Inclusional Research
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Brief Introduction On his death bed, Louis Pasteur, founding father of ‘germ theory’, the notion that microrganisms are causal agencies of many ‘diseases’, is said to have confided to his friend, Dr Renon, that ‘Bernard avait raison; le microbe n’est rien, c’est le terrain qui est tout’. [‘Bernard was right; the microbe is nothing, it is the terrain that is all’]. What Pasteur was acknowledging here is that ‘disease’ - and correspondingly ‘health’ - cannot be understood more than very superficially in rationalistic terms of linear causality, the one-sided action of one ‘body’, the ‘pathogen’, upon another ‘body’, its ‘host’ or ‘victim’. Deep understanding of disease can only come inclusionally, in terms of the context or ‘terrain’ of which both ‘bodies’ are dynamic relational, variably receptive-responsive inclusions. What manifests locally as what we call disease is situation-dependent and what we call disease is dependent upon which of innumerable nested organisational scales from microcosm to macrocosm our situational view is based upon. Since death and degeneration are inescapably vital to a dynamic evolutionary life that doesn’t sit still in a fixed survival capsule forever, what grounds do we have for absolutely defining some manifestation of these processes as ‘disease’ or some dynamic relational form involved in these processes as ‘sole causal agent’? None! We can only make carefully balanced judgements in sensitive relation to contextual setting. Nonetheless, our cultural habit continues to be to try to single out and blame something or someone solely responsible for whatever we may deem to be ‘unhealthy’ or ‘dysfunctional’. We then attempt to target this agency with some ‘magic bullet’, only to discover that the bullet can have all sorts of undesirable and unforeseen repercussions, known as ‘side-effects’ and ‘collateral damage’. This habit applies to all kinds of conditions of human distress, whether we attempt to define these narrowly as psychological, cultural, environmental or physiological. If we wish to alleviate, not aggravate these conditions through our very efforts to ‘cure’ or ‘eliminate’ them, we need to remember Pasteur’s dying, inclusional words and appreciate our human condition as dynamic inclusions, not Masters of Nature. We need find ways to attend receptively, responsively and hence compassionately to our human situation within, not out of this world. Contacts
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