Talk:Organicism

Rewrite for style

I added the tag (essay-entry|article) to the article. Article needs to be rewritten for a more professional/encyclopedic style. -- 201.19.11.75 15:52, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

I absolutely agree, and would add that there is another related article which also needs work: kyokan. They reference each other.72.78.29.132 (talk) 19:34, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Needs Revision

For those with free time in the coming days, weeks, months, etc., please add to the this wiki-page. It needs some love. Here are some great resources for expanding upon the material and (potentially) adding new sections and accompanying information:

1. https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/1097-0177%282000%299999%3A9999%3C%3A%3AAID-DVDY1036%3E3.0.CO%3B2-A

2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24176290_Mechanism_vitalism_and_organicism_in_late_nineteenth_and_twentieth-century_biology_The_importance_of_historical_context

3. https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3260986/ (if you click on "View More")

I will be adding substantial material over the coming weeks, and would appreciate assistance from any willing to help.

I'll help you.

Some other interesting articles:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/746712

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2708514

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707685

https://www.jstor.org/stable/428314

(they are behind a paywall; I have full access to them and can send them to other contributors by email if necessary. Just send me an email via my personal page if needed).

Alcaios (talk) 00:40, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

Great to hear! I too have access to the JSTOR archives via educational access, and I will be looking through the attached links when I get a chance. I look forward to reading your future additions.

This article, particularly the intro, conflates organicism with vitalism, which is easy to do from a mechanistic position. It needs a lot love by someone who understands the difference. Sometimes as well these distinctions are lost from a philosophical approach that sidelines the history of science. Fanboi Chau (talk) 15:50, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Organicism in Ecology

Alcaios has quite rightly pointed out that this lemma needs revision. One problem of the lemma is that its range of subjects is insufficient. As regards biology, organicism in ecology is not even mentioned although it has been (one of) the main field(s) of discussion about organicism in biology in the last hundred years. (The controversy among mechanicism, vitalism and organicism about the nature of single living beings is older and mostly ended in the 19th century.) For that reason, I have suggested to add a section on organicism in ecology. My editing has been removed arguing "I did not see it adding anything to the overall page, and it was very poorly written". I'm not a native English speaker, so, maybe, the English was poor. However, I'm a scientific expert in theory and history of ecology, and I claim that the content was substantial. I would be happy if anybody could comment on the addition I have suggested and on its removal. Maybe, my addition could be reworked by somebody to reach a helpful expansion of the scope of the lemma. Best Smht% (talk) 14:01, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Structure of the Lemma

To my mind, the structure of the lemma isn't conclusive, especially as regards the section "In philosophy". I would propose to put the three paragraphs beginning with "Some forms of organicism ..." and ending with "... elementaristic individualism and mechanical materialism.[16]" into a new section called "In sociology and political philosophy". Thereby I would propose to place the 1. paragraph at the end, thus:

"Organicism' has also been used to characterize notions put forth by various late 19th-century social scientists who considered human society to be analogous to an organism, and individual humans to be analogous to the cells of an organism. This sort of organicist sociology was articulated by Alfred Espinas, Paul von Lilienfeld, Jacques Novicow, Albert Schäffle, Herbert Spencer, and René Worms, among others.[15] Thomas Hobbes arguably put forward a form of organicism. In the Leviathan, he argued that the state is like a secular God whose constituents (individual people) make up a larger organism. However, the body of the Leviathan is composed of many human faces (all looking outwards from the body), and these faces do not symbolize different organs of a complex organism but the individual people who themselves have consented to the social contract, and thereby ceded their power to the Leviathan. That the Leviathan is more like a constructed machine than like a literal organism is perfectly in line with Hobbes' elementaristic individualism and mechanical materialism.[16] Some forms of organicism have intellectually and politically controversial, or suspect, associations. "Holism" in terms of the doctrine that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, often used synonymously with organicism, or as a broader category under which organicism falls, has been co-opted in recent decades by "holistic medicine" and by New Age Thought. German Nazism appealed to organicist and holistic doctrines, discrediting for many in retrospect, the original organicist doctrines. (See Anne Harrington). Soviet Dialectical Materialism also made appeals to an holistic and organicist approach stemming from Hegel via Karl Marx's co-worker Friedrich Engels, again giving a controversial political association to organicism."

What do you think of such a change? Smht% (talk) 22:04, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Organism in politics

In order to avoid the obvious edit war which is developing, I suggest attempting to resolve the conflict here. Currently GenoV84 insists on adding what appears to be off-topic content, which has been removed by 3 separate editors. His justification for the inclusion of such material relies on the use of the word "organic" by his sources, which occurs in reference to a desired quality of leadership, or of society, possessed by certain American political ideologies, i.e. they want either their leaders, or their society, to be what they consider "organic."

