Sept 21/99
Since I brought up the topic of ch'i as a possible kind of dualism that is a Far Eastern alternative to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic notion of the individual soul, I thought I should check into it a bit. I also received an interesting note from Peter Murray (a student in the class) which I include below.
So here are some excerpts from `The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion' (Shambala Press, Boston, 1994).
``Ch'i (Chinese literally `air, vapor, breath', Japanese borrowing ki). A central concept in Taoism and Chinese medicine. In the Taoist view ch'i is the vital energy, the life force, the cosmic spirit that pervades and enlivens all things and is therefore synonymous with primordial energy. In the human body ch'i is accumulated in the area near the navel, known as the `ocean of breath' and must be carefully tended to prevent it from being wasted, which results in sickness or death.
Ch'i as life energy is a central concept in Taoist breathing exercises aimed at strengthening and increasing this energy. By training a Taoist adept can acquire extraordinary abilities which, incidentally play an important role in the various martial arts.'' (p. 69)
In response to my request for further info on this concept, Peter Murray sent me the following note about the Japanese version of this concept, ki, as used in the martial arts community.
``Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 From: Peter Murray <pemurray@indiana.edu>
My own experience with the concept of ki comes from a period where I was studying a traditional Japanese martial art which had come to the United States in the mid 60's. Since that time, there had come to be two schools of thought within the art.
1. Ki is an ineffable non-substance, which permeates the world. Like the wind, we cannot see it directly, but can observe its effect in the world. One can become sensitive to the flow of ki through consistant training and meditation. Most of the traditional Japanese practitioners fell into this camp.
2. Ki is a useful model for personal units of measure, such as personal balance, personal distance, and comfortable levels of joint flexion. Ki is sort of a general currency of proprioception. Most of the American practitioners fell into this camp.
Not surprisingly, there were often heated and (sadly) violent confrontation between partisans of both sides of the debate. What surprised me the most was that like the Zen concept of enlightenment, the nature of ki seemed to be impervious to verbal description. A "true believer" in ki can only demonstrate ki in action, or can point out where ki isn't. I understand that the concept is closely related to certain notions of Shintoism and esoteric Buddhism, such as animism, reincarnation, etc.
The mythos of ki is still deeply embedded in the martial arts. A "kiai" (frequently mistranslated as ``hi-yah'' or the like) is the martial artist's shout, which supposedly stirs his ki from its resting place behind his navel and projects it outside of himself, using it to enhance his own strikes or defences. If you observe a martial artist of any eastern tradition closely, you can observe the emphasis on the body's center as the origin of the attack and the center of the defense.
From a more practical standpoint, the seat of ki also happens to be roughly at the center of gravity of an adult male. It makes sense, then, that attacks from the center of gravity do more damage (you can bring more of your body's weight behind the attack) and that one would want to protect this area (as to avoid being knocked over). So, ki apparently fell by Occam's razor to the second school of thought, who now only mention "ki" as part of the historical record of the school or as a quick shorthand for balance.
George Lucas admits to having "borrowed" the idea for the Force in Star Wars from the idea of ki. A few years ago in Japan, a prominent manga writer [RP: Manga are Japanese comics] hypothesized that a self-aware machine would have ki. This idea formed an integral part of his storyline to the "Ghost in the Shell" series [RP: a Japanese anime movie] (although the idea of ki is not mentioned directly in the Japanese version and is translated into western concepts in translations).
--Pete Murray''
Is this dualism? It seems pretty clear that we should think of ch'i or ki as a nonphysical notion. But it is not as narrowly restricted to human beings as the soul is. Of course, the notion of dualism has a long history in European thought: people were believed to have both a Body and a Soul and the Soul survives the death of the Body. Such beliefs surely predate Jesus. (I think they are part of the large Zoroastrian legacy to Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought. And Zoroastrianism dates to about the first millenium BC.) In any case, these notions were not based on a clear theory of what a body is like or how matter should behave as opposed to non-matter.
Now Descartes died in 1650 (though many of his works were published posthumously) and Newton was born in 1642. So the more modern view of dualism, as the claim that people have both `A Material Part plus Something Else', gets much of its theoretical bite from the fact that, since Newton's work, we have an explicit theory of matter - what it is like, how it behaves, what can be expected of it. But presumably such a theory of matter did not exist in the far east. So whether ch'i should be called a `dualistic concept', as we now understand dualism, seems debatable.
Bob Port , Sept/99