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KMID : 1172020020030020123
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Journal of Korean Bioethics Association
2002 Volume.3 No. 2 p.123 ~ p.135
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The Body seen from East Asian and Western Medical Perspectives
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Kang Shin-Ik
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Abstract
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This essay tries to overview the differences in the concept of the body constructed by Traditional East Asian Medicine and the Western Biomedicine. Due to the differences in the historical and cultural contexts in which each of the two has developed, however, it may not be fair to apply western criteria directly to the eastern system or vice versa. Therefore we cannot but synthesize each system according to its own historical and cultural perspective first, rather than analyze both of them using any allegedly universal criteria. In the west, the body has been constructed as a machine, a battlefield and a marketplace, whereas in the east it has been conceived as a microcosm or a field through which not only biological and physicochemical but also spiritual, political and moral powers traverses. I propose to synthesize these two sets of concepts by concentrating on actual bodies that are living through actual world, and neither in terms of highly abstracted nor simply material object. We need a new ontology of the body that will guide us to the new world in which not only epistemological but also cosmological and phenomenological insights play major roles.
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KEYWORD
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body, ontology, metaphor, epistemology, phenomenology
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