Talk:Organicism

Rewrite for style
I added the tag (essay-entry|article) to the article. Article needs to be rewritten for a more professional/encyclopedic style. -- 201.19.11.75 15:52, 28 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I absolutely agree, and would add that there is another related article which also needs work: kyokan. They reference each other.72.78.29.132 (talk) 19:34, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Needs Revision
For those with free time in the coming days, weeks, months, etc., please add to the this wiki-page. It needs some love. Here are some great resources for expanding upon the material and (potentially) adding new sections and accompanying information:

1. https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/1097-0177%282000%299999%3A9999%3C%3A%3AAID-DVDY1036%3E3.0.CO%3B2-A

2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24176290_Mechanism_vitalism_and_organicism_in_late_nineteenth_and_twentieth-century_biology_The_importance_of_historical_context

3. https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3260986/ (if you click on "View More")

I will be adding substantial material over the coming weeks, and would appreciate assistance from any willing to help.
 * I'll help you.
 * Some other interesting articles:
 * https://www.jstor.org/stable/746712
 * https://www.jstor.org/stable/2708514
 * https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707685
 * https://www.jstor.org/stable/428314
 * (they are behind a paywall; I have full access to them and can send them to other contributors by email if necessary. Just send me an email via my personal page if needed).
 * Alcaios (talk) 00:40, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

Great to hear! I too have access to the JSTOR archives via educational access, and I will be looking through the attached links when I get a chance. I look forward to reading your future additions.

This article, particularly the intro, conflates organicism with vitalism, which is easy to do from a mechanistic position. It needs a lot love by someone who understands the difference. Sometimes as well these distinctions are lost from a philosophical approach that sidelines the history of science. Fanboi Chau (talk) 15:50, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Organicism in Ecology
Alcaios has quite rightly pointed out that this lemma needs revision. One problem of the lemma is that its range of subjects is insufficient. As regards biology, organicism in ecology is not even mentioned although it has been (one of) the main field(s) of discussion about organicism in biology in the last hundred years. (The controversy among mechanicism, vitalism and organicism about the nature of single living beings is older and mostly ended in the 19th century.) For that reason, I have suggested to add a section on organicism in ecology. My editing has been removed arguing "I did not see it adding anything to the overall page, and it was very poorly written". I'm not a native English speaker, so, maybe, the English was poor. However, I'm a scientific expert in theory and history of ecology, and I claim that the content was substantial. I would be happy if anybody could comment on the addition I have suggested and on its removal. Maybe, my addition could be reworked by somebody to reach a helpful expansion of the scope of the lemma. Best Smht% (talk) 14:01, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Structure of the Lemma
To my mind, the structure of the lemma isn't conclusive, especially as regards the section "In philosophy". I would propose to put the three paragraphs beginning with "Some forms of organicism ..." and ending with "... elementaristic individualism and mechanical materialism.[16]" into a new section called "In sociology and political philosophy". Thereby I would propose to place the 1. paragraph at the end, thus:

"Organicism' has also been used to characterize notions put forth by various late 19th-century social scientists who considered human society to be analogous to an organism, and individual humans to be analogous to the cells of an organism. This sort of organicist sociology was articulated by Alfred Espinas, Paul von Lilienfeld, Jacques Novicow, Albert Schäffle, Herbert Spencer, and René Worms, among others.[15] Thomas Hobbes arguably put forward a form of organicism. In the Leviathan, he argued that the state is like a secular God whose constituents (individual people) make up a larger organism. However, the body of the Leviathan is composed of many human faces (all looking outwards from the body), and these faces do not symbolize different organs of a complex organism but the individual people who themselves have consented to the social contract, and thereby ceded their power to the Leviathan. That the Leviathan is more like a constructed machine than like a literal organism is perfectly in line with Hobbes' elementaristic individualism and mechanical materialism.[16] Some forms of organicism have intellectually and politically controversial, or suspect, associations. "Holism" in terms of the doctrine that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, often used synonymously with organicism, or as a broader category under which organicism falls, has been co-opted in recent decades by "holistic medicine" and by New Age Thought. German Nazism appealed to organicist and holistic doctrines, discrediting for many in retrospect, the original organicist doctrines. (See Anne Harrington). Soviet Dialectical Materialism also made appeals to an holistic and organicist approach stemming from Hegel via Karl Marx's co-worker Friedrich Engels, again giving a controversial political association to organicism."

