Organicism

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about the philosophical doctrine. For the method of interpretation, see
Organicist architecture
.
Not to be confused with Organism.

Organicism is the

living organism.[1][2] Vital to the position is the idea that organicistic elements are not dormant "things" per se but rather dynamic components in a comprehensive system that is, as a whole, everchanging. Organicism is related to but remains distinct from holism insofar as it prefigures holism; while the latter concept is applied more broadly to universal part-whole interconnections such as in anthropology and sociology, the former is traditionally applied only in philosophy and biology.[3][4] Furthermore, organicism is incongruous with reductionism because of organicism's consideration of "both bottom-up and top-down causation."[5] Regarded as a fundamental tenet in natural philosophy, organicism has remained a vital current in modern thought, alongside both reductionism and mechanism, that has guided scientific inquiry since the early 17th century.[6][7]

Though there remains dissent among scientific historians concerning organicism's pregeneration, most scholars agree on

Ancient Athens as its birthplace. Surfacing in Athenian writing in the 4th-century BC, Plato was among the first philosophers to consider the universe an intelligent living (almost sentient) being, which he posits in his Philebus and Timaeus.[1] At the turn of the 18th-century, Immanuel Kant championed a revival of organicisitic thought by stressing, in his written works, "the inter-relatedness of the organism and its parts[,] and the circular causality" inherent to the inextricable entanglement of the greater whole.[2]

Organicism flourished for a period during the

organisms. John Scott Haldane was the first modern biologist to use the term to expand his philosophical stance in 1917; other 20th-century academics and professionals, such as Theodor Adorno and Albert Dalcq [fr], have followed in Haldane's wake.[9][10]

Interest in organicist biology has recently been revived with the extended evolutionary synthesis.[11][12]

In philosophy

Organicism as a doctrine rejects mechanism and reductionism (doctrines that claim that the smallest parts by themselves explain the behavior of larger organized systems of which they are a part). However, organicism also rejects vitalism, the doctrine that there is a vital force different from physical forces that accounts for living things. As Fritjof Capra[13] puts it, both schools, organicism and vitalism, were born from the quest for getting rid of the Cartesian picture of reality, a view that has been claimed to be the most destructive paradigm nowadays, from science to politics.[14] A number of biologists in the early to mid-twentieth century embraced organicism. They wished to reject earlier vitalisms but also to stress that whole organism biology was not fully explainable by atomic mechanism. The larger organization of an organic system has features that must be taken into account to explain its behavior.

The French zoologist Yves Delage, in his seminal text L'Hérédité Et Les Grands Problèmes de la Biologie Générale, described organicism thus:

[L]ife, the form of the body, the properties and characters of its diverse parts, as resulting from the reciprocal play or struggle of all its elements, cells, fibres, tissues, organs, which act the one on the other, modify one the other, allot among them each its place and part, and lead all together to the final result, giving thus the appearance of a consensus, or a pre-established harmony, where in reality there is nothing but the result of independent phenomena.[15]

Scott F. Gilbert and Sahotra Sarkar distinguish organicism from holism to avoid what they see as the vitalistic or spiritualistic connotations of holism.[10] Val Dusek notes that holism contains a continuum of degrees of the top-down control of organization, ranging from monism (the doctrine that the only complete object is the whole universe, or that there is only one entity, the universe) to organicism, which allows relatively more independence of the parts from the whole, despite the whole being more than the sum of the parts, and/or the whole exerting some control on the behavior of the parts.[16]

Still more independence is present in relational holism. This doctrine does not assert top-down control of the whole over its parts, but does claim that the relations of the parts are essential to explanation of behavior of the system. Aristotle and early modern philosophers and scientists tended to describe reality as made of substances and their qualities, and to neglect relations.

symbolic logic, in phenomenology
, or in metaphysics.

William Wimsatt has suggested that the number of terms in the relations considered distinguishes reductionism from holism. Reductionistic explanations claim that two or at most three term relations are sufficient to account for the system's behavior. At the other extreme the system could be considered as a single ten to the twenty-sixth term relation, for instance.

In politics and sociology

Main articles: Social organism and Body politic

Organicism has also been used to characterize notions put forth by various late 19th-century social scientists who considered human society to be analogous to an organism, and individual humans to be analogous to the cells of an organism. This sort of organicist sociology was articulated by Alfred Espinas, Paul von Lilienfeld, Jacques Novicow, Albert Schäffle, Herbert Spencer, and René Worms, among others.[17] Prominent conservative political thinkers who have developed an organic view of society are Edmund Burke,[18] G.W.F. Hegel,[19] Adam Müller,[20] and Julius Evola.[21] Organicism has also been identified with the "Tory Radicalism" of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Benjamin Disraeli.[22]

Thomas Hobbes arguably put forward a form of organicism. In the Leviathan, he argued that the state is like a secular God whose constituents (individual people) make up a larger organism. However, the body of the Leviathan is composed of many human faces (all looking outwards from the body), and these faces do not symbolize different organs of a complex organism but the individual people who themselves have consented to the social contract, and thereby ceded their power to the Leviathan. That the Leviathan is more like a constructed machine than like a literal organism is perfectly in line with Hobbes' elementaristic individualism and mechanical materialism.[23]

According to scholars

complex systems and theorization of organic-racial societies.[25][26][27][28] In particular, one of the most significant ideological influences on the Nazis was the 19th-century German nationalist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works had served as an inspiration to Hitler and other Nazi Party members, and whose ideas were implemented among the philosophical and ideological foundations of Nazi-oriented Völkisch nationalism.[26][29]

In biology

Main articles: Biological organisation and Organism

In breathing organisms, the

invention of the microscope. Before that period, individual organisms were studied as a whole in a field known as "organismic biology"; that area of research remains an important component of the biological sciences.[30]

In

Robert Rosen, founder of "relational biology", provided a comprehensive mathematical and category-theoretic treatment of irreducible causal relations he believed to be responsible for life.[32]

The early biologists of the organicist movement have influenced the organism-centered perspective of the extended evolutionary synthesis.[12]

Theoretical Biology Club

In the early 1930s

gene-centric view of evolution. Most of the members were influenced by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.[34][35][36][37] The club disbanded as the Rockefeller Foundation refused to fund their investigations.[38]

Ecology

In ecology, "organicism" and "organicistic" (or "organismic") are used to designate theories which conceptualize populations, particularly ecological communities or ecosystems, according to the model of the individual organism.[39][40] As such, the term "organicism" is sometimes used interchangeably with "holism", although there are versions of holism that are not organicistic/organismic but individualistic.[41]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Plato: Organicism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". www.iep.utm.edu. Retrieved 11 June 2020.
  2. ^ a b Gilbert, S. F., and S. Sarkar. 2000. "Embracing Complexity: Organicism for the 21st Century." Develop Dynam 219: 1–9.
  3. ^ "Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology | Wiley". Wiley.com. Retrieved 11 June 2020.
  4. ^ Charles Wolfe. HOLISM, ORGANICISM AND THE RISK OF BIOCHAUVINISM. Verifiche. Rivista di scienze umana, 2014
  5. S2CID 58624436
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  6. Ionian Enlightenment were referred to by later philosophers (such as Aristotle) as hylozoists meaning 'those who thought that matter was alive' (see Farrington
    (1941/53)
  7. ^ For a general overview see Capra (1996)
  8. ^ Richards, Robert J. "The Impact of German Romanticism on Biology in the Nineteenth Century" (PDF). University of Chicago.
  9. S2CID 156039471
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  10. ^
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  11. doi:10.1111/phc3.12128
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  12. ^
    ISBN 978-3031220272
  13. ^ Fritjof Capra. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. Anchor Books Doubleday, 1996.
  14. ^ What The Bleep Do We Know – Down The Rabbit Hole. Samuel Goldwyn Films. Roadside attractions. Documentary film, Drama. 3 February 2006.
  15. JSTOR 3745903
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  16. ^ Dusek, Val (1999). The Holistic Inspirations of Physics. Rutgers University Press.
  17. ^ Daniela Barberis, "In search of an object: organicist sociology and the reality of society in fin-de-siècle France", History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2003. Page 54.
  18. ^ Cecil, Lord Hugh (1913). Konservatismen. Tiden. p. 54.
  19. OCLC 829713938
    . Retrieved 14 September 2021.
  20. OCLC 1166587654
    . Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  21. ISBN 978-1-136-72549-4
    . Retrieved 17 July 2022.
  22. JSTOR 41178487
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  23. ^ Cf. O'Flynn, Micheal 2009: The individualism of Hobbes and Locke. In: O'Flynn, Micheal (Hg.): Profitable Ideas. The Ideology of the Individual in Capitalist Development. Brill, Leiden: 21–37; Duncan, Stewart, "Thomas Hobbes", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/hobbes/>.
  24. ISBN 978-0-674-97153-0
    . The core of the far right's worldview was organicism, that is, the idea that society functions as a living being. The far-right movements disseminated an organicist conception of the community they wished to constitute (whether based on ethnicity, nationality, or race), or that they said they wanted to reconstitute. That organicism entailed the rejection of every form of universalism, in favor of autophilia (the valorization of the "we") and alterophobia. Extremists on the right thus absolutize differences (between nations, races, individuals, cultures). They tend to conflate inequalities and differences, which creates a climate of anxiety, since differences disrupt their efforts to organize their community homogeneously.
  25. German people (Volk) as a mystical, pseudobiological whole and the state as an "organism" in which the individual was subsumed in the whole ("You are nothing, your Volk is everything"); the condemnation of Jews as an alien force representing chaos, mechanism, and inauthenticity. Hitler himself had even used the stock imagery of conservative holism in Mein Kampf
    when he spoke of the democratic state as "a dead mechanism which only lays claim to existence for its own sake" and contrasted this with his vision of statehood for Germany in which "there must be formed a living organism with the exclusive aim of serving a higher idea."
  26. ^
    anti-Semitism of young faculty and students was particularly virulent. Moreover, I show that scientists supported Nazi ideologies and policies not only through so-called reductionist science such as eugenics and race-hygiene, but also by promoting organicist and holistic ideologies of the racial state. [...] The ideology of leading Nazi party ideologues was strongly influenced by the Volkish movement which, in the wake of the writings of philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte
    and other nineteenth century authors, promoted the idea of Volk (people) as an organic unity. They did not base their virulent anti-Semitism and racism on anthropological concepts.
  27. Homo sapiens. A substantial part of this chapter will thus return to their research on human ecology to explore the mutual field of inspiration linking them and Smuts. Two aspects of this human ecological research were particularly important: the human gradualism or ecological "succession" of human personalities researched by Bews, and the concept of an ecological biotic community explored by Phillips. Smuts transformed this research into a policy of racial gradualism that respected local ways of life in different (biotic) communities, a policy he tried to morally sanctify and promote as author of the famous 1945 Preamble of the United Nation Charter
    about human rights.
  28. Weimar Germany and then under Nazism, holistic science became a mainstream academic endeavour, once more intermingling cultural politics and serious scientific research. Holistic perspectives also became popular in the interwar years among academics and the wider public throughout the UK and US. In France, it was associated with vitalist philosophies
    and the emergence of neo-Hippocratic thinking in medicine, manifesting the unease many people felt about the shifts that biomedicine was undergoing at the time.
  29. racially pure "organic" society will be restored after what they believe to be an ongoing age of corruption, the Kali Yuga
    , is swept away in an apocalyptic war, and that it is their role to hasten the end of the Kali Yuga by generating chaos and violence.
  30. ^ "biology". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2016. Web. 19 January 2016 <http://www.britannica.com/science/biology>.
  31. JSTOR 3745903
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  32. ^ Rosen, R. 1991. "Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life". Columbia University Press, New York.
  33. ISBN 9780822944669
    .
  34. ^ Reconciling science and religion: the debate in early-twentieth-century Britain, 2001, Peter J. Bowler
  35. ^ A history of molecular biology, Michel Morange, Matthew Cobb, 2000, p. 91
  36. ^ Cambridge scientific minds, Peter Michael Harman, Simon Mitton, 2002, p. 302
  37. ^ Greater than the parts: holism in biomedicine, 1920–1950, Christopher Lawrence, George Weisz, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 12
  38. ^ The future of DNA, Johannes Wirz, Edith T. Lammerts van Bueren, 1997, p. 87
  39. S2CID 219563329
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  40. PMID 32997274
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  41. ^ Cf. Trepl, Ludwig & Voigt, Annette 2011: The classical holism-reductionism debate in ecology. In: Schwarz, Astrid/ Jax, Kurt (Hg.): Ecology Revisited. Reflecting on Concepts, Advancing Science. Dordrecht, Springer: 45–83.

Further reading

External links

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