You have to excuse Claude Bernard. He lived in a century a bit before we knew much about microbiology, the relationship between what we are on in our tiniest parts to what we are in total. If he didn’t quite understand how the human body worked, it wasn’t his fault. The information just wasn’t available; he didn’t have the technology and the million biologists who have since studied the body.
Yet, Claude did have at least one insight that kick started our knowledge of how our bodies work. That idea he termed milieu intérieur. You probably eat some “health food” or drink some “medicinal tea” because of the idea. You probably have heard someone say that humans need to put their bodies in holistic balance. The health foods, the teas, the holistic herbs and medicines, and the study of physiology begin with Claude’s idea. When the individual’s interior environment is in good repair, when things are working in harmony, the individual can move with relative independence in a potentially threatening world of external organisms. Your health and mine largely depend on our interior condition.
And to the end of preserving that interior condition, to the end of a holistic, healthful life, we have studied, experimented, developed, and consumed that which we believe to be healthful. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Who wants to argue against holistic harmony within especially when that harmony warrants health?
Claude lived in the nineteenth century. As human history and prehistory go, he was a relatively recent human, a grandfather of a grandfather of today. In that short time since he died in 1878, we have taken what he postulated and developed on his principle modern medicine and ways of living that have enhanced, saved, and prolonged life for billions of our contemporaries.
What Claude did for enhancing life by postulating an inner harmony seems to have no analog in philosophy, regardless of what adherents might say. If societies are analogs to bodies, they fail in achieving harmony. Two hundred thousand years of societal conflict have continued through our time. Take the massacre at Nataruk near Lake Turkana in Kenya, where archaeologists found the remains of 27 people killed 10,000 years ago. Or take the massacres of today. There doesn’t seem to be a milieu intérieur for society. Something within, something not in sync, something of a traitor among us seems always present. The inner peace of any society is constantly in jeopardy. From Plato’s Republic through More’s Utopia, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, to the works of Hobbes, Jefferson, and Rousseau, we have yet to find a governing principle that leads to a practical advance of inner societal harmony comparable to Claude’s principle of milieu intérieur. Conflict arises regardless of the social principles at work.
True, something will eventually go wrong with the body. Some hormone will be out of balance, or some organ will function less efficiently. But Claude gave us a principle by which we can mitigate many imbalances, and, as it has been the basis of medical research, that principle seems to apply universally to the human body. Nice if we could find a similar political principle, one that works universally, that keeps us all in harmony. That principle, should we ever discover it, would open the world to a truly new milieu.
Yet, Claude did have at least one insight that kick started our knowledge of how our bodies work. That idea he termed milieu intérieur. You probably eat some “health food” or drink some “medicinal tea” because of the idea. You probably have heard someone say that humans need to put their bodies in holistic balance. The health foods, the teas, the holistic herbs and medicines, and the study of physiology begin with Claude’s idea. When the individual’s interior environment is in good repair, when things are working in harmony, the individual can move with relative independence in a potentially threatening world of external organisms. Your health and mine largely depend on our interior condition.
And to the end of preserving that interior condition, to the end of a holistic, healthful life, we have studied, experimented, developed, and consumed that which we believe to be healthful. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Who wants to argue against holistic harmony within especially when that harmony warrants health?
Claude lived in the nineteenth century. As human history and prehistory go, he was a relatively recent human, a grandfather of a grandfather of today. In that short time since he died in 1878, we have taken what he postulated and developed on his principle modern medicine and ways of living that have enhanced, saved, and prolonged life for billions of our contemporaries.
What Claude did for enhancing life by postulating an inner harmony seems to have no analog in philosophy, regardless of what adherents might say. If societies are analogs to bodies, they fail in achieving harmony. Two hundred thousand years of societal conflict have continued through our time. Take the massacre at Nataruk near Lake Turkana in Kenya, where archaeologists found the remains of 27 people killed 10,000 years ago. Or take the massacres of today. There doesn’t seem to be a milieu intérieur for society. Something within, something not in sync, something of a traitor among us seems always present. The inner peace of any society is constantly in jeopardy. From Plato’s Republic through More’s Utopia, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, to the works of Hobbes, Jefferson, and Rousseau, we have yet to find a governing principle that leads to a practical advance of inner societal harmony comparable to Claude’s principle of milieu intérieur. Conflict arises regardless of the social principles at work.
True, something will eventually go wrong with the body. Some hormone will be out of balance, or some organ will function less efficiently. But Claude gave us a principle by which we can mitigate many imbalances, and, as it has been the basis of medical research, that principle seems to apply universally to the human body. Nice if we could find a similar political principle, one that works universally, that keeps us all in harmony. That principle, should we ever discover it, would open the world to a truly new milieu.
RSS Feed