Endo-Exo Circulation as a Paradigm of Life: Towards a New Synthesis of Eastern Philosophy and Western Science

Abstract

What is life? Despite the advanced studies of Western science and the progress of modern technology, we have not yet answered this problem satisfactorily. What is worse, it is a double problem that we cannot realize how we are deeply influenced by the traditional way of Western thinking in attacking the above problem. Owing to the dichotomy of subject (or endo) and object (or exo), together with its corresponding reductionism, we have specified more and more the detailed components of a living system and have also required the reproducibility principle that the living system shows the same responses to the same stimuli under the same conditions. A dichotomy perspective of this kind, which has been central to modern science, stands on the assumption that opposites are mutually exclusive and even contradictory.

Contrary to this dichotomy perspective, there is an alternative complementarity perspective typical of Eastern philosophy, which is surprisingly similar to Niels Bohr's complementarity principle in modern physics. It actually suggests that opposites are not mutually exclusive, but merely complementary to one another, because opposites are thought to be only different aspects of the same wholeness. This means that there is no clear distinction between subject (endo) and object (exo). As there is no definitely isolated object, the reproducibility principle is mostly violated. We must therefore pay much attention to the transients – or processes – during the past history of life.

On the basis of this complementarity idea, we are encouraged to have a holistic view by integrating fragments of knowledge at various component levels and time scales when investigating the history of life. In this sense, we need a new synthesis of Western science and Eastern philosophy, instead of considering either of them separately. Only then, it is possible to attack the long-standing question: what is life?

Along these lines, in the present paper, a process of endo-exo circulation is introduced as an essential paradigm of life. As a living organism is engaged in challenges from both its internal and external environments, it contains unlimited conflicts and oppositions, which in turn must be the driving force for itsevolution and development. It is such reconstructive dynamics that can give rise to an identity of the living organism. The resultant identity of life is represented by the Eastern image of the Mandala as an emergent symbol generated by the process of endo-exo circulation.