Holism: Blueprint for Revival?

Abstract

greater than that which produced so-called Homo sapiens. In this respect I share Bergson's antimechanistic view. There is an evolutionary impetusan internal push that has carried life, by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies.! But this is taking us into waters too deep and too wide to be done justice here. Nevertheless, all real improvement in our evolutionary state must depend upon a vision of the ideal, however far short we may fall of bringing it about. We must be skeptical of the reasoning of those who say, in effect, that because the bull's-eye is beyond The fifteenth-century Dutch humanist Erasmusour present skill we are wasting time hitting the outer seldom quoted these days-saw the salvation of the rings. Negative and down-pulling reasoning is always world as lying in our individual endeavors, not in on tap. Such thinking has to be resisted, just as the systems. To make over the individual man is to make more perfect concept has to be invited, by drawing over the entire world. strength from the supra-rational. As Augustine said, I tried to explore this theme in my book The Civilised later to be echoed by the Christian Scientists: Evil Alternative in 1972. As it brought a number of requests has no positive nature; what we call evil is merely the for a more spelled-out view of the form that alternative lack of something that is good.2 might take, I would like to suggest a few general pointers. In any discussion of an alternative world view it is As a start, however, I must make clear that I do not tremendously easy to focus on the notion that merely go along with such as Godwin and Pelagius who, in cosmetic social change is all that is required. Our their different ways, believed in the perfectibility of deficient educational system places inordinate faith in humanity. This is not because I side with the established social engineering, technological skills, and the church in its comfortable doctrine of Original Sin, but restructuring of existing systems according to the because human perfection is a contradiction in termsprecepts of an essentially materialistic and acquisitive as Luther and Plato saw---especially in a world in which humanism. even God is often presented as a model falling well short of the sublime. Except in the Buddhist sense of disengagement, it is difficult to see how people can achieve perfection other than in the narrow practical or _.. ?C' task sense. Perfection, it may be, is unavailable except -=: 4~'