Abstract
In this chapter we focus on the relationship at the turn of the twentieth century between vitalistic theories and a special case of a holistic approach to biology, Kurt Goldstein’s organicism. We consider Goldstein’s biographical and historical background and present the research cases that lead him to formulate his ‘holistic-organismic’ approach to the study of the brain and the mind, which developed into an ambitious theory on the nature of biological knowledge. Goldstein’s organicism emerges as an antagonist to the aseptic and unsatisfactory framework of mechanistic biology. However, Goldstein’s organicism strives to keep apart from some members of its own ‘family’ of anti-mechanistic approaches. It is especially wary of the metaphysical commitments of vitalistic hypotheses, and seeks alternative conceptual routes to traditional problems in the biological sciences, like teleology and the organization of the living. Goldstein’s organicism will result in a rigorously materialist but non-reductionist epistemology of biology, which represents in his view the only feasible route to effective therapy. Goldstein’s efforts to solve the problem of teleology, while incomplete, ultimately reveals the richest dimension of his intellectual legacy, that of an ethical stance towards science and medical practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Hein (1969).
- 2.
- 3.
Etymologically, the term ‘holism’ comes from the Greek ὅλος, meaning ‘totality’, ‘unitary whole’. Its first relevant occurrence is in the 1926 work by the South African statesman Jan Christian Smuts, Holism and Evolution (Smuts 1926).
- 4.
Phillips (1970).
- 5.
Bertalanffy (1950).
- 6.
- 7.
Cf. Ash (1998).
- 8.
Cf. Ibid., 186. It should also be noted that after 1918, along with the concept of Gestalt, the organismic one became the dominant paradigm from which to borrow bio-political metaphors with a reactionary matrix – although other political sympathies were “possible and persuasive,” cf. Harrington (1996).
- 9.
The first to export the concept of Gestalt in psychology, with his essay Über Gestaltqualitäten, was Ehrenfels (1890). The historic meeting of the three leading exponents of Gestaltpsychologie, Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka took place in Frankfurt in 1910. After a period of great productivity and greater impact on German culture during the 1920s, the representatives of Gestalt psychology, nearly all Jews, suffered the growing Nazi persecution, and fled to the States.
- 10.
- 11.
Cf. Forman (1984).
- 12.
Spengler (1918).
- 13.
Koselleck (1979, 102).
- 14.
Forman (1971, 26–27).
- 15.
Cf. Kant (1790, §§ IV, VIII, 63, 65); concerning reflections on ‘external’ purposiveness, cf. ibid. §§ 79–80, 82–85.
- 16.
Harrington (1996, 51), referring to Driesch (1899). Entelécheia [ὲντελέχεια]: a term used by Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book IX) to designate the state of perfection (from the Greek entelés [ὲντελές], completed, whole) of an entity that has reached its ‘end’ [τέλος] by fully implementing its potential being. The activity that transforms the possible into the real is called enérgheia [ἐνέργεια], and in this sense is distinct from the entelechy of the entity, which is instead the result of full implementation of the possible. This distinction is very important, because in the first case we are dealing with a state, a process or a final cause, while in the latter case with an immanent force.
- 17.
- 18.
Lenoir (1982).
- 19.
Ash (1998, 83).
- 20.
Thus, abandoning W. Wundt’s cherished dream of a rigorous experimental foundation, the psychology proposed by these three authors (respectively psychology of ‘worldviews’, ‘structural psychology’ and ‘characterology’), instead of being ‘scientific’, becomes ‘humanist’, and obtains a place within the Geisteswissenschaften (Dilthey 1883).
- 21.
Ash (1998, 171–185).
- 22.
Goldstein (1995, 285).
- 23.
Simmel (1968, 9).
- 24.
Sacks (1995, 10).
- 25.
- 26.
“When I had to decide between natural science and philosophy before entering the university, I did not know which to choose. In deciding on natural science I was certain that I would use it only as a basis for becoming a physician. Medicine alone appeared suited to my inclination – to deal with human beings” (Goldstein 1959, 109).
