The Scientific Mode Lives within Cultural Content
Chengdu Longtan Hospital · Deng Wanfa
Science is mode; culture is content. A particular cultural content must be born of a particular scientific mode; a particular scientific mode must live within its corresponding cultural content. So culture-science and science-culture are linked terms, generally used together. To clarify the related concepts of culture and science is of critical importance to the proper recognition of the objective character of multi-element science.
1. The concept of culture, and science
Surface meaning: culture is thought and feeling written down. Deeper: writing is a symbol that records and expresses language; one of the exchange tools of human society at a certain stage. Language is for exchanging thought and feeling. So language, writing, and culture all serve the exchange of thought and feeling among humans. Different peoples have different ways to express and exchange their thought and feeling — hence different languages and scripts.
Since language and writing serve to exchange thought and feeling, conversely, every sound and image that can be used to exchange thought and feeling may be reckoned a language or script — may be given cultural content. This yields the narrow and broad senses of culture.
Narrow-sense culture's language and script: within a defined range, the use of symbols of definite form-and-structure to stand for definite sound-and-meaning, as a means of exchange.
But there are over a hundred countries in the world and many peoples; each has its own language and script. For broad exchange among people, thought and feeling cannot be limited to narrow-sense language and writing. We may extend to body language (gestures, dance, expressive motions, daily action), music language (musical works that mirror thought and feeling; sound that mirrors familiar natural sounds and life content), image language (images that mirror nature and daily life; artistic-thought image works), thing language (under certain conditions, the natural and non-natural phenomena, related persons and things, that can be used to exchange thought and feeling: food culture, sexuality-culture, alcohol-culture, tea-culture, military culture, political culture, scientific culture, aerospace culture, ethnic culture — uncountable). In sum, broad culture is the sum of the material and spiritual used to exchange thought and feeling.
Though culture aims at exchange, different modes of cognition and practice make for different cultural content, and require different conditions for exchange. These different modes of cognition and practice stand for different scientific modes. Below, from another angle, we explore the relation between culture and science.
2. Human nature and culture-science
From broad culture one sees that cultural content is enormous; pick any small topic and one could write a book. Here we discuss only the cultural content tied to scientific mode. However broad, deep, and rich the content is, it is born of human nature and serves human nature. So studying human nature and culture is one entry-point to the recognition of culture and science.
What people today call human nature usually points at the lines from the Song San Zi Jing (Wang Yinglin): "At humanity's first birth, nature is good. Natures are alike; habits part them." But human nature can hardly be summed by a single good. Since relative good and evil — these so-called characteristics — can be changed or built in family and social environments after birth, good and evil are not human nature.
I hold: every content and phenomenon of human society derives from the six basic-impulse desires, themselves born of innate human disposition, not built later. As the carnivore's nature is the weak as meat for the strong. Tamed, it may seem obedient; under certain conditions, the inner nature returns. Or: however high the leader's rank, all show appetite, sexual desire, the desire to possess — leading to the matching "scandal." This shows that though human nature is held down by social morality, law, and other behavioral norms, it still drives the unconscious; once conditions permit, the nature comes out. This is the key knot of conflict between nature and society — the eternal topic of nature and "reason". To study human nature, one must first set aside the social character and study from the natural side. The six basic-impulse desires are explored from this side. The six are: appetite, possession, sexual desire, authority-desire, health-and-longevity desire, distinction (discernment) desire. Before exploring them, let us study the character yu (desire):
The character yu is composed of gu (grain) and qian (to lack). Gu stands for grain, by extension for every edible food. Qian means lack, insufficiency. So when the body lacks food, or no food is to be had, the body cannot conduct its material exchange. The life-threatening hunger and panic that ensue, with their strong craving for food — that physiological and psychological response — is the meaning of desire. With this, the relations of human nature to culture, to science, to society become not hard to grasp from the natural side.
(1) Appetite. Born, a person must eat to live. This is inborn, untaught, unhabituated — first basic impulse.
(2) Possession. Since one must eat to maintain material exchange, how can one live without possessing food (extending to possessing everything)? Possession comes with appetite. Watch: a newborn hungry will cry; given milk or substitute, the crying stops. Not yet full, if you take his food, he will cry fiercely. Possession, like appetite, is born with the body — a basic impulse.