An example of what he considers a justification follows:

"The skull mask network’s ideology is a political-religious hybrid based in large part on the work of the philosopher Julius Evola. Evola mixed fascism with “Traditionalism,” a syncretic 20th century religious movement that combines Hermetic occultismc with the Hindu doctrine of cyclical time and a belief in a now-lost primordial European paganism. Adherents of this blend of doctrines, which can be termed “Traditionalist fascism” believe that a caste-based, racially pure “organic” society will be restored after what they believe to be an ongoing age of corruption, the Kali Yuga, is swept away in an apocalyptic war, and that it is their role to hasten the end of the Kali Yuga by generating chaos and violence."

There is, however, no obvious connection between organic as it is used in that context and between the definition of philosophical Organicism as it is provided at the beginning of this article, which also follows:

"Organicism is the philosophical position that states that the universe and its various parts (including human societies) ought to be considered alive and naturally ordered, much like a living organism."

Organic, by itself, can mean a number of things. Most commonly the word is taken to mean "natural." As in, 'I only eat organic food.' Or, 'I only support organic political movements, not astroturfed ones.' Or, 'American culture is extremely artificial--not at all organic like other cultures.' Actual adherents to the doctrine of organicism specifically believe that society *is* organic, meaning that it is, or is analogous to, a living organism in itself. Therefore, a society can never lose its status as organic in the mind of an adherent of organicism, anymore than an animal can. And thus, if your desire is to *make* society organic, you obviously merely mean to bring society in congruity with a set of ideals which you see as natural, which is NOT the same as organicism. And in the above justification originally provided by JenoV84, we see that these "Traditionalist Fascists," want to restore society to a state that they feel is organic--NOT that they see society as an organic, living entity.

Therefore, I believe JenoV84 needs to provide justification for his addition, besides merely pointing to the word "organic." SwordOfEquity (talk) 01:41, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Here's the entire paragraph with the full quote from the cited source, containing the the term that you were looking for; you didn't even bother to check it out before repeatedly vandalizing this article on purpose:

In United States politics, the terms "extreme right", "far-right", and "ultra-right" are labels used to describe "militant forms of insurgent revolutionary right ideology and separatist ethnocentric nationalism", such as Christian Identity, the Creativity Movement, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement, the National Alliance, the Joy of Satan Ministries, and the Order of Nine Angles. These far-right groups share conspiracist views of power which are overwhelmingly anti-Semitic and reject pluralist democracy in favour of an organic oligarchy that would unite the perceived homogeneously-racial Völkish nation. The far-right in the United States is composed of various Neo-fascist, Neo-Nazi, White nationalist, and White supremacist organizations and networks who have been known to refer to an "acceleration" of racial conflict through violent means such as assassinations, murders, terrorist attacks, and societal collapse, in order to achieve the building of a White ethnostate.

You better give a proper explanation and justification for your reiterated vandalism and disruptive editing of sourced content with multiple reliable references that is both pertinent and relevant regarding the subject of this article, because the source explains quite eloquently what is the conception of organicism according to the far-right. Also, the same section of this article in the previous paragraph mentions organicism as it was conceived within the Nazi racial ideology of the Third Reich, which is identical in its concern to establish a racially pure “organic” society entirely composed of White people as the Neo-Nazi ideology of contemporary Western right-wing extremists, so why should this article mention Nazi organicism in the 20th century but we are somehow supposed to remove the paragraph on Neo-Nazi organicism in the 21st century? Please explain your motivation, and provide reliable sources for your unsubstantiated claims. GenoV84 (talk) 11:44, 28 February 2022

(UTC)

Moreover, the editors that passed by on this article and attempted to delete the paragraph didn't provide any good reason in accordance with WP policies that would justify its deletion, in fact they gave up and moved on. Also, you cannot change the way an article is written by other editors simply because you don't like what is written in it; I already told you: Do not disrupt Wikipedia in order to illustrate your point and Wikipedia is not censored. You need first to reach WP:CONSENSUS on the article's Talk page by collaborating with other editors, not through disruptive vandalism and manual reverts, as you did on purpose multiple times. GenoV84 (talk) 11:30, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Ok, well, we're obviously going to need an arbiter, because not only are you lying, but you've completely and willfully ignored all of my points--again merely pointing to the word organic as though that implies organicism. They are two different words. Again, a belief that we should have an "organic society" does not imply a belief that society is a living organism.

And my motivation is accuracy. I have a special interest in philosophy, with which comes a commitment to truth, and, as such, I refuse to allow falsities to be spread generally, but especially as regards the domain of philosophy.

