In social wide semantics, homeopathy means mostly a “natural product” people can get without the physician prescription at drug stores, even at self services shelves. It mirrors how homeopathy strategy of positioning itself on market appeals to the still alive popular romantic idea of nature as good, notwithstanding how venomous it can be.

A teaching and an understanding of health and disease in the cultural background of educated classic homeopath physicians, homeopathy appears, in collective imagination, represented in just that dimension that best fits reification: the product, a denomination. Whether the “product-medicine” corresponds or not to a therapeutics decision according to the homeopathic method Hahnemann did illustrate and to a “remedy” incorporated into the Materia Medica after proving, constitutes an elite’s arguments.

In most parallel worlds to a medical congress of homeopathy, it is not expected the product demonstrates it works according to the similar principle and theoretical aspects but according to the molecular model or in line with a botanical-therapy rationale.

At most levels of homeopathy’s semantic worlds, homeopathy, at best, is a synonym of a product manufactured according to “homeopathic pharmacopoeia techniques”. This last use of the term expresses a representation of homeopathy in a manner ordinary people can grasp it: a commodity.

Meanings In Post-Modern Societies – Homeopathy: Just An Episode of Ideation in Historical Annals or A Knowledge That Still Bears Historic Meaning!

Understanding what homeopathy means as social, institutional and historic fact is of utmost importance for understanding my remarks regarding homeopathy’s future, particularly, in the context of Post-Modernity’s Meanings Fragmentation. Your future will not to be the same if homeopathy is an historical fact, since it would mean homeopathy is just an episode in the chronicle of the past!

From a sociological point of view a multiplicity or a fragmentation of meanings related to homeopathy is not a matter of “perversion”. Most homeopathic physicians arguing about the true homeopathy to be taught and practised do not realize that science and knowledge are historic facts. If a knowledge system does not bear historic meaning it becomes just a historical fact.

From the “genealogy” prospective – and from Nietzsche forwards – history or the historic sense goes beyond categories of true and false. The right meaning is not a matter of logic. Logic has meaning only within a system. A right meaning is a matter of “genealogy”. According to genealogy, knowledge systems (like homeopathy) are historic facts and are understood on the basis of their existence course.

That means that any single system of knowledge is judged by considering the social circumstances that have produced it, that have conserved and transformed it, and even those circumstances that have vanished any meaning to be attributed to this system.

If knowledge systems, like homeopathy, are historic facts, this also means that homeopathy’s history does not refer to a chronicle of individual episodes, regarding Hahnemann’s insights, that have no circumstance to subsist. Homeopathy’s history refers to the social conditions that have produced, sustained and transformed homeopathy. Homeopathy is an “institutional fact”, or at least, it tries to be recognized largely as such.

The limits of this course of meanings homeopathy might have given rise to indicate the borders of the truth and the falsity in homeopathy, where the subject that decides is not any longer the unfolding logical explanation of its epistemology or the cohorts and meta-analysis order, but the historic unfolding order of their meanings succession, i.e., the order of plausible senses, one moment of truth, then of falsity.

There is no a timeless truth of homeopathy. There are conditions under which the idea of homeopathy has been introduced and conditions that remain valid until the idea of homeopathy produces effects of reality, till history confirms the idea. The meaning of an idea does not depend on the elucidation of its sense but on its life and historic death.

Truth or falsity of ideas are, then, written in their social existence. The life of an idea opens the conditions of its truth and of its falsity, similarly, its death, its vanishing, bring them to a close. There is no truth, then, that transcends history. Any truth is encompassed between a beginning and an end and occupies the space of a historic course that unfold from the idea’s origin to its disappearance.

Any speech for or against an idea supposes the existence of this idea, when this existence collapses, any proof for or against is not necessary any more.

What Christians from the first century of their age call ecclesia is not at all just a common dogma and a community of persons met around it. Since the beginning, the concept of Church has signified, equally, a collection of testimonies that shows through times the truth of the idea of rescue. It tries to evidence with new examples “the reality of the idea of rescue”, admitting that any successful society must regenerate and reinvest with accuracy its social capital.

