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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Chi, Parsimony, and Pragmatism8/12/2007 10:28:33The other day I had the chance to spend some time talking with a friend's brother (now a friend in his own right, I hope), who has been living in China for about a year studying Chinese medicine and language. It was a great conversation and has left me with a lot to reflect on, from theories of science to future geopolitics. Here, I'll stick to the theories. Before becoming interested in Chinese medicine, this fellow was on a standard Western medical track, taking all the necessary backround courses in college and setting his frame of mind accordingly. "Alternatives" began to draw his attention after, quite simply, he tried them and they worked. He has remained respectful of Western scientific medicine, though insistent on its limits. That is, Wesern medicine has not succeeded in instilling a culture and practice of positive health, and it is suspicious of what is not yet fully understood, however beneficial it might seem to be. I agree with both of these observations. The first, in particular, is troubling to me and I have written about it. Meanwhile, lately, I've been working my way through biologist E. O. Wilson's 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which is scientific triumphalism at its best. Wilson argues that the methods of science need to be integrated into social sciences, arts, ethics, and religion. Two principles are at the center of these methods: integration among disciplines and parsimony. Integration means the willingness to explain a phenomenon in terms of its constiuents. For instance: to grasp the patterns of social behavior by use of psychology, and to grasp psychology by use of neuroscience, etc. Parsimony means relying on no unecessary concepts. For instance: there is no need for a theory of storks to explain where babies come from if one already has a theory of sexuality. With Wilson in mind, I was especially interested in the concept of chi - "energy," that staple of the Westernized Eastern vocabulary. What is it, really? I got two anwers from this fellow, and I'm not sure if they are contridictory. (1) Chi is an actual thing, a characteristic of living things, which perhaps quantum physics is beginning to elucidate. Or (2) chi is an abstraction over the functioning of living things that encompasses many processes that we have yet to fully understand. In either case, chi is useful because it works, because the theories organized around it have generated successful therapies. Nevertheless, chi is not a parsimonious theory. In all likelihood, the phenomena that it covers are describable in more precise, specific ways (I assume definition 2 is closer to the truth, since 1 is basically reducible to it via quantum physics). The therapies that have been developed under its auspicies, if they work, can be explained in more precise, specific terms. Nevertheless, without the abstraction of chi, people might never have thought up those therapies that may ultimately be valuable. A science that is devoid of abstraction over the whole (even a whole it doesn't fully understand), it seems, will fall short in offering theories of the health of the whole. A truly scientific medicine in Wilson's sense, which will describe only what it integrally, parsimoniously understands, cannot fully justify a theory of total health. Only, it seems to me, a pragmatic, imaginative effort, willing to deal in unparsimonious abstractions, can do so. An interchange between the two approaches seems imperative for progress in either, and this is the essence of good scientific method. A method of precision mixed with leaps of fallible imagination, and the willingness to use what works even when one doesn't understand it. The intelligence of Homo sapiens, despite our highest gnostic ambitions for exact science, is made principally for pragmatism, not omniscience. |
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