Contents

1. Introduction
2. A brief summary
3. What was especially valuable
4. What I took issue with
5. Concluding remarks

Introduction

These past months, as my doctorate research project outlined in Non-Duality, Neuroscience, and the Enactive Approach had begun, several books had organically appeared along my path as entry points into the subject matter. Amongst these was Kurt Goldstein’s The Organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man (1934/1939). Adnan had mentioned it in passing at a conference on madness^[1]The conference in question was Too Mad to be True III., during his presentation about making psychotic states more intelligible through Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. It suddenly struck me that this book, which Merleau-Ponty cites so often^[2]Especially in The Structure of Behavior (Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1963)., could be of major value to better understand the theme of holism in the phenomenon of life. This theme had already come up repeatedly in Merleau-Ponty’s works, as the idea that what is operative in life is not just an assembly of parts, but something more encompassing, a totality that holds the parts under its sway. The Gestalt-nature of phenomena is investigated by Merleau-Ponty across the interwoven domains of embodiment, perception, behavior, speech, expression, art, and philosophy. All this had convinced me that a holistic principle is at work in our reality – and yet it remained elusive and mysterious. It is still so, but Goldstein has shown me that the mystery is concretely, empirically, biologically demonstrable. Through painstaking analysis of an abundance of neuropathological data, he shows how the reductive, mechanistic view of the human being as a contingent construction of thousands of interconnected causal processes is thoroughly insufficient, and how a careful and open-minded consideration of the data shows instead that the organism is one. In this first entry of my research journal, I want to summarize my take-aways from this book, highlight what I thought was of special value, and explain what I took issue with.

A brief summary

Roughly half (if not more) of this 500-page treatise is dedicated to critiquing, in one way or another, the supposition that the concept of the reflex hasany explanatory value for understanding natural behavior.  With reflex, we mean a stable and consistent linkage of stimulus and response in the organism. As Goldstein puts it: “According to the view underlying the reflex theory, the organism represents a bundle of isolable mechanisms which are constant in structure, and which respond, in a constant way, to events in the environment (stimuli)” (p. 67). Goldstein argues that no such simple stimulus-response relationships can be observed anywhere in life. And if we do observe them, it is because of pathology, or because we have contrived experimental conditions so foreign to what is natural that pathological effects ensue. The idea of the conditioned reflex, for example, is derived from experiments in such controlled settings that some of Pavlov’s dogs are said to have developed neuroses.^[3] Merleau-Ponty, 1963, p. 123. There are no constant responses to stimuli because each response is poised upon the changing condition of the entire organism in a given situation. Only by isolating one part of the organism from the whole do we obtain constant responses. Such isolation can be brought about by experimentally manipulating a part while holding the rest still, or, as with pathology or injury, by damaging the connections between part and whole. Such isolating methods of research lay at the origin of the reflex concept. If we were to follow the organism in its natural performances, we would see that each response flows from an integrated whole. We would soon discover that a reflex as paradigmatic as the knee-jerk response in fact depends upon a host of other factors such as the posture of the individual, what they are paying attention to, their general mood, and the significance of the situation. But, one might argue, does a changed posture not simply release other reflexes or modulating factors, which interfere with the first? In general, is the organism not made up of essentially simple associations between stimulus and response which compound (along with modulating factors) to form complex responses to rich tapestries of stimuli? Such a hypothesis is certainly appealing to the analytic spirit for its promise to explain the many by the few, the complex by the simple. We must only find the fundamental building blocks of behavior – which consist of physical ties between the world, the organism’s sensory receptors, and its movements – and the entire puzzle of living behavior will fall into place. No, says Goldstein. The modulating factors are only introduced because one erroneously begins from simple reflexes, and each deviation from these elementary associations demands an additional hypothesis to correct for it. His alternative: to begin from the whole, undivided, which is the entire organism in a given situation. We would then see that the variable responses of the organism and its “parts” are all expressions of a singular current, a drive for self-actualization, which realizes itself continuously in the changing conditions of the world.

