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Karen Tesson writes:
The Cartesian/Newtonian worldview has not gone unchallenged. At sporadic intervals since it was first developed, alternatives to the dominant mechanistic worldview have appeared. For example, during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Romantic movement, which was pioneered by authors, painters, and other artists of the day, shifted the balance of favour away from the mechanistic paradigm (Capra, 1996). During that time, the influential philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that the processes of scientific enquiry can only provide insights that are mechanistic, but that organisms are not like machines, and that they exist as self-reproducing, self-organizing wholes (Capra, 1996; Kauffman, 1995). Later in the nineteenth century however, the mechanistic view regained its dominant hold, spurred on by the development of microscope technology that lead to significant advances in biological science (Capra, 1996). It was during this era that modern cell biology and microbiology were born, which of course was driven a significant step further by the work of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), who discovered the first antibiotics. Early in the twentieth century there was a further shift away from Classical Analysis toward what we now refer to as the “holistic” movement. The development of the quantum theory of physics during the 1920s and 30s revolutionised the world of physics and mathematics. Quantum theory represented a radical shift from classical Newtonian physics and analytical reductionism. Unlike the Newtonian view, which considers matter to be completely solid, according to quantum theory, at a subatomic level matter exists as a pattern of probabilities (Capra, 1996; Penrose, 1999). This revelation threw Classical Analysis, with its reliance on the Cartesian distinction between the substantial and the insubstantial, into turmoil. A bevy of physicists and mathematicians, including Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg and of course later Einstein (Penrose, 1999) published work related to quantum mechanics that remains influential today. The physics-led advances in quantum mechanics opened a path that led researchers in other sciences toward new non-classical approaches, particularly in biology, but also in the social sciences and psychology. For example, a number of psychologists in the 1920s began to develop a view of human psychology that involved pattern-recognition, and concerned “wholes”, rather than parts, resulting in a field of psychology known as Gestalt theory (Greenfield, 1995). Gestalt theory states that the way living beings perceive the world around them is not as a series of isolated elements, but as integrated patterns that give rise to meaningful wholes. The work of the Gestalt psychologists had significant influence on other researchers. It was instrumental in the development of Social Network Theory, and also led directly to the rise of systems thinking, and systems theory. Part 3: Systems theory, information theory and cybernetics Back to Table of Contents |
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