Organicism - Logic And Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Theology And Cosmology, Social And Political Thought, Decline Of Organicism
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Organicism refers to the idea that some object or entity shares an important property or quality in common with a living or animate being. It is related to, although remains distinct from, holism, in the sense that organicist doctrines tend to uphold the view that the living creature is an integrated whole containing precisely the range and number of parts necessary for the maintenance of its existence and for its flourishing. Hence, organicism is closely aligned with the concept of "organic unity." Organicism enjoys a long intellectual history in a number of fields of endeavor, including metaphysics and logic, aesthetics, theology, and social and political thought. While perhaps most fully articulated by Western thinkers, organic ideas seem to have a global purchase.
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Organicist metaphysics thus stands in stark contrast to metaphysical atomism. The organicist believes that some inhering force—the Good, telos—unites beings into a single Being and therefore that apparent clashes or disparities between opposites are entirely illusory. The neo-Platonic doctrine of a concordance or coincidence of opposites follows an organicist track, as does Hegelian …
While the idea that a work of art was an organic unity whose very "beauty" was constituted by its totality can be traced back to the ancient Greeks (for example, Aristotle's Poetics), this idea enjoyed its culmination in the modern world, especially among the Romantics. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) emphasized the idea of an "inner form" that ani…
Many of the world's religions and philosophies have regarded the universe as possessing an organic unity as a macrocosm of a living body. For example, Hinduism, Sufism, the Russian philosophy of All-Unity, and numerous strains of Christianity (especially those of a mystical or neo-Platonic bent) display organicist tendencies by viewing the world as a collection of diverse beings that nevert…
In Western thought, the origins of the body politic can again be traced back to Greece and Rome in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and others. It was during the Latin Middle Ages, however, that the organic metaphor for society became commonplace. In its earliest expression, and perhaps under the influence of Plato's Timaeus, medieval society was divided into a three-fold yet unifi…
The rise of modern scientific thought and of moral and political individualism profoundly challenged and damaged the organicist outlook. The tendency to consider nature in mechanistic and evolutionary terms devalues the distinctively organic and purposive character of biological creatures, as does the emphasis on the individual as the building block of social institutions. Organicism has been conf…
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