Mechanism vs. Holism: 19th Century Debate

So one thing we learn from Hegel is that closer attention to art history is philosophically necessary, demanding a contradictory move simultaneously into the minute details of painting and sculpture on one hand, and to the widest social and stylistic contexts of the work on the other. This requires the admission that artworks are genuinely historical, shot through with material contingency, and open to numerous interpretations, a realm governed by relativism; and those requirements strain the resources and run against the grain of analytic philosophy as it’s now practiced.  But theories ought to bend to the artworks and the people who produce, interpret, and enjoy them.  And here that means that analytic aesthetics must reconsider the philosophy of history and the philosophy of social sciences.

During the nineteenth century, there was much debate between proponents of mechanism and holism, and those who argued for a holistic (or organicist) approach to the study of biology were joined by philosophers.  The organicist position was connected with “the resurgence of Hegelian philosophy” represented in the English-speaking world by figures like “F. H. Bradley, A. E. Taylor, and J. Mc. Taggart.”[1]  Bradley offered an epistemological account of holism by arguing that relations of similarity and difference are only possible between entities that are within the same whole; “everywhere there must be a whole embracing what is related, or there would be no differences and no relation.”[2]  A biological or cultural entity is what it is within a larger system like a lebenswelt (with predators, food sources, mates, changes in temperature, and an array of behavioral options in response) or an artworld (with traditions, critics, galleries, academies, salons and exhibitions).  It’s within these massively complex and interconnected systems that living and meaningful beings have their forms of life.  Furthermore, it follows from Bradley’s holistic account of relations that a change in the whole implies a change in the entities that are its constituent parts: “There is no identity or likeness possible except in a whole, and every such whole must qualify and be qualified by its terms.  And, where the whole is different, the terms that qualify it and contribute to it must so far be different, and so far therefore by becoming elements in a fresh unity the terms must be altered.”[3] It’s significant here that Bertrand Russell’s approach, which forms the bedrock of traditional analytic philosophy, was in direct opposition to Bradley’s Hegelianism.  But, if analytic philosophy was framed in direct opposition to holism, organicism and so forth, how can it give an adequate account of the epistemology of the historical sciences?