holism
holism ‘My body is not a machine!’ ‘Treat the whole person!’ ‘The whole is different from the sum of the parts.’ ‘Reductionism is wrong, because organisms possess properties at a certain level of organization that cannot be explained in terms of properties at lower levels.’ ‘How people work, love, or vote is not determined by our genes!’ These are holist views.
The term ‘holism’ was coined in 1926, from the Greek holos (whole), by the South African statesman General Jan Smuts. But whilst the period between the World Wars was a heyday of holist creativity in biology and medicine, approaches that we can identify as holist are much older. Holism was the unquestioned orthodoxy of the Western tradition of practising medicine and investigating nature for the two millennia before the nineteenth century. The body was a complex system, in dynamic equilibrium with its environment, and disease a state of imbalance. Mechanistic approaches were canvassed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but they left this ancient model largely intact. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it could be taken for granted no longer. From palatial new laboratories, mechanistic science reigned increasingly triumphant. Living organisms, once models for the entire cosmos, were now themselves modelled on industrial machines. The nervous system functioned like the telegraph, the eye like a photometer.
As the ‘century of science’ drew to a close, and especially after World War I, various scientists and intellectuals, professionals, and cultural critics pronounced a crisis of scientific confidence. They began to question the achievements of a science that was not just mechanistic but increasingly specialized and fragmented, industrialized and bureaucratic, and to express scepticism, unease, and even horror at its methods. Whilst the scientific factories efficiently probed and shocked, dissected and sliced, crushed and ground bodies into new facts, the most important problems of life, and of living, appeared to cry out for solution in vain. In reaction against ‘machine science’ holists produced new ways of knowing and healing, approaches that sought to respect rather than take apart and analyze the whole. This holism was a collection of self-consciously defensive or oppositional interventions by a wide variety of people, united — if at all — only by what they were against.
Many of the leading holists were themselves scientists. In answer to the general fragmentation of knowledge about the body, they preached synthesis and interdependence. Opposing the claims of mechanistic reductionism, they asked what kind of science could do justice to the complexity of living organisms and their purposiveness. Relativity and quantum theory were beating the old mechanistic physics on its own ground, they observed; surely it was passé still to be modelling animals on locomotives? Some embryologists, for example, followed Hans Driesch in arguing that no machine could compensate for loss of parts in the ways that embryos did. He embraced vitalism, teaching that the development of a harmonious whole embryo was guided by a non-spatial and immaterial ‘entelechy’ — but other biologists came up with organicist approaches that gave the whole embryo priority over its parts whilst remaining safely within materialist bounds. In academic psychology the Gestalt theorists, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler, claimed that not atomistic sensations but structured wholes are the primary units of mental life. And, like many holists, they were not content to reform scientific theories but also took up the challenge of finding appropriate paths to knowledge in science. Gestalt experimentation in Weimar Germany investigated the variation among perceptions not between but within individual subjects, and so opposed the administrative, classifying style of science embodied in intelligence testing that was becoming dominant in the US. The Gestalt psychologists prided themselves on doing rigorous science, but some holists explored alternative ways of knowing, such as intuition, that to most scientists smacked of the irrational, of the frankly unscientific.
Especially in medicine, holists concentrated on setting acceptable terms for the relations between the new laboratory sciences and their professional practice. Early-twentieth-century medical élites, for example, cultivated the clinical art as a mark of a gentleman. It would temper the cold precision of scientific medicine — and prevent the physician becoming a mere technician. Against the spectre of specialized and bureaucratic state medicine they defended traditional doctor–patient relationships and a medicine of the whole person. In many ways from the other side but also holistic, the mid-twentieth-century ‘social medicine’ of Oxford professor John Ryle criticized the dominant anti-bacterial and surgical strategies as narrow and blinkered. The social medicine movement showed the dependence of sickness on the social variables of lifestyle and environment, and called for medicine to move beyond the hospital and the laboratory. More widely, as people confronted the extension of mechanistic science and technology into their lives, many were moved to ask how they could avoid becoming mere cogs in its machines, and to wonder what new insights might re-enchant a world that science appeared to be emptying of meaning.
The political geography of twentieth-century holism was extremely complex. Conservatives and liberals, fascists and communists, feminists and male chauvinists, racists and internationalists were all known to help themselves to holist rhetoric. Variously opposing alienation, atheism, bureaucracy, democracy, free-market capitalism, industrialism, mass culture, and metropolitan life, some holists have sought to defend human individuality as an absolute, whilst others have subsumed individuals into groups, be they classes, nations or — as most notoriously in Nazi Germany — races. Holists have traditionally opposed the treatment of human beings as machines, but historian Jeffrey Herf has shown that in Weimar and Nazi Germany some reactionaries succeeded in reconciling their ‘hunger for wholeness’ with a cult of technology.
Holism was marginalized after World War II, but since the late 1960s holist approaches have attracted renewed interest. Many holists are outside and opposed to official science and medicine, especially in the alternative health, environmentalist, feminist, animal rights, and New Age movements. But, though generally elusive, much more holism can be found in mainstream science and medicine than their dominant reductionism would suggest. Scientists continue to model bodies on machines, but in the age of digital computers machines can do things of which turn-of-the-century holists never even dreamed. The language of DNA is among the most reductionist ever invented, but the intricacies of gene regulation can warm the cockles of a holist heart. Just as hard-headed reductionists have pragmatically factored in some complexity, so holists have typically had to accept some reductionist means. The very terms are treacherous — but the opposition endures.