- 27.
“Kurt Goldstein is a philosophical scientist because he’s a true scientist…. It is not that he ‘also’ has a philosophical penchant and, as a kind of reprieve from the rigors of science, sometimes permits himself flights into philosophy. On the contrary, the very intimacy with concrete problems issues into philosophical dimensions, just as it was already a philosophical awareness which made the problem visible, as such, in the first place. ‘Method as well as theory must originate from nothing but the most concrete evidence’, says Goldstein himself. But, of course, they really originate from the viewer of the evidence, he who makes the evidence – mute in itself – tell its story by asking it the right kind of question, having gathered it first with questions in mind: and when he gives himself account of what kind of questions are right, and even reflects on such things as evidence and questioning in general, he has turned philosopher without turning from the matter in hand” (Jonas 1959, 161).
- 28.
Canguilhem, in his Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique (1943), explicitly acknowledges the major intellectual debt he owed Goldstein, whom he considers his first inspirational and insightful source of reflection on the concept of health and disease. Cf. especially chapter XII of The Organism, entitled On Norm, Health, and Disease. On Anomaly, Heredity and Breeding. Cf. also Gayon (1998) and Delaporte (1994).
- 29.
Sacks (1995).
- 30.
Edinger (1855–1918) was an eminent German anatomist and neurologist and is considered one of the fathers of comparative neuroanatomy; Wernicke (1848–1925) was a pioneer neuropathologist (also physician, anatomist and psychiatrist) in the study of aphasia. He insisted on the necessity of evaluating the psychological consequences of neurological damage. In the classification of aphasia symptomatology, receptive or sensory aphasia is named after him (Wernicke’s aphasia).
- 31.
Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) is now remembered for his detailed research on the symptomatology of psychiatric disorders, and is considered a precursor of the contemporary classifications of the psychiatric pathologies (DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; or the ICD, International Classification of Disease).
- 32.
Simmel (1968).
- 33.
- 34.
- 35.
Cf. Brown, in Calamari and Pini (2007, 161–164).
- 36.
- 37.
Brown (1990).
- 38.
“I shall confine my discussion essentially to the nervous system, since only in this realm do I feel confident that my judgment of the material will be sufficiently reliable. I believe, however, that the conclusions drawn will convince the reader that it is permissible to make some generalizations regarding processes in the other systems of the organism” (Goldstein 1995, 26).
- 39.
Ibid., 35, 334.
- 40.
Ibid., 85, 106.
- 41.
Ibid., 325.
- 42.
Ibid., 42. Our italics.
- 43.
Sacks (1995).
- 44.
Cf. Ferrario (2008).
- 45.
Goldstein (1995, 187).
- 46.
Bertalanffy (1969, 174–179).
- 47.
Goldstein (1995, 60).
- 48.
Ibid., 61.
- 49.
Ibid., 189.
- 50.
Cf. ibid., 265 (a section entitled “The constants. Preferred and ordered behaviour”).
- 51.
Ibid., 282–283.
- 52.
Goldstein (1940, 184).
- 53.
Goldstein (1995, 198–199). Also cf. ibid., 334–337.
- 54.
Ibid., 196.
- 55.
Harrington (1996), our italics. The study of this case (published for the first time in 1918: A. Gelb and K. Goldstein, Zur Psychologie des optischen Wahrnehmungsund Erkennungsvorganges, 1–142, then reissued two years later in the official journal of Gestalt Psychology, Psychologische Analysen hirnpathologischer Fälle, 1920, I, 561), is also quoted at length by a maternal cousin of Goldstein, the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who frequently came to Frankfurt to the Institute for Research on the After-effects of Brain Damage, where he could observe the ‘concrete’ behaviour of brain-injured patients. Cassirer devoted an entire chapter in the third volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to language pathology and review of clinical cases lacking symbolic capacities (Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, III, Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis, 1929). The case was revisited quite often also in recent times (Goldenberg 2003; Marotta and Behrman 2004; Jensen 2009).
