Toward Constructing Post-Postmodern Twenty-First Century Sciences: The Relevance of Classical Chinese Medicine

Abstract

The world is on the cusp of great changes—political, economic, and physical. Economic and political power is shifting from the mature economies and democracies to rapidly developing countries such as China and India. Such fundamental shifts may have implications for an epistemological shift from “West” to “East.” The philosophical paradigm behind the modern revolution in science since the seventeenth century underpins the rise of Western supremacy for the last two centuries or so. That paradigm, its entailed methodology, including its understanding of causal agency and logic are being severely challenged by the crisis of global climate change and sustainability, as well as more spectacularly the meltdown of the global financial system. George Soros¹ has correctly argued that the cause of the latter lies in the inherently flawed nature of the causal paradigm behind market fundamentalism; an analogous flaw appears to have retarded the recognition that a climate change crisis confronts humankind. Soros proposes the alternative paradigm of reflexivity, which this author sees but as a subspecies of a more general paradigm involving a “post-postmodern concept of cause and logic” that is non-Humean and non-Aristotelian, being nonlinear, necessarily multifactorial and reciprocal, nonreductionist in character, and holistic in its metaphysics. One may argue that this kind of “ecosystemic science” was pioneered, though not perhaps self-consciously, by the ancient Chinese

in their theory and practice of “Traditional Chinese Medicine,” although for the purpose of this chapter, the term “Classical Chinese Medicine” is preferred.