The term ‘holism’ was coined in 1926, from the Greek holos (whole), by the South African statesman General Jan Smuts. But whilst the period between the World Wars was a heyday of holist creativity in biology and medicine, approaches that we can identify as holist are much older. Holism was the unquestioned orthodoxy of the Western tradition of practising medicine and investigating nature for the two millennia before the nineteenth century. The body was a complex system, in dynamic equilibrium with its environment, and disease a state of imbalance. Mechanistic approaches were canvassed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but they left this ancient model largely intact. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it could be taken for granted no longer. From palatial new laboratories, mechanistic science reigned increasingly triumphant. Living organisms, once models for the entire cosmos, were now themselves modelled on industrial machines. The nervous system functioned like the telegraph, the eye like a photometer.
As the ‘century of science’ drew to a close, and especially after World War I, various scientists and intellectuals, professionals, and cultural critics pronounced a crisis of scientific confidence. They began to question the achievements of a science that was not just mechanistic but increasingly specialized and fragmented, industrialized and bureaucratic, and to express scepticism, unease, and even horror at its methods. Whilst the scientific factories efficiently probed and shocked, dissected and sliced, crushed and ground bodies into new facts, the most important problems of life, and of living, appeared to cry out for solution in vain. In reaction against ‘machine science’ holists produced new ways of knowing and healing, approaches that sought to respect rather than take apart and analyze the whole. This holism was a collection of self-consciously defensive or oppositional interventions by a wide variety of people, united — if at all — only by what they were against.
Many of the leading holists were themselves scientists. In answer to the general fragmentation of knowledge about the body, they preached synthesis and interdependence. Opposing the claims of mechanistic reductionism, they asked what kind of science could do justice to the complexity of living organisms and their purposiveness. Relativity and quantum theory were beating the old mechanistic physics on its own ground, they observed; surely it was passé still to be modelling animals on locomotives? Some embryologists, for example, followed Hans Driesch in arguing that no machine could compensate for loss of parts in the ways that embryos did. He embraced vitalism, teaching that the development of a harmonious whole embryo was guided by a non-spatial and immaterial ‘entelechy’ — but other biologists came up with organicist approaches that gave the whole embryo priority over its parts whilst remaining safely within materialist bounds. In academic psychology the Gestalt theorists, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler, claimed that not atomistic sensations but structured wholes are the primary units of mental life. And, like many holists, they were not content to reform scientific theories but also took up the challenge of finding appropriate paths to knowledge in science. Gestalt experimentation in Weimar Germany investigated the variation among perceptions not between but within individual subjects, and so opposed the administrative, classifying style of science embodied in intelligence testing that was becoming dominant in the US. The Gestalt psychologists prided themselves on doing rigorous science, but some holists explored alternative ways of knowing, such as intuition, that to most scientists smacked of the irrational, of the frankly unscientific.
Especially in medicine, holists concentrated on setting acceptable terms for the relations between the new laboratory sciences and their professional practice. Early-twentieth-century medical élites, for example, cultivated the clinical art as a mark of a gentleman. It would temper the cold precision of scientific medicine — and prevent the physician becoming a mere technician. Against the spectre of specialized and bureaucratic state medicine they defended traditional doctor–patient relationships and a medicine of the whole person. In many ways from the other side but also holistic, the mid-twentieth-century ‘social medicine’ of Oxford professor John Ryle criticized the dominant anti-bacterial and surgical strategies as narrow and blinkered. The social medicine movement showed the dependence of sickness on the social variables of lifestyle and environment, and called for medicine to move beyond the hospital and the laboratory. More widely, as people confronted the extension of mechanistic science and technology into their lives, many were moved to ask how they could avoid becoming mere cogs in its machines, and to wonder what new insights might re-enchant a world that science appeared to be emptying of meaning.
The political geography of twentieth-century holism was extremely complex. Conservatives and liberals, fascists and communists, feminists and male chauvinists, racists and internationalists were all known to help themselves to holist rhetoric. Variously opposing alienation, atheism, bureaucracy, democracy, free-market capitalism, industrialism, mass culture, and metropolitan life, some holists have sought to defend human individuality as an absolute, whilst others have subsumed individuals into groups, be they classes, nations or — as most notoriously in Nazi Germany — races. Holists have traditionally opposed the treatment of human beings as machines, but historian Jeffrey Herf has shown that in Weimar and Nazi Germany some reactionaries succeeded in reconciling their ‘hunger for wholeness’ with a cult of technology.
Holism was marginalized after World War II, but since the late 1960s holist approaches have attracted renewed interest. Many holists are outside and opposed to official science and medicine, especially in the alternative health, environmentalist, feminist, animal rights, and New Age movements. But, though generally elusive, much more holism can be found in mainstream science and medicine than their dominant reductionism would suggest. Scientists continue to model bodies on machines, but in the age of digital computers machines can do things of which turn-of-the-century holists never even dreamed. The language of DNA is among the most reductionist ever invented, but the intricacies of gene regulation can warm the cockles of a holist heart. Just as hard-headed reductionists have pragmatically factored in some complexity, so holists have typically had to accept some reductionist means. The very terms are treacherous — but the opposition endures.
Nick Hopwood
Bibliography
Lawrence, C. and Weisz, G. (ed.) (1998). Greater than the parts: holism in biomedicine, 1920–1950. Oxford University Press, New York.
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