What do you think of such a change? Smht% (talk) 22:04, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Organism in politics
In order to avoid the obvious edit war which is developing, I suggest attempting to resolve the conflict here. Currently GenoV84 insists on adding what appears to be off-topic content, which has been removed by 3 separate editors. His justification for the inclusion of such material relies on the use of the word "organic" by his sources, which occurs in reference to a desired quality of leadership, or of society, possessed by certain American political ideologies, i.e. they want either their leaders, or their society, to be what they consider "organic."

An example of what he considers a justification follows:

"The skull mask network’s ideology is a political-religious hybrid based in large part on the work of the philosopher Julius Evola. Evola mixed fascism with “Traditionalism,” a syncretic 20th century religious movement that combines Hermetic occultismc with the Hindu doctrine of cyclical time and a belief in a now-lost primordial European paganism. Adherents of this blend of doctrines, which can be termed “Traditionalist fascism” believe that a caste-based, racially pure “organic” society will be restored after what they believe to be an ongoing age of corruption, the Kali Yuga, is swept away in an apocalyptic war, and that it is their role to hasten the end of the Kali Yuga by generating chaos and violence."

There is, however, no obvious connection between organic as it is used in that context and between the definition of philosophical Organicism as it is provided at the beginning of this article, which also follows:

"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."

Organic, by itself, can mean a number of things. Most commonly the word is taken to mean "natural." As in, 'I only eat organic food.' Or, 'I only support organic political movements, not astroturfed ones.' Or, 'American culture is extremely artificial--not at all organic like other cultures.' Actual adherents to the doctrine of organicism specifically believe that society *is* organic, meaning that it is, or is analogous to, a living organism in itself. Therefore, a society can never lose its status as organic in the mind of an adherent of organicism, anymore than an animal can. And thus, if your desire is to *make* society organic, you obviously merely mean to bring society in congruity with a set of ideals which you see as natural, which is NOT the same as organicism. And in the above justification originally provided by JenoV84, we see that these "Traditionalist Fascists," want to restore society to a state that they feel is organic--NOT that they see society as an organic, living entity.

Therefore, I believe JenoV84 needs to provide justification for his addition, besides merely pointing to the word "organic." SwordOfEquity (talk) 01:41, 28 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Here's the entire paragraph with the full quote from the cited source, containing the the term that you were looking for; you didn't even bother to check it out before repeatedly vandalizing this article on purpose:

"In United States politics, the terms "extreme right", "far-right", and "ultra-right" are labels used to describe "militant forms of insurgent revolutionary right ideology and separatist ethnocentric nationalism", such as Christian Identity, the Creativity Movement, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement,  • •   the National Alliance, the Joy of Satan Ministries,  and the Order of Nine Angles. These far-right groups share conspiracist views of power which are overwhelmingly anti-Semitic and reject pluralist democracy in favour of an organic oligarchy that would unite the perceived homogeneously-racial Völkish nation. The far-right in the United States is composed of various Neo-fascist, Neo-Nazi, White nationalist, and White supremacist organizations and networks who have been known to refer to an "acceleration" of racial conflict through violent means such as assassinations, murders, terrorist attacks, and societal collapse, in order to achieve the building of a White ethnostate."

