Comparativa de antivirus

The atomistic and holistic perspectives offer very different templates for understanding and valuing nature to a real, socially and culturally situated human being. They are also templates with their own cultural histories: and it is useful to put the differences between them into this historical context.

In particular there are strong points of connection between the holistic perspective and Romanticism, over and above those already noted in §6.4.1. Holism is a central thread in the Romantic approach to science – in opposition to the analytical and (in the terms of the contrast drawn in the last section) atomistic perspective of Enlightenment thinking. As Cunningham and Jardine (1990a) explain:

The Romantics were certainly hostile to the mechanical natural philosophy and descriptive natural history that they inherited from the Enlightenment. […] The hostility runs deep: for the Romantics mechanistic natural philosophy is the

culmination of the analytic and judgemental approach responsible for our fall from grace with nature.

These ideas found their way into the sciences too, through figures such as Alexander von Humboldt, often considered one of the fathers of modern ecology. Nicolson (1990) argues that “Humboldt directed attention to the ‘whole’ because Nature could not be understood by concentrating only on particulars. Nature was one holistic unity.” He quotes his own

translation of a passage from Humboldt’s Essai sur la geographie de plantes.

This science [la physique générale], which without doubt is one of the most beautiful fields of human knowledge, can only progress… by bringing together of all the phenomena and creations which the earth has to offer. In this great sequence of cause and effect, nothing can be considered in isolation. The general equilibrium, which reigns amongst disturbances and apparent turmoil, is the result of an infinity of mechanical forces and chemical attractions balancing each other out. Even if each series of facts must be considered separately to identify a particular law, the study of nature, which is the greatest problem of la physique générale, requires the bringing together of all the forms of knowledge which deal with the modifications of matter.

As well as finding its way into the foundations of sciences such as ecology, the holistic outlook of Romanticism has, as we have seen, lived on more widely in our culture, providing a

coherent way of understanding and valuing the world which is available even to those lacking in scientific knowledge. Consider, for example, the participant whose confident adoption of the holistic perspective was discussed in detail in §5.3.3. As we saw, this participant – having arrived at the holistic perspective – argues that: “I think we human beings, don’t understand properly the harmonious and… I can’t even find the words, because it’s so incredible, the natural world and nature.” Having concluded that “probably there’s something on the feeling level as well”, she develops further the idea that, as a species, we may understand less than we think we do:

We think we’re all so wonderful. We clever humans do XYZ, you know, and there we are with our GM foods and manipulating this and manipulating that, without looking at the bigger picture of the harmony and all that nature does for us, and how nature in a way serves us. And it’s just disrespectful, and I don’t like the way that it’s going with you know, you know with the way we manipulate. I think we need to know more, and I think there needs to be more knowledge, so that people can really work with nature, and not try and dominate nature.

The views expressed here echo Goethe’s Faust, who “spurns knowledge ‘extorted with levers and screws’, longing instead for a grasp of Nature’s secret elements, her hidden active forces, the harmony of her whole and parts” (Cunningham and Jardine, 1990b). At this point, in response to the participant’s suggestion that “there needs to be more knowledge”, the interviewer suggests that: “when it comes to nature, there are experts who know a lot about it, and there are the rest of us who don’t know much.” This observation prompts the following response from the participant:

Can I say something about that? Often the experts will know these things. So say you might get an expert in ants and insects, and he absolutely knows how they work, how the function, why they colonise as they do, what… he understands it you know, like a PhD. But is he looking at those ants and insects in the context of how that relates to everything else, and all the other things. He can’t be an expert in everything. And so I think often people are in their own little boxes and their own little like expert world of individualism, and they’re not… they’re not necessarily making the connection outside of their field. You know and connecting with the way that everything should be… I think a lot of different animal species exist like in a balance, or like in a harmony for a particular reason that we don’t understand. It’s hard for me to think that because I

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don’t understand it either. So I’m kind of like intuiting, you now, I’m intuiting what I scientifically can’t back up, which is where the scientists always get me you know. One may take issue with this participant’s characterisation of contemporary science as necessarily reductionist and atomistic. Setting this aside, however, what is striking is that the aspiration she expresses here is directly comparable to Humboldt’s, in his Essai sur la

geographie de plantes, for a science which is “one of the most beautiful fields of human knowledge “ and which “can only progress… by bringing together of all the phenomena and creations which the earth has to offer”.

The Romantic commitment to a holistic perspective in science has implications for the diversity of ways in which one may arrive at an understanding or valuing of nature. For example,

Humboldt tried to make room within his science for the kind of awe and wonder described in §5.1, alongside the dispassionate objectivity we have come to think of as the hallmark of genuine science. As Knight (1990) notes:

Humboldt sought to balance the subjective and the objective; and his later Aspects of Nature was an attempt at word-pictures of exotic scenery, informed by botany, geology and zoology. Descriptive natural science with Humboldt was passionate, in line with Davy’s poem; and particularly united the aesthetic and the scientific.

“Davy’s poem” in the above quotation refers to a poem from the notebooks of Humphrey Davy, another key figure in both Romanticism and the development of science. This poem is reproduced by Knight (1990):

Oh, most magnificent and noble Nature! Have I not worshipped thee with such a love As never mortal man displayed?

Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation, And searched into thy hidden and mysterious ways as Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage?

The Romantic ideal of science expressed in this poem seeks to accommodate within a larger, overarching perspective the different ways of understanding and valuing nature offered by the poet, the philosopher and the sage. There is room in this larger perspective for the

“unscientific man’s knowledge” so loved by Henry Thoreau (see §6.4.3); or indeed, to borrow the contrast drawn by a participant and quoted earlier (§6.4), the views of “a human being” alongside those of “a logical person”:

I'm mentioning it because that's a distinction. As a logical person we see all the… I can understand the need for it [building new homes on greenfield sites] because the modern world is one of gradual destruction to the environment, that's just a fact. But as a person, the thing is, you can see that it's wrong.

Note, however, that this larger perspective still makes room for the dispassionate, objective perspective of scientist in the Enlightenment mode (i.e. the natural “philosopher”). As Cunningham and Jardine (1990a) note, notwithstanding the hostility of Romantic thinkers to the mechanical and (in our terms) ‘atomistic’ science of the Enlightenment:

their attitude was rarely one of outright rejection. Goethe’s Faust spurns book learning and the cold-hearted attempt to extort knowledge from nature ‘with levers and screws’. Yet Goethe’s own ventures into the sciences are both methodical and solidly founded in observation and experiment. […] In a letter to Wordsworth, Coleridge writes of ‘the philosophy of mechanism, which, in everything that is most worthy of the human intellect, strikes Death’. But on reading the Optiks of the arch-mechanist

Newton he declares his delight ‘with the beauty and neatness of the experiments, and with the accuracy of his immediate deductions from them’. Nor does he envisage an outright refutation of the mechanical philosophy at the hands of his new ‘philosophy of life and intelligence’; instead the mechanical view will be shown to embody only a superficial and partial insight. Though the natural history and natural philosophy of the Enlightenment typify for the Romantics the attitudes responsible for our fall from grace with nature, they are also seen as a necessary stage on man’s ‘eccentric’ way to redemption.

It is not Enlightenment science that is rejected by the Romantics, but the pretensions of that science to completeness, and its refusal to countenance the possibility of other ways of understanding and valuing nature.

In a similar way, it is not logical inconsistency that brings the atomistic and holistic perspective on nature into conflict, but a perception that all other perspectives, including the holistic perspective, can and must be reduced without loss to an atomistic focus on usefulness to human beings.