Let me illustrate his position using three examples. When one has an itch, one generally scratches it using the limb which has easiest access to the itchy area (p. 222). One might assume that this scratching motion, say right-hand-to-right-side-of-the-face, is set in motion by a reflexive pathway connecting the itch (stimulus) to the scratch (response). After all, the movement happens so unconsciously that it might well be a mechanical chain of events. However, if the usual limb is made immobile through experimental manipulation, then the next limb with easiest access is immediately put to use. Without any trial-and-error, the new limb succeeds in scratching the relevant spot. If it were a matter of learned associations sedimenting into habitual pathways, one would expect some degree of learned adaptation, involving in the first attempt at least a modest amount of error, rather than instantaneous adjustment. There is no such error, as if the organism acts in accordance with an integrated sense of its needs, without relying on pre-established stimulus-response links.

This hypothesis becomes even more evident with the orienting reflex. If one hears a loud noise, it often happens that one turns toward it before even registering what it is.^[4]While Goldstein discusses the orienting reflex in depth, this specific example appears only in passing (p. 354). I find it an intuitive case and apply to it the same analysis that Goldstein applies … Continue reading Entire neuroanatomical pathways have been mapped out from the reception of the auditory stimulus to the activation of muscles, which bypass any higher-order processing and thus may explain the phenomenon. Once again, this explanation commonly assumes the establishment of neural pathways linking stimulus to response. However, the actual orienting movement in each particular situation depends wholly on one’s initial posture. The muscles which are recruited to realize the reorientation differ greatly whether one is standing upright, sitting down, lying on one’s back, etc. Furthermore, even this reflex is sensitive to the significance of the situation, and if more pressing matters demand one’s attention, the sudden noise might go unnoticed. Reflex theorists might account for this by positing modulatory factors interfering with the course of the reflex. Goldstein objects, arguing that such factors are only necessary if there is a primary stratum of reflexes that require correction. But this assumption is misguided: rather than being built from reflexes that are later modified, behavior is holistic from the beginning. In sum, the orienting reflex is not a set of fixed pathways from certain stimuli to certain responses, but a performance of the whole organism responding to situational demands. Orienting is thus not the output of an isolated neural circuit but an expression of the organism’s integrated state in relation to its world.

Goldstein also draws heavily on findings from lesion studies. For instance, he discusses cases of cerebellar impairment, which often manifests as a characteristic “tonus pull” – a persistent inclination of the head to one side (p. 440). If one attempts to “correct” the tilted head by forcibly straightening it, a range of motor disturbances emerge elsewhere in the body. This suggests that the tilted head is not a defect but rather a strategy by which the body somehow redistributes tension across the entire neuromuscular network to restore optimal functioning. The tilt is not merely a passive symptom of the lesion but an adaptive response of the organism, which dynamically and intuitively devises holistic solutions to problems.

While these are but a fraction of the examples which Goldstein examines, they might suffice to broadly clarify his stance. His lifelong work as a clinician treating neuropathology has led him to understand the organism as a functional unit. There are no separable “parts” in the organism. Of course, one can distinguish different organs and processes, and correlate them with different functions, but these functions only emerge in relation to the whole in which the parts are embedded. Rather than saying that the organism consists of parts, Goldstein says that the organism is differentiated into members (p. 423). In his words: “According to our basic stand, we do not concede the existence of anything ‘apart from’ or ‘additional to,’ but always regard the organism as a whole in which segregation of any sort is artificial, and in which every phenomenon is a manifestation of the whole” (p. 465).

From this point of view, the phenomenon of the reflex is made understandable as a particular response of the whole organism under peculiar settings which isolate one part of its total functioning (p. 158). This reveals a stable and consistent machine-like reaction pattern that does not exist under natural conditions. Thus, we can understand the partitive reaction of the reflex by considering it in its relationship to the whole organism, namely as a controlled distortion of normal functioning. The converse, however, is not possible: we cannot understand the total functioning of the organism in terms of reflexes, as a mechanical aggregate of parts plus their interactions. The whole is ontologically prior. As he puts it: “The ‘partitive’ revealed itself as an ‘unnatural’ state of the organism under isolation of certain often very arbitrarily selected parts. Thus the ‘partitive’ proved itself unsuited to derive the whole from it. All individual parts pointed beyond themselves to the whole, to a base differing from the parts themselves, to a center to which they owe their functional reality and by which they achieve their place (i.e. order of the parts)” (p. 509).

