here.
And thank you, Wendy, for clarifying something of your thoughts.
I see that my invitation to contribute when you can has miscommunicated as
an invitation to desist while you can't. Not at all. I don't expect you
to be able to contribute to any genuine, useful understanding of
homoeopathy until you understand something about it yourself, but I'm
(unlike you) certainly *not* inviting you to remain silent until you can
understand it. It is only by airing our understandings and
misunderstandings and testing them, if not against the real world, at least
against others' understandings, that we may hope to use this list to
progress significantly on the path of reason.
Reasoned discussion is something that, however abhorrent polypaths find it,
homoeopaths always seem to welcome.
Your point about Kent's inability to fully understand Hahnemann and value
the baron due to the limitations that his fervent beliefs imposed on his
understanding is well taken. It is of course a salutary lesson to all of
us; but I'm sanguine about your ability to see its relevance to yourself as
well as to those whose insistence upon calling a spade a spade but a flat
rock nothing but a pancake you find disagreeable.
If we apply this lesson of yours to the question at hand here, what do we
find?
On the one hand, we encounter people stating that there can be no mistaking
the one thing that discriminates homoeopathy from all else: the law of
similars, to which knowledge of drug pathogenesis is not incidental but
utterly central. On the other, we encounter people stating that
combination therapies work and that it is not possible to judge whether
they work and that nobody can really know -- and, through some logic I
haven't yet fathomed, that it is therefore incumbent upon the
first-mentioned people to discard their understanding of the distinction!
You do see now what mindless drivel that latter position is, don't you. It
is only exceptionally that the question of whether novel concoctions "work"
may bear in any way at all upon the question of whether use of those
concoctions can -- by any stretch of unimaginative speciousness -- be said
to have a basis in knowledge of pathogenesis.
You're right: for as long as concoctionists continue to concoct reasons to
stifle debate that are no more than unreasoned, uncritical, inconsistent
non sequiturs to the topic and to the reasoning offered in support of an
understanding of homoeopathy's sole difference from all else -- for as long
as they continue to speak, in other words, on topics of no relevance,
disdaining respect for both reason and meaning -- there can be no elegance
to the interaction. That is no reason, however, to desist from the attempt
to shed light where one may.
The truth, beauty, elegance, and spirit of homoeopathy did not exist before
Hahnemann formulated its practice, however nice it would be to think
otherwise. Naturally, there are other beautiful principles in the
universe, and some bear a resemblance. (After all, how many ways do we
uncritically classify difference? Let's see: [1] it's different; [2] it's
similar. That's two. So we will see similarity everywhere, even if it
exists only superficially.) But let's not kid ourselves: without the
spirit of enquiry that motivated Hahnemann to learn what the primary
deranging effect of a medicine was, there would be no homoeopathy except
the occasional unrecognised (and unrecognisable) accident of the kind that
Irene has mentioned and that Hahnemann discovered in medical history
*after*recognising the indicative law of similars,
*Similia similibus* (*curantur*) and formulating from it the imperative law
of similars (*Similia similibus curentur*).
There are beautiful suppositions, too, and probably some of them reflect
the facts. Even some of the way-out ones that Shannon and several others
constantly propose on this list, concerning the self-selection of a
medicine in a mixture, may have more than a grain of truth. But:
(1) they remain suppositions; and
(2) they remain wholly, irrevocably, and above all *tediously* irrelevant
to the sole principle that *all* homoeopaths acknowledge underlies
*all*homoeopathic practice, a principle that cannot be stripped of the
necessity
of knowledge of pathogenesis -- though we'd welcome any *reasoned* attempt.
Kind regards,
John
On 23 December 2011 02:42, Wendy Howard <wendy@smeddum.net> wrote:
> Ah John! You're a hoot! Are you trying to tell me when I can and can't
> contribute to this thread now as well as how to define homeopathy? Who's
> hand is the shoehorn in, eh?
>
> I can see where you're coming from and what you're reading into what I've
> written, but from your responses it's clear you haven't understood where
> I'm coming from in what I'm saying. This is beautifully illustrative of the
> point I was making earlier about Kent.
>
> Kent believed that his view of Hahnemann's work was truly Hahnemann's own
> interpretation. Yet he was looking at it through his Swedenborgian lenses
> and didn't realise that the distortions those lenses produced belonged to
> his perception, not what he was looking at. In his later years he was very
> fond of tearing Bönninghausen's method to shreds, criticising it in much
> the same sort of dismissive language as you're using here. But a closer
> examination of what his criticisms are about reveals he doesn't actually
> comprehend Bönninghausen's method because it's incongruent with the
> Swedenborgian filter in his thinking. Hahnemann himself is on record as
> saying that of all his followers, Bönninghausen's perspective and practice
> was closest to his own, so how on earth could Kent lay claim to
> representing Hahnemann's view if he couldn't even understand
> Bönninghausen's?!
>
> My point was that we all do this. Note that I'm not making any sort of
> exception for myself here. We all have our individual perspective and
> approach that we bring to bear on everything, not just homeopathy. We read
> others' positions through our own filters, judge that THEY, not we, are
> 'wrong', draw a line in the sand and create 'sides' - 'us' and 'them',
> inclusive and exclusive - puff ourselves up to make ourselves look bigger,
> employ judgemental authoritarian language and big words while being
> dismissive of the other 'side', try to make them look smaller and undermine
> their positions, call in the 'support' of an army of opinions that appear
> to roughly coincide with our own, use all kinds of inflammatory emotive
> divisive language to artificially polarise the discussion way past the
> position of the other 'side' ... it's a grand game, to be sure! And after a
> year spent playing it with homeopathy's main detractors 'face to face' (so
> to speak), believe me there isn't a trick in the book I don't know about!
> But it goes absolutely nowhere, convinces no-one, contributes nothing but
> bad feeling, advances our knowledge not one jot and is ultimately just
> tedious and boring. So if you're expecting me to play along John, forget
> it! My main purpose in contributing to this thread was to suggest possible
> ways out of this perpetual cycle of behaviour ...
>
> But given that this IS the reality we find ourselves in, how do you
> imagine it's possible for there to be consensus about what homeopathy
> represents ...?!!
--
"And if care became the ethical basis of citizenship? Our parliaments,
guided by such ideas, would be very different places."
—Paul Ginsborg, *Democracy: Crisis and Renewal*, London: Profile, 2008.
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