history - an introduction
Organicism is as old as mechanicalism. In these three
pages - Anaximander,
Atomism
and Newton
- I tell the story of how both ways of thinking about
causality first arose in ancient Greece and then how atomism and
mechanicalism came to take over in the scientific Renaissance.
Other pages linked to below consider the more
recent developments.
modern organicism
This cannot be the history of a movement as organicism has
long existed as the vague other. Mechanical logic has had a proud
steadily evolving tradition. As a way of thinking, it arose out of
ancient maths and philosophy, got quietly polished up by medieval
monks, then became a full-blown revolution with the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment. Eventually the mechanical way was responsible for
everything from the space shuttle to the Furbie. Organicism was only
ever the weak voice of protest - the feeling that there had to be
something more than simple-minded reductionism.
So through history there have been various schools that were
to one extent or another trying to be "organic". There was
Naturphilosophie, Holism, Dialectics, Systems Science, Gestalt
psychology, Cybernetics, Ecology, Semiotics, Neural Networks, Hierarchy
Theory, Complexity Theory.
There was the honour roll of thinkers. Hegel,
Spinoza, Peirce, Whitehead, Bergson, Lloyd Morgan,
Wundt, Engels, Alexander and Broad, von
Bertalanffy, Ashby, Kohler, Hebb, MacKay, Bateson,
Schrödinger, Prigogine,
Sperry, Spencer Brown, Polanyi, Koestler, Weiss, Maturana.
Then in recent times, the people who have have had the most direct
influence on me, Kauffman, Grossberg, Rosen, Kelso, Pattee and
Salthe.
Most of these schools and scholars were united by a holism and
an anti-reductionism. The whole is greater than its parts. Reality is
based on meaning as well as information, relationships as well as
atoms. Reality is process rather than existence. But while
well-intentioned, it was all pretty woolly stuff. It could never match
the mechanical view of mainstream thought - the view that made
everything seem simple and clear-cut at base.
So what I am attempting to do on this site is boil down
organicism to a few hard essentials. I am showing that dichotomies and
hierarchies - two things that organicists often end up rejecting as
"mechanical"! - are central to the organicist project. I am also
drawing attention to the role of vagueness as the natural foundation
for any organic development. And lastly I hope to show that organicism
is precisely complementary to mechanicalism. It is not either/or but
both that we need.
In this history section then, I will be looking mostly to show
where earlier organicists were talking about these things - vagueness,
dichotomies, hierarchies and epistemology.