The question arisen – the meaning of homeopathy – should not be misunderstood. The genealogy of homeopathy is not its historiography. Historiography searches for the chronological starting point of an idea, for the historical context in which the idea is generated. Genealogy, on the contrary, searches for the disclosure of meaning that a certain idea inaugurates, meaning by which the disclosure expresses itself. The research regarding the genealogy of homeopathy aims at tracing the idea of healing a suffering with an artificial similar suffering and exploring what such idea has signified.

Such a distinction must be done because when one refers to the history of homeopathy, strictly speaking, it means that the idea of homeopathy, healing a suffering with an artificial similar suffering, still carries a useful meaning. It would be wrong to confuse the history of homeopathy with an account of episodes or anecdotes that do not subsist any longer as carrier of a social project, of meaningful historic time.

If the history of homeopathy were considered as anything else than a chronicle, than a warehouse of anecdotes and miracles, a decisive transformation of its image could be generated, an image that would cast light on the crucial role of social and cultural relations as the true subject of sciences and transactions.

Strictly speaking, when one refers to history, one refers to a social project. When one refers to the end of history, one refers to societies without ideologies, without any social meaningful idea and, consequently, without a meaningful project for the collectivity but the one of a consumerism that feedbacks itself by fulfilling lifestyles tasks. When, on the contrary, one refers to events of the past, disregarding their useful meaning for societies, one refers to the chronicle. It is a paradox, when one refers to history one refers to a coming time.

The point is, consequently, which is the socially prevailing meaning of homeopathy? To put the question crudely, whether the idea of healing a suffering with an artificial similar suffering, still bears a useful meaning for the collectivity?

The Subject

We have been describing representations processes, i.e. attributes, predicates. But who is, actually, the subject of our times?

Being post-modernity a time without a denominated ideology and being the idea of ideology consequently hidden, by reification, behind the infatuated adhesion to lifestyles, even homeopathy ceases being an idea and enters to participate in the reification process, it becomes just “products” on drug stores shelves, a denomination, a commodity for ritual transactions, at best, a software for prescribing remedies.

It does not mean that we live in a time of depravity. The question is of another nature. It regards the subject of what happens today.

Churches and religions are still important subjects, but the greatest subject of current times is the binomial capital and technique relationship. Capital and Technique are no longer the means but the end. Societies are the means, their predicates or attributes.

Money, contrary to treasure, is movement. It is permanently traveling its tour of auto-valorization. Its only motto and mission is to broaden, at any time, its self movement of capitalization. Consequently, it produces effects essentially “futuristic”, generates a chronic affection to the future that articulates itself at any level money reaches in the form of a renewed expectative of profits. Its chronological form is the permanent crisis of accretion. Its modus vivendi implies the overthrowing of any relation – deregulation – coming from uses, custom and legislation interfering with its logic of auto-valorization. In its triumphal march money interfaces with nihilism.

The absence of ontological truths in post-modern times does not means degeneration of human being nor a symptom of the human malady. The cult of nothingness is, simply, an unavoidable result of the monotheism of money. For this god, any other value means a mere idol, an illusion.

The Sphere of Knowledge

To get some idea regarding how the subject “money” affects homeopathy, it is enough to verify that the logic of the capital transformations has signified important modification in the sphere of knowledge. In the post-modern context, erudite knowledge, like treasure, makes no sense. Scientific academies and universities become the capital’s partners. Knowledge acts as material stock for application in commodities and services that make possible the dynamism of money.

In the realm of functional knowledge, the research corresponds to the complex of activities that in the sphere of money is indicated as investment. It implies the controlled risk of exposing to losses what until now was acquired in favor of future acquisitions.

