From Modern Scientism to Pseudoscience — On *Westernizing* TCM and *Integrated Medicine*
School of Chinese Medicine, Hong Kong Baptist University · Li Zhizhong
In the hundred-plus years since the Opium War, Chinese medicine has been bewildered under impact and declining within bewilderment. Over the last 50 years, the State has put in enormous human, financial, and material resources for its development; on the basis of the Constitution's develop modern medicine and our country's traditional medicine, the Chinese-and-Western equally weighted health-work principle was set. Yet on TCM, the heavy current of modern scientism and pseudoscience has not been effectively curbed. In this era of Scientific Outlook on Development, these problems deserve deep thought.
1. The starting point, content, and classification of science
Some say: society today is in an age of scientific superstition or technological mania. I will not judge other fields. But the man is machine mechanistic materialism — making the observations and methods of the non-life domain the supreme tenet for studying the life (medical) domain — is plainly one-sided. TCM must heed this. So a brief clarification:
1. The starting point. Aristotle's Metaphysics opens: "All men by nature desire to know — proof: the delight we take in our senses." The seeking is the pursuit of truth behind the objective world. Broadly, the objective world is science's starting point.
The objective world appears in various, changing things. Some philosophy calls this matter. By Lenin: those changing things — knowable by sense (extended by instruments) — exist independent of will.
Aristotle called them all-that-is or being; Laozi, the ten thousand things. By the Buddha: form, feeling, perception, volition, consciousness — the five aggregates; or by the six senses' six objects — color, sound, scent, taste, touch, dharmas. From sensory experience to rational grasp of essential nature behind — that is science. To grasp one's specific research object from the all-that-is truly, fully, completely — that is the specific starting point.
Though humans have eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind, Aristotle said: "We love sight above the rest." So one-sidedness in object-recognition is science's first hurdle. To safeguard the objective real starting point, Aristotle (and later Aquinas in the 13th c.) shaped metaphysics: the principles of identity, contradiction, the excluded middle; the senses of truth, good, beauty; the principle of cause and effect. These are logical rules to which rational thought must conform before scientific research.
I hold thing is better than matter as the term. Thing (事物) splits: 事 — motion, process — appears as state (information, phenomenon); 物 — structure-and-function. TCM zheng, climate, wuhou are all 事 — the time-trajectory of an objective real. 物 — what physics-and-chemistry study — is the spatial feature. The Western matter doctrine emphasizes raw materials (structure); but West-medicine material studies the yuan-zhi and its structure-and-function — Chinese medicine studies yuan-xing, the integral life of the real human. In an age of physics-and-chemistry-dominant scientism, this distinction has straightening-the-bias value. 事物 is a better word than 物 for all-that-is.
So: science's starting point is the time-trajectory and spatial-feature of all things' arising, developing, changing, moving. Each discipline studies only some of this.
2. The content. Aristotle: science = knowledge. Hence the Western knowledge is power expresses science's value. Knowing the objective also includes technique and experience — but strictly, only rational knowing of essential nature is science. The Taiwanese scholar Miao Litian, translating Metaphysics, stressed: science is for the goal of truth; technology is means.
In China's Liji · Daxue: gewu zhizhi — "extend knowledge through investigating things." Zhu Xi: "Zhi: extend to the utmost; zhi: knowing. To extend my knowledge so what I know is exhausted of all that may be known." The same as Aristotle's knowing.
Late-Qing Chinese translations rendered science as gewu zhizhi. The Japanese coined 科学 (kagaku, the learning of branches) for translating Western works. Yan Fu first used 科学 in Chinese, in translating On the Origin of Species, replacing gewu zhizhi.
Yan Fu's gloss: "Learning (学) seeks the natural rule, sets the necessary law; technique (术) takes the known rule and pursues an achievable success. So learning is knowing; technique is doing." — same as Aristotle.
My modern definition: the systematic body of knowledge gained by sorted research into different things — that is science.
Any science has its own specific objective real; its own method; and the systematic concept/category system from method applied to object. This system reveals the object's essential nature; is repeatable in practice; and reaches single-expression. These are the hallmarks of a mature science. Science is not mysterious; different disciplines are not exclusive of each other. Each science's growth is inner to its own tradition's historical evolution — no other can substitute.
