Reprinted from the Centre for Science Development,
Humanities & Social Science Bulletin: July/August 1994
Within every individual there are two deep-seated natural desires. The one is to learn and discover how things work by analysing the parts or elements thereof, while the other is the innate desire to synthesize the parts and let the image of the whole emerge. For example; if given a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, you can study it in great detail, but you will nevertheless be severely handicapped in making any real sense of it until such time as you see the picture in its entirety.
Researchers and scientists (both in the human and natural sciences) have placed great emphasis on the specialised, analytical approach in which things are viewed and studied in isolation. While scientific research and specialisation have undoubtedly produced wonderful new technologies and breakthroughs, they have also given rise to many associated social, economic, biological and environmental problems. In our pursuit of acquiring more and more ‘know-how’, we appear to have become less and less conscious of what is really worth doing.
The word ‘holistic’ is commonly used throughout the modern world. However, it is not generally known that the father of modern holism was our own statesman, General Jan Christiaan Smuts. He was the first to coin the term ‘holism’ from the Greek “Olos’ which means whole. In his book ‘Holism and Evolution’, published in 1926, Smuts referred to the whole as being greater than the sum of its parts. Smuts’ ideas, visions and concepts were so advanced that is has taken almost 70 years for them to be recognised and understood by enlightened individuals working in the fields of science, education, politics, philosophy, conservation, medicine, art, psychology and religion.
Smuts was of the opinion that we live in a world that has an innate tendency towards wholeness. In his view, material, organic and spiritual wholes were not isolated entities, but profoundly reticulated systems of interconnections and interactions.
The shortcomings of a SPECIALIST APPROACH are succinctly described in the following story:
A group of knowledgeable psychologists were attempting to study an elephant. The Freudian went to the back and proceeded to explain its behaviour from this view. The behaviourist hit the elephant on the kneecap, received a kick in the face and then proceeded to formulate a positive reinforcement plan for young elephants. The cognitive psychologist began to coax the elephant into doing things in order to establish its stage of development, while the humanist felt its ears and tried to convince the elephant that it could fly. The transpersonal psychologist pondered the elephant’s ability to achieve altered states of consciousness. The holistic psychologist never arrived and some argued that HE was in reality, the elephant.
Specialisation has been described as ‘learning more and more about less and less until a point is reached where one knows everything about nothing’. I agree it’s a rather cynical statement, but one with a disturbing ring of truth. A growing number of scientists and researchers have realised that analytical precision and excellence must be balanced by an equivalent ability to synthesize and think systemically.
Willis Harman, President of the American-based Institute of Noetic Sciences, notes that modern science is characterised by certain basic assumptions, namely ontological (dealing with the question ‘what is reality?’) and epistemological (concerned with the question ‘how do you know?’). These assumptions are categorised into OBJECTIVISM; an objective world which can be studied separately and at a distance from oneself; POSITIVISM; the real world is what is physically measurable; and REDUCTIONISM; understanding a phenomenon by studying the behaviour of its elemental or fundamental parts.
The work of Smuts and others – such as Carl Jung, Lourens van der Post, Alvin Toffler and Fritjof Capra, has given rise to the idea of a new concept of science which Willis Harman calls ‘Wholeness Science’. If this is the future path of science, I believe it’s encouraging news indeed.
Wholeness science, which complements the more traditional form of modern science, is founded on the ontological assumption of wholeness, oneness and the interconnectedness of everything as well as the epistemological decision to include ‘all the evidence’. This evidence would comprise measurable data, self reports of subjective experience, data of expert judges (such as those on which systematic biology is based) and subjective self-reports of skilled ‘inner explorers’ from various cultures. Naturally, the data from these categories would only be accepted after careful consensual validation.
Harman believes the advantages of a ‘wholeness science’ are:
- Developing and fostering different attitudes towards nature;
- A more sympathetic and open attitude by traditional science towards research relating to ‘meaningful coincidences’
- Promoting a world view which supports the highest values held by all societies.
In addition, the new science would also promote unity among various scientific disciplines, resolve long standing paradoxes (e.g. mind versus matter) and be in accord with the insights and wisdom derived from the experiences of life. In our world of disunity and disorganisation, ‘‘wholeness science’ may be just the solution.
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