Winds, Waters, and Earth Energies: Fengshui and Sense of Place

Abstract

When one reflects on the problems that beset nature and the environment at the beginning of the 21 st century, it is clear that China, with its huge population and ongoing modernization and industrialization, is going to be one of the major contributors to those problems as well as an important factor in the search for solutions. What is striking about most of the current discussions of environmental questions is just how parochial are the terms in which they are conducted — presupposing a Cartesian-Newtonian view of the natural world as a mass of “dead matter in motion”, deriving from natural-scientific discourse that arose in western Europe during the seventeenth century. It is worth recalling that most human beings throughout most of human history have understood the natural world in a variety of quite different ways from this.

In China, and now throughout the world, the question of qi and the correlative issue of fengshui have been encumbered with a mishmash of obtuse superstitions dictated by the most retrograde kind of charlatanism. But this does not prevent this question, if one disengages it from these accretions, from bearing vitally on the reality of being human — and indeed at the very foundations of human existence, including our own, however non-Chinese we may think ourselves.

Augustin Berque