Eastern and Western attitudes toward nature

A seventeenth-century Japanese haiku by Basho:

When I look carefully

I see the nazuna blooming

By the hedge!

A nineteenth-century poem by Alfred Tennyson:

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower--but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

The Buddhist philosopher Suzuki (1960) observes that the Japanese poet does not pluck the nazuna but is content to admire it from a respectful distance; his feelings are "too full, too deep, and he has no desire to conceptualize it" (3). Tennyson, in contrast, is active and analytical. He rips the plant by its roots, destroying it in the very act of admiring it. "He does not apparently care for its destiny. His curiosity must be satisfied. As some medical scientists do, he would vivisect the flower" (3).

Tennyson's violent imagery is reminiscent of Francis Bacon's description of the natural scientist as one who must "torture nature's secrets from her" and make her a "slave" to mankind (Merchant 1980: 169). Principles of monism, holism, and balanced complementarity in nature, which can temper perceptions of opposition and conflict, have largely given way to the analytic urge in the recent history of Western culture.

(from "A Critical-Interpretive Approach in Medical Anthropology: Rituals and Routines of Discipline and Dissent" by Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, 1990)