| article |
| An Ecological Imagination and Human Studies in East-Asia |
| The Foundation Conference of “The Center For Humanities Research” at Sangji University 12.Oct. 2000 An Ecological Imagination and Human Studies in East-Asia Jongduck Choi (Sangji Univ.,Philosophy) 1. An intercultural consolidation The discourse on the East-asian identity has been the center of attention in a field of the social and human studies in a recent time. The focus of the discourse pertains to the phenomena of discord or harmony between the east and west. Confrontationists such as S. Huntington and E. Said emphasize crash of two civilizations, while the harmonists such as H. Mueller stresses togetherness(zusammenleben) of the two. These discourses had their own historical and social meanings. These discourses may be inclined to the dividing logic in the struggle or the subordination without sufficient philosophical understanding. Therefore, it is very important to illuminate the problems of identity from the view of natural philosophy. It may be very dangerous attempt to make a sharp distinction between the West and East to find one’s identity, and to acknowledge this danger is the aim of this paper. Finding one’s identity is a mirroring task, and it is important to explore their peculiarity and originality. A relative peculiarity of Eastern thinking can be found from an ecological view of nature. This essay is based on the East-asian ecological thoughts. Eastern philosophy could play more fundamental role in a multi-cultural society in the future. It is very likely that the traditional East-asian philosophy may become a fashionable alternative to the conventional Euro-american attitudes and values. But comparative studies examining only external similarities between the western and oriental thoughts may lead to a misunderstanding. It would not be wise to conduct a comparative studies on the similarities without having philosophical reflection. The postulation of the rational discrimination between the West and East should not be aimed at separation, but for an inter-cultural communication and consolidation. 2. Scientific view of nature Through the comparison on the views of nature, we could construct a frame of thinking to discriminate the differences between the Western and traditional East-asian thoughts. The Western concept of Nature is represented in atomism as particulate, material, inert, quantitative, and mechanical paradigm. The Western concept of nature became institutionalized in an early stage of modern science and pragmatically translated into an engineering agenda. However, the so called cultural crisis may, in large part, be diagnosed as a symptom of the atomic-mechanistic image of nature inherited from Greeks, classical science, and modern technology. Newton mechanics was not just a theory of physics. It was an all-embracing philosophy of the natural world. During the eighteenth century of European scientific enlightenment, what had once been an integral part of natural philosophy evolved into the natural sciences. This is why Democlito’s atomism from the ancient time was easily absorbed into the Newton’s theory. Atomistic thought just expresses the idea that a quantitative method through the mathematical tools is a criterion of the western modernity. The standing rule of quantitative measurement was a philosophical seed of the Industrial Revolution. In the twentieth century scientific technology and industrial capital gave us not only material fertility, but also subsidiary ill effects of alienation. The explosive development of twentieth century technology may be a cause of an alienation and isolation. The alienation of homo sapiens in our modern civilization is at the bottom of the cultural crisis which committed the environmental crisis. That is to say, our crisis is due to the discord between human rationality and human alienation. This discord is revealed in the scientific view of nature. So we must seek to find another view of nature in order to shift from ‘discord’ toward ‘harmony’. 3. Continuum paradigm Among the views on nature, including the rational system of external and material atomism, we can choose the organistic process thinking about the nature. The process thinking invites a return to the kind of philosophical reflection, which could be a therapy for the human alienation. The relatedness-oriented process thinking may be worthwhile for the humanity. There is a radical difference between the processed world concept and substantial atomism. That is to say, the flow of the organistic process thinking is destructing the philosophical dualism on which the traditional substantialism is built upon; its mind-body and man-nature formulations. From the point of relational process paradigm, the nature is not, as represented in the classical science, an aggregate of substantial independent entities. The relational view of nature is holistic. And organistic feature is the integral part of the man to nature relationship. Living organisms are preeminent examples of the kind of continuum system that can not be understood by atomistic materialism. Similarly, the relational net of our nature is a kind of continuum system. While a rational order is comparable to the discontinuum system as like collection of atoms, the dynamics of nature can not be captured easily by a rational medium. Unfortunately we are ignorant on how to define a continuum system in details. We need to turn the thinking process, moving from an object centered substantial view toward a continuum view of nature to congregate between the West and East. In the meeting of East and West, F.S.C. Northrop has pointed out that Eastern thought is much more devoted to continuum view of reality, while the Western thought is much more centered on theoretic constructs, such as an atomistic object. Traditional understanding of human in the West has developed within the Western object-centered atomistic view of reality. To understand a human is not to explain analytically. It is therefore needed to be moved from an analytical discontinuum paradigm of the science to a differentiated continuum paradigm which is much closer to the Eastern philosophy. The organistic process thinking exhibits three basic motifs: continuity, wholeness, and dynamism. To say that the nature is in a state of continuum and that all of its components are internally connected, means that its organistic unity is integrated holistically at each level with hierarchy. The contiguous flow of nature is characterized by the dynamic change of vital force. The continuum of nature is itself complex, and a wholeness of nature is the optimum functioning of the hierarchial supra-system containing all the subsidiary systems. While the physical world may be recognized as a closed system, the nature is an open system. Open system, as opposed to closed, is that which ceaselessly interacts with their environment. In the open network there is no external motivation as like god or world-engine. Nature means causa sui in Chinese word. There are only internal relations. Another