Jim Sensenig
Opening remarks
Is this microphone on? Can you hear me? Well I kind of think that if we were celebrating the Vis we would all be out at the pool, I know that is where I want to be. I’m not quite sure how to follow that, that was really very informative thank you.
Those of you who have seen me teach before and whom I’ve taught, and those who have seen me speak before I was born in the last century I have not quite gotten to the power point thing yet, maybe before I die. So you are going to have to imaging what I’m saying up here somewhere.
I just have a couple of responses; I’m going to go with the minimal dose here. Um, a couple of responses to what Bill wrote and what I saw and heard Leanna talk about, whenever that was last week, it seems like that already, Um, the first is the question that Pamela framed about upward and downward causation, and you all know what we mean by that, right?
Upward and downward causation
Our science, the science of the 20th century, has taught us that the uh the living organisms, the bodies that we find ourselves in is results of some molecules that met by random and made love and then by natural selection and random mutation developed into something else, as we go on, to the point where we are complicated enough to develop consciousness in a search for the divine. and the other model of cause is that there is a divine that is guiding the whole process, what is interesting to me is that the evidence that is available to us in the models that we have, that is to say the physical evidence that is available to us, fits both models, that is to say can be explained either way, it is not a problem that we are going to solve.
It’s a problem that has been at the root, it’s the question that mankind has been asked from day one. Are the gods angry or was it just an earthquake? Which is it? Is there a divine something going on that manifest as physical matter or has physical matter evolved to the point where it manifests as consciousness?
Where the question meets clinical practice
I think for the terms, at least for our discussion as a profession, for me where the rubber hits the road is in clinical practice.
And what we know, and what we say we know in the profession is that there is a force at work that we organizing as a principle that is always moving us toward normal or wholeness ,or perfection, or balance, or in Lindlahr’s words, “normal harmonious balance”, in uh Hahnemann’s words, “the unbounding sway ruling the body”.
So I don’t think it’s a problem that we are ever going to solve, I think that we just have to, we can argue about it there has been some really elegant books in the last couple of years that have argued both points very well.
There is an interesting book by Frank Tippler that I talk about in class that is called The Physics of Immortality and he purports to show through his um, through what he calls pure physics and the mathematics of pure physics that there is a heaven, there is a god, there is a life after death and that human beings far from being an accident of evolution are the cause of the very universe itself. He says over and over again, in his book I am not appealing to faith but to pure physics. He goes so far as to say that we don’t need to evoke the idea some mysterious force that we can explain by behavior of matter that all of those end points exist.
And of course the opposite is true, there are many new books in the last few years that demonstrate or purport to show evidence that physical matter is the consequence of some higher order of intelligence and we can quote Lindlahr and Hahnemann and the rest on that.
So once again I don’t think we are going to solve the problem. We can argue the vita list mechanistic thing all day and I think that as doctor Louise just said, if we think about it in terms of a whole, this is the yin and the yang the left and the right and all a part of the same whole.
The historical meaning of the Vis
The other thing that I want to mention is that I thought that I saw as a teacher of philosophy and as a principle author of this book project I though dr. Standish struggling with trying to explain what she was explaining the other day, and the question keeps coming up that in a about is the vis causative, does the vis cause the physical? Or is the Vis the result of the physical and I felt that I heard the Vis, this term Vis being used to apple to several different things. I had this discussion with dr. Mitchell before he died and I had this reaction to his work when I saw the first draft and I am going to take the position of somewhat critical here, he is using the term vis medicatrix naturae in a way that is not consistent with its historical use.
Let me explain that. In my 1865 dictionary of medical terms Vis is defined as Latin meaning “a force” or a power and then there are 12 or 15 different kinds of Vis that are described. There’s a Vis aturgo and a Vis spiritus and Vis medicatrix naturae, so on and so forth. In other words 150 years ago in a medical dictionary there was recognition of a number of different kinds of forces or powers at work.
