Webster defines holism as follows:
a theory that the universe and especially living nature is correctly seen in terms of interacting wholes (as of living organisms) that are more than the mere sum of elementary particles
As a scientist studying complex systems, especially living systems, I have been forced to try to understand the relationship between holistic thinking and the dominant Cartesian reductionist world view that dominates Western thought. I am particularly interested in the resultant fragmentation of knowledge into disciplines and the implications of this fragmentation in today's politics. We all get very wrapped up in issues and often, in my eyes, loose sight of the forest for the trees. Come with me below the fold and let us look further into what we have lost by behaving this way.
My introduction to holistic thinking came when I was doing my Ph. D. in physiology at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s. What I was learning from people around the University was the legacy of Robert Maynard Hutchins. In 1927, Hutchins became Dean at the Yale Law School until he left in 1929 to become President of the University of Chicago. At 30 he was , as far as I know, the youngest university president in history. Hutchins served as President of the University of Chicago until 1945, after which he served as the University's Chancellor until 1951. After leaving his position at the University, Hutchins founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1959, which was his attempt to bring together a community of scholars to analyze this broad area. Hutchins described the Center's goal as examining democratic institutions "by taking a multidisciplinary look at the state of the democratic world -- and the undemocratic world as well, because one has to contrast the two and see how they are going to develop." He further stated, "After discovering what is going on, or trying to discover what is going on, the Center offers its observations for such public consideration as the public is willing to give them".
Throughout his career, Hutchins was a fierce proponent of using those select books, which have gained the reputation of being great books, as an educational tool. In his interview in 1970 titled, "Don't Just Do Something", Hutchins explained, "...the Great Books [are] the most promising avenue to liberal education if only because they are teacher-proof." Illustrating his dedication to the Great Books, Hutchins served as Editor In Chief of Great Books of the Western World and Gateway to the Great Books. Additionally, he served as coeditor of The Great Ideas Today, Chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica from 1943 to 1974, and published his own works, No Friendly Voice (1936), The Higher Learning in America (1936), Education for Freedom (1943), The University of Utopia (1953), and The Learning Society (1968).
The University had already changed after Hutchins left, but there was enough of his legacy around to more than joggle my mind after having done my undergraduate work at an engineering school. The history told by Robert Rosen as part of his introduction to his book: Anticipatory Systems will serve us better than my own memory of what I learned in bits and pieces back then. Rosen obtained his Ph. D. in Mathematical Biology under Nicholas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago during the 1950's so he was well aware of the changes that occured after Hutchins left. Rosen was invited by Hutchins in 1972 to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California as as a Visiting Fellow. Here's his story:
it may be helpful to try to characterize some of the ambience of the place, and of the remarkable man who created it. The Center's spirit and modus operandi revolved around the concept of the Dialog. The Dialog was indispensable in Hutchins' thought, because he believed it to be the instrument through which an intellectual community is created. He felt that
the reason why an intellectual community is necessary is that it offers the only hope of grasping the whole
. "The whole", for him, was nothing less than discovering the means and ends of human society:
The real questions to which we seek answers are, what should I do, what should we do, why should we do these things? What are the purposes of human life and of organized society?
The operative word here is "ought"; without a conception of "ought" there could be no guide to politics, which, as he often said, quoting Aristotle, "is architectonic". That is to say, he felt that politics, in the broadest sense, is ultimately the most important thing in the world. Thus for Hutchins the Dialog and politics were inseparable from one another.
For Hutchins, the intellectual community was both means and end. He said,
The common good of every community belongs to every member of it. The community makes him better because he belongs to it. In political terms the common good is usually defined as peace, order, freedom and justice. These are indispensable to any person, and no person could obtain anyone of them in the absence of the community... An intellectual community is one in which everybody does better intellectual work because he belongs to a community of intellectual workers. As I have already intimated, an intellectual community cannot be formed of people who cannot or will not think, who will not think about anything in which the other members of the community are interested. Work that does not require intellectual effort and workers that will not engage in a common intellectual effort have no place in the intellectual community.
He viewed the Dialog as a continuation of what he called "the great conversation". In his view,
The great conversation began with the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Hindus and the Chinese, and has continued to the present day. It is a conversation that deals - perhaps more extensively than it deals with anything else with morals and religion. The questions of the nature and existence of God, the nature and destiny of man, and the organization and purpose of human society are the recurring themes of the great conversation ...
