Organicism

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.

"[5] Regarded as a fundamental tenet in natural philosophy, organicism has remained a vital current in modern thought, alongside both reductionism and mechanism, that has guided scientific inquiry since the early 17th century.

Surfacing in Athenian writing in the 4th-century BC, Plato was among the first philosophers to consider the universe an intelligent living (almost sentient) being, which he posits in his Philebus and Timaeus.

[1] At the turn of the 18th-century, Immanuel Kant championed a revival of organicisitic thought by stressing, in his written works, "the inter-relatedness of the organism and its parts[,] and the circular causality" inherent to the inextricable entanglement of the greater whole.

[2] Organicism flourished for a period during the German romanticism intellectual movement and was a position considered by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling to be an important principle in the burgeoning field of biological studies.

As Fritjof Capra[13] puts it, both schools, organicism and vitalism, were born from the quest for getting rid of the Cartesian picture of reality, a view that has been claimed to be the most destructive paradigm nowadays, from science to politics.

Nonetheless, Bavinck's consideration of reality as both being and becoming, with an organic unity-and-diversity rooted in the united essence of the Trinity, stands as a prominent example of a theological implementation of organicism.

[3] This sort of organicist sociology was articulated by Alfred Espinas, Paul von Lilienfeld, Jacques Novicow, Albert Schäffle, Herbert Spencer, and René Worms, among others.

[23] Organicism has also been identified with the "Tory Radicalism" of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Benjamin Disraeli.

[26] Adolf Hitler himself along with other members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) were greatly influenced by several 19th- and early 20th-century thinkers and proponents of philosophical, onto-epistemic, and theoretical perspectives on ecological anthropology, scientific racism, holistic science, and organicism regarding the constitution of complex systems and theorization of organic-racial societies.

B. S. Haldane), William Emerson Ritter, Edward Stuart Russell, Joseph Henry Woodger, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Ralph Stayner Lillie are other early 20th-century organicists.

[43] Early iterations of Gaia theory took an explicitly organicist approach by conceptualizing the entire Earth as an integrated, self-regulating organic whole akin to a living being, rather than just a mechanical collection of separate components.