3.0. Return to Eastern Philosophy: Negation of philosophical realism (实在论) and its extensions in various fields of academic thought (Continued)
3-6. Theoretical Physics: From Elementary Particles to Wave-Particle Duality
As we know, physicists have been looking for elementary particles for a long time, starting from atoms, then later divided into protons, neutrons and electrons, and still further divided into even smaller particles with other names. We may wonder if the new achievements in theoretical physics made in the last century, such as the discovery of wave-particle duality of photons, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, field theory, many-worlds interpretation and chaos theory, marked the beginning and progress in the deconstruction of the substantialist “elementary particles” theory, but at least we can believe that man can only temporarily assume the smallest perceptible particle at a given historical time as the elementary particle but actually can never find any particle that is really “elementary” in the sense of being ultimately no more dividable. That is because there exist no such elementary particles at all.
Likewise, taking the Big Bang as the beginning of all existence is also a substantialist assumption -- a macroscopic edition of the “elementary particles” theory. It is because there are thousands of millions, or an infinite number, of universes in existence, just as, on a much, much lower level, there are an infinite number of atoms in this universe, or to use a metaphor from Buddhist scripture, an infinite number of sand grains in the Ganges; and this universe we are living in is only one of them.
As a matter of fact, we can extend the application of the “wave-particle duality” perspective to viewing all things, or in a symbolic sense at least – the “particle” symbolizing the unreal appearance of separate material entities in man’s direct perception while the “wave” representing the relatedness, or mutual infiltration and influence, between all things. The universe is a sea of such unreal “substances”, numerous in number and various in size, suggestive of particles and waves at the same time, and mutually penetrating and interacting everywhere and all the time.
3-7.Social Ethics: From Atomism-Monolithism to Theory of Interaction on and across Multiple Levels
In modern West, the mainstream application of “elementary particles” perspective to social science has resulted in atomistic-individualistic ethics and methodology. Meanwhile, monolithic collectivism looks at certain social groups, such as an economic class or a political party or a nation-state as indivisible (in the same way as elementary particles), disregarding the individualities of their members, and is essentially not different from atomism. Hence, they can be grouped together as atomism-monolithism. This thought system chooses to overlook the identity of all individuals and groups as entities both relatively independent of each other (on the same level) or independent of their member entities (on lower levels) or independent of (higher-level) entities of which they are members, and mutually overlapping, penetrating and interacting at the same time; or in short, it overlooks all entities’ divisibility and relatedness on and across multiple levels of the society and nature. For instances, treating an individual as a “screw” on a (monolithic) political “machine”, or to wage imperialist wars for the interests of monopoly capital (only a handful of “atoms”) but in the name of the whole (allegedly indivisible) nation, or to override a nation’s sovereign rights (group entity on a higher level) in the name of “human rights” (atoms on a much lower level), or to judge the nature of a nation’s political process in isolation from its economic power relations on all levels of the society from grassroots up (cutting off cross-level relatedness), or to make positive assessment of Western capitalism by citing capitalist countries’ domestic “successes” only (atoms) in isolation from the far greater negative consequences their imperialist policies have brought about to all other countries in the world for the past five centuries or so (cutting off geographical and historical relatedness) – all these are manifestations of this atomistic-monolithic ideology. Fortunately, other theories in opposition to it have been emerging, such as “relationship theory”, “systems theory”, “holism”, “interactionism”, and the “dynamically-balanced multi-dimensional whole” worldview, which all will combine forces to break up the monopoly of the currently dominant ideology and methodology.
3-8. Political Economy: From Capitalist-Imperialist Hegemonic Economics to Overall Balance-Oriented World Political Economy
It is only in a relative sense that many economic phenomena generalized by categories in modern economics are distinguishable from each other. And actually they are often mutually overlapping, infiltrating, and hardly separable from each other. But viewing relative differentiation as totally splitting apart in economic studies is commonly seen, such as between man and nature, between a nation-state and the whole world, between the public/collective and the private/individual, between politics and economy, between productive force and production relations/superstructure. All those splits are reflections of philosophical substantialism in political economy.
Man-nature split finds expression mainly in two things: (1) The traditional value theory, which accredits the utility value of all social products to human factors only, either labor or capital, denying the fact that all products contain hidden values from nature, i.e., the potential utility values primarily existing in all natural resources before they are processed. (2) The “scarcity of resources” argument, being used as the major premise for the whole system of capitalist economic “science”, which rationalizes a minority of people’s insatiable desires and places the satisfaction of such desires above the necessity for harmony between man and nature (besides that in social relations), disregarding the fact that man is only a tiny part of nature and never really separable from it and therefore man-nature harmony should be the No. One premise of economic studies.
A major example of isolating the situation in a specific country from the world political-economic scenario is to try to impose on the developing countries the political-economic model which was adopted much earlier by the developed countries but is no longer applicable to the new reality of the globalized, i.e., almost completely capitalized, world today, in which the developing economies have become inextricably involved with the developed ones which are totally dominated by world monopoly financial capital and, thus, liberalist policies towards such monopoly capital would only mean economic colonization or self-castration and political submission instead of real development in the interests of the majority of people.