- 56.
- 57.
- 58.
Gilbert and Sarkar (2000).
- 59.
Wolfe (2008).
- 60.
Cf. Benton (1974).
- 61.
If we do not endorse an identity thesis, a strong affinity between vitalism and organicism is undeniable. Aside from being vivaciously allied against the dominant paradigm of mechanistic biology, the two approaches seem to us likely to share a character of ‘meta-theoretical commitment’, namely an attitude towards knowledge that is motivated from beliefs and concerns that do not necessarily belong to the field of investigation (cf. Greco 2005).
- 62.
Cf. Nicholson (2010).
- 63.
Gilbert and Sarkar (2000).
- 64.
Many authors have conceived of the relationship in different ways: Benton distinguishes between different degrees of ‘epistemological scepticism’ and ‘metaphysical daring’ involved in vitalistic theories, co-locating what we call here organicism on the sceptic side of the continuum (Benton 1974); Lenoir talks of ‘vital materialism’ (Lenoir 1982); Kaitaro prefers to call organicist thinkers ‘materialist vitalists’ (Kaitaro 2008); Allen talks of ‘non-vitalistic holisms’ (Allen 2005); Normandin (2007) of “physical vitalism”; and so on. Since in the end it seems to us that it is a matter of what aspect of theorization one finds more relevant, and this depends not on the intrinsic properties of a theory, as much as on the subjectivity of the observer, we want to insist on the adoption, for the purposes of this article, of the above-mentioned partition (i.e. organicism as non-materialistic holism).
- 65.
Goldstein (1995, 323).
- 66.
“We are not afraid of the term entelechy in so far as it is a metaphysical conception but primarily because it is much too general and undefined … [It] has too much the character of a correction, necessitated by errors made elsewhere … The cause of these errors rests in the conception of the organism as a mechanism … Since it was in no occasion necessary to assume mechanistic processes in order to understand life, we do not need to speculate on entelechy” (Goldstein 1995, 321).
- 67.
Ibid., 320–324.
- 68.
By this argument, Goldstein is also trying to defend his own organismic position from charges of ‘teleologism’ or finalism, and to mark a clear boundary between organicism and vitalism: quite frequently organicism had been censured for superficial affinities with vitalistic positions, cf. Gilbert and Sarkar (2000).
- 69.
Once again, Goldstein does not provide it in The Organism. Actually, he thinks that the term teleology and all language involving finalistic gloss “would best be avoided altogether,” or reduced to mere “descriptive use,” and accordingly does not use it in the book. Unfortunately, this lexical accommodation leaves the problem substantially unaltered. As for vitalism, such vagueness represents a serious weakness of Goldstein’s argument – see Sects. 5 and 6.
- 70.
Mayr (1988, 235).
- 71.
- 72.
Mayr (2004, 39).
- 73.
Cf. Mayr (2004).
- 74.
Cf. Gilbert and Sarkar (2000) on the ‘bad intellectual company’ of organicism and vitalism.
- 75.
Mechanicism had dominated the scene in the natural sciences roughly since the Newtonian revolution in the seventeenth century. But it did not lack drawbacks: in the neat and entrenched model of the organism-machine, every finalistic consideration suddenly disappeared and left an explanatory gap that urged to be filled. This represented a problem especially in embryology. This persistent dissatisfaction with the mechanistic model in the biological sciences remained unchanged for a surprising amount of time. Cf. Micheli (1970) and Allen (2005).
- 76.