And the definition of the Vis medicatrix naturae was the power that resists disease and restores health. A power supposed to resist disease and restore health and the implication in the context of what I’m telling you, this is a power that resides in the body itself or a power that resides within living systems, as distinct from, in my opinion, the concept of vital force or what Hahnemann calls the dynamis or the simple substance which is used and in fact, Hahnemann and Kant both talk about simple substance and dynamis , in the sense that it’s a universal force, it’s imperturbable, it un disturbable, it’s never change and it informs physical matter.
We have been using the short hand for Vis medicatrix naturae, the “vis”, to mean possibly the vital force now this may or may not be important I think as a one of the senior editors on this project that it’s highly important because we have to have internal consistency and we need to know what we are talking about.
Precision in the language of the profession
An example here might be from Chinese medicine where we have chi and then we have different kinds of chi, I don’t know anything about Chinese medicine so you have to correct me if I’m wrong, we have chi and then we have ancestral chi and kidney chi and chi chi and whatever else chi, but we have different kinds of energy and in the west we haven’t taken the time or the effort or we are not precise enough about what we mean by these different energies, so we through them all in the same bucket and we keep using these terms interchangeably vis medicatrix naturae, dynamis, simple substance vital force and so on.
So I think my argument there would be that , I’m not attached to any particular definition but I think as a profession we need to decide exactly what it means by vital force, exactly what we mean by vis . Vis medicatrix naturae, exactly what we mean by vitality and so on, how these things relate or interact with each other in order to be able to be more precise in our language.
Models, evidence, and paradigm shifts
Which brings up one more problem that I saw that Leanna was struggling with the other day, those of you who have read the structures of, how many of you are familiar with Koon’s the structure of scientific revolution?
Ok just real quickly, I know that time is going fast here, Koon is the guy, Koon is the guy who wrote, introduced paradigm shift into our language in the 1970s, his doctoral thesis was the history of western science, specifically physics, and his argument goes like this, you cannot understand the development of western thinking in science in any, there is no linear development to the development of our thinking in science but rather we go along, this is a whole lecture by itself I’ll make it short, with what we know until the facts that we have available, to us no longer fit the model that we have evoked to explain them.
When we reach that point we have to do one of two things we have to change the model or we have to throw away the facts, a perfect example is homeopathy, when a medical doctor in a conventional system of Newtonian physics is confronted with the evidence of homeopathy it is denied. Like in the nature article of 1988, there is no physical basis for these phenomena therefore we are going to reinvestigate it.
Instead of, there are two ways to approach that, one is to say there is no physical basis and throw it away because it doesn’t fit your model; the other possibility is to change the model. When you change the model, you have literally changed your world view and know things become explainable and possible that was not possible before.
Now what does that have to do with what I am talking about? Well, Koon says that you cannot communicate across paradigms, it’s not possible.
It’s not possible for two reasons, first reason is if you are in paradigm A and you understand paradigm B then obviously you understand both, however you are in paradigm A but don’t understand paradigm B than obviously you don’t understand so you don’t understand paradigm B, so it’s a one way street the person who knows that the world is flat and then understands that the whole is round can understand both but the person who still believes that the world is flat doesn’t understand that the world is round or they would understand that the world is round. It’s a one way street.
Finding language for a new paradigm
The second problem which is unique to our situation right now, not unique to but is plaguing us right now in this room is this; Koon says that at the time of any paradigm shift there are no words there are no words to describe the new paradigm, all of the words are borrowed from the old paradigm where they have a different meaning in a different context.
An example where they have um frequently in Naturopathic medicine is this thing called mind body whatever that is right? We take two words that have specific connotations in a specific paradigm and we move them in a new paradigm we stick them together to try and convey some different meaning by bringing them together even though they still have the same connotation from the old paradigm
and one of the things that I think we are doing here is, we have been the heirs to the vitalist system of medicine that has its own language it own understanding of this thing called the Vis or the vital force or the vis medicatrix naturae we are not only trying to explain it in the light of today’s science but today’s science in our understanding has moved to a new paradigm we do not have the language to explain it we are trying to fit square pegs into round wholes and we need to essentially redefine the whole discussion and probably come up with a new language.
Thank you. (Applause)