More specifically, regarding the Dialog at the Center, he said,
Its members talk about what ought to be done. They come to the conference table as citizens, and their talk is about the common good ... It does not take positions about what ought to be done. It asserts only that the issues it is discussing deserve the attention of citizens. The Center tries to think about the things it believes its fellow citizens ought to be thinking about.
The Dialog was institutionalized at the Center. Almost every working day, at 11.00 am, the resident staff would assemble around the large green table to discuss a pre-circulated paper prepared by one of us, or by an invited visitor. At least once a month, and usually more often, a large-scale conference on a specific topic, organized by
one or another of the resident Senior Fellows, and attended by the best in that field, would be held. Every word of these sessions was recorded, and often found its way into the Center's extensive publication program, through which the Dialog was disseminated to a wider public.
It might be wondered why a natural scientist such as myself was invited to spend a year at an institution of this kind, and even more, why the invitation was accepted. On the face of it, the Center's preoccupations were far removed from natural science. There were no natural scientists among the Center's staff of Senior Fellows, although several were numbered among the Center's Associates and Consultants; the resident population, as well as most of the invited visitors, consisted primarily of political scientists, journalists, philosophers, economists, historians, and a full spectrum of other intellectuals. Indeed, Mr. Hutchins himself, originally trained in the Law and preoccupied primarily with the role of education in society, was widely regarded as contemptuous of science and of scientists. Immediately on assuming the presidency of the University of Chicago, for instance, he became embroiled in a fulminating controversy on curricular reform, in which many of the faculty regarded his position as anti-scientific, mystical and authoritarian. At an important conference on Science and Ethics,
he said,
Long experience as a university president has taught me that professors are generally a little worse than other people, and scientists are a little worse than other professors.
However, this kind of sentiment was merely an expression of the well known Hutchins irony. His basic position had been clearly stated
as early as 1931:
Science is not the collection of facts or the accumulation of data. A discipline does not become scientific merely because its professors have acquired a great deal of information. Facts do not arrange themselves. Facts do not solve problems. I do not wish to be misunderstood. We must get the facts. We must get them all...But at the same time we must raise the question whether facts alone will settle our difficulties for us. And we must raise the question whether...the accumulation and distribution of facts is likely to lead us through the mazes of a world whose complications have been produced by the facts we have have discovered.
There is much more but this brief introduction will serve to tell you what I think needs to be furthered. Since Rosen's death in 1998, I have been exploring the relationships between fragmented disciplines from the point of view that sees them as aspects of human activity rather than something distinct from us that we can study with detachment. This is in the spirit of Hutchins and Rosen and also gets some help from George Lakoff's idea of the "embodied mind" In Worldviews, Science and Us: Philosophy and Complexity edited by Carlos Gershonen, Diederick Aerts and Bruce Edmonds, I wrote about "Complexity Science as an aspect of the complexity of Science." I tackled the issue of circularity as a real part of complex reality. My friend Steve Kercel has formalized this in a very scientific manner. I have a number of diaries here that. perhaps clumsily, introduce other aspects of the emerging theory of a holistic World View. World views, politics, religion and science
World views, religion, politics and science II
On causality, science, and magic: Umberto Eco
Just what is "science" anyway?
I am doing a king of experiment. The poll results and comments tell me something about attitudes and world views. What I am learning is not that surprising. There are some who have a somewhat flexible world view and can entertain the idea that science is not a sacred cow and that we have much to learn from broadening our approach to knowledge and escaping the prison that Cartesian reductionism and the resultant fragmentation of knowledge has put us in. Many others cling to popular myths about the efficacy of the scientific method as being a way to disembody our minds from the bodies that house them and treat the world around us as something we can study with out bias or any influence from the student. Others see clear differences between a field like political science and hard science. They are willing to throw caution to the winds with scientific information yet are totally cautious and sceptical about political and social issues. This is what Hutcins was getting at almost eighty years ago. Things have changed very little since then. One big change is that there are consequences to a world view that erases philosophy and political scrutiny from the way one evaluates the practice of science. The obvious one is the state of the planet. Less obvious still is the role of science in the way health is viewed. Then there is the confusion between science and technology. The latter has been almost substituted for science in popular discourse. It is time to stop burying heads in the sand and to take a fresh look at the situation. I hope my meager efforts can serve in some small way, but there has to be far more.