A first point was made about teleological language (language implying the recourse to final causes), which would entail the commitment to a metaphysical hypothesis. Mayr’s reply is that no contemporary biologist needs to call for immaterial agencies to explain directed behaviour or development after the clarification of the concepts of genetic program, genetic information and evolution by natural selection. A second critique comes to teleology from physical reductionism. This has to do with the concern that accepting teleological explanations in biology would somehow subtract biology to universality of physical –chemical laws. The answer is here represented by the formulation of the concept of double causality in biology: biological objects would be subjected to a twofold source of causation, the proximate one constituted by their genetic code, and the ultimate one by chemical-physical laws. A third critique judges the assumptions of future ends and purposes to be logically contradictory with the principle of causality (it is essentially a critique of the very concept of final cause): the reply to this criticism is represented by nothing but the acceptance of teleological causality into logic, once the previous mentioned suspects are dispelled. A last criticism highlights how making use of concepts like plan, end, purpose, intention, could conceal the application of anthropomorphic qualities to completely unconscious processes. Mayr dispels this final doubt, emphasizing how contemporary biology can explain all physiological functions and all animal behaviour without having to appeal to consciousness or intentionality of any sort (cf. Mayr 1988; 2004).
- 77.
Mayr (1988, 49).
- 78.
Mayr (2004, 54).
- 79.
Mayr (1988, 39).
- 80.
Mayr (2004, 51). A different consideration holds for adaptiveness and adaptations, i.e. those features of an organism that are the product of natural selection and seem to perform a specific function. These are not genuinely teleonomic processes, for here the language employed is only apparently (so to say metaphorically) teleological. Adaptation is in fact an a posteriori phenomenon, due to the differential survival of phenotypic modifications produced by random processes of variation. Generally, adaptive features contribute to perform teleonomic activities, and are, so to say, executive organs of teleonomic programs. However, being themselves stable acquisitions and stationary systems, describing them in genuinely teleological terms is misleading.
- 81.
Mayr (2004, 53). In his latest work, Mayr goes as far as distinguishing closed, open and somatic programs (cf. ibid., 54–55) from the original insight into genetic programs. As the genetic one (which is a closed program), open and somatic programs are evolved to function as guiding information for biological processes that finally assume the appearance of goal-directed activities.
- 82.
“At most, the concept of the so-called inner purposiveness in the sense of Kant, could be taken into consideration” (Goldstein 1995, 323).
- 83.
Goldstein’s sympathies for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) went well beyond always keeping a portrait of the German philosopher above his work desk (cf. Teuber 1966). Ferrario (2008) argues that it is exactly the conception of the organism as a prototype (Goethe’s Urbild), to which all the organisms would tend in the process of realizing their ‘essential natures’ that inspires the bizarre view of the ‘hierarchy of living beings’ in Chapter XI of The Organism. The hierarchy of life ranks organisms (but also organs, and psychological types) on the basis of an hypothetical “degree of centering and richness” (Goldstein 1995, 370), i.e. the greater or lesser organization of the organism, which is manifest in a series of formal attributes (centering); and the capacity of an organism to “absorb the richness of content of the apprehended world,” as well as the “richness of essential nature” (richness). In other words, centering and richness measure the approximation of the individual organism to the Urbild, aside from characterizing Goldstein’s views on the topic as fairly anachronistic ones.
- 84.
Sacks (1995).
- 85.
- 86.
Cf. Ferrario (2008). The idea of hierarchy and ‘centering’ of living beings, the doubtful statements on evolutionary theory, and the position assigned to mankind with respect to the animal domain are among the most important elements of divergence from Darwinian theory.
- 87.
See the section on “The Problem of Parts and Wholes,” Goldstein (1995, 302).
- 88.
Cf. for example the “certainly difficult and very serious question” of the being-alive of the parts, Ibid.
- 89.
Problematizing the boundaries and individuality of the organisms, as in contemporary debates, was far from Goldstein’s interests. His definition of the organism is a simple, intuitive, empirical one: the organism is the object of study of biology, the ‘living being’, which simply ‘confronts us’. (“We stand in the presence of a multiformity of material that is scientifically undefined. This material is simply the world around us, in which certain phenomena immediately stand out as ‘living,’ without revealing to us the why and wherefore of this characteristic, or even challenging an inquiry concerning it. Life confronts us in the living being. These organisms, at least for the time being, provide our subject matter,” Goldstein 1995, 26–27).
- 90.
Goldstein (1995, 87). Our italics.
- 91.
“Abstract attitude” is an essential term in Goldstein’s specific terminology (in Goldstein 1995) and indicates the propensity, in humans, to gain knowledge by analytic focus.
- 92.
Ibid., 28–29: “Apropos of methodology, one thing must be emphasized in advance. We will not be satisfied with any form of intuitive approach. Every natural science, indeed any science at all, must start with an analytic dissection. So, too, in biology we must first observe the ‘parts’ of the organism. We are forced to accept this point of departure because a naive approach to the phenomena is not feasible, unless one is to be content with fictitious generalities.” Or: “Certainly, isolated data acquired by the dissecting method of natural science could not be neglected if we were to maintain a scientific basis” (ibid., 18).
- 93.
The author often mentions Rubin’s famous picture, which may appear as a white vase on a black background or as two black profiles on a bright background (Goldstein 1995, 125; 1940, 19–21). Goldstein uses the image quite freely; first of all he applies it to the ‘figure’ of excitement within the nervous system, in order to enact a behavior whatsoever, but he later extends its application to several levels of arguments: reflex alternations, performances, strategies of knowledge (atomistic-holistic), existential dimensions (sphere of adequacy-sphere of immediacy), cf. Corsi (2012).
- 94.
Goldstein (1995, 198) (a section entitled “Localization and specificity”).
- 95.
“Whether or not both [subject matter and methodology, which are interrelated] are adequate instruments of science can be verified by only one criterion: fruitfulness in their respective fields. We must attempt to understand living organisms in the most fruitful way” (Ibid., 28–29).
- 96.
Cf. Ibid., 316 on the incompleteness of biological knowledge.
- 97.
Ibid., 302.
- 98.
Cf. Laughlin 2003.
- 99.
- 100.
Cf. Nicholson (2010).
- 101.
“The Organism consists mainly of a detailed description of the new method, the so-called holistic, organismic approach.… We were confronted then with a difficult problem of epistemology. The primary aim of my book is to describe this methodological procedure in detail, by means of numerous observations” (Goldstein 1995, 18).
- 102.
Ibid., 324.
- 103.
In one of his last papers, outlining the differences between his point of view and that of existential psychiatry, the old Goldstein was to state: “I agree with the existentialistic concept in so far as I also deny that biological phenomena, particularly human existence, can be understood by application of the method of natural science. But I differ in the meaning of the term existence. It means for me an epistemological concept based on phenomenological observations, which enables us to describe normal and pathological behavior and to give a definite orientation for therapy. It is a kind of philosophical anthropology” (Goldstein 1959, 13, our italics).
- 104.
Goldstein (1957, 179–180).
- 105.
Heidegger (1927, §§ 31, 48, 53).
- 106.
For example, readers may wonder whether the writer is a scientist or a mystic when they read: “…the organism is a Being enduring in time, or if we may say so, in eternal time; for it does not commence with procreation, certainly not with birth, and does not end with death. What we mean by the terms ‘birth’ and ‘death’ are merely certain landmarks like others, for example, like puberty and menopause. Their real nature is yet to be determined. But they belong essentially to existence …” (Goldstein 1995, 387, our italics). It remains an open question regarding the possible substantialistic or metaphysical implications of this term Being, written capitalized (in German Sein): implications that the author would vehemently deny. But in the light of the last quotation, the logical step comes to mind, with which Freud envisioned a possible hypostatization of the libido. So we understand the remark of Walter Riese, when he wrote that in Goldstein’s theory, “The organism thus appears as a kind of a higher truth …” (Riese 1968, 28).
- 107.
Goldstein (1995, 47).
- 108.
Goldstein (1940, 142).
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Ferrario, C.E., Corsi, L. (2013). Vitalism and Teleology in Kurt Goldstein’s Organismic Approach. In: Normandin, S., Wolfe, C. (eds) Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2445-7_9
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