92 Chapter 2 Holism and Evolution. Etymologically, he derives it from the Greek word holos (öλος), which means whole, entire or complete. Purposefully, he coins the term to counterbalance the post-Enlightenment focus within the natural sciences on the analytical nature of matter. Smuts (1926) disliked the mechanistic approach, concept and interpretation of nature (pp. 16, 56, 87, 89, 101, 103, 142, 145, etc.), and he criticised the ‘hard and narrow concept of causation’ that arose as a dogma from 19th century science (p. 17). As a diagnosis of this one-sidedness, Smuts (1926) stated that, in his view, there had been an erroneous divorce between philosophy and science: The result of this divorce is lamentable in the extreme. For science, divorced from the viewpoints and principles which philosophy embraces, structure becomes merely mechanism. For philosophy, divorced from the actual concrete structural facts which science studies, the general principles remain in the air, and never generate this specific concrete sensible world which is there to explain and understand. (p. 91) Smuts (1926) was very impressed with the new perspectives offered by Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein's theory of relativity, although he lamented that despite these ‘great advances which have been made in knowledge (...), matter, life and mind still remain utterly disparate phenomena’ (p. 1). He introduced his holism concept as a fundamental creative principle, wherein the understanding of the existence and functionality of ‘wholes’ is crucial to understanding the universe. Explicitly, he argued for a synthetic approach to correct the analytical one (Smuts, 1926, pp. 86, 105–107, 118–119, 125, 129, etc.). Smuts (1926) concentrated on wholes not only in biology but everywhere in the universe, even in international politics, where he became one of the initiators of the League of Nations, the first international organisation with truly global pretentions (Kochanek, 2013). He went as far as to tie his definition of holism to the concept of personality, stating that he had gradually come to realise that personality is ‘only a special case of a much more universal phenomenon, namely, the existence of wholes and the tendency towards wholes and wholeness in nature’ (Smuts, 1926, p. vi). After having described the mind as an organ of wholes (3), Smuts (1926) treated personality as ‘the latest and supreme whole which has arisen in the holistic series of Evolution’ 3 Smuts explained: ‘For Mind is much more elusive and penetrative than life and still more so than matter. Its “field” covers and penetrates the “fields” of matter and life in a way which makes the tracing of hard-and-fast boundaries very difficult, if not practically impossible. It seems to impinge in all directions on areas already apparently securely held by the other departments of natural and biological science’. (pp. 223-224)
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