“Chi”
and Other Mysterious Things
If you read about Daoism you will inevitably come across language that mentions mysterious “energies” like “chi”. For example, a quick Google search came up with this:
Central to Taoist world-view and practice is qi (chi). Qi is life-force -- that which animates the forms of the world. It is the vibratory nature of phenomena -- the flow and tremoring that is happening continuously at molecular, atomic and sub-atomic levels. In Japan it is called “ki,” and in India, “prana” or “shakti.” The ancient Egyptians referred to it as “ka,” and the ancient Greeks as “pneuma.” For Native Americans it is the “Great Spirit” and for Christians, the “Holy Spirit.” In Africa it’s known as “ashe” and in Hawaii as “ha” or “mana.”
(Elizabeth Reninger, Taoism “Expert”)
Actually, this isn't too far from an original Daoist view, as this quotation from the Nei-yeh suggests (“Chi” is translated as “vital essence”):
1 The vital essence of all things:
2 It is this that brings them to life.
3 It generates the five grains below
4 And becomes the constellated stars above.
5 When flowing amid the heavens and the earth
6 We call it ghostly and numinous.
7 When stored within the chests of human beings,
8 We call them sages.
(Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh), Verse 1, Harold D. Roth trans)
People with “New Age” tendencies will focus on this mysterious “energy” and talk about feeling chi flow through their bodies while doing tajiquan. Others will be concerned about the amount of “chi” in their food. Belief in chi becomes a sticking point for many people. Many people who call themselves Daoists see a belief in this occult phenomenon as being essential. On the other hand, many folks of a more skeptical bent tend to see it as a “deal breaker” and dismiss Daoism as just so much “wooo”---like belief in alien abductions or pyramid power. I would suggest that both points of view are understandable but somewhat naive.
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I suspect that most people reading this book haven't thought about this, but our collective understanding of the world advances partially through our ability to invent new concepts to help us organize our experiences in new ways. To understand this point, consider the long history of “atoms”. In the fifth century BC, a philosopher named Democritus asked questions about what matter is made up of. If you take a rock, for example, and grind it down into smaller and smaller pieces, would you arrive at the “ultimately small” piece of rock? Or would you be able to continue to break it into smaller and smaller pieces forever? Democritus believed that there had to be an “ultimate building block” of matter, which he called the “atom”.
Most folks would consider this just ridiculous speculation, but once the idea was “out there”, people eventually started thinking about just how these tiny particles would work with one another. In contrast to the atomic hypothesis, there also existed a competing one based on four “elements”: earth, air, fire and water. These were substances that were defined by their “qualities”---earth is solid, air is gaseous, fire is hot, and water is liquid. The atomic hypothesis argued that these qualities were accidents in the arrangement of atoms, not basic parts of the universe, whereas the “elemental” hypothesis insisted that they were the basis of reality.
One particular divergence of the two hypotheses dealt with fire. People who supported the elemental hypothesis suggested that there was an elemental substance called “phlogiston” (from the Greek, “burning up”) that existed in things like wood. And when it burned, this was being sucked out of it and absorbed by the air. This is why wood ash weighs less than wood. And, a given volume of air can only absorb so much phlogiston, which is why fire goes out we put it in a totally enclosed space. Experiments caused problems with the phlogiston hypothesis, however. For example, some substances, such as metals, gain weight when they burn, which would suggest something else is taking place than the hypothesis would suggest.
After a series of experiments, the atomic hypothesis described combustion as a process where heat is given off by the combination of one set of atoms with others like oxygen. In that hypothesis the fact that metals gain weight from combustion whereas wood loses it is explained. The difference is that wood is largely made of carbon. When carbon combines with oxygen through combustion, the resulting molecule, CO2, is a gas. The gas drifts away from the ash, which means the ash weighs less than the original wood. In contrast metals burn by combining with oxygen to create molecules that are a solid. This means that metal ash weights more than the original metal---because you have added the weight of the oxygen.
The important point I'm trying to raise is that for human knowledge to grow, we need to create concepts that allow us to have an intelligent conversation about specific issues. In the case of fire, Democritus' speculation about the ultimate nature of reality was helpful in getting chemists thinking beyond the old idea of there being four elements that are qualities instead of substances. Even “phlogiston” is a useful concept in that it stepped even beyond the idea that fire was just an element by trying to describe a mechanism behind combustion. The conversation between the two hypotheses allowed chemists like Lavoisier to create experiments that would eventually discover and describe a specific type of atom, which was called “oxygen”. Without Democritus' original speculation and the resulting concept of the “atom”, modern chemistry might have found it much harder to emerge as the scientific discipline we know today.
