| Description |
1 online resource illustrations, portraits |
| Contents |
Cover Page -- Half-title Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One: The ""Human Machine"" and the Call to ""Wholeness -- The Original Goethean Vision of ""Wholeness -- A Fractured Nation and the Mechanists' Quest for Unity in Nature -- Necessary Ways of Knowing and the Mechanization of Mind and Brain -- Wholeness Betrayed: Political Unification and the Rise of the ""Machine"" Society -- The Place of ""Wholeness"" in the Fin de Siecle Upheavals |
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World War I and Its Aftermath: Science as Cultural Critique -- Chapter Two: Biology against Democracy and the ""Gorilla-Machine -- On the Way to a Biology of Subjects -- Scientists in Their Soap Bubbles: Uexktill 's Kantian Challenge to Science -- Revitalizing Life: Umweltlehre and the Vitalist-Mechanist Controversy -- The Shocks of World War I and Weimar -- Toward a ""Biology of the State -- Uexkiill on the ""Jewish Question -- The Fight against the ""Gorilla-Machine -- Uexkiill's Relationship to National Socialism -- Chapter Three: World War I and the Search for God in the Nervous System |
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Shock, Recovery, and the Localization of Time in the Brain -- World War I: Degeneration and Renewal -- The Biology of Instincts and the Evolutionary Arrow -- The ""World of Orientation"" versus the ""World of Feeling -- Morality in the Cells: The ""Syneidesis "" or Biological Conscience -- An Answer to ""Ignorabimus"": Monakow's Neurobiology of Scientific Knowledge -- Chapter Four: ""A Peacefully Blossoming Tree"": The Rational Enchantment of Gestalt Psychology -- Gestalt versus Chaos: The Voice of Houston Stewart Chamberlain -- Gestalt versus Chaos: The Voice of Christian von Ehrenfels |
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Max Wertheimer: Claiming Gestaltfor Science and Rational Enchantment -- The Mind's Laws of ""Immanent Structuralism -- A Peacefully Blossoming Tree: Wertheimer's Vision for Weimar -- Attacks on the Berlin Gestalt Vision -- The Rise of National Socialism and Wertheimer's Emigration to America -- Wolfgang Kohler's Case to Americans for the Reality of Values in a World of Facts -- Wertheimer's ""Gestalt Logic"" as an Antidote to Demagoguery -- Chapter Five: The Self-Actualizing Brain and the Biology of Existential Choice -- The Imperative of Regeneration in the Clinic and Society |
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Insights from Brain-Damaged Soldiers: Actualization and Wholeness -- Changing Theoretical Orientations: From Reflex Theory to Gestalt -- Reason, Courage, and the Making of a Weimar Hero -- The Call for a Holistic Clinical Practice -- The Goethean ""Schau"": Toward a Holistic Epistemology -- Goldstein's Persecution and the Biology of Fascism -- Goldstein in America: The ""Wholeness"" in the Human Encounter -- The Lessons of Goethe in the Post-Hiroshima Age -- Chapter Six: Life Science, Nazi Wholeness, and the ""Machine"" in Germany's Midst -- Gestalt, Goethe, and the Fiihrerprinzip |
| Summary |
By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-301) and index |
| Subject |
Life (Biology) -- Philosophy
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Medicine -- Germany -- Philosophy -- History
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Science -- Germany -- Philosophy -- History
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Mind and body -- Philosophy
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Holism.
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Holism -- Philosophy
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Biological Science Disciplines -- history
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Philosophy -- history
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Psychophysiology -- history
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holism.
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Holism -- Philosophy.
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Holism.
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Life (Biology) -- Philosophy.
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Medicine -- Philosophy.
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Mind and body -- Philosophy.
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Science -- Philosophy.
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Medizin
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Philosophie
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Biowissenschaften
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Gestalttheorie
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Holisme.
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Wetenschap.
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Cultuur.
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Biologie.
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Neurologie.
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Gestaltpsychologie.
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Holismus
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Holisme -- Allemagne -- 1900-1945.
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Médecine holistique -- Allemagne -- 1900-1945.
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Sciences -- Allemagne -- 1900-1945.
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Philosophie et sciences -- Allemagne -- 1900-1945.
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| SUBJECT |
Germany |
| Subject |
Germany.
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Deutschland
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| Genre/Form |
History.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| LC no. |
95048463 |
| ISBN |
0691218080 |
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9780691218083 |
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