The capital as knowledge, like the capital as money, meets periodical crisis in which its further utilities are called into question – for instance the benefits deriving from the promises of the higher purpose of existence, the principle of similar, the proving. The crisis solution is almost always what the sociology of knowledge names a paradigm shift. During the process the more antique cognitive or symbolic values are destroyed, while activity goes on in a more intensive way under new concepts and mental innovations.

In the context of the modern positive science, in which the post-modern man has been grown, the questions regarding the purposes of existence or the meaning of human life do not subsist, indeed.

The positive concept of science, in modern times, represents, from a historic point of view, as Husserl has denominated it, a residual concept. It has dropped all the questions which have been considered under the now narrower, now broader concept of metaphysics, including all questions vaguely termed “ultimate and highest”. In the objectifying molecular mechanisms and models paradigm there is no room for transcendental subjectivity. The science of data creates a data-man, following the data-based decision-making software.

A most outstanding aspect of Post-Modernity is concerned with questions regarding the organization of knowledge. In modern societies, knowledge was equated with science. In a post-modern society, however, knowledge becomes functional: one learns how to use tools, appliances derived from knowledge but one does not develop a knowledge. Educational policy puts emphasis on skills and training rather than on humanist ideal.

Homeopathy nowadays is taught rather as functional knowledge: developing skills to manage the “tools” like “taking case techniques” and “repertories” in order to get the remedy for prescription. The philosophical question about the practical matters and concerns (what do “health” and “disease” mean? / how should man be healed?) become redundant.

Not only is knowledge in post-modern societies reduced to its utility, its appliances, to competences, to use of tools, but knowledge is also distributed, stored and arranged differently than in modern ones. Specially the advent of electronic computer technologies has revolutionized the modes of knowledge production, distribution and consumption.

In post-modern societies, anything which is not able to be translated into a form recognizable and storable by computer, i.e., anything that’s not digitizable, will cease to be knowledge. In this paradigm, the opposite of “knowledge” is not “ignorance”, as it is in the modern/humanist paradigm, but rather “noise”. Anything that does not qualify as a kind of knowledge is “noise”, is something that is not recognizable as anything within this system.

Thinking about the phenomenon described raises an important question in post-modern societies. Who decides what knowledge is and what “noise” is, and who knows what needs to be decided. Such decisions about knowledge do not involve the old modern/humanist qualifications. (For example, to assess knowledge as truth (its technical quality), or as goodness or justice (its ethical quality) or as beauty (its aesthetic quality). Rather, knowledge follows the paradigm of a language game, as laid out by Wittgenstein.

The subject is no longer the philosophical question about the practical matter, that is, in homeopathy, how to comprehend man is in order to, then, find out right methods to restore his/her health. The subject now is the technique, the capital, the software and the product or medicine.

Simillimum And Higher Purpose Of Existence In Post-Modern Times

It seems a nonsense to discuss the idea of the simillimum without considering a sort of fundamental ontology or epistemology regarding man or human being. Hahnemann’s Organon first edition was published in 1810, just one year after Darwin was born. In Hahnemann’s times man was still considered a theological creation. Science was still subjected to a theological ideation and the positive science was not abundantly developed.

Many features of the contemporary natural science conception of reality are still in dispute and still problematic. But two features are not for grabs. They are not, so to speak, optional for us as citizens of the early twenty-first century. It is a condition of our being an educated person in our era that one is apprised of these two theories: the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology.

The picture of reality derived from these two theories, to state it crudely, is as follows: The world consist entirely of entities that we find it convenient, though not entirely accurate, to describe as particles. These particles exist in fields of force, and are organized into systems. The boundaries of systems are set by causal relations or necessary connections. Examples of systems are mountains, molecules, crystals, rivers and babies. Some of these systems are living systems. Types of living systems evolve through natural selection, and some of them have evolved certain sorts of cellular structures, specially, nervous systems capable of causing and sustaining consciousness. Consciousness is a biological, and therefore physical, though of course also mental, feature of certain higher-level nervous systems, such as human brains and a large number of different types of animal brains. With consciousness comes intentionality, the capacity of mind to represent objects and states of affairs in the world other than itself.