At this point, one begins to sense what Goldstein means by “the whole”. He means to say that the organism displays a fundamental unity across its many processes, forming an integrated system which behaves and unfolds as one. But what exactlyis the nature of this whole? That is what Goldstein strives to delineate progressively with each new example that he analyses. But he cautions us just as well that “[a]s to the nature of this [holistic] base, mere empirical observation can never furnish a definite determination” (p. 509). Besides observation, conceptual insight is essential – and even then, each answer is only provisional, a momentary approximation. It is as if he does not know exactly what the organism is when he sets out his investigation; he only senses that something global is at play. And by examining mainly cases of neuropathology and contrasting them with normal functioning, he gradually acquires a clearer sense of the nature of the organism. Through this dialectical approach, Goldstein arrives at a central insight: the organism is not merely a reactive system, but an individual which seeks to actualize itself in the world by the plurality of potentialities with which it is endowed (p. 196). There is something optimistic about his account of organismic nature. He sees in life a phenomenon which seeks to flourish, a blossoming towards what it deems to be good. Indeed, he explicitly rejects the view that life is fundamentally a matter of survival or self-preservation, noting that these drives predominate only in border conditions when life is threatened, and in which case they represent the drive to self-actualize under catastrophic circumstances (p. 443). The organism’s natural state is not one of defensive struggle but of creative, open-ended self-actualization.

But is it really natural for us to experience life as a journey of flourishing? Is it not often punctuated by struggle in one way or another? Is human nature not often characterized by internal conflict, whether between passion and reason, or between different passions, or between one or some other part of ourselves? And if so, then are we not better off understanding the organism as a composite of different parts in tension with one another, struggling for dominance? Goldstein acknowledges this volatile aspect of human nature. In short, his answer is that the tremendous complexity of the human organism both increases its scope for self-actualization and its risk for disorder (p. 516). A human being that acts compulsively out of, say, a drive for sex, is not properly centered, has not integrated their sexuality into their total being. Because of this, there appears to be an isolated “sex drive”, which is but an expression of inner fragmentation in the course of holistic self-actualization.

It is clear now why Goldstein spends so much of the book critiquing reflex theory. The latter represents the view that the complex whole of organismic life is an aggregate of disjointed, partitive processes interacting and competing with each other. Goldstein’s view is directly antithetical to this, positing that the complex whole is primary, functioning through its various members, displaying across all of them a unitary rhythm and flow. At this level, the organism is not a set of tensions poised against each other and seeking equilibrium; rather, the organism is a functional whole engaged in a process of what he calls coming to terms with the world.

What was especially valuable

Looking back at this book, I could encapsulate its value for me in two categories.

Firstly, there is its intellectual value. After laboring through its dense chapters, the philosophical idea of holism has acquired a newfound biological bite to it. The organism is a functional whole, and this shows itself in the dynamism of nervous excitation, hormonal regulation, the recruitment of muscle fibers, the functioning of organs, and any other partial phenomena we can discern in its flesh – all of these “parts” are abstractions of one integrated being. The apparent separateness of parts arises only when we analyze them in isolation, rather than seeing them as interwoven aspects of a single living dynamic. Goldstein shows how the behavior of these biological phenomena can only be properly understood in their full scope if we take account of the organism’s holistic nature.

Furthermore, it is refreshing to read a thoroughly scientific work which does not shy away from the question of the nature of knowledge. Goldstein grapples with the phenomenon of biological knowledge itself, infusing the work with a self-awareness of its own place in the larger scheme of life.^[5] See Chapter 9, “The Nature of Biological Knowledge”.