3. Classification. Science being branched learning, classes run into the hundreds. Here, only the broad strokes:
By research object. The Yijing · Xici 12: "What is above form is called the Way; what is below form is called the vessel." Form — the naturally-arising real (Heaven-given); vessel — the human-made.
In Spring-Autumn–Qin-Han, the human capacity to make vessels was thin; the capacity to know the naturally-arising form was strong. China's ancestors' approach was learn the lower, attain the higher. The route: take form as research object; near at hand, far afield; investigate Heaven-and-human; classify the ten thousand things; follow Heaven-and-human in correspondence; learn the lower, attain the higher; finally reach the great Way of all things' birth, growth, change. Then use that Way to recognize form's comings and goings. This up-and-back route is also TCM's.
Making vessels runs downward: know the material (zhi); know how to make. By human will, make the desired vessel.
So research-of-natural-things versus research-of-human-made-things gives two knowledge systems — two classifications.
Aristotle's classification, also learn-the-lower-attain-the-higher: start from physics, through physiology and psychology (soul), to theology. Physics covers today's natural science. Metaphysics (his Post-Physics) covers their principles. Post-Physics is later called First Philosophy — emphasizing beyond matter, beyond experience, beyond sensation, beyond phenomenon. First Philosophy corresponds to today's philosophy. The Chinese translation Xing-Er-Shang Xue — the learning above form — is apt: above-form's truth is China's Way; Aristotle, too, started from form and reached the Way.
Things and matter is another modern classification. Some of the objectively real shows as state (info, phenomenon, zheng) — 事. History, sociology, evolution, ecology, astronomy, meteorology, the TCM zheng — all study an objective real's time-trajectory. To analyze 物's structure-and-function, and synthesize structures into human-made things by will, follows the spatial feature of 物. Things-as-event (事) and things-as-thing (物) are incommensurable objects.
Of these three classifications: form and 事 trace similar trajectories; vessel and quality share structural-functional features. Modern science, in common usage, mostly means the latter.
By research method. Studying natural-things: by Heaven-watching above, Earth-observing below; near at hand, far afield; investigate Heaven-and-human; classify the ten thousand things — comprehend the Way, then tie it to the specific object's life-Way. This is close to today's comprehensive systems methodology.
Studying human-made things: first know modern physics-and-chemistry's concepts and methods, study the object's physical-chemical features. This is analytic-reductionist methodology — what people today call the modern scientific method.
So: comprehensive-systems vs. analytic-reductionist. So today; so historically. Comprehensive-systems serves Way, metaphysics, form, 事. Analytic-reductionist is needed for vessel and quality. Both methodologies are required by their two incommensurable kinds of objects. They are incommensurable too.
By knowledge layer. Science–technology–experience: high to low. Theory-principle-rule is science. Technology rests on it. Experience is the lowest, sense-based layer.
To call these three theoretical-foundational science, technological science, experiential science is not serious — it confuses the relations and exposes a blind spot under modern scientism and technological mania. (Same as calling high-tech high-tech-and-science.) In the past 20 years, most Nobel Prize medical projects are technical; some are barely experience-confirmed. The blind spot is widespread.
Science and philosophy. Philosophy is the highest-level summary of natural, social, mental laws. The Cihai: science is the knowledge-system of nature, society, and thought. Philosophy covers all. Philosophy is science's science. No discipline can do without philosophy's guidance — as post-physics contains physics' principles. To exclude philosophy from science, or to put them in parallel, are both wrong; but to think philosophy can replace all natural science is also wrong (we know the lesson from the Cultural Revolution).
The line in Spring-Autumn–Qin-Han, science had not yet separated from philosophy — even taking the Yijing as the reason modern science did not appear in China — is worth questioning. (1) Philosophy is itself a kind of science — the highest. (2) The Spring-Autumn–Qin-Han sciences — like Chinese medicine — were comprehensive-systems sciences, of different paradigm from modern analytic-reductionist science. TCM's closeness to philosophy does not exclude it from science. (3) An analytic-reductionist scientist looking at comprehensive-systems science is like one who knows Jiuzhang Suanshu not getting Leibniz's binary — not catching the flavor does not mean no flavor. (4) Modern science's proliferation reflects analytic-reductionist science's leap forward — its own history, not the constraint of ancient philosophy.