Here are the bare bones of our world: We live in a world made up entirely of physical particles in fields of force. Some of these are organized into systems. Some of these systems are living systems and some living systems have evolved consciousness. With consciousness comes intentionality, the capacity of the organism to represent objects and state of affairs in the world to itself.

Now the question is, how can co-exist a theological idea of a human life created by a god and the evolutionary theory of biology? In this context Hahnemann’s homeopathy, with its method of healing that intends to restore health to the patient so that he/she is able to act for “the higher purpose of existence”, as a theological design, seems a moral philosophy, something without heuristic evidence.

Overcome even the concept of individuality with the Christianity crisis, that has cultivated it, and with the global technological capitalism profiles homologation, even the idea itself of a “simillimum” for the single individual seems redundant in a world of homologated profiles working as servant of the technique.

In a context in which the historic concept of individuality comes to an end, it sounds more plausible a kind of homeopathy in which the principle of similar refers to a therapeutics diagnosis, as in conventional medicine, that is, a homeopathic remedy assimilated to the concept of standardized drug.

The deficit of Hahnemann’s homeopathy in post-modern times seems to be keeping itself devoted to a transcendence, to an individuality and to the meaning of life and higher purpose of existence.

From an epistemological point of view its interest in the “individuality” holds back clinical work with therapeutic guide lines aimed at the building-up of a database useful to design cohorts and meta-analysis to accredit evidence, in the term requested by the conventional positive science research.

Yet from an epistemological point of view, another aspect of this deficit is the one of mistaking the experimental data (that are a function of the observer) for “ontological essences” and conferring such “ontological nature” to the language derived from the proving.

From the point of view of the pharmaco-dynamics, linked to the positive science, homeopathy should yet prove effective using the models to establish the action of drugs designed according to the objectivism of classical physics.

Conclusions

The main characteristic of postmodernism seems to be a loss of faith (consensus) in the ideas of the Enlightenment. It is argued by postmodernists that people have become disillusioned with the idea that science and rational thought can be used to make the world a better place. Since Western God’s Death, the “optimism” of the new testament god’s character, is lacking and ordinary people have started to get depressed and disenchanted with the idea of so-called “progress”.

Post-modern societies are also seeing the disappearance of old certainties. In the past, gender roles, ethnic differences, social class differences were all clear-cut and people generally conformed to societal expectations.

Today the old distinctions are blurring and people choose who they want to be, and how they want to behave. Whilst earlier societies, with a social order based firmly in tradition, would provide individuals with (more or less) clearly defined roles, in post-traditional societies one has to work out his/her roles for him/herself. Another feature of post-modern time is its scepticism towards meta-narratives.

In societies where the old certainties vanish, the consensus towards the idea of the “higher purposes of existence” appears tricky and the theological utility Hahnemann ascribed to health has been questioned.

If health is an end in itself, if there is no identity the subject cannot modify, since he/she does not belong anymore to a theological design, a therapeutic approach is just as good as any other, whether it restores the man’s performance or a condition of performances that stands an optimal cost-effective rapport.

Therefore, the research for heuristic documentation widens from “demonstrating how remedy works” to another field, conjectural as the former: to determining “conventions” about the marketing positioning of homeopathy’s cost-effectiveness or cost/benefit rapport.

Since the idea of the “higher purposes of existence” appears tricky, any therapeutic approach is just as good as any other and the research for heuristic documentation widens from “demonstrating how a remedy works” to another field, conjectural as the former: to determining “conventions” about the marketing positioning of homeopathy’s cost-effectiveness. All this does not mean homeopathy cannot have its chance in Post-Modernity, with its ability to borrow from the past and combine a wide range of styles together – a ‘pick and mix’ approach.

As said before, secularization in post-modern times presents a paradox. While elites know “disillusion” and agree upon the idea of reality and truth as conventions, as representations, the ordinary people, on the contrary and by means of reification, go on in a kind of mythological world where things are considered as metaphysical values and representations are mistaken for “reality”.