The real question is, what is your motivation. Because lying certainly does not lead me to believe that you're operating in good faith. I asked for a reference to the word organicism, and you literally said that it was in the article which you just provided, but the only word even close to the word organicism is the word "organic." I can't even believe I have to keep saying this, but they are not the same word. And a desire for an "organic" society, therefore, is not the same as believing society is, or is analogous to, a living organism.

Furthermore, the section prior to your addition makes the vague, unreferenced, and unsubstantiated assertion that the The Nazis in some way made an appeal to holism and organicism, without any mention whatever of how or what that means. If the assertion is true, however, then it must be that they viewed some aspect of their society (probably their race) as a living entity. Again, however, that would not mean that they merely desired an "organic society," it would mean that they literally believed their society or race was an organism. And as of yet, there is no evidence that that is what either they, or Neo-Nazis, believe. Because again, merely wanting an organic society is not organicism. Believing society is an organism is Organicism. They aren't the same thing. Organicism is a descriptive belief system, while the desire to "make society organic" is a normative preference.

And as for sources, logic and common sense shouldn't need to be sourced, however, for the sake of leaving no doubt in anyone's mind, I've included some.

And yes, yes, you've told me a number of things, but I don't frankly think much of your attempts to bully and intimidate me with accusations of breaching policy on account of my being new. You're the one who refuses to build a consensus. Three different editors have removed your addition because it has no relevance to the topic. So how are you not the one who's being disruptive? You literally refuse to present any argument besides, 'it said organic, that means organicism.' Assuredly it does not, and as not a single one of your sources contains either the word organicism, or indeed any reference at all to the beliefs held by the adherents of organicism, I believe it's you who needs to justify yourself, actually. Also please refer to: WP:DNB]

SwordOfEquity (talk) 11:45, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Yet the following academic, high-quality, reliable sources contradict everything that you claimed about Nazi Germany, organicism, holism, and the "organic" conception of politics and society:

