Science, Humanism, and Religion by Matthias Jung

Author:Matthias Jung
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030214920
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Holism

Holism is a dangerous word. It easily lends itself to rather vague and nebulous uses, and its invocations often smack of mystification. Fortunately, we can give it a clear-cut meaning not susceptible of esoteric misconceptions: the holistic nature of ordinary experience means precisely that experience is not merely cognitive but involves the whole human being, its willpower and its emotions included. Like the German philosopher of life Wilhelm Dilthey, who influenced pragmatism via his student (and Dewey’s friend) George Herbert Mead, Dewey was convinced that cognition was shaped by the constant interplay of feelings, practical attitudes, and rationality. Obviously, this idea challenges the traditional conviction that true cognition, conceived of as the undistorted mirroring of nature, depends upon the suppression of other than cognitive mental activities. More radically, it even demands giving up the idea that there are such things as clear-cut, essentially different mental faculties. A holistic understanding of experience would certainly never deny that real and important functional differences obtain between thinking, feeling, and volition. Feeling or sensing the quality of a situation, acting in order to probe its different aspects, and reflecting upon its possible and desirable outcomes, for example, are different activities, but their difference does not reside in the existence of different parts out of which mind is composed, but rather in the changing demands of ongoing action.

Holism, thus understood, is nothing mysterious or esoteric. It flows straight from the fact that cognition is for action. We experience processes and things because we have to act, and action includes emotional assessment of the situation’s relevance for the organism, the exertion of physical movements and—in the case of us linguistic and rational beings—reflection upon means and ends. If one starts to think in terms of those repeated, interactional feedback-loops between the organism and its environment called experience or action—the difference being mainly one in emphasis—another cherished dichotomy of the empiricist tradition starts to break down: the one between facts and values. Once again, the holistic rendering of experience should not be taken to deny that there actually is a difference between the two. But, as before, it proves to be a functional one. All organisms, human beings included, experience their surrounding in terms of its contribution to survival and flourishing, in other terms: to value. In many cases, value for life and factual truth come in one package: if an organism values a certain plant as nutrient and tasty, it better be able to correctly pick out the right one and not confuse it with its poisonous neighbor.

As already shown above, in the course of the Scientific Revolution, we have learned that nature is not intrinsically anthropocentric. Therefore, and despite the fact that values permeate the social institution of science, we have to abstract methodically from this ordinary, life-worldly coupling of value and factual truth if we want to maximize factual knowledge and instrumental success pertaining to the workings of nature. Hence the immense superiority of scientific over ordinary experience when it comes to mind-independent nature. Where the holism of volition, emotion, and cognition ends, scientific methods begin.

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