Yeo I S
Department of Medical History, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Korea.
Uisahak. 1998;7(2):179-97.
Michel Foucault has brought some considerable changes in our way of seeing the human body. He argued that the body is not merely a natural object, but a medium of numerous social messages and even the most favorable habitat of power. According to him, the birth of social institutions, such as asylums, clinics, and jails, have been closely linked to the process of modernization and further that the very process through which the body becomes an object of social control has been an important part of our modernization. He proposed a new concept, viz., the social stigma carved on the body and provided us certain clues that makes us think newly of the boundary between nature and culture. Although his arguments opened a new perspective on our body, it did have a premise of so-called "the passivity of body" as its limitation. The body is not just a purely natural object, nor a purely social construction. It resides at both sides simultaneously and the disease, an incident happened within the body, reveals subtle relationship between these two. Those who see the body as an object of power as such or a medium of certain social messages tend to consider it only as an objective being, yet on the other side of this standpoint, the Cartesian dualism is hidden as a premise. Deleuze defined, in his book on Spinoza, the ethics of Spinoza as a practical study mainly dealing with the mode of existence. Provided that this definition is correct enough, we may term this practical study for the mode of existence of the body as the ethics of the body. Spinoza proposed a very unique view with regard to the body, which differs from that of the Cartesian Dualism. It is based on the entire system of his philosophy, viz., the system of the univocity of substance and the immanence of being which finally appears in the form of ethics. In the later half of this article, a very unique medicine whose starting point is none other than this kind of ethics, a practical study for the mode of existence, was dealt with. It is named Sasang(Four Symbol) medicine which was founded upon the long tradition of one of the most profound ethical teachings of mankind, Confuciaism. Sasang medicine of Yi Jae-ma is in a sense a continuation of the Neo-Confucianism tradition of Korea in the field of medicine.
米歇尔·福柯给我们看待人体的方式带来了相当大的变化。他认为，身体不仅仅是一个自然物体，而是众多社会信息的媒介，甚至是权力最有利的栖息地。据他所说，诸如精神病院、诊所和监狱等社会机构的诞生与现代化进程紧密相连，而且身体成为社会控制对象的这一过程本身就是我们现代化的重要组成部分。他提出了一个新概念，即刻在身体上的社会耻辱，并为我们提供了一些线索，使我们重新思考自然与文化之间的界限。尽管他的论点为我们看待身体开启了一个新视角，但它确实有一个所谓“身体的被动性”的前提作为其局限性。身体既不仅仅是一个纯粹的自然物体，也不是一个纯粹的社会建构。它同时存在于两者之中，而疾病，作为发生在身体内部的一个事件，揭示了这两者之间的微妙关系。那些将身体视为权力对象或某种社会信息媒介的人往往只把它看作一个客观存在，然而在这个立场的另一面，笛卡尔二元论作为一个前提隐藏其中。德勒兹在他关于斯宾诺莎的书中，将斯宾诺莎的伦理学定义为主要研究存在方式的实践学问。如果这个定义足够正确，我们可以将这种对身体存在方式的实践学问称为身体伦理学。斯宾诺莎对身体提出了一种非常独特的观点，这与笛卡尔二元论不同。它基于他整个哲学体系，即实体的单义性和存在的内在性体系，最终以伦理学的形式呈现。在本文后半部分，探讨了一种非常独特的医学，其出发点正是这种存在方式的实践学问，即身体伦理学。它被称为四象医学，它建立在人类最深刻的伦理教诲之一——儒家思想的悠久传统之上。李济马的四象医学在某种意义上是韩国新儒家传统在医学领域的延续。
