Contextual Quote

"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]

Introduction

New section, created March 9, 2023, on the Organicist philosophical and metaphysical approach.

• Before the victory of the modernist mindset of separation and atomization, the Renaissance had attempted the construction of a participatory worldview, which Loren Goldner calls the Cosmobiological Tradition.

• Robert Hanna and Otto Paans, relate a similar trajectory of philosophy under the name of Organicism. Prominent formulations of this philosophy come from philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, but especially the process philosophy of Whitehead.

See: Robert Hanna on Defining and Defending Human Dignity

• We also include attention to non-European trends such as the Organic Marxism in China, which seeks a blend of both traditional and modern Chinese philosophy (i.e. Confucianism, Taoism but also Open Marxism) while including the kind of Marxism still functioning in China; Thinkers like Zhihe Wang, Huili He and Meijun Fan consider Whitehead's Process Philosophy to originate the fork of Constructive Postmodernism; alternatively, the Mesology of Augustin Berque, which is entirely a philosophy of relations, is inspired by trends in Japanese philosophy.

See: Second Enlightenment as an Aesthetic Enlightenment

• Given the orientation of this wiki towards peer to peer and commons-oriented relational logics, this section will also cover Relational philosophies.

As usual, listing in this wiki is done under a philosophy of pluralistic curation and does not mean an endorsement. However, we do feel, at this stage of our inquiry and mapping, that the Organicist tradition is the most compatible approach to a relational philosophy in harmony with our commons approach.

Essentially, what binds the elements of the organicist philosophy together is the critique of the Cartesian and mechanistic worldview, and the Eight_Core_Commitments_of_Mainstream_Contemporary_Western_Metaphysics.

Related Sections:

• Integral Theory covers approaches that aim to integrate the subjective and objective aspects of reality: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Integral_Theory

• Our section on relationality, includes philosophical approach to relational dynamics, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Relational

• In our section on Civilizational Analysis, we pay attention to approaches that link societal evolution, to the evolution of human consciousness, including those that take seriously the data from the mystical tradition and connection to the 'ground of being', for example, the Sophiological tradition: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Civilizational_Analysis

Themes

Thought-Shapers

• An introduction to the Theory of Thought-Shapers: "Thought-shapers are essentially non-conceptual contents that operate in the construction of mental imagery and thought by arbitrarily picking out some topological and/or processual properties, and subsequently exaggerating or diminishing their presence."

According to Robert Hanna and Otto Paans et al."In our view, only organicism is a philosophically, scientifically, artistically, morally, and socio-politically fully adequate worldview, and therefore only its root metaphor—the organism — is a fully generative thought-shaper. As a consequence, the root metaphors associated with animism, mysticism, formism, mechanism, and contextualism are all, to some degree, constrictive thought-shapers; and the natural automaton or natural machine, the root metaphor associated with the mechanistic worldview, is the most constrictive."

See: Constrictive vs. Generative Thought-Shapers

See also for related material:

1. Religious Ground Motives Behind Human Thought, by Herman Dooyeweerd (i.e. Transcendental Pragmatism)
2. The Root Metaphor Theory in the Fourfold World Hypotheses Model of Stephen Pepper which distinguishes Formism (similarity), Mechanism (machine), Contextualism (historical act) and Organicism (living system)

Quotes

Technology as Artificial Representation

"The very idea of “natural representation,” when combined with the 17th-century Cartesian idea of an objective space in which we can represent by means of coordinates, contributed significantly to the emergence of the mechanistic worldview: not only is the natural world nothing but a large-scale complex machine, but also the human perceptual mind is nothing but a small-scale simple machine like a pinhole camera, i.e., a camera obscura. This thought-shaping mental model—the human perceptual mind as a camera obscura—which more or less covertly lies behind the shaped thought that the technology associated with the leading formal and natural sciences are the final answer to the problem of mental representation—whether it is a pinhole camera, a brownie camera, a movie camera, or a digital camera application in a smart phone—has proven to be a remarkably influential and persistent myth. The increasing mathematization of the sciences, the models for problemsolving derived from engineering, the reduction of biology to statistical mathematics, evolutionary genetics, chemistry, and physics, and the reduction of animal behavior to Turing-computable algorithms, as well as the reduction of consciousness to physico-neural processes, all point in the same conceptual direction: the variety of life itself must be brought under one idealizing system of representation. And, not surprisingly, that very idiom is conceptual and limited to the operations of mathematizability and/or formal logic. The fact that science itself speaks in abstractions and idealizations does not in the slightest stop the advance of mechanistic thinking, because it justifies its existence by appeals to its objectivity and practical efficacy. Thereby, it reduces life (and in its wake, Being) to phenomena that are understood once they can be replicated or described in mathematical (and increasingly digital) terms, potentially making them available for artificial reproduction."

- Otto Paans [2]