Vital Energy - with vigor and spirit (con brio)
It hardly seems worth mentioning that all humans share the same basic bodies; however, from there, the idea that there are still some differences among the large groups of humans has not entirely been put to rest. As one example of that, it is still thought an oddity that the Chinese have the concept of qi pronounced chee) as a central part of its classic philosophy, while no other major philosophical tradition really has anything quite like it.
I would like to present some evidence to the contrary.
(Qi)
As can be read in the Wikipedia entry, Chinese conceptions of qi date from the earliest records of their philosophy (5th century BC). Although the literal translation of qi (also chi or ch'i) is air, breath, or gas, corresponding to the ancient Indian concept of Prana, in Chinese philosophy, qi is an active principle forming part of any living thing, and is frequently translated as "lifeforce" or “energy flow”.
But is classic Chinese philosophy the only place that it assumes that level of importance?
Indo-Europeans
Over a period covering much of the 20th century, etymologists constructed what is known to many simply as PIE – standing for the 640 or so Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root words that are hypothesized to have formed the core of a common language from which most of the non-Semitic languages from India to northwest Europe may have developed--one of which, of course, is English.
Looking at it in a general way, slightly more than one in twenty of these roots1 have to do with birth, existence, life, vitality, growth, age, or death. This should come as no surprise. More specifically, there are six root words having to do with “vital force”, strength, or vigor, as seen below (the symbol ⇒ signifies “leading to” present-day English words):
aiw – vital force, life, long life, eternity ⇒ no, never, ever,
every, medieval, age, eternal
ner – “man”, with a basic sense of ‘vigorous, vital, strong’
⇒ (the prefix) andro-
wal – to be strong ⇒ valiant, valid, valor, value,
avail, prevail, wield, convalesce
weg – to be strong, be lively ⇒ wake, watch, wait,
bivouac, vigil, vigor, velocity
wei∂ – vital force ⇒ vim, violate, violent [∂ has a sound
like the “o”s in “confront”]
yeu – vital force, youthful vigor ⇒ youth, young,
junior, rejuvenate, juvenile
Anyone with any familiarity with the Age of Chivalry in the West surely has a feel for the extent to which these core definitions came to permeate Western culture, and certainly our major interests in sports, particularly contact sports, guns, and military matters (not to mention, fitness) are more contemporary signs. Nor should we lose sight of the central place that force plays in our physical sciences.
Sub-Saharan Africa
In 1945, there appeared a French translation of a work on Bantu philosophy by Father Placide Tempels, who had lived with one group of Bantu for some time. In the book, he states that for the Bantu, the “supreme valu[e] is life, force, to live strongly, or vital force.”2 He goes on to say that the Bantu “speak, act, live as if…beings were forces” (p. 51), that for them, force is a necessary element in being and inseparable from it.
Although Father Tempels’ work has been criticized for extending to all Bantus the observations made from a study of only one group of them, a 1973 work by John Mbiti on African religions and philosophies also cited the work of one J. Jahn, who was noted as having ‘covered a great part of Africa’, and who made observations similar to those originally made by Father Tempels. (My notes for this, by the way, are from a Spanish translation of Mbiti’s work by José Carlos Rodriguez, titled Entre Dios y el Tiempo [Between God and Time].)
According to Mbiti, Jahn had written that the African groups he studied spoke of muntu, which applied to beings that were constituted by force with intelligence [Muntu was the title of Jahn’s book, and it was also an important concept in Father Tempels’ work]); Kintu (forces not acting on their own [such as plants and animals]; Hantu (time and space); and Kuntu (modalities like beauty and laughter). Moreover, Jahn also pointed out that all four of these words go back to the same pure root ntu, or universal force).
What the above somewhat abbreviated exposition suggests to me is that the importance of vital energy as such is not a Chinese, or an Indian, or a “Western” or “African” realization and conceptualization, but a completely human realization and conceptualization. How could it be otherwise?
Your Assignment for next week (should you choose to accept it, of course):
Today’s post, as it developed, was quite a bit longer than the above. At first, I was disconcerted about that, but now I see that splitting it into two postings may be a good thing, as the second part, which I will post next week, follows from this first part, and is not simply a further elaboration of it, and so in one sense might be distracting.
Your assignment for next week is to simply think about what it means for us to have the biology that we have, and, further, about the virtually worldwide importance of the idea of vital energy, and how these relate to present conditions that we see (or not see) around us--and to our future.
[1] From “Indo-European Roots,” beginning at page 1584 in The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, NY, 1993.
[2] From the English translation by Rev. Colin King, M.A., Bantu Philosophy, published by Presence Africaine in Paris, 1959; p.44.
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