(3) Sexual desire. When one has possessed enough food and life's material exchange is assured, a new problem appears: life has its limit. To maintain the species, only by the mating of male and female to bear offspring is one's life extended. This is a human desire nature has made. The Neijing · Discourse on the Primordial Heavenly Truth: a man at two-eights (16), kidney-qi flourishing, tian-gui arrives, essence-qi spills, yin and yang harmonize — so he can father a child. A woman at two-sevens (14), tian-gui arrives, the renmai opens, the taichong mai flourishes, menses descend in time — so she can bear a child. When these reproductive essences fill to a certain point, the joys and impulses of mating appear — nature's marvel at work. The attraction between the sexes and the strong urge to unite is sexual desire. Also unschooled, unhabituated — a basic impulse.
(4) Authority-desire. To preserve one's existence and extend life, one must reject one's kin or non-kin. This is the common nature of life in competition. Two dogs fight over a bone; two males clash in mating-rivalry. A newborn, when needing to urinate, defecate, or in any other discomfort, will cry until someone solves the problem. This is one of the most original forms of human authority-desire. From the life angle, authority-desire is an extension of possession and sexual desire — a form serving the first three, decided by the basic nature of life. To show authority needs strength. An infant's strength lies in his being life's continuation. To protect the infant is to protect oneself. This is the sacred force nature has given.
(5) Health-and-longevity desire. To preserve oneself, and to evolve in continuation so as to fit the changing environment, the desire for health and long life arises. When harm appears (temperature too high or too low, sound too loud or odd, foul smell, monstrous form), an infant cries or shows protective expression; remove the harm, he is quiet. People feel fear when they see blood, killing, or death-related things. So the desire for health and longevity is also inborn. Everyone fears death — this is undeniable.
(6) Discernment. This serves the first five — most tied to culture, science, society. The newborn's first cry shows: he comes with discriminating power. The womb-outside environment is not as good as the womb's; he protests with crying. To fit nature's changes, nature has built for humans a sensory system — mouth, eyes, nose, ears, skin, and other unknown organs (perhaps a special bio-electromagnetic sensing system) — all serving discernment. Their essence: cosmos-information receptors. The brain is the general engineering office receiving and processing their information, and the general command issuing matching signals to the body. A well-functioning infant feels which conditions favor and which harm him; his clearest response is laughter and crying. Favorable: he accepts and shows joy; harmful: he cries until the harmful is avoided or removed. This is the original form of human discernment. With human evolution and social development, discerning good and evil, beautiful and ugly, fortune and ill, right and wrong, took form. In sum, the discernment is born and grows within the five preceding desires. Every desire serves the survival and growth of the human. Conversely, every content and phenomenon of human society is born of and evolved from the basic impulses of the human. So studying the relation of human nature to culture, science, society is a doctrine of great value.
3. Thinking about cultural mode from writing
The most original motive and final aim of broad culture is to exchange thought and feeling between humans. Human thought and feeling cannot leave the basic impulses. What mode is used to fulfill the aim of exchange is decided by the thinking mode of the time-and-space conditions. This thinking mode is also cultural mode, scientific mode, and finally touches the formation of social institutions. As for the thinking mode of Chinese national culture, I cannot do extensive verification — I can only seek answers from extant Chinese culture.
The Yijing is the crystallized fruit of Chinese national-cultural thinking. From it we can take relevant content to dissect the thinking mode of Chinese culture.
Writing is a symbol that records and expresses language; one of the chief tools of cultural exchange. It is also the smallest cell-unit forming a culture-system.
China's writing — beyond the fang-kuai-zi of present-day Chinese — also has other language symbols. The Yijing's Taiji-Triple-Combined-Bagua diagram (see below) is a language symbol of the greatest thought-content and deepest meaning. It is figuratively called the Cosmic Diagram. As a tool of language-exchange, for those without the matching conditions, it cannot complete the task of past-and-present exchange. I can only draw a drop or two from it to explain.
Each bagua glyph is built of three lines representing Heaven, Earth, and the human. Among the three, there are yin lines and yang lines. The yang line, a straight line, signals light not blocked by any object. The yin line, a broken line, signals light blocked by an object. So the original meaning of yin and yang stands for an object's two sides relative to light: the lit side is yang, the back is yin. Because the yang line in the bagua stands specifically for sunlight, the dynamic yin-yang concept it extends to is boundless. The sun above is Heaven, Heaven is yang; the Earth below is Earth, Earth is yin. This dynamic yin-yang concept is countless in instance, but in reality points at no single thing. Heaven and Earth, up and down, yin and yang are bounded by the human — by human doing. Heaven-Earth-Human make three lines; the three lines make a gua (trigram). The reason cannot be elaborated here; we discuss only how this Heaven-Earth-Human integral view shaped the character of thinking, and its relation to the Chinese script.
The character shang (up): a pole with a small mark, standing above a horizontal boundary, marks up.
