Organicism
Encyclopedia
Holism
Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone...
. Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, Hobbes or Constantin Brunner
Constantin Brunner
Constantin Brunner was the pen-name of the German Jewish philosopher Arjeh Yehuda Wertheimer . He was born in Altona . He came from a prominent Jewish family that had lived in the vicinity of Hamburg for generations; his grandfather, Akiba Wertheimer, was chief Rabbi of Altona and Schleswig-Holstein...
are examples of such philosophical thought.
Organicism is also a biological
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
doctrine
Doctrine
Doctrine is a codification of beliefs or a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the body of teachings in a branch of knowledge or belief system...
that stresses the organization, rather than the composition, of organism
Organism
In biology, an organism is any contiguous living system . In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homoeostasis as a stable whole.An organism may either be unicellular or, as in the case of humans, comprise...
s. William Emerson Ritter
William Emerson Ritter
William Emerson Ritter, Ph.D. was an American biologist. Ritter initiated and shaped the Marine Biological Association of San Diego and the American Society for the Dissemination of Science...
coined the term in 1919. Organicism became well-accepted in the 20th century.
In philosophy
Organicism as a doctrine rejects mechanism and reductionismReductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...
(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
Vitalism
Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is#a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions...
, the doctrine that there is a vital force different from physical forces that accounts for living things.
A number of biologists in the early to mid-twentieth century embraced organicism. They wished to reject earlier vitalisms but 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.
Gilbert and Sarkar distinguish organicism from holism to avoid what they see as the vitalistic or spritualistic connotations of holism. Dusek notes that holism contains a continuum of degrees of the top-down control of organization, ranging from monism
Monism
Monism is any philosophical view which holds that there is unity in a given field of inquiry. Accordingly, some philosophers may hold that the universe is one rather than dualistic or pluralistic...
(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.
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. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz showed the bizarre conclusions to which a doctrine of the non-existence of relations led. Twentieth century philosophy has been characterized by the introduction of and emphasis on the importance of relations, whether in symbolic logic, in phenomenology, or in metaphysics.
William Wimsatt
William C. Wimsatt
William C. Wimsatt is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science , and the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago...
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.
Organicism has some intellectually and politically controversial or suspect associations. "Holism," the doctrine that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, often used synonymously with organicism, or as a broader category under which organicism falls, has been coopted in recent decades by "holistic medicine" and by New Age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
Thought. German Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
appealed to organicist and holistic doctrines, discrediting for many in retrospect, the original organicist doctrines. (See Anne Harrington). Soviet Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
also made appeals to an holistic and organicist approach stemming from Hegel via Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
's co-worker Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
, again giving a controversial political association to organicism.
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
Paul von Lilienfeld
Paul von Lilienfeld was a statesman and social scientist of imperial Russia. He was governor of the Courland Governorate from 1868 till 1885...
, Jacques Novicow, Albert Schäffle
Albert Schäffle
Albert Eberhard Friedrich Schäffle , German statesman and political economist, was born at Nürtingen in Württemberg, and in 1848 became a student at the University of Tübingen....
, Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
, and René Worms
René Worms
René Worms was a French auditor of the council of state, son of professor of political economics Émile Worms....
, among others (Barberis 2003: 54).
In biology
In biology organicism considers that the observable structures of life, its overall form and the properties and characteristics of its component parts are a result of the reciprocal play of all the components on each other.Examples of 20th century biologists who were organicists are Ross Harrison
Ross Granville Harrison
Ross Granville Harrison was an American biologist and anatomist credited as the first to work successfully with artificial tissue culture....
, Paul Weiss
Paul Alfred Weiss
Paul Alfred Weiss was an Austrian biologist who specialised in morphogenesis, development, differentiation and neurobiology...
, and Joseph Needham
Joseph Needham
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA , also known as Li Yuese , was a British scientist, historian and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, and as a fellow of the British...
. Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway
Donna J. Haraway is currently a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States...
discusses them in her first book Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields. John Scott Haldane (father of J. B. S. Haldane
J. B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS , known as Jack , was a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist. A staunch Marxist, he was critical of Britain's role in the Suez Crisis, and chose to leave Oxford and moved to India and became an Indian citizen...
), R. S. Lillie, W. E. Agar, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian-born biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory . GST is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics, and other fields...
are other early twentieth century organicists.
Theoretical Biology Club
In the early 1930s Joseph NeedhamJoseph Needham
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA , also known as Li Yuese , was a British scientist, historian and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, and as a fellow of the British...
, Joseph Henry Woodger
Joseph Henry Woodger
Joseph Henry Woodger was a British theoretical biologist and philosopher of biology whose attempts to make biological sciences more rigorous and empirical was significantly influential to the philosophy of biology in the twentieth century...
, C. H. Waddington and Dorothy Wrinch formed the Theoretical Biology Club as by means on promoting the organicist approach to biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
. The club was in opposition to mechanism
Mechanism
Mechanism may refer to:*Mechanism , rigid bodies connected by joints in order to accomplish a desired force and/or motion transmission*Mechanism , explaining how a feature is created...
, reductionism
Reductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...
and the gene-centric view of evolution. Most of the members were influenced by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead, OM FRS was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and education...
. The club disbanded as funding was failed from the Rockfeller Foundation which was needed for them to carry out their investigations.
Further reading
- Barberis D. S. (2003). 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, pp. 51–72.
- Beckner, Morton, (1967) Organismic Biology, in "Encyclopedia of Philosophy," ed. Paul Edwards, MacMillan Publishing CO., Inc. & The Free Press.
- Dusek, Val, (1999). The Holistic Inspirations of Physics, Rutgers University Press.
- Haraway, Donna (1976). Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Harrington, Anne (1996). Reenchanted Science, Harvard University Press.
- Mayr, E. (1997). The organicists. In What is the meaning of life. In This is biology. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- Gilbert, Scott F. and Sahotra Sarkar (2000): “Embracing complexity: Organicism for the 21st Century”, Developmental Dynamics 219(1): 1–9. (abstract of the paper: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/72513248/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0)
- Wimsatt, Willam (2007) Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings :Peicewise Approximations to Reality, Harvard University Press.
External links
- Orsini, G. N. G. - "Organicism", in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973)
- Dictionary definition