• Harrington, Anne (2021) [1996]. "CHAPTER SIX: Life Science, Nazi Wholeness, and the "Machine" in Germany's Midst". Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 175. doi:10.1515/9780691218083-009. ISBN 9780691218083. JSTOR j.ctv14163kf.11. S2CID 162490363. When Hans Shemm in 1935 declared National Socialism to be "politically applied biology," things began to look up, not only for holism, but for the life sciences in general. After all, if the good National Socialist citizen was now seen as the man or woman who understood and revered what were called "Life's laws," then it seemed clear that the life scientists had a major role to play in defining a National Socialist educational program that would transmit the essence of these laws to every family in every village in the country. [...] So much seemed familiar: the calls among the National Socialists to return to authentic "German" values and "ways of knowing," to "overcome" the materialism and mechanism of the "West" and the "Jewish-international lie" of scientific objectivity; the use of traditional volkisch tropes that spoke of the German people (Volk) as a mystical, pseudobiological whole and the state as an "organism" in which the individual was subsumed in the whole ("You are nothing, your Volk is everything");4 the condemnation of Jews as an alien force representing chaos, mechanism, and inauthenticity. Hitler himself had even used the stock imagery of conservative holism in Mein Kampf when he spoke of the democratic state as "a dead mechanism which only lays claim to existence for its own sake" and contrasted this with his vision of statehood for Germany in which "there must be formed a living organism with the exclusive aim of serving a higher idea."5
• Deichmann, Ute (2020). "Science and political ideology: The example of Nazi Germany". Mètode Science Studies Journal. 10 (Science and Nazism. The unconfessed collaboration of scientists with National Socialism). Universitat de València: 129–137. doi:10.7203/metode.10.13657. ISSN 2174-9221. S2CID 203335127. Although in their basic framework Nazi anti-Semitic and racist ideology and policies were not grounded in science, scientists not only supported them in various ways, but also took advantage of them, for example by using the new possibilities of unethical experimentation in humans that these ideologies provided. Scientists' complicity with Nazi ideology and politics does, however, not mean that all sciences in Nazi Germany were ideologically tainted. I argue, rather, that despite the fact that some areas of science continued at high levels, science in Nazi Germany was most negatively affected not by the imposition of Nazi ideology on the conduct of science but by the enactment of legal measures that ensured the expulsion of Jewish scientists. The anti-Semitism of young faculty and students was particularly virulent. Moreover, I show that scientists supported Nazi ideologies and policies not only through so-called reductionist science such as eugenics and race-hygiene, but also by promoting organicist and holistic ideologies of the racial state. [...] The ideology of leading Nazi party ideologues was strongly influenced by the Volkish movement which, in the wake of the writings of philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and other nineteenth century authors, promoted the idea of Volk (people) as an organic unity. They did not base their virulent anti-Semitism and racism on anthropological concepts.
• Anker, Peder (2021) [2001]. "The Politics of Holism, Ecology, and Human Rights". Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. p. 157. doi:10.4159/9780674020221-008. ISBN 9780674020221. S2CID 142173094. The paradoxical character of the politics of holism is the theme of this chapter, which focuses on the mutually shaping relationship between John William Bews, John Phillips, and the South African politician Jan Christian Smuts. Smuts was a promoter of international peace and understanding through the League of Nations, but also a defender of racial suppression and white supremacy in his own country. His politics, I will argue, were fully consistent with his holistic philosophy of science. Smuts was guided by the efforts of ecologists such as Bews and Phillips, who provided him with a day-to-day update of the latest advances in scientific knowledge of natural laws governing Homo sapiens. A substantial part of this chapter will thus return to their research on human ecology to explore the mutual field of inspiration linking them and Smuts. Two aspects of this human ecological research were particularly important: the human gradualism or ecological "succession" of human personalities researched by Bews, andthe concept of an ecological biotic community explored by Phillips. Smuts transformed this research into a policy of racial gradualism that respected local ways of life in different (biotic) communities, a policy he tried to morally sanctify and promote as author of the famous 1945 Preamble of the United Nation Charter about human rights.
• Scheid, Volker (June 2016). "Chapter 3: Holism, Chinese Medicine, and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future". In Whitehead, A.; Woods, A.; Atkinson, S.; Macnaughton, J.; Richards, J. (eds.). The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0003. ISBN 9781474400046. S2CID 13333626. Bookshelf ID:NBK379258 – via NCBI. Common Roots: Holism Before and During the Interwar Years: This chapter cannot explore in detail the complex entanglements between these different notions of holism, or how they reflect Germany's troubled path towards modernity. My starting point, instead, is the interwar years. By then, holism had become an important resource for people across Europe, the US and beyond – but once again specifically in Germany – for dealing with what Max Weber, in 1918, had famously analysed as a widely felt disenchantment with the modern world.12 The very word 'holism' (as opposed to ideas or practices designated as such today), as well as related words like 'emergence' or 'organicism', date from this time.13 It was coined in 1926 by Jan Smuts to describe a perceived tendency of evolutionary processes towards the formation of wholes, granting these wholes a special onto-epistemic significance that parts lack.14 This was cultural holism now underpinned by evolutionary science and deployed by Smuts not only as a tool for grasping the coming into being of the world but also as an ideological justification for the development of Apartheid in South Africa. In Weimar Germany and then under Nazism, holistic science became a mainstream academic endeavour, once more intermingling cultural politics and serious scientific research.15 Holistic perspectives also became popular in the interwar years among academics and the wider public throughout the UK and US. In France, it was associated with vitalist philosophies and the emergence of neo-Hippocratic thinking in medicine, manifesting the unease many people felt about the shifts that biomedicine was undergoing at the time.16

Nobody has harassed you in the first place, so there's no point to cry wolf when there is none. Being a regular editor doesn't mean that you are exonerated from being warned for making mistakes, whether intentionally or inadvertently. I already explained the reason for reverting your disruptive edits, so there's not much to add about it. As you can see, your reiterated claim that both the paragraph on Nazi organicism in the 20th century and the paragraph on Neo-Nazi organicism in the 21st century are "off-topic", "irrelevant", and "out of place" is completely wrong, unjustified, and senseless. Now that I have provided the reliable sources that you were asking for, and which have been missing from this article for a long time, I think that the most appropriate thing to do now is to implement them in the body of the article, if you and other editors agree. GenoV84 (talk) 18:18, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

If you would prefer to ask the opinion of an uninvolved third editor or "arbiter", you can post a formal request for a third opinion at WP:3O. GenoV84 (talk) 18:00, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

References

Under normal circumstances, I would continue my disputation as you have still failed to provide evidence that "organic state" as it is used by "traditional fascists," or indeed by any other group one could brand as Neo-Nazi, has any connection at all with organicism. After all, neo-nazis are not Nazis proper. Therefore, while you have demonstrated that the Nazis of Germany themselves did indeed seem to espouse a type of Organicism (which I didn't even originally dispute), you haven't addressed the original issue.

However, while you have failed to establish a clear link, I, myself, have found the necessary evidence to support your claims, which I will be adding. I also fully approve of the adding of the information you recently uncovered. Thanks. SwordOfEquity (talk) 06:37, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

@SwordOfEquity: Too late. Keep crying, babe. GenoV84 (talk) 20:02, 7 March 2022 (UTC)