The character xia (down): also a pole with a mark, standing below a horizontal boundary, marks down.
Both shang and xia take a horizontal line as boundary — above it is shang, below it xia. The horizontal is set by the human — bounded by the human. Above the human is Heaven; below the human is Earth. Heaven and Earth, up and down, bounded by the human — this is the implicit meaning.
Linking these up and down characters with the earlier desire character, as examples: each Chinese character, as a cell of the Chinese culture-system, carries within it the gene of Chinese culture's integral thinking.
Hence Chinese characters are in essence form-meaning writing. From the form-structure of a given character, beyond the surface meaning, one can find connections among related things. This is one face of Chinese cultural mode's integral thinking.
Western culture — chiefly English — has phonetic writing. Each word is built of one or a group of letters. Each letter is one phonetic unit. Each unit, or syllable formed of units, can clearly express a meaning. Each phonetic unit or syllable begins from how the human voice apparatus produces sound, and what meaning. As a cell of the Western culture-system, this writing carries the gene of a culture that prizes the individuality of things, that is skilled at recognition from the depth of things, that focuses on structure and function.
Chinese writing expresses the gene of a culture that prizes the universality of things, that is skilled at recognition from the breadth of things, that focuses on the mutual relations among things.
The two writings unlock two cultural modes, two scientific modes, two social relations — as a cell carries all the information of the whole body. Plant a broad-bean seed under right conditions, and a broad-bean plant grows. So writing, cultural mode, scientific mode, and social relations are all linked.
Hence Chinese culture must contain Chinese science. Western culture must beget Western science. This is necessary. As for multi-element science, how to choose by benefit and harm — only by recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of the two sciences can we choose or accept many co-existing.
Because Western culture-science is already universal worldwide, only Chinese culture-science still suffers in the underground. We have a duty to lift her. We are Yan-Huang's children; we too have the right to contribute to all humanity.
4. Discernment and science
Nature made for humans a sensory system and a thinking brain so that the human could discern things. In the cosmos there is unlimited information. The human, in this information world, takes in and processes information beyond any other creature. Hence the human is the spirit of the ten thousand things.
But to recognize correctly the laws of motion and change of the cosmic world, to discern under what conditions a thing favors humans and under what conditions it harms them, is not easy. Because the cosmos moves and changes ceaselessly, information too changes. To discern from the flow which information is useful needs the integrated functioning of multiple bodily faculties, and the cooperative effort of human society.
The integrated functioning of multiple bodily faculties: information sensing, absorption, analysis, judgment, processing, storage, and feedback — overall information-processing capacity and process.
Society's cooperation: the individual as one unit of information processing; the whole society and one large block of information processing — these joined as one. A person stores one piece of information; a few billion people, a few billion pieces. More grandly: humans can read information from the broad cultural content, forming a sea of knowledge that satisfies the human discernment need.
But social cooperation depends on exchange. Exchange needs certain conditions. A particular cultural mode and content are the chief conditions for the corresponding cultural-exchange range. Each people has its own language, script, mode of recognition, and mode of practice. So exchange is bounded by time-and-space conditions. The cultural-exchange range formed by the mode of recognition and practice that those time-and-space conditions determine is, in essence, the inner content of science. Conversely, the essence of science is a cultural category of a particular mode.
Western culture-science focuses on the structure and function of matter — uncovers the secret of matter for human use. It can satisfy human possession-desire to the limit; can build high-energy killing weapons; can send humans into space.
Chinese culture-science focuses on mutual relations among things; takes Heaven, Earth, and the human as one whole. It urges respect for and following nature, capable of safeguarding humanity's living environment to the limit.
The two sciences have each their strengths and weaknesses. Chinese science-mode cannot build airplanes, cannons, atomic bombs, but Chinese science aims at respecting and following nature; it does not need airplanes, cannons, atomic bombs. We seek integral harmony; harmony as honored. Western science can build airplanes, cannons, atomic bombs, but this mode can never draw the Taiji Triple-Combined Bagua diagram. Because Western science cannot bring the Heaven-Earth-Human integral relation into its frame; once it does, the mode breaks down. They seek man defeats Heaven; strife as joy.
In all, scientific content is bound by mode and condition; human discernment is bound by many conditions. For this reason, the development of human society calls for many sciences co-existing in harmony.
1 May 2004
Postscript:
Harmony is the basis of long life. The combative is destroyed if not by another, then by oneself. From the trend of Western culture-science, humanity is to be self-destroyed by its own desires. Though Chinese science can save humanity, it cannot defeat the natural law of unceasing human desire. So we can only hope for many-sided harmony as the highest.