Organicism
Contextual Quote
1.
"Organicism in the maximally broad sense, entails a commitment to the thesis that there is a metaphysical continuity between the natural world, life, and (human) mindedness. We are metaphysically continuous with the rest of the cosmos."
- Otto Paans [1]
2.
"Kant’s Copernican Revolution says that in order to explain rational human cognition and authentic a priori knowledge, we must hold that necessarily, the manifestly real world structurally conforms to our minds, rather than the converse. The Organicist Revolution, in turn, says that the real possibility of human consciousness, cognition, caring, rationality, and free agency, and therefore also the “Copernican” necessary structural conformity of world -to-mind, provided that we actually do exist , is built essentially into the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of organismic life, and necessarily underdetermined by any and all naturally-mechanical processes and facts. Hence the Organicist Revolution in philosophy that’s implied by liberal naturalism and natural piety not only includes Kant’s Copernican Revolution, but also goes one full revolutionary cycle beyond it."
- Robert Hanna [2]
Description
Robert Hanna:
"Organicism is a liberally naturalistic and pro-scientific, but also anti-mechanistic and anti-scientistic conception of the world, including ourselves. Organicism is committed to the metaphysical doctrine of Liberal Naturalism. Liberal naturalism says that the irreducible but also non-dualistic mental properties of rational minded animals are as basic in nature as biological properties, and metaphysically continuous with them.
More precisely, according to liberal naturalism, rational human free agency is an immanent structure of essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind; essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind is an immanent structure of organismic life; and organismic life is an immanent structure of spatiotemporally asymmetric, non-equilibrium matter and/or energy flows. Each more complex structure is metaphysically continuous with, and embeds, all of the less complex structures.
Again: Human freedom is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind. And essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from life. Thus human freedom is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from life. Moreover, life is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from spatiotemporally asymmetric, non-equilibrium matter and/or energy flows. Therefore, human freedom, human mind, and life are all dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerge from spatiotemporally asymmetric, non-equilibrium matter and/or energy flows.
In view of liberal naturalism, to borrow an apt phrase from the later Wittgenstein, our rational human free agency is just our own “form of life,” and free agency, as such, grows naturally in certain minded animal species or life-forms. Correspondingly, freedom grows naturally and evolves in certain species of minded animals, including the human species, precisely because minds like ours grow naturally and evolve in certain species of animals, including the human species
Another name for liberal naturalism is “Objective Idealism.”
Status
Robert Hanna:
"Mostly, but not entirely. E.g., Hayne Reese and Willis Overton overlook Whitehead and process philosophy in their coverage of organicism in their (1970), a survey article much-used by psychologists up through the end of the 20th century. But that oversight may only reflect East Coast vs. West Coast professional academic biases in the 1960s and early 1970s. At roughly the same time, Whiteheadian process philosophy had a brief popular heyday, and indeed has survived into the 21st century, but not usually in philosophy departments or psychology departments, instead almost exclusively in theology programs or privately funded consciousness-studies institutes, especially in California, e.g., at Claremont. In any case, even despite blinkered neglect by mainstream professional academic philosophers and psychologists, process metaphysics has in fact been productively updated, in a larger theoretical and sociocultural context, by a few prescient philosophers in the 2010s: see, e.g., (Gare, 2011)"
(https://www.academia.edu/62653411/THE_PHILOSOPHY_OF_THE_FUTURE_Uniscience_and_the_Modern_World_2022_)
History
1. Otto Paans:
"Surveyed from a bird’s-eye point of view, mainstream contemporary Western metaphysics has rejected any form of organicism as foundational principle of the cosmos, and consequently it has rejected this doctrine as a “root metaphor” (Pepper, 1942). A root metaphor is a fundamental explanatory model that is captured in a single complex image. Organicism takes the living organism (as processual, purposive, and self-organizing, in a homeostatic balance and symbiosis with its natural environment) as its root metaphor, as opposed to the mechanistic worldview, which takes the machine (for example, in different eras, the clock, the steam engine, or the digital computer) as its root metaphor.
The contemporary rejection of organicism is ironic, as this was precisely one of the working principles of many German idealists, a philosophical school that may well be regarded as one of the most inventive periods of Western modern philosophy, and moreover, a philosophical movement that still makes its influence felt, even in those areas where contemporary metaphysics reigns supreme. We could easily pursue the pedigree of philosophical organicism backwards in time, encountering earlier formulations of its core concepts in the thought of Spinoza and Duns Scotus; but equally, we might survey its pervasive influence in 18th, 19th, and early 20th century thought, notably in the philosophies of the later Kant, Goethe, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and A. N. Whitehead, although this is not the aim of this essay. Suffice it to say that the organicist worldview has a long history in Western philosophy, and under vastly different forms, also in various Eastern philosophies. However, with the rise of Anglo-American classical or post-classical Analytic philosophy, and its scientistic alliance with the formal and natural sciences, philosophical organicism has been explicitly or implicitly dismissed as anti-scientific."
(Source: Otto Paans, Reason, Subjectivity, Organicism. Borderless Philosophy 5 (2022): 161-212)
2. Robert Hanna:
"In his brilliant, break-through 1925 Lowell Lectures, published as Science and the Modern World (1967), Alfred North Whitehead worked out a fundamental critique of European formal and natural sciences up through the first two decades of the 20thcentury, together with a radically reformed conception of those sciences by means of a profoundly original organicist cosmology, and the outlines of a new philosophy of civilization or Kultur-philosophie. Edmund Husserl tackled the same basic set of issues — a fundamental critique of European formal and natural sciences, a radically reformed conception of those sciences, and a new philosophy of civilization — in his unfinished Crisis of European Sciences , written in 1936, but not published until 1954 (Husserl, 1970).
Let’s call the shared philosophical target of Whitehead’s and Husserl’s books, the problem of science and the modern world.
Husserl’s ideas were absorbed into the mainstream post-World War II phenomenological tradition (Moran, 2012). Nevertheless, not only were Whitehead’s ideas a full century ahead of their time, but also, for various fairly dire world-historical, sociocultural, social-institutional, and more generally socio-political reasons, they’ve been mostly ignored since then."
(https://www.academia.edu/62653411/THE_PHILOSOPHY_OF_THE_FUTURE_Uniscience_and_the_Modern_World_2022_)
More information
* Article: Cold Reason, Creative Subjectivity: From Scientism and the Mechanistic Worldview To Expressive Organicism. Otto Paans. Borderless Philosophy 5 (2022): 161-212