character of the internal relation is that there is no difference in quality between the objects and its internal relation. All of the parts of the entire nature belong to one organistic whole, and they all interact as participants in one spontaneously self-generating life process. In the self-generating processes, all things and processes in the world are related in processes which proceed toward a balance and a harmony. So ‘what a thing is’ means ‘how the flow of self-generating force is concentrated’. Western atomistic realism has an implication that all relations were held to be external. Western rational property can not evoke the imagination of these internal relation. The very radical difference between external relation and internal relation is not easy to explain. Because of this difference, it can be said that internal relation unfortunately cannot be submissive to the terminology of western science. For example, the traditional medical definition of the Korean word kan as ‘liver’ may be misleading in the context of modern anatomy; the name of organ ‘liver’ is used in Korean medicine to refer to functional systems of which the liver is not merely the physical substrata. This situation is the same in the concept of life. The medical criteria of death is mainly the cessation of the heart-beat or breathing. But in traditional Korean medicine death means that chi (life energy), chung (organic essence) or shin (spirit) is choked or dispersed (not exhausted). Such problems as medical terminology are applicable to all disciplines of Human Studies in Korea. 4. Task of our human studies We have to ask the question how the western philosophers can dialectically engage eastern thoughts, and vice versa, in order to find shared goals and evaluative standards. The possible answer to this question may be the task of human studies in the East, especially in Korea. A common understanding of the philosophical enterprise may or may not be attainable. However, to organize eastern human studies by means of western philosophical categories and to evaluate it by western criteria of evidence, argument and proof is idle as it is parochial. Likewise, it would be absurd to explain modern scientific thinking with the eastern philosophy, despite the dissatisfaction with a western mechanical worldview. We can not deny that the western science and the science-based industrial technology have made our life easier, more comfortable and, in some ways, more satisfying. This satisfaction is however gradually turning out to be a dissatisfaction, especially by those who have begun to realize the threat of environmental crisis posed by the increasing demands of the technological world. However we must recognize that the so called human crisis of today is not a western phenomenon alone. Nobody can be sure whether the East-asian thought is an alternative to the modern civilization. Nevertheless, man has to make an attempt to find a new philosophical therapy. Nowadays the difference between the East and West is not a geographical difference alone. We should not lay the human crisis on the Western civilization alone, but also on the industrialized Asian climate. The alternative is not a revolutionary solution but just concentration of a small cultural improvement. Therefore there is no such thing as perfect alternative. We can not judge by predominance-comparision between the West and East. We can only reconcile both cultures. This is a task of our human studies. Baird Callicott/Roger T. Ames(ed.), Nature, SUNY, 1989 Harold H. Oliver, A Relational Metaphysic, Nijhoff, 1981 Jongduck Choi, Die Ontologische Interpretation in der Quantenmechnik, Giessen, 1993 H.Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung.- Versuch einer Ethik fuer die Technologische Zivilisation,Frankfurt, 1979 ABSTRACT Choi, Jongduck (Sangji University, Philosophy) The discourse on the East-asian identity has been the center of attention in a field of the social and human studies in a recent time. The focus of the discourse pertains to the phenomena of discord or harmony between the east and west. Confrontationists such as S. Huntington and E. Said emphasize crash of two civilizations, while the harmonists such as H. Mueller stresses togetherness(zusammenleben) of the two. These discourses had their own historical and social meanings. These discourses may be inclined to the dividing logic in the struggle or the subordination without sufficient philosophical understanding. Therefore, it is very important to illuminate the problems of identity from the view of natural philosophy. It may be very dangerous attempt to make a sharp distinction between the West and East to find one’s identity, and to acknowledge this danger is the aim of this paper. Finding one’s identity is a mirroring task, and it is important to explore their peculiarity and originality. A relative peculiarity of Eastern thinking can be found from an ecological view of nature. This essay is based on the East-asian ecological thoughts. Eastern philosophy could play more fundamental role in a multi-cultural society in the future. It is very likely that the traditional East-asian philosophy may become a fashionable alternative to the conventional Euro-american attitudes and values. But comparative studies examining only external similarities between the western and oriental thoughts may lead to a misunderstanding. It would not be wise to conduct a comparative studies on the similarities without having philosophical reflection. The postulation of the rational discrimination between the West and East should not be aimed at separation, but for an inter-cultural communication and consolidation. We have to ask the question how the western philosophers can dialectically engage eastern thoughts, and vice versa, in order to find shared goals and evaluative standards. The possible answer to this question may be the task of human studies in the East, especially in Korea. A common understanding of the philosophical enterprise may or may not be attainable. However, to organize eastern human studies by means of western philosophical categories and to evaluate it by western criteria of evidence, argument and proof is idle as it is parochial. Likewise, it would be absurd to explain modern scientific thinking with the eastern philosophy, despite the dissatisfaction with a western mechanical worldview. Nobody can be sure whether the East-asian thought is an alternative to the modern civilization. Nevertheless, man has to make an attempt to find a new philosophical therapy. Nowadays the difference between the East and West is not a geographical difference alone. We should not lay the human crisis on the Western civilization alone, but also on the industrialized Asian climate. The alternative is not a revolutionary solution but just concentration of a small cultural improvement. Therefore there is no such thing as perfect alternative. We can not judge by predominance-comparision between the West and East. We can only reconcile both cultures. This is a task of our human studies. |