Free The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts

to understand nature in terms of mechanical models. According to Joseph Needham, the Chinese—despite all their sophistication—made little progress in science because it never occurred to them to think of nature as mechanism, as "composed" of separable parts and "obeying" logical laws. Their view of the universe was organic. It was not a game of billiards in which the balls knocked each other around in a cause-and-effect series. What were causes and effects to us were to them "correlatives"—events that arose mutually, like back and front. The "parts" of their universe were not separable, but as fully interwoven as the act of selling with the act of buying.(1) A "made" universe, whether of the Crackpot or Fully Automatic Model, is made of bits, and the bits are the basic realities of nature.
     
    Nature is therefore to be understood by microscopy and analysis, to find out what the bits are and how they are put together. This was the view of the nominalist philosophers of the late Middle Ages, who strongly opposed the then-called realists for maintaining that such entities as Mankind or Human Nature were real "substances" underlying the
    "accidents" of particular men and women. Every individual was therefore an example or case of the human "substance," though the word as then used did not mean matter or stuff but a kind of essence standing ( stance ) under ( sub ) its particular manifestations. The nominalists maintained that this was nonsense. For them, Mankind was no more than the sum total of individual people. Mankind was not a substance but simply a name for a class of creatures; it was not real but merely nominal.
    Nominalism, as we know, became the dominant attitude of Western thought and especially of the philosophy of science. In the eighteenth century Rousseau went so far as to suggest that Society and the State had originally been formed by a contract between individuals. Society was an association, like the Rotary Club, which individuals had at some time joined and thereby abandoned their original independence. But from the standpoint of modern sociology we feel that man is necessarily a social thing, if only for the reason that no individual can come into being without a father and a mother—and this is already society. Until quite recent times it has been the prevailing view of Western science that animals and plants, rocks and gases, are "composed" of such units as molecules, cells, atoms, and other particles in much the same way that a house is composed of bricks.
    But a consistent nominalist will have to be forced into the position that there really is no such thing as the human body: there are only the particular molecules of which it is composed, or only the particular atoms—not to mention electrons, protons, neutrons, and so forth.
    Obviously, these particles do not by themselves constitute the human body. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts if only for the fact that a scientific description of the body must take account of the order or pattern in which the particles are arranged and of what they are doing.
     
    The man behind the microscope
    Has this advice for you:
    "Instead of asking what it is , Just ask, 'What does it do? '"
    But even this is not enough. We must also ask, "In what surroundings is it doing it?" If a description of the human body must include the description of what it, and all its "parts," are doing —that is, of its behavior —this behavior will be one thing in the open air but quite another in a vacuum, in a furnace, or under water. Blood in a test-tube is not the same thing as blood in the veins because it is not behaving in the same way. Its behaviour has changed because its environment or context has changed, just as the meaning of one and the same word may change according to the kind of sentence in which it is used. There is a vast difference between the bark of a tree and the bark of a dog.
    It is not enough, therefore, to describe, define, and try to