Secondly, the book has had a personal and existential value for me, because of its potential to transform one’s conception of life. Goldstein’s persistent demonstration of how the organism forms a whole, his emphasis on the importance of “centering” or integration, and his argument that all defects and dysfunctions come down to isolation – these are not just intellectual points. They suggest that healing – whether psychological or physical – comes not from fixing isolated problems but from restoring coherence to the whole organism. Applying these ideas to my own life, I have experienced their fruitfulness in making sense of my own nature. There is therapeutic potential to his conception of the organism. Perhaps that is not too surprising, given that this work is the product of his journey as a physician.

What I took issue with

In the second half of the book, Goldstein begins to explicitly venture beyond the traditional domain of biology, as the science of living physical systems, and enters into more philosophical terrain, when he raises the question of the relationship between body and mind (p. 335). Here, too, the holistic approach is steadfastly defended: body and mind are two abstractly isolated aspects of what originally exists as one whole. While I’m inclined to agree with the general manner in which he understands the relationship between these concepts, I am left with a sense that it remains somewhat vague. Why can we discern these two aspects at all? What is mindedness, what is physicality? These are questions that, to my understanding, are left open. More generally, during some sections of the book, I had the feeling more of encountering a motley crew of holistic ideas, rather than a clear conceptual framework for holistic biology. Perhaps this “shortcoming” is made all the more understandable if we realize that Goldstein wrote this massive treatise in the span of a few weeks, under the threat of Nazi persecution.

Besides this overall sentiment of being a bit conceptually loose, there were three specific issues that evoked some resistance in me, or that I felt require a different approach than what Goldstein pursues. They are all related, and it would require another, more in-depth essay, to explore them in full. Here, I only wish to outline them.

Firstly, while I stated earlier that I broadly agree with his holistic approach to the mind-body relation, I sensed that his conception still retains some traces of dualism.^[6] While Goldstein was far less dualistic than most of his contemporaries in biology, I evaluate his stance in light of Merleau-Ponty’s radically non-dualist position, as will be made clear. While he explicitly rejects the separation of the mental and the physical, regarding them as abstractions of the organism, in some sections his writing suggests that this separation remains operative in his thinking. Several references are made to an outside world or objective reality, as opposed to a subjective world that exists for the organism. Most strikingly, in discussing the “three behavioral aspects” – conscious behavior (or performances), attitudes (or inner states), and processes (or somatic events) – he insists that they each represent “an artificially isolated aspect of the total behavior of an organism” (p. 313). At the same time, the former two aspects (performances and inner states) belong to the realm of what is experienced, whereas the somatic events, for Goldstein, are divorced from experience; they “just occur” (p. 312), and we only recognize them indirectly, through perception. This, it seems to me, follows the general scheme of representationalism, reintroducing the notion of an “in itself”, a pure objective world of material processes outside of all experience. And if we grant such a world, it forces us to understand the mind as a counter-abstraction, a subjective world immanent to experience. My reproach here is, essentially, that Goldstein misses the intuition of a phenomenological world. Having never read Husserl, and working within a scientific context, he could hardly be blamed for this. And yet, to carry his insights forward, this feels important to acknowledge.

The second point concerns his use of the concepts of “figure” and “ground” to make sense of the holistic nature of the organism. Each partial phenomenon – such as nervous excitation in the visual cortex, or the release of adrenaline from the adrenal gland – is understood as a figure of activity upon the ground of the whole organism. He makes quite fruitful use of this conceptual lens, which is why Merleau-Ponty adopts the same approach in The Structure of Behavior (1942/1963). However, almost halfway through the book, Merleau-Ponty points out that “the function, ‘figure and ground,’ has a meaning only in the perceived world: it is there that we learn what it is to be a figure and what it is to be a ground” (1963, p. 92). From here onwards, the book undergoes a profound shift, addressing itself to the perceiving organism, the one we concretely live, rather than one existing in an abstract physical world. Goldstein’s “organism” is not a purely physical one either, but one which is holistically mental and physical. Nonetheless, because his conception of the physical body dwells in the realm of the in-itself, his discussion of the organism does not have the air of addressing this concrete organism that I am here and now; it floats in the abstraction of science. This is perhaps encapsulated by the fact that Goldstein speaks of figure and ground, whereas Merleau-Ponