The organism

The Medieval Latin noun organisatio and the later coinage organismus contain the Greek organon, which means tool and, metaphorically, ‘tool’ of a body (Webster 2023). Through modernity, both organisation and organism gradually came to refer to the disposition and assemblage of components that are oriented to a given purpose, one which mechanicism cannot fully represent. Tobias Cheung (2010: 155) has noted that ‘during the eighteenth century, the word ‘organism’ generally referred to a specific principle or form of order, often in opposition to the order of ‘mechanism,’ that could be applied to plants, animals or the entire world.’ Since then, the adjective ‘organic’ has become synonymous with the living, although in English it still maintains the meanings of ‘organised’, ‘systemic’, and ‘being part of’ with no necessary reference to life. As the previous part covered the making of the paradigm of the machine, this part focuses on the making of the organism in modernity in between a scientific object and philosophical concept (Wolfe 2010).

Immanuel Kant (1790) canonised the philosophical concept of organism in the Kritik der Urteilskraft, where he defined organic beings (organische Wesen) according to an internal teleological principle, rather than an external one. Kant’s elaboration must be read in its historical context, against the background of Newtonian mechanistic physics, on one hand, and, on the other, Christian theology, which maintained that the soul is inscribed in the living body by God alone. In polemics against both mechanicism and theology, Kant (1790: 555, §64) wrote that an organism is ‘cause and effect of itself’, an independent being in which form and finality coincide. As Evelyn Fox Keller (2008) noted, in this way, Kant provided the first definition of self-organisation that cast a long influence on natural sciences and even cybernetics and AI. The constituent parts of the organism are not independent (as in the machine) but inter-dependent and capable of reproducing each other (Kant 1790: 557, §65).

It should be noted that mechanicism posed no threat to a religious worldview: a machine is soulless and therefore compatible with God's role as prime mover. On the other hand, organicism entails an autonomy of the living, in opposition to the doctrine of the soul. It is perhaps no coincidence then that mechanicism was dominant in Catholic Europe, whilst organicism spread in Protestant Europe. The main lineage of organicism expands across the German tradition of Naturphilosophie (Humboldt 1845; Driesch 1908), that sought an organic unity in all phenomena of the universe from crystals and living beings to social and cultural forms. Goethe’s (1790) quest for the Urform of living beings such as plants cast a lasting influence on German science that can be recorded up to the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology (Koffka 1935). German organicism situated the organism in a dialectical relation with the environment. Unlike the objective world (Welt), the environment (Umwelt) is the universe as experienced and projected from the subjective existence and point of view of a given organism. Haeckel (1866) coined the term ecology (Ökologie) precisely as the study of the interdependency between the organism and its environment. Similarly, Uexküll (1920b) defined the organism’s adaptation to its environment through an operative circuit (Funktionskreis): that is, a physiological feedback in which stimuli are continuously exchanged between the inner and outer world. The basic diagram of the cybernetic machine based on a feedback loop as a means of equilibrium with the environment can be traced back to Uexküll’s formalisation of the organism’s relation with the environment.

As Anne Harrington (1996: 3) recorded, the ‘call to Wholeness’ that animated German culture since the nineteenth century was a response to a dismembered country looking for unity and a reaction to the industrial crisis and alienation of urban masses. The movie Metropolis (Lang 1927) famously photographed the technophobic sentiment of the age. In addition, vitalist interpretations of the organism propelled far-right doctrines. The Lebensphilosophie contributed to biomorphic reactionary notions such as Staatsbiologie (Uexküll 1920a), Geopolitik and Biopolitik (Kjellén 1917), and Lebensraum (Ratzel 1897), which Nazi Germany adopted to defend its right to expansion in analogy to the ‘natural’ growth of a life form. On the other hand, progressive readings of organicism can be found in the Gestalt school and in the neurology of Kurt Goldstein (1934/2000), Goldstein (1940). Goldstein’s concept of the mind as an organic unity implied not only capacity of self-organisation but also self-repair and self-regeneration after injury and trauma. Goldstein’s main work Der Aufbau des Organismus (1934/2000: literally, ‘The Structure of the Organism’) cast a deep influence on French philosophy and epistemology (Canguilhem 1943/1966; Merleau-Ponty 1942/1967) up to contemporary neurophilosophy (Metzinger 2004) and theories of neuroplasticity.