You better give a proper explanation and justification for your reiterated vandalism and disruptive editing of sourced content with multiple reliable references that is both pertinent and relevant regarding the subject of this article, because the source explains quite eloquently what is the conception of organicism according to the far-right. Also, the same section of this article in the previous paragraph mentions organicism as it was conceived within the Nazi racial ideology of the Third Reich, which is identical in its concern to establish a racially pure “organic” society entirely composed of White people as the Neo-Nazi ideology of contemporary Western right-wing extremists, so why should this article mention Nazi organicism in the 20th century but we are somehow supposed to remove the paragraph on Neo-Nazi organicism in the 21st century? Please explain your motivation, and provide reliable sources for your unsubstantiated claims. GenoV84 (talk) 11:44, 28 February 2022

(UTC)


 * Moreover, the editors that passed by on this article and attempted to delete the paragraph didn't provide any good reason in accordance with WP policies that would justify its deletion, in fact they gave up and moved on. Also, you cannot change the way an article is written by other editors simply because you don't like what is written in it; I already told you: Do not disrupt Wikipedia in order to illustrate your point and Wikipedia is not censored. You need first to reach WP:CONSENSUS on the article's Talk page by collaborating with other editors, not through disruptive vandalism and manual reverts, as you did on purpose multiple times. GenoV84 (talk) 11:30, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Ok, well, we're obviously going to need an arbiter, because not only are you lying, but you've completely and willfully ignored all of my points--again merely pointing to the word organic as though that implies organicism. They are two different words. Again, a belief that we should have an "organic society" does not imply a belief that society is a living organism.

And my motivation is accuracy. I have a special interest in philosophy, with which comes a commitment to truth, and, as such, I refuse to allow falsities to be spread generally, but especially as regards the domain of philosophy.

The real question is, what is your motivation. Because lying certainly does not lead me to believe that you're operating in good faith. I asked for a reference to the word organicism, and you literally said that it was in the article which you just provided, but the only word even close to the word organicism is the word "organic." I can't even believe I have to keep saying this, but they are not the same word. And a desire for an "organic" society, therefore, is not the same as believing society is, or is analogous to, a living organism.

Furthermore, the section prior to your addition makes the vague, unreferenced, and unsubstantiated assertion that the The Nazis in some way made an appeal to holism and organicism, without any mention whatever of how or what that means. If the assertion is true, however, then it must be that they viewed some aspect of their society (probably their race) as a living entity. Again, however, that would not mean that they merely desired an "organic society," it would mean that they literally believed their society or race was an organism. And as of yet, there is no evidence that that is what either they, or Neo-Nazis, believe. Because again, merely wanting an organic society is not organicism. Believing society is an organism is Organicism. They aren't the same thing. Organicism is a descriptive belief system, while the desire to "make society organic" is a normative preference.

And as for sources, logic and common sense shouldn't need to be sourced, however, for the sake of leaving no doubt in anyone's mind, I've included some.

And yes, yes, you've told me a number of things, but I don't frankly think much of your attempts to bully and intimidate me with accusations of breaching policy on account of my being new. You're the one who refuses to build a consensus. Three different editors have removed your addition because it has no relevance to the topic. So how are you not the one who's being disruptive? You literally refuse to present any argument besides, 'it said organic, that means organicism.' Assuredly it does not, and as not a single one of your sources contains either the word organicism, or indeed any reference at all to the beliefs held by the adherents of organicism, I believe it's you who needs to justify yourself, actually. Also please refer to: WP:DNB]

SwordOfEquity (talk) 11:45, 1 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Yet the following academic, high-quality, reliable sources contradict everything that you claimed about Nazi Germany, organicism, holism, and the "organic" conception of politics and society:



Nobody has harassed you in the first place, so there's no point to cry wolf when there is none. Being a regular editor doesn't mean that you are exonerated from being warned for making mistakes, whether intentionally or inadvertently. I already explained the reason for reverting your disruptive edits, so there's not much to add about it. As you can see, your reiterated claim that both the paragraph on Nazi organicism in the 20th century and the paragraph on Neo-Nazi organicism in the 21st century are "off-topic", "irrelevant", and "out of place" is completely wrong, unjustified, and senseless. Now that I have provided the reliable sources that you were asking for, and which have been missing from this article for a long time, I think that the most appropriate thing to do now is to implement them in the body of the article, if you and other editors agree. GenoV84 (talk) 18:18, 1 March 2022 (UTC)
 * If you would prefer to ask the opinion of an uninvolved third editor or "arbiter", you can post a formal request for a third opinion at WP:3O. GenoV84 (talk) 18:00, 1 March 2022 (UTC)