Yesterday, Senior Brother Shengli came back to the discussion group to take our brickbats, and the result turned into Senior Brother Shengli holding the floor against the assembled scholars, arguing from class all the way through dinner in unflagging high spirits.
After graduating, Senior Brother Shengli’s research focus shifted entirely to the question of Chinese medicine, and he tried to vindicate the “scientificity” of Chinese medicine on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Senior Brother Shengli extended Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the “phenomenal body” and the “objective body” into a distinction between “phenomenal science” and “objective science,” and argued that the scientificity of Chinese medicine could be supported under the category of “phenomenal science.”
My criticism of “phenomenal science” and “objective science” was already laid out in Lushan Conference Travel Notes. The key point is that “phenomenon” and “object” should be understood as a vertical relation of levels, not a horizontal relation of opposition. What phenomenologists emphasize is that modern science, in its excessive fixation on objectification, has forgotten its phenomenological foundation, forgotten the lifeworld as the root source of science. But phenomenologists do not directly oppose the specific content of modern science; we still acknowledge that the various precise, objectified forms of knowledge provided by modern science are valid. The criticism is only that it is not yet complete, not yet whole, that it has cut off its source and living spring, and thus may give rise to certain forms of hubris and confusion, and so on.
But Senior Brother Shengli seems to set phenomenon and object against each other, as if Western science were only objective science and Chinese medicine were only phenomenal science. This is a misuse of phenomenology. Yet today Senior Brother Shengli also admits that his phenomenal science and objective science are in a vertical relation; he also acknowledges that Western science likewise has its dimension of phenomenal science, while Chinese medicine “is and is not” objective science.
This dialectic of “is and is not” certainly has its power, but it must be used with particular caution; otherwise it easily degenerates into empty slogans and clichés like those in political textbooks. We feel that Senior Brother Shengli may not yet have fallen to such a state, but there do seem to be some dangerous signs: his dialectic does not display enough tension, and instead gives the impression of evading the question.
Teacher Wu’s objection is mainly directed at Senior Brother Shengli’s fixation on “science”: why must one defend the scientificity of Chinese medicine? The word science involves enormously complicated issues, and in any case it belongs to a Western academic context. If one wants to defend Chinese medicine, one can do so in the discourse of Chinese medicine itself; there is no need to wade into the muddy waters of boundary-drawing around science.
Senior Brother Shengli was clearly somewhat anxious. He felt that none of us had understood his core concern; he kept cutting in on us and trying hard to explain why one must defend scientificity, insisting that this is a question of crucial theoretical and practical importance.
Why one argues and to whom one argues are related, and we generally felt that Senior Brother Shengli’s essay was written a bit like a government work report, as if it were aimed at those in power—they want to support Chinese medicine, and indeed they do need some banners and lofty slogans. But if the target were the medical community or the philosophical community, it might not be written in this way.
Senior Brother Donglin and I both expressed support for Senior Brother Shengli’s exploration of the question of scientificity. I also agree with Teacher Wu’s view: this is an overly troublesome question, but I think the development of Chinese medicine really does have to confront it, namely, the interrogation of scientificity.
Simply invoking pluralism and using one’s own discourse to make everything self-consistent is not enough. On the one hand, Chinese medicine is indeed under powerful pressure from modern science and must respond. On the other hand, Chinese medicine itself originally had no sufficiently self-consistent discursive system; a mature disciplinary paradigm has not yet taken shape, and its own development also forces it to introduce a theoretical framework. So, as Teacher Wu said, shutting the door and talking to oneself simply will not do: the first door cannot be shut, and within the second door there is not yet enough common language.
As for the pressure modern science exerts on Chinese medicine, I think the key issue is not primarily that objectifying biomedicine has dissolved the various entities in Chinese medical theory—qi, the five phases, the channels and collaterals, and so on. The greater challenge comes from statistics, namely the datafication and standardization requirements centered on double-blind experiments.
In fact, after quantum mechanics, “being objectifiable” in a certain sense is no longer a core requirement of scientificity. Wave functions, quarks, strings, and the like are also theoretical entities that cannot be seen or touched; their reality must be obtained through data analysis. For Chinese medicine, whether the “five zang” correspond to the organs of Western medicine in the anatomical sense, whether the meridians can be found to have a material substrate, whether qi can be grasped in some tangible form—these questions are actually all negotiable. So long as the theoretical structure of Chinese medicine can find support in experimental data, modern science can recognize them as “real.” Chinese medicine can evade the objectifying demand of “scientific realism,” but it still has to face the utilitarian criterion of efficacy, and requirements such as operability, reproducibility, and datafication are even more stringent.
I think Chinese medicine really is retreating step by step under the pressure of modern science and is in a weak position, but I still try to offer it a certain degree of defense in the face of “reproducibility.” One of my assignments back then addressed precisely this issue: Seeing the Blindness of Modern Medicine from the Perspective of “Double-Blind Experiments”
Although I also defend Chinese medicine from a sympathetic standpoint, this is like the sympathetic understanding we extend to Aristotelian physics, scholastic philosophy, and the like: understanding their rationality does not mean thinking they are more brilliant than modern science. With Chinese medicine, our sympathy is greater, because it is not only different from Western modern science, but also very different from Western premodern scientific styles; it is a unique and not yet fully tapped treasure of thought, containing many spaces for thought still waiting to be unfolded, and these spaces are often obscured by a one-track-minded Western scientific perspective.
But I still acknowledge this: Chinese medicine cannot be placed on the same level as Western modern science and made to compete there. Compared with Western science, it is at least one era behind.
But how can proponents of scientific pluralism possibly speak of advancement and backwardness between two radically different scientific paradigms? To assess advancement and backwardness, one must inevitably select a standard of measurement, and that standard is likely to be some criterion internal to one science or another. For example, if we use the standards of Western science itself to measure Chinese medicine, of course we will find Chinese medicine to be more backward—but that seems unfair. If one is to assess two systems fairly, one must introduce a third standard at a higher level.
So when I say Chinese medicine is backward, I am indeed introducing another standard. This standard comes from media history and media philosophy.
I have always maintained that modern Western science is a product of the print era. Western classical scholarship, from ancient Greece onward, first encountered the impact of printing technology; scientific methods, standards, and the organizational form of scientific communities all had to transform themselves in order to adapt to the new environment of print. In the end, the so-called “Scientific Revolution” marked the success of this transformation.
But Chinese medicine has not yet undergone the baptism of print culture. Although by the late Ming and early Qing, Chinese culture itself had begun to show the influence of printing technology, this transitional period happened to overlap with the eastward spread of Western learning. Before Chinese classical scholarship could respond to the impact of print culture, it was already busy resisting the influence of Western learning. Moreover, by the late Qing, Western learning further used printing technology to expand its influence, while Chinese classical scholarship, which had not yet adapted to printing technology, could only retreat step by step under the double pressure of print culture and Western learning, never in time to complete its own metamorphosis. A traditional Chinese scientific community capable of standing on its own in the print era never took shape; the Chinese academic world that began to form in the print era was marked from the very start by Western learning.
Traditional Chinese discourse on medicine, like Western classical scholarship before the print era, was mainly based on commentary on canonical texts and transmission within small circles. It was basically centered on annotation of classics such as the Huangdi Neijing and the Shanghan Lun. This mode of scholarly transmission belongs to the manuscript age and cannot adapt to print culture, let alone the electronic media era. Only when the Huangdi Neijing and the Shanghan Lun are completely surpassed by a continuously renewing academic community, just as Aristotle’s Physics and Ptolemy’s Almagest were, can such a Chinese scientific community possibly stand on an equal footing with modern Western science. Here I am not merely using the ready-made standards of Western science to demand that Chinese medicine measure up; rather, I am saying that even without the impact of Western science, Chinese medicine would anyway have to respond to the impact of print culture. It would also have to form its own new public discourse system. Unfortunately, history did not give us the chance to see how Chinese medicine, following its own logic, would undergo the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution of the print era. We can only seek anew the place of Chinese medicine in the modern world, where Western science has already won out.
Therefore the question of the scientificity of Chinese medicine is, on the one hand, a pressure from Western science, and on the other hand, also a pressure from the information age itself. If Chinese medicine is to continue developing, it certainly cannot remain in the manuscript age of canonical commentary and private transmission. It must establish its own public space; it needs its own Bacon and Descartes to excavate the “methodology” of “new Chinese medicine.” Standardization, datafication, objectification, reproducibility, and so on are in fact all demands of print culture.
Of course, we might also bypass print culture and move directly to adapting to the new environment of electronic media, which differs in many respects from print culture and in many ways represents a return to oral culture. But Chinese medicine still does not yet have a ready-made territory of its own.
Of course, even if Chinese medicine has not developed a new paradigm adapted to new media, I still advocate leaving space for the traditional form of Chinese medicine in the interstices of modern medicine. As a technical practice transmitted from master to disciple, Chinese medicine may still serve as a useful supplement to modern medicine. But when facing the question of “scientificity,” we are demanding a greater transformation, and I myself am not optimistic. I hope Senior Brother Shengli’s work can make some progress.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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