deeply pervasive philosophical misunderstandings that characterize the modern Western worldview, and how they get in the way of us understanding the Chinese medical view of the body. It is, admittedly, a bit on the 'heady' side, but the ideas discussed are important and relevant to a wide range of concerns in the contemporary world. I hope you like it.
Note: As always, if you’d like to book an online appointment with me, click here or respond to this email and I will be more than happy to connect.
Mind and Body, Mind and Matter
Just as Chinese medicine did not evolve a sharp dichotomy between self and body, it also never considered mind and matter to be fundamentally separate or at odds. In this way it differs from much of the modern worldview, as the alleged dichotomy between consciousness and matter is today deeply pervasive in science, philosophy, and medicine. It is commonly assumed that mind and matter are mutually exclusive concepts. This notion became common in the West with Enlightenment philosopher Descartes, who divided the world and human existence into two completely separate substances: the material world (which included the body) and the human mind. Still operating in the shadow of Cartesian dualism, many people today assume that reality can be neatly divided into either mental phenomena (first-person experiences such as thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions, hallucinations, etc.) and physical phenomena (things in the world that can be perceived from a third-person perspective, such as benches, tables, bodies, etc.) and that these two aspects of reality are polar opposites.
This dichotomy has given rise to the popular world-view called “physicalism,” a modern rendering of the materialism that became increasingly popular in the West since the Enlightenment (though it has its precursors in ancient philosophy). Physicalism is the idea that the real world is purely material, obeying the laws of physics, and exists completely independent of our conscious awareness. In the physicalist view, it is only physical phenomena that are truly real, and mental phenomena can be fully reduced to, and explained by, physical processes. The physicalist worldview takes one side of Descartes’ dualism—matter—and elevates it to the status of “objective” reality.
There is nothing inherently scientific or empirical about this view, however. The existence of matter outside of perception—outside of conscious experience, that is—is not actually an empirical reality. After all, our knowledge about the world, including about the existence and behavior of matter, is dependent upon our perception of the world. For this reason, the existence of physically objective matter outside of perception is not an observable fact, but rather a conceptual explanatory notion, derived by abstracting from the patterns and regularities of the observable world. It is true that the dense, physical, material phenomena we perceive are generally more inter-subjective than other parts of our experience; that is, the material aspects of our perceived world appear to be similarly perceivable by others, whereas emotions, thoughts, or sensations, are more privately experienced. However, extrapolating from this observable fact to claim that matter exists independently of the field experience is not actually empirically based.
Noting that the behaviour of nature as it is observed through scientific investigations seems to obey certain laws, and that these laws can be formulated conveniently if we assume that there is an underlying physical reality beyond our perceptions, scientists have forgotten that the positing of such a reality is only a useful theoretical construct, not one based on empirical observation (and thus, not properly scientific). Unfortunately, the science of our times has a major tendency to mistake such explanatory abstractions for what is empirically observable. The extreme example of this is found in theoretical physics, in abstract theoretical constructions like superstring theory or the positing of multiple universes which, though they are interesting and imaginative ideas to consider, are not directly derived from any kind of empirical observation or direct experience. The same is true even of the everyday notion of mind-independent, physically objective matter. In actual fact, the idea is empirically unverifiable, and always will be. The existence of a material world outside and independent of awareness is merely a theoretical inference which is based on an abstract interpretation of sense perceptions, not the concrete perceptions themselves.
Chinese medicine, and the methods of observation that it is derived from, did not proceed from a physicalist bias. The assumption that mind and matter are fundamentally separate and at odds with each other, or that the world is really just a material thing, was not part of the worldview of the tradition. In fact, teachings from Buddhist and Daoist schools, which co-evolved with Chinese medicine, often explicitly suggest putting aside speculation about the way the world “really” exists outside of perception of it, to instead dwell in a state of openness that allows one to be more attentive to the raw immediacy of lived experience. Scientists would do well to cultivate a similar type of epistemological humility, in order to avoid interpreting their observations in ways that are not empirically grounded.
The assumption that human bodies are, objectively, nothing more than physical objects, is an example of an abstraction that diverges from our actual lived experience of the world. It is not surprising that the architects of the Chinese medical tradition did not hold this view, since they were far more interested in exploring the complex and intricate terrain of actual embodied experience, than engaging in metaphysical speculation about what the body “really” is.
Thanks for reading! And, just a quick reminder that I am currently accepting new clients for online sessions, where I regularly help people heal from chronic disease, emotional imbalances, and support the fine-tuning of life-style for purposes of personal cultivation.
Aidan
Aidan Keeva, DACM, L. Ac.,
Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine