Organicist
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Organicism is the
philosophical Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
position that states that the
universe The universe is all of space and time and their contents. It comprises all of existence, any fundamental interaction, physical process and physical constant, and therefore all forms of matter and energy, and the structures they form, from s ...
and its various parts (including
human societies A society () is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Soc ...
) ought to be considered alive and naturally ordered, much like a
living organism An organism is any life, living thing that functions as an individual. Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Many criteria, few of them widely accepted, have be ...
.Gilbert, S. F., and S. Sarkar. 2000. "Embracing Complexity: Organicism for the 21st Century." ''Develop Dynam'' 219: 1–9. 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 Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts. Julian Tudor Hart (2010''The Political Economy of Health Care''pp.106, 258 The aphorism "The whole is greater than t ...
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. Furthermore, organicism is incongruous with
reductionism Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena. It is also described as an intellectual and philosophical positi ...
because of organicism's consideration of "both bottom-up and top-down causation." Regarded as a fundamental tenet in
natural philosophy Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin ''philosophia naturalis'') is the philosophical study of physics, that is, nature and the physical universe, while ignoring any supernatural influence. It was dominant before the develop ...
, organicism has remained a vital current in modern thought, alongside both
reductionism Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena. It is also described as an intellectual and philosophical positi ...
and
mechanism Mechanism may refer to: *Mechanism (economics), a set of rules for a game designed to achieve a certain outcome **Mechanism design, the study of such mechanisms *Mechanism (engineering), rigid bodies connected by joints in order to accomplish a ...
, that has guided scientific inquiry since the early 17th century. Though there remains dissent among scientific historians concerning organicism's pregeneration, most scholars agree on
Ancient Athens Athens is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest named cities in the world, having been continuously inhabited for perhaps 5,000 years. Situated in southern Europe, Athens became the leading city of ancient Greece in t ...
as its birthplace. Surfacing in Athenian writing in the 4th-century BC,
Plato Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born  BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
was among the first philosophers to consider the universe an intelligent living (almost sentient) being, which he posits in his '' Philebus'' and '' Timaeus''. At the turn of the 18th-century,
Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German Philosophy, philosopher and one of the central Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works ...
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. Organicism flourished for a period during the
German romanticism German Romanticism () was the dominant intellectual movement of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, influencing philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and criticism. Compared to English Romanticism, the German vari ...
intellectual movement and was a position considered by
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (; 27 January 1775 – 20 August 1854), later (after 1812) von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him be ...
to be an important principle in the burgeoning field of biological studies. Within contemporary biology, organicism stresses the organization (particularly the
self-organizing Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order and disorder, order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spont ...
properties) rather than the composition (the reduction into biological components) of
organisms An organism is any living thing that functions as an individual. Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Many criteria, few of them widely accepted, have been pr ...
. 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 Theodor is a masculine given name. It is a German form of Theodore. It is also a variant of Teodor. List of people with the given name Theodor * Theodor Adorno, (1903–1969), German philosopher * Theodor Aman, Romanian painter * Theodor Blue ...
and , have followed in Haldane's wake. Properly scientific interest in organicist biology has recently been revived with the extended evolutionary synthesis.Baedke, J., Fábregas-Tejeda, A. (2023) ''The Organism in Evolutionary Explanation: From Early Twentieth Century to the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis''. In: Dickins, T.E., Dickins, B.J. (eds) ''Evolutionary Biology: Contemporary and Historical Reflections Upon Core Theory''. Springer. pp. 121–150.


In philosophy

Organicism as a doctrine rejects mechanism and
reductionism Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena. It is also described as an intellectual and philosophical positi ...
(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 is a belief that starts from the premise that "living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things." Wher ...
, the doctrine that there is a vital force different from physical forces that accounts for living things. As Fritjof CapraFritjof Capra. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. Anchor Books Doubleday, 1996. 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. 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:
fe, 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.
Scott F. Gilbert and Sahotra Sarkar distinguish organicism from holism to avoid what they see as the vitalistic or spiritualistic connotations of holism. Val Dusek notes that holism contains a continuum of degrees of the top-down control of organization, ranging from
monism Monism attributes oneness or singleness () to a concept, such as to existence. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished: * Priority monism states that all existing things go back to a source that is distinct from them; e.g., in Neoplatonis ...
(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 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to ...
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 Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure o ...
, in
phenomenology Phenomenology may refer to: Art * Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties Philosophy * Phenomenology (Peirce), a branch of philosophy according to Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 ...
, 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 theology

Organicism as a structuring or worldview motif finds implementation in the dogmatic theology of the nineteenth century. It was implemented prominently by Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, and has been variously debated and appraised. Nonetheless, Bavinck's consideration of reality as both being and becoming, with an organic unity-and-diversity rooted in the united essence of the Trinity, stands as a prominent example of a theological implementation of organicism. Likewise, organicist language can be found in relation to faith and the church by Norwegian Lutheran theologian Gisle Johnson. Johnson will construe the relationship between faith, church, and historical development as "an organic development", likening it to a sprout. For Gisle, systematic theology itself is an organic entity, a correlate of faith as ''principium cognoscendi'' where "the task is a ''systematic explication and'' ''reproduction'' of the content of faith-consciousness (''Troesbevidsthedens''), whereby the parts appear everywhere in their essential inner connection with the whole as an organism permeated and controlled by a definite principle." Prior to both of these theologians, organicism played an important role in the dogmatic construction of Danish dogmatician Hans Lassen Martensen. It is Martensen who provides a helpful and concise definition of organicism in its theological implementation: “It is true only of lifeless, mechanical things (e.g., a ring or a chain), that the whole cannot be had without having all the parts. In living, organic objects, it is very possible to have the whole without having all the parts. But eternal life, and the things that belong to eternal life must, as all will allow, be considered as subject to the laws of life.” As such, although implemented broadly between individual dogmaticians, organicism proves to provide a helpful conceptual common denominator, allow for a certain plasticity and malleability between concepts: for Bavinck, God and the world; for Gisle, faith and truth; and for Martensen, life and gospel.


In politics and sociology

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 Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in '' ...
, and René Worms, among others. Prominent
conservative Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civiliza ...
political thinkers who have developed an organic view of society are
Edmund Burke Edmund Burke (; 12 January ew Style, NS1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Anglo-Irish Politician, statesman, journalist, writer, literary critic, philosopher, and parliamentary orator who is regarded as the founder of the Social philosophy, soc ...
, G.W.F. Hegel, Adam Müller, and
Julius Evola Giulio Cesare Andrea "Julius" Evola (; 19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974) was an Italian far-right philosopher and writer. Evola regarded his values as Traditionalist conservatism, traditionalist, Aristocracy, aristocratic, War, martial and Empire, im ...
. Organicism has also been identified with the "
Tory A Tory () is an individual who supports a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalist conservatism which upholds the established social order as it has evolved through the history of Great Britain. The To ...
Radicalism" of
Thomas Carlyle Thomas Carlyle (4 December 17955 February 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher. Known as the "Sage writing, sage of Chelsea, London, Chelsea", his writings strongly influenced the intellectual and artistic culture of the V ...
,
John Ruskin John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English polymath a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and philanthropist of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as art, architecture, Critique of politic ...
,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( ; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets with his friend William Wordsworth ...
, and
Benjamin Disraeli Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British statesman, Conservative Party (UK), Conservative politician and writer who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He played a ...
.
Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan (Hobbes book), Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. He is considered t ...
arguably put forward a form of organicism. In the ''
Leviathan Leviathan ( ; ; ) is a sea serpent demon noted in theology and mythology. It is referenced in several books of the Hebrew Bible, including Psalms, the Book of Job, the Book of Isaiah, and the pseudepigraphical Book of Enoch. Leviathan is of ...
'', 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. According to scholars Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, organicism stands at the core of the historical far-right's worldview.
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...
himself along with other members of the
National Socialist German Workers' Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor ...
(German: ''Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei'', NSDAP) in the
Weimar Republic The Weimar Republic, officially known as the German Reich, was the German Reich, German state from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional republic for the first time in history; hence it is also referred to, and unofficially proclai ...
(1918–1933) were greatly influenced by several 19th- and early 20th-century thinkers and proponents of philosophical, onto-epistemic, and theoretical perspectives on ecological anthropology,
scientific racism Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that the Human, human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "race (human categorization), races", and that empirical evi ...
, holistic science, and organicism regarding the constitution of
complex systems A complex system is a system composed of many components that may interact with one another. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication s ...
and theorization of organic-racial societies. In particular, one of the most significant ideological influences on the Nazis was the 19th-century German nationalist philosopher
Johann Gottlieb Fichte Johann Gottlieb Fichte (; ; 19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814) was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Ka ...
, 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.


