By Dave Riley
The tradition of science — the science we are used to — looks upon events in terms of constituent parts. We find out about the whole by cutting it up into individual bits and pieces. Each bit has its own intrinsic properties, contained and independent from everything else.
Like so many pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, knowledge is constructed by the accumulation of detail, and the most complex phenomena are reduced to the activity of elementary particles. Lines of causality run from part to whole. Ultimately, the world is thought to be like the method used to understand it.
But there is another scientific tradition which rejects this approach. Romantic science seeks neither to split living reality into elementary components nor to represent the width of life's concrete events in abstract models that lose the properties of the living whole. It aspires instead to a science that preserves the complexity and richness of natural phenomena. As the poet Goethe wrote, "Grey is every theory, but ever green is the tree of life".
Neuropsychologist A.L.Luria was a tireless advocate of romantic science. "Scientific observation is not merely pure description of separate facts", he insisted. "Its main goal is to view an event from as many perspectives as possible. The eye of science does not probe 'a thing', an event isolated from other things or events. Its real object is to see and understand the way a thing or event relates to other things or events."
He pointed out that a glass, as an object of science, can be understood only when it is viewed from many perspectives. With respect to the material of which it is made, it becomes an object of physics; with respect to its value, an object of economics; with respect to its form, an object of aesthetics. The more we single out important relations during our description, the closer we come to the essence of the object, to an understanding of its qualities and the rules of its existence.
This belief that nothing is isolated from anything else, that everything is interconnected, preoccupies the environmental movement and the related science of ecology. The current greening cries out for a method to comprehend interconnectedness.
Green activist and geneticist David Suzuki recognises the glaring inadequacies of science in this regard. "Parts of Nature and other systems", he wrote recently, "were shown [by modern science] to interact synergistically so that the behavior and properties of a system as a whole cannot be predicted on the basis of what is known about its individual components. Thus, while science yields powerful insights into isolated fragments of the world, the sum total of these insights is a disconnected, inadequate description of the whole. Ironically, scientists today are faced with the devastating possibility that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
Holism is also the catchcry of the alternative health movement. The unity of body and mind is emphasised and the relevance to health of nutrition, exercise, emotions is stressed. A reaction against the fragmentation of life under capitalism, modern holistic health focuses on the individual without integrating the individual into society and social process. And like many ecological systems, its organising principle is harmony — the pursuit of balance, a "oneness" with nature.
But this is a false interconnectedness because balance is only a temporary phenomenon. Wholes are not inherently balanced or harmonious, nor are their identities fixed — whether they be molecules, individual human beings, species, social and ecosystems or the Milky Way.
Similarly, the eastern system of Taoism shares an emphasis on wholeness. The whole is maintained by a balance of opposites — yin versus yang. Chinese medicine recognises excess of yin and deficiency of yang as distinct pathologies, and the same notion is extended to physical phenomena because balance is seen as a natural, desirable state.
Writers such as Fritjof Capra have popularised Taoism by applying it to modern science, and its logic permeates martial arts such as tai chi and aikido as well as nutritional programs like macrobiotics. Unfortunately, while Taoism is becoming increasingly familiar in the West as a method to comprehend nature, oftentimes spiritually, it is a doctrine of harmony rather than of development.
A further method for comprehending the totality of the universe is dialectics. It is applied to all phenomena — nature, society, thought. "The unified process of development is the universality of the dialectic", writes the Marxist philosopher George Novack, "which maintains that everything is linked together and interactive, in continuous motion and change, and that this change is the outcome of the conflict of opposing forces within nature as well as everything to be found in it."
As radical scientists Steven Rose, Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin have pointed out, "Dialectical explanations attempt to provide a coherent, unitary, but nonreductionist account of the material universe. For dialectics the universe is unitary but always in change; the phenomena we can see at any instant, are parts of processes, processes with histories and futures whose paths are not uniquely determined by their constituent units".
Dialectics — or dialectical materialism as it is also known — is the most consistent way of thinking about the universal interconnection of things. However complicated the many forms of life may be, its processes are fundamentally the same.
After being crudely dogmatised for most of this century, DiaMat — as the academic philosophers are wont to call it nowadays — is making a comeback. The glaring limitations of the traditional methods of scientific investigation have encouraged some researchers to review the contributions of dialecticians working in the 1920s and '30s. In many disciplines — such as biology and neuropsychology — there is a new alignment of opposing sides — reductionism and dialectics.
Instead of rigid formulations, dialectics reflects certain habits of thought and certain forms of questioning resting on a very fluid world view. "To me", wrote Frederick Engels in a collection of essays known as Dialectics of Nature, "there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it".
The utility of this outlook can be judged only by the outcome of its application in explaining phenomena. If you are seeking a comprehensive world view that rests firmly within the processes of nature itself, then do yourself a favour and check out dialectics.