Rigor verses resonance
There is in the rigor of Western rational thought an insensitivity and aggressiveness that have advanced the Western conquest of lands and nature through avoiding ‘unnecessary’ distractions.
In this context, the Chinese concern with ‘correspondences, resonances and inter-relationships’ is likely to be viewed as getting in the way of scientific exploration, intellectual property patenting and profit maximisation.
In many situations, particularly when pursuing short term profit, the Western rational approach seems hard to challenge. Even the growing concern with environmental and human well-being problems produced by modern commercialisation has not led people to examine the fundamentals of Western thought. Yet many problems begin with the peculiar type of impatience inherent in the West’s insistence on ‘clarity and deductive rigor’.
Discoveries associated with quantum physics suggest that even the most physical of realities in this world can be understood most profoundly at the level of resonances at the sub-atomic level. Much Western science, based on reductionist and mechanistic assumptions, is extraordinarily insensitive towards what it does not understand.
Only recently have the limitations and dangers inherent in thought characterised by clarity and deductive rigor begun to attract attention. Yet few associate contemporary environmental and health problems with fundamental failings in intellectual discipline or defective scientific paradigms.