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“Chi” is an idea that was created at roughly the same time in human history that Democritus was talking about “atoms”. I am arguing that as such it was a useful hypothesis that allowed people to talk about mysterious aspects of life. It was an attempt to answer to the following sorts of questions: “What is the difference between life and death?”, “Why are some people healthy and strong, whereas others are sick and weak?”, “Why are some people socially influential and others 'no-bodies'?”, and, “What are these strange feelings in my body when I do certain things?”. The answer to all of these questions was “chi”.
A dead body can look exactly the same as a live one, but it lacks “chi”. Weak people are either “low on chi” or they have a “chi blockage” in their body. A “sage” or “realized man” can instantly command the attention of other people because he is filled with “powerful chi”. And when you have strange feelings in various parts of the body, it's because you can feel the “chi” flowing through it. Ancients all over the world talked about this sort of thing. The Greeks used the term “pneumos”, the Indians “prana”, the Arabs, “baraka”, and so on.
What was happening is the result of a very simple problem that is basic to the way all of us think. The ancients didn't have a way of thinking about “processes”, so they had a conceptual bias towards thinking about complex activities as “things”. We still have this bias now. That's why we identify a lot of verbs as nouns. Take for instance a sporting event like a foot race. People refer to specific races like the Boston Marathon, but ultimately what is happening is several human beings are running along a course to see who is fastest. This an activity, not a thing.
We also make other conceptual errors by wildly over-generalizing groups of people. For example, we say “America declared war on Iraq”. But the geographic entity known as the USA didn't invade. Nor did the entire people collectively decide to attack. In fact, what happened was a coalition of influential individuals who found themselves in control of the machinery of government in America for a short period of time declared war on Iraq. As a matter of fact people rarely use this sort of phrasing because it is wordy. But saying things like that is a lot more accurate than common parlance. And people get themselves into a great many problems by not remembering that this is just a type of short hand. For example, outsiders routinely blame the entire American people for the decisions of their ruling class. Many terrorists seem motivated to attack all Americans for the crimes it's government has committed across the world---but precious few of the people who get killed have had anything to do with those atrocities or would even support them if anyone had asked their opinion in the first place. Similarly, some Americans want to blame and punish all Muslims or Arabs for the actions of a very small number of terrorists.
These are what modern philosophers call “category mistakes”. They are manifestations of a flaw in reasoning where you take one type of concept with its own distinct set of rules for understanding it and confuse it with another type that has a very different set. Let's consider yet another example---one that is less laden with emotion. The words “University of Guelph” denote a conceptual grouping of very different things: a history, a legal entity, a geographic location, a collection of scholars, students and support staff, and so on. Yet someone could walk from the Arts building to the Library to the Science Complex and ask, “Yes, but where is the University?” The problem is that the grammar of our language seems to imply that a “university” is a physical object, when it isn't. The university campus is a physical entity, but not the university itself, which is more a conceptual agglomeration of various things---some physical and some not.
This is the same problem that confronts us when we talk about “chi”. What we perceive as “life” in a person, for example, is not a “thing”, but rather a process---the eyes move, the chest breathes in and out, the heart beats, etc. And when someone feels “chi” moving in their body it could be any number of things, such as hormones moving through the nervous system. The ancients didn't have a clue about how complex our bodies or the world around them was. They'd never heard of “nerves”, “cells”, “hormones”, “conditioned reflexes”, or any of the other gazillion things that modern science has revealed about how our bodies work. But they had to start somewhere, and where they started was by trying to explain things through some sort of subtle substance that they labelled “chi”.
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When different groups approach statements in the old books about “chi” most of them come from one of two perspectives. They can blindly accept them as “ancient Chinese wisdom”, or, dismiss them out-of-hand as “so much New Age bosh”. In both cases I suspect that this is caused by not understanding how important conceptual sophistication is to the understanding the world around us. Both groups would benefit from asking themselves the following questions: “Do I think that the ancient Daoist masters were Gods who understood everything?” or, “Do I think they were total morons that couldn't possibly have anything worthwhile to teach us?” If you answer in the affirmative to either, then I have nothing more to say to you. But if you answer in the negative to both, then you have to admit that no matter how wise these guys were, they were labouring under the limitations of the culture they inhabited. At that point it is possible to look at the statements made in their books and understand how they could be improved upon by people who have had the benefit of thousands of years in cultural progress. IMHO, this should make New Agers a little more willing to listen to people who take issue with their cherished theories and Skeptics a little less willing to dismiss ancient ideas totally out-of-hand. Consider the following quotation---.
"Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature."
(attributed to John of Salisbury in the Wikipedia)
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