Severing the individual from the collective also resulted in two major fallacies: (1) Again the traditional value theory, which accredits the utility value of all social products to individual human labor, ignoring the fact that all products contain values from long time accumulated human wisdom, i.e., the values transformed from collective human knowledge and wisdom embodied in all production equipment, technology, skills and organization, and in skills for business and social management. (2) The “economic man” premise, which pretends to be defending all individuals’ “human rights” to strive for personal happiness but actually sanctifying only a privileged few’s unscrupulous predatory acts against all others, by alleging that all individual’s pursuit for the maximization of one’s own self-interest will add up to the maximization of the whole society’s common interests. This is obviously an untenable substantialist-atomist argument, because the fact of the matter is, and therefore the tenable premise should be, that, if not properly regulated in the interests of the public, or the whole society, individuals’ separate efforts in pursuit of one’s own gains only may negatively affect and cancel out, instead of promoting, each other’s interests; especially, the privileged few’s immoral pursuit for maximum self-interest would definitely end in depriving the unprivileged majority of their basic interests. Furthermore, not only the economic but also the political institutions in the Western model are based on the same “maximization of self-interest” premise; and, for the same reason, such political institutions, including its much boasted democratic process, certainly cannot serve to curb but only facilitate the privileged few’s predatory acts against the majority, against the whole human society and against nature. That is why Western mainstream economic and political theories based on atomistic substantialist philosophy are the most glaring antinomies in modern social science.
Cutting off the close relatedness between economy and politics in mainstream economic and political theory has made it possible, besides the above-mentioned antinomies, to ignore the unequal power relations between capital and labor on the grassroots level -- the very foundation of all political and economic relations in a society, and to cover up the ugly reality of sinister collaborations and two-way exchanges of interests between unjust capital and corrupted political power so prevalent in today’s world. And economic determinism based on mechanical materialist philosophy has boosted imperialist economics into the position of imperialistic domination over all other branches of human thought, causing all the troubles tormenting the world today..|
In a word, the only way to change the present political and economic status of the world and lead humanity out of the current dilemma is to have a brand new world political economy based on a “dynamically-balanced, multi-dimensional whole” worldview, which should assimilate thoughts from Eastern non-substantialist philosophical wisdom, from Marxist political economy, and from many other Eastern and Western schools of thought.
3-9. Medical Science and Self-Health Maintenance: From Piecemeal Confrontation to Mind-Body Wholeness
While human’s physiological and psychological systems are each governed by specific laws and the different parts of the body have different characteristics in their physical and pathological processes, all of them are closely related and affecting each other, positively or negatively, all the time, because a human being is an integrated whole; and, moreover, human health is closely related to and affected by the changes, regular or irregular, in natural conditions, because man is an integrated part of the whole of nature -- this is the philosophy underlying traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and its health maintenance theories and practices. But Western medicine, restricted by the substantialist-atomistic way of thinking, tends to focus on differentiation between parts and on local conditions only and therefore, while more reliant on medical equipments for making local diagnosis (often incomplete or missing the root cause) and having accumulated more experiences in surgical operations, it does not look into the physical conditions of the whole body as related to the sick or injured part when making diagnosis and prescriptions, and Western medicinal therapies tend to address the symptoms only in a locally confrontational approach but not the cause, only to be used as palliative remedies, not real cures while harmful side effects are often ignored . For the same reason, it also lacks holistic theories and practices for self-health maintenance and illness prevention. Some academic elites in China who would not bother to take a look at the different philosophies underlying Chinese and Western medicine even go so far as to denounce TCM together with its health maintenance theories and practices as “unscientific” and have been clamoring to abolish it.
But fortunately, an increasing number of Westerners are coming to get acquainted with, to understand and benefit from TCM and its unique treatment and self-help approaches such as acupuncture, massage, Qi gong therapy, meditation, Tai Ji or stretching exercises, herbal prescriptions and many other techniques. It can be expected that, with the growing popularity of TCM in the West, traditional Chinese philosophical thought and way of thinking will also come to be understood and appreciated by more and more Westerners, and Eastern and Western cultures will be able to draw upon and benefit from each other in an all-round way, thus making still greater contributions to the wellbeing of mankind.
4-0. Transcend Mind-Matter Divide to Reach Realm of Happiness
The above-said aspects of the return from philosophical realism and substantialism to the view of an insubstantial world of relatedness will constitute a new and great revolution of incomparably far-reaching significance in the history of human thought. To say it is a “return” is because the philosophical view of the world as an intangible one of relatedness is nothing new -- it has been existing since antiquity. To say it will be a revolution is because it will not be a simplistic return to the ancients, but a “negation of negation” – it will sort out, assimilate and integrate what reasonable elements there might be in the realistic philosophies and their extensions, though to be negated as a whole -- that is, a kind of negation on a higher spiral level. This worldview revolution has been triggered by the snowballing crisis which has originated in the capitalist core countries and is sweeping across the whole globe. It has taken the first step in the convergence between Eastern philosophy and latest Western achievements in philosophical thought embodied in theoretical physics, and will bring about profound changes in human thought and social institutions.
To refrom human thought means, finally speaking, to gradually replace egocentrism by an awareness of the ultimate insubstantiality of all things and of the relatedness between man and nature and between man and man. To get rid of egocentrism does not mean to deny individuality – it only means that all individuals have to position themselves in mutually complementary and balanced relations with other individuals and groups on all social levels. When the number and social influence of such enlightened individuals increase to a certain level, it would then be possible to reform the existing social institutions into just and fair and effective ones. Everybody is born with the Buddha-nature, but corruptive institutions smother it while good ones help it grow and bear fruit.
Good social institutions should be ones that do not only embody justice, fairness and effectiveness in being able to properly meet everyone’s basic needs without upsetting the balances in social relations, between body and soul, and between man and nature, but also serve to promote the transformation and uplifting of human consciousness instead of stimulating human greed for material gains and accelerating human spiritual decline.
Reforming human soul and reforming institutions are the two mutually complementary sides of a general transformation of human society into one with harmonious relations in all aspects or one providing happiness for all. In this sense, philosophy is not something dispensable, or just word games for a few elites. It has to be rooted in and at the service of human life for itself to be vivacious.
