Holism: principles, history, examples, and relation to reductionism

Jan Christiaan Smuts built his theory of holism on the basis of the idea of creative evolution. In doing so, he took up the ideas of John Scott Haldane, who opposed mechanical monism as well as vitalistic dualism and in turn referred to Smuts.

Smuts postulated that "all forms of existence [...] strive to be wholes [...] The new whole, according to the material, contains within itself older wholes, but it is itself essentially new and goes beyond the substance or parts on which it is founded," a phenomenon he called "emergence" (of the new).

The process of wholeness, according to Smuts, grounds evolution and makes the world a progressive series of wholes from its physical beginnings as matter or energy to its highest creations as life. Traditional natural science has been too concerned with the dissection and synthetic reconstruction of living and non-living things from their analytically derived elements.

Smuts assumed that both the natural sciences and philosophy were necessary to explain evolution. The natural sciences provided the structures, philosophy the principles of evolution. According to Smuts, matter and life consist of partial structures whose arrangement leads to natural wholes. These partial structures are also each a whole. Whether it is an atom, a molecule, a chemical compound, plants, animals or states, everything is in each case a whole. Conglomerates of these wholes again build a new whole with new functions and abilities. This striving for wholeness, that is, this holism, is the driving force of evolution, its vera causa, as Smuts says, which exerts influence on the mechanisms of evolution, variation and selection. According to Smuts, the various forms of variation were explained by individual expediency, use (use of body parts in new ways) and by physical environmental conditions. A variation is not an isolated variation of one part of the organism, but always consists of several variations that change the organism as a whole, according to Smuts. "Variation A necessarily includes a number of like-directed adaptations which are dependent on A and are not independently caused or maintained. [...] Here the whole makes the 'selection' by the application of its central supervision." () In Smuts, holism is not merely an explanatory principle, but is itself active, as it were, as the creative cause of evolution.

Natural Philosophy

Adolf Meyer-Abich developed a comprehensive conception of holism in an ontological as well as epistemological perspective. In doing so, he critically linked to concepts of Hans Driesch, a founder of systems biology, who concluded in experiments with sea urchin germs that future states and forms of an organism cannot be derived from a present material state. Driesch considered it impossible to explain the morphogenesis of organisms in this way. Beyond the mechanistic and vitalistic worldview, he developed an "order-monistic" view of biological systems, but later distanced himself from the concept of holism, considering the dualism of materialism and vitalism insurmountable.

Holism is a relative and correlative concept for Meyer-Abich. For him, as for Haldane, biological laws are not derivable from physical laws because physical laws are simplifications of biological laws. Thus the biological ones are more universal and general than the physical ones. Accordingly, biology contains the theories of physics and chemistry, whereby, according to Meyer-Abich, the physical theories are derivable from the biological ones by simplification, but not vice versa. His son Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich also holds holistic positions. His practical philosophy of nature is an enlightenment project: everything in nature exists for its own sake; it is not oriented towards man. Man must acknowledge that he is a part of nature and understand his environment as "co-environment".

Ontic holism

Ontic holism is defined as a philosophical theory according to which everything that exists is a mode of existence of a substance or that all areas of reality form a real wholeness despite fundamental differences (e.g. in the form of a stepladder). Spinoza's pantheism belongs to this theory as well as newer positions of natural philosophy which assume a block universe.

Epistemology and philosophy of language

Semantic holism holds that the meaning of a sentence can only be determined by the overall context in the language in question. It was advocated by Quine and Davidson, among others. According to this view, every linguistic expression is related not only to the world of objects and other non-linguistic objects, but to other linguistic elements, so that a comprehensive picture of language as a structure emerges. In poetics, meaning is often not generated by the object relation of language, but "emerges" through the expressive content arising in the relation of linguistic elements to each other.

According to epistemological holism or epistemic holism, a hypothesis cannot be tested (falsified) in isolation, but only in the context of a comprehensive theory (See also: Duhem-Quine thesis). One representative was Norwood Russell Hanson. Epistemic holism is based on semantic holism and has far-reaching consequences for the philosophy of science.

Structuralism

In a structuralist sense, holism is defined by the fact that the elements of an object domain are what they are only through their mutual relations. Example: A drug for a certain ailment contains an active ingredient whose effect promises relief. This is the relevant object area of a specific treatment. There is a reciprocal relationship between relief of suffering and the effect of the drug. In the holistic sense, this circumstance excludes all effects of the drug that are not related to the relief of suffering. Those excluded effects are in themselves commonly referred to as side effects, although in the true holistic sense they are also effects. The effect becomes a side effect if it is not part of the subject matter. If the drug does not contain an active substance despite having a palliative effect, there is nevertheless a reciprocal relationship. Thus, the analytically causal relationship between the elements of an object domain is not a condition for holism.