In biology

In breathing organisms, the cells were first observed in 17th-century Europe following 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. In
biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...
, 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, Paul Weiss, and
Joseph Needham Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (; 9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995) was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initia ...
.
Donna Haraway Donna Jeanne Haraway (born September 6, 1944) is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and te ...
discusses them in her first book ''Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields''. John Scott Haldane (father of J. B. S. Haldane), William Emerson Ritter,
Edward Stuart Russell Edward Stuart Russell OBE Fellow of the Linnean Society, FLS (25 March 1887 – 24 August 1954) was a Scotland, Scottish biologist and philosopher of biology. Russell was born near Glasgow. He studied at Greenock Academy and later at Glasgow Uni ...
, Joseph Henry Woodger,
Ludwig von Bertalanffy Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (19 September 1901 – 12 June 1972) was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST). This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, app ...
, and Ralph Stayner Lillie are other early 20th-century organicists. 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. The early biologists of the organicist movement have influenced the organism-centered perspective of the extended evolutionary synthesis.


Theoretical Biology Club

In the early 1930s Joseph Henry Woodger and
Joseph Needham Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (; 9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995) was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initia ...
, together with Conrad Hal Waddington,
John Desmond Bernal John Desmond Bernal (; 10 May 1901 – 15 September 1971) was an Irish scientist who pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography in molecular biology. He published extensively on the history of science. In addition, Bernal wrote popular boo ...
, Dorothy Needham, and Dorothy Wrinch, formed the Theoretical Biology Club, to promote the organicist approach to
biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...
. The club was in opposition to mechanistic philosophy,
reductionism Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena. It is also described as an intellectual and philosophical positi ...
, and the gene-centric view of evolution. Most of the members were influenced by the philosophy of
Alfred North Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, inclu ...
. The club disbanded as the
Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The foundation was created by Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller (" ...
refused to fund their investigations.


Ecology

In
ecology Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere lev ...
, "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 An organism is any life, living thing that functions as an individual. Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Many criteria, few of them widely accepted, have be ...
. As such, the term "organicism" is sometimes used interchangeably with "
holism Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts. Julian Tudor Hart (2010''The Political Economy of Health Care''pp.106, 258 The aphorism "The whole is greater than t ...
", although there are versions of holism that are not organicistic/organismic but individualistic. Early iterations of Gaia theory took an explicitly organicist approach by conceptualizing the entire Earth as an integrated, self-regulating organic whole akin to a living being, rather than just a mechanical collection of separate components.


See also

* Holistic community * Hylozoism * Mechanical and organic solidarity *
Organic unity Organic unity is the idea that a thing is made up of interdependent parts. For example, a body is made up of its constituent organs, and a society is made up of its constituent social roles. In Aristotle's '' Poetics'' he likened drama narrative ...
*
Organismic theory Organismic theories in psychology are a family of holistic psychological theories which tend to stress the organization, unity, and integration of human beings expressed through each individual's inherent growth or developmental tendency. The id ...
*
Orthogenesis Orthogenesis, also known as orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution, evolutionary progress, or progressionism, is an Superseded theories in science, obsolete biological hypothesis that organisms have an innate tendency to evolution, evolve ...
* Philosophy of organism *
Structural functionalism Structural functionalism, or simply functionalism, is "a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability". This approach looks at society through a macro-level o ...
*
Structuralism (biology) Biological or process structuralism is a school of biological thought that objects to an exclusively Darwinism, Darwinian or adaptationism, adaptationist explanation of natural selection such as is described in the Modern synthesis (20th centur ...


References


Further reading

* * Beckner, Morton (1967) Organismic Biology, in "Encyclopedia of Philosophy," ed. Paul Edwards, MacMillan and The Free Press. * * Haraway, Donna (1976). ''Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Define Embryos''. Johns Hopkins University Press. * Harrington, Anne (1996). Reenchanted Science, Harvard University Press. * Mayr, Ernst (1997). "What is the meaning of life?" In ''This is Biology''. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. * Peterson, Erik L. (2017). ''The Life Organic: the Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics''. University of Pittsburgh Press. * Wimsatt, Willam (2007) ''Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings :Piecewise Approximations to Reality.'' Harvard University Press.


External links


Orsini, G. N. G. – "Organicism"
in ''Dictionary of the History of Ideas'' (1973)
Dictionary definition
*{{cite IEP , url-id=platoorg , title=Plato: Organicism Natural philosophy Holism Philosophical analogies Philosophy of science Political philosophy Timaeus (Plato)