Take apart a living frog and you end up with a heap of components and no frog. Take apart a clockwork and you end up with a heap of components that can be reassembled into a clock. This elementary difference — that one whole survives its parts and the other does not — is the core of what natural philosophy since Schelling has called organicism. The question is not one of mood but of structure: does the cosmos follow the logic of clockwork or the logic of the living? Do the parts determine the whole, or does the whole determine its parts?
#The Direction of Grounding
Mechanism thinks from the parts to the whole. Atoms form molecules, molecules form cells, cells form organs, organs form living beings — the whole is the sum of its parts, and whoever fully understands the parts understands the whole. This direction of grounding, from the bottom up, has its legitimacy in the technical sphere, where machines are in fact assembled from parts. It becomes a problem the moment it is elevated into a universal ontological claim. For the machine is a de-vitalised artefact, brought forth by human construction. It can serve as a model; it cannot be the model for everything.
Organicism reverses the direction of grounding. The parts are to be understood from the whole, not the whole from the parts. A heart is a heart only as the heart of an organism; cut out from the corpse it rots into matter. A hand is a hand only as the hand of a living person; severed from the arm it is a piece of flesh. Aristotle captured this in a formula that has remained decisive for the organic tradition: the severed hand is a hand in name only. The whole ontologically precedes the parts — it constitutes them as what they are.
#Schelling’s First Outline
In 1798 and 1799, Schelling brought this reversal into a philosophical form that has not been surpassed since. Von der Weltseele (1798) and Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (1799) develop the thought that nature is not an inert aggregate of substances but a productive process that brings itself forth. Schelling speaks of nature as natura naturans — nature as creator, not creature. The universe is an absolute organism, he writes — a whole whose parts are explained from its inner livingness, not the other way around (cf. Schelling, 1799).
From this follows an unfamiliar thesis: the inorganic is merely the negated organic, the dead merely the suppressed living. Bound in rigid fetters, it lies in the dead remnants of true substance. There is nothing absolutely dead — everything is primal seed or nothing (cf. Schelling, Genie der Naturphilosophie, 76:00–79:00). This is the radical reversal of organicism: it is not the living that must be explained from the dead — the dead is a secondary form of inhibited livingness. Materiality is not the primal ground but the result of a hardening, an inhibition of the original movement.
#Goethe’s Method on Growth
While Schelling provides the ontological grounding, Goethe demonstrated the methodological practice of organic thinking. In The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) he shows how all outer plant parts — leaf, sepal, petal, stamen — are transformations of a single basic form, ascending step by step toward reproduction. Nature creates not by addition but by transformation of the One (cf. Goethe, 1790). This is organic method in practical application: one understands the parts not by dissection but by tracing their transformations from a common law of formation.
This method is neither mysticism nor untested speculation. It is the sober observation of what living nature actually does. A plant does not come into being by assembling root, stem, leaf, and blossom as ready-made modules. It unfolds from a law of formation that constitutes all of its parts at once and holds them in relation. Whoever fails to grasp this logic will be able to describe the plant but not to understand it.
#What Organicism Is Not
In the twentieth century, the term took on a narrower meaning that is not what is meant here. In biology, organicism stands for the attempt to explain living systems not by reduction to physics and chemistry but as emergent wholes — Whitehead, Bertalanffy, later Maturana and Varela. This biological-systems-theoretical line has its legitimacy but remains within biology. The organicism meant here is broader and older: it is an ontological position about the cosmos as a whole, not only about the relation of living to non-living matter.
Just as little is organicism a metaphor. When Schelling thinks the cosmos as organism, he does not mean: like an organism. He means: organism-structure is the basic constitution of the real, and the machine is a derivative special case. A metaphor adorns; an ontological claim commits. Organicism is a claim, not an image.
#Kirchhoff’s Continuation
In Jochen Kirchhoff’s Die Erlösung der Natur (2004), this line is systematically unfolded. The living shows itself phenomenologically through three determinations: indivisibility, gestalt-character, and selfhood — an irreducible wholeness, a self-being as form, a substantial centre that cannot be removed without destroying the whole (cf. Kirchhoff, 2004). These three features are no special property of the biological. They mark the living as an ontological category — and thereby the cosmos as a whole, insofar as it is understood as a great organism in which every part mirrors the whole (cf. Kirchhoff, Anti-Geschichte der Physik, ch. 7.2).
What Kirchhoff adds to organicism is the sharpening: materialism is bad metaphysics, because it passes off metaphysical assumptions as established facts. The claim that matter is primary and consciousness derivative is not a scientific discovery but an undeclared ontological commitment. Whoever makes this presupposition visible sees at the same time that organicism can lay claim to no less, but more rationality — because it does not explain away phenomenological evidence.
#Consequences for Thinking
The choice between organicist and mechanist basic assumption has consequences far beyond natural philosophy. Whoever understands the human being as a complex machine will try to repair them. Whoever understands them as an organism will accompany them — and will think healing not as repair but as organic movement. Whoever takes consciousness to be an epiphenomenon of material processes will want to control it. Whoever understands it as participation in a cosmic livingness will respect it. What looks like an abstract ontological question has practical consequences that take effect in therapy, pedagogy, medicine, ecology, and the critique of technology.
In philosophical work, the organicist background lies beneath everything. A biographical question is not understood from its components — childhood plus trauma plus relational pattern do not yield the life of the human being — but from the wholeness of a life in which each individual station has its place. This organic perspective belongs to natural philosophy and to the analogy model: the livingness of the human being is transparent toward the livingness of the cosmos, and the layer model unfolds how this wholeness shows itself in distinct layers without falling apart into them.
#Sources
- Bruno, G. (1584). De la causa, principio et uno. London: John Charlewood.
- Goethe, J. W. (1790). Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären. Gotha: Ettinger.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2004). Die Erlösung der Natur. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele. Hamburg: Perthes.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1799). Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie. Jena/Leipzig: Gabler.