Ontology of complexity by Gianfranco Savino

Author:Gianfranco Savino [Savino, Gianfranco]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Published: 2014-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

47 It is worth quoting in full a poem published inAngels Fear, 5, which makes clear the way Bateson sees its cultural legacy and the dangers to which it is necessarily exposed. Title of poem isThe manuscript: “So there it is in words / Precise / And if you read between the lines / You will find nothing there / For that is the discipline I ask / Not more, not less / Not the world as it is / Nor ought to be - / Only the precision / The skeleton of truth / I do not dabble in emotion / Hint at implications / Evoke the ghosts of old forgotten creeds / All that is for the preacher / The hypnotist, therapist and missionary / They will come after me / And use the little that I said / To bait more traps / For those

“ ‘Holistic’ is a popular word today, occurring most often in phrases like ‘holistic medicine,’ referring to a multitude of views and practices, ranging from homeopathy to acupuncture, from hypnosis to psychedelics, from the laying of hands to the cultivation of the alpha rhythms, from Hinduism to Zen, from the bedside manner to the ultimate depersonalization of diagnosis by astrological typing. And so on.

Men have hoped for holistic solutions for a long time. The word itself goes back to Smuts in the 1920s and is defined in the OSD as ‘the tendency in nature to produce wholes from the ordered grouping of units’. The systematic thinking that makes it possible to give precise, formal, and nonsupernatural meaning to the word goes back to the nineteenth century. It is there we find the early contributors to this thinking about wholes and to the formal relations between information and organization, including Claude Bernard (the ‘milieu interieur’), Clerk Maxwell (his ‘demon’ and his analysis of the steam engine with a governor, 1870), Russel Wallace (natural selection, 1858), and a man of special interest to doctors – the 'Old Doctor' Dr Andrew Still. Old Still was the founder of osteopathic medicine. In the late nineteenth century, he got the idea that the pathologies of the body could be due to disruption of what we today call communication – that the inner physiological organization of the body could be a matter of message transport and that the spinal cord was the principal clearinghouse through which all messages had to pass. He argued that by manipulation of the spine it should be possible to cure all pathologies. He went a little crazy, I think, as men do who have ideas a hundred years too soon. He came to believe that his ideas would cover not only the may defects whose focus indeed is related to the spine, its postures and its messages, but also that similar theories could be applied to bacterial invasions and so on. This got him into trouble, but still and all, he was an earlyholistin precisely the sense in which I want to use the word.

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