After Modernity and deities sunset, post-modern societies present a yearning for rescue promises. This vacuum represents a chance for Medicine to be considered again as a tool to manage people or as a medium to get power.

Behind the widespread phenomenon of healthier lifestyles, indeed, there is the utmost need of a sense of rescue in Western societies recently launched into secularization “officially “.

The elite that put an end to the idea of a world created by a divinity can cope with secularised life with a sort of scientific rationality. The ordinary people, however, are not able to manage with rational tools the madness from which humankind comes forward. Nietzsche has explained that Western man was yet incapable of taking on the responsibility of self-determination. The ordinary man still seeks to be rescued and health is the nearest ideal to the thought of salvation. Likely, health products are the nearest “entities” to the idea of protection. The paradox is that Medicine starts struggling against deities.

After the sunset of the ideologies of scatological rescue, it is likely consumption trends regarding “healthier lifestyles” will go on growing. It means a chance for Homeopathy, that can be seen as a sort of Pietas or as a sort of secularized rescue or healthy lifestyle.

The question to elucidate is whether homeopathy will be capable of resigning to the temptation of playing its part in a mystifying version or it will be capable of playing its part in a secular manner.

Related to this question, there is another one: whether and how homeopathy’s idea, i.e. healing a suffering using a similar artificial suffering, still bears any functional useful sense in post-modern times.

As I have said at the introduction of my reflection, taking into account some intensified phenomena of representation of the world in Post-modernity, as for instance, reification, money as subject and society as its predicate, and considering their expressions in homeopathy, this elucidation intends to motivate stakeholders to see themselves in this epochal change, in which they live in, and formulate some hypotheses pertaining to the future of their everyday practices in post modern times.

No-one can command by decree whether the hómoios-páthos idea will go on producing effects of reality in post-modern times. Taking into account the reification of the idea of homeopathy, we can conjecture that homeopathy might become a “simulacra” (Baudrillard), a copy, in the commodities flow with “signified” (surfaces or packaging) regarding mainly pleasantries, according to the contexts of interest in which the “copy” is used.

That homeopathy is a way of producing “products” under the denomination “homeopathy” or specific manufacturing process may be taken for granted. Whether, in the sunset of theological rescue plans, at the sunrise of neurosciences, homeopathy will be capable of upgrading itself as the hómoios-páthos medicine, being able to play the role of a secularized medicine, depends on the ongoing conflict of interests that defines its present meanings in social terms.

“Social auto-determination”, evolutionary biology and neurosciences seem to be of paramount importance as references in the discussion related to the future of homeopathy. Homeopathy’s future does not depend on its logical, theoretical or clinical implications but on its social meaning. Indeed, if homeopathic medicine has a meaning, it cannot be separated from the social circumstances in which it has an effect on reality.

The reasoning now shifts, indeed, to the sociological and anthropological point of view, to cast light on the question of whether and how homeopathy’s idea, i.e. healing a suffering using a similar artificial suffering, still bears any functional useful sense in post-modern times.

Any successful society or knowledge must regenerate and reinvest with accuracy its social capital.

From 64th LMHI World Congress 2009 – Timeless Quality Homeopathy

Footnotes

¹Social and historical Believing in order to understand: Hahnemann’s hierarchisation of values J.M. Schmidt Department of the History of Medicine, University of Munich, Germany. In Homeopathy, Volume 97, Issue 4, October 2008, Page 226 JM Schmidt

²Western culture owed to Hippocrates the first diseases secularization attempt. On the Sacred Disease he states it has a natural structure & natural causes but that men yet considered it in a certain way a divinity’s work by men inexperience & astonishment. The first technique to emancipate from deities is medicine, as an attempt to avoid the evitable death, the death owed to ignorance, which sinks its roots in the action of ascribing to deities the causes of phenomena.

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