From Aristotle and Aquinas: metaphysics is the learning of being-as-being and its properties — and especially its principles of identity, contradiction, excluded middle, cause-and-effect — the philosophy of philosophy. In the US alone over a thousand universities and research centers teach this; each year over five hundred books and twenty-five journals appear: this shows modern science-philosophy's attention to metaphysics. To call it the mother of scientific research is no exaggeration.
By life versus non-life. The Cihai's science as natural, social, thought-knowledge is fine for modern classification — but on TCM's plight it feels incomplete. In China, life-science (incl. medicine) is grouped under natural science. Today's natural science is dominated by analytic-reductionist physics-chemistry — most successful in the non-life domain (human-made things). But medicine faces the Heaven-given — not human-made. The human is unlike the human-made: metabolism is unique to life. The human body is an open, complex, self-organizing macro-system still with many blind spots. The West can reduce body to organ to cell to molecule — but cannot link a few gene fragments to make the simplest virus. Life-science is not analytic-reductionist's only domain. From the angle that the human is Heaven-given, medical science must in part belong to comprehensive-systems science. So with TCM and Western medicine.
Putting TCM under life science under natural science puts TCM under Western medicine — promoting modern scientism's interference with TCM's self-development. So at least in China, where the two coexist, life science should be its own category. The Cihai would read: the knowledge system of nature, society, life, and thought.
2. Modern scientism's interference with TCM
Modern scientism: make the analytic-reductionist concepts and methods of modern physics-chemistry the supreme criterion for any science.
Its interference is tied to mechanistic materialism. In life science the mutual reinforcement is widespread. Though animals are machines and man is a machine were deeply questioned by Western philosophers of science a hundred years ago, they still bind TCM and shape Western medicine here.
In January 2004 I published On the Revival of Chinese Medicine. There, On the Definition of Chinese Medicine, On the Incommensurability of Chinese and Western Medicine, Research on the Definition of Chinese-Western Integration, Chinese Medicine's Place and Role in Human Medicine, Some Theoretical Questions in TCM Going to the World — argued the definitions and explored modern scientism's harms. Summed: TCM-westernization.
Some representative events:
Early 20th c. Yu Yunxiu — modern-scientism's main figure. Lingsu Shangdui (1917) totally negated Lingshu and Suwen on Western grounds. In 1929, at the Nanjing Government's First Central Health Committee, he proposed Resolution to Abolish Chinese Medicine to Remove the Obstacle to Public-Health Work — the first call to abolish TCM. In 1950, at the early-PRC National Health Conference, he repackaged and re-proposed Draft Plan for Steps to Reshape Old Medicine. A Japan-trained Western doctor — only analytic-reductionist Western medicine in his head — saw TCM as alien. His focus: TCM's foundational theory, the scientific-principle part. Cut its capital, block its source — abolish TCM's metaphysical principles. He kept formulas and herbs cut off from their root — abolish medicine, keep herbs.
Early 1950s. Make TCM scientific — to reshape TCM. Practitioners had to study and pass several Western foundational courses, replacing TCM theory in their heads. Under it, the 1956 TCM universities placed all Western foundational courses into early years as medical-science courses — so students stepped onto westernization the moment they entered.
Late 1950s. A national-leader directive on a Ministry-of-Health report produced the double academic standard: acknowledge TCM as science, yet rest its development on Western concepts and methods. Metaphysical medicine to be mined and lifted by physical-methods. Strange indeed. The fifty-year fact: the mainstream of mining and lifting TCM has been TCM-westernization.
Modern scientism filled TCM's medicine, education, research, administration. Westernizing TCM is the great wrong corner of TCM's development. The flood led TCM into pseudoscience.
3. Pseudoscience and its faces in TCM
Pseudoscience is the opposite of truth-seeking — false science.
"Pseudo —
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