The Romantic Movement passionately fought the machine-metaphor of the world. William Blake, living in the period of Newton and pre-Romanticism, fiercely defended his anthroposophic worldview against the mechanistic outlook. Yet his early warnings of the deadness of Newton’s world were ignored in the blazing hope that everything could be explained with the advancement of science and in the luxury of technology. Romanticists were concerned mainly with the qualitative understanding of patterns (4) and conceived of form as a pattern of relationships within an organized whole. The German Romantic poets and philosophers returned to the Aristotelian tradition to explore the nature of the organic form, organized in Goethe’s “moving order” (beweglische Ordnung) of nature (5).

Kant’s major influence on the world of thought was and still is manifold. In this context we should mention only that he presented scientific mechanistic knowledge as inadequate for understanding of life. He was also the first to discern and use the notion of ’self-organizing wholes” as a feature that distinguishes organisms from machines. His differentiation implies that the parts in the machine exist for each other, whereas in an organism parts also produce each other; in other words parts in an organism exist for and by means of each other. Kant regarded the objects of the material world as fundamentally unknowable; from the point of view of reason, they serve merely as the raw material from which sensations are formed. Objects in and of themselves have no existence, and space and time exist only as part of the mind, as “intuitions” by which perceptions are measured and judged. In the 20th c. his philosophy found much proof in scientific experiments.

The shift of interest from parts to the whole in the first decades of the 20th c. was a beginning of a sequence of changes, which may evolve one day, or is already evolving, into a new episteme. The philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels was the first to use Gestalt (in German, “organic form”) in the sense of irreducible perceptual patterns. This notion later on inspired the school of Gestalt psychology, whose main contribution lies in the simple realization that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” (6) This postulate stemmed from the observance that living organisms perceive things not in terms of isolated elements but as integrated perceptual patterns or organized wholes individually and contextually meaningful, wholes that exhibit qualities that are absent in their parts.

The turn of the 20th century signalized a series of discoveries in several domains of sciences, which displaced the foundation of the mechanistic worldview and the anthropocentric episteme. A general movement from mechanistic function to organic (later developed into systemic) organization occurred almost simultaneously in biology, psychology, and quantum physics. The myth of the stable and indivisible metrical or material unit (particle or information) of the universe dissolved when the subatomic world showed to be made of infinitely interconnected patterns, and no elements whatsoever. Experiments proved the influence of the observer on the outcome of the experiment, and thus exposed the ungrounded myth of objectivity. This all led to a shattering view of reality and a new possible relation between the nature of matter and the human mind, much more intimate and functional than it had been considered in the Newtonian world.

The shift of paradigms within sciences effected with a correspondent shift in the social sciences as well. The intellectual crisis of the quantum physicists in 1920s affected the general epistemology of our age: when the old rules of what is knowable and unknowable changed, when the basic axioms were proven to function only in limited domains (7), the old episteme was disturbed and a new way of thinking began to form. Different sciences use different names for this new outlook with slight differentiation of meaning - systemic, environmental, or network worldview, with emphasis on patterns of connectivity.

(4) The notion of the pattern is recorded as early as the roots of the Western thought. The Pythagoreans distinguished number or pattern form substance or matter, where the number-pattern is that which limits and shapes the substance-matter. This view still implies a dichotomy between pattern and matter.

(5) Goethe: “Each creature is but a patterned gradation (Schattierung) of one great harmonious whole.”

(6) In the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, both organismic biology and Gestalt psychology were part of a larger intellectual movement against the increasing fragmentation and alienation of human nature. It was basically an anti-mechanistic outlook, and its “signature” was the search for wholeness. The Gestalt psychology gave rise to Gestalt psychotherapy in the 1960s, which emphasizes the integration of personal experiences into meaningful wholes.

(7) For example, Newton’s laws and the laws of thermodynamics, which give basis to our everyday existence, function only for systems close to equilibrium, and are bent out in outer space or disappear when the system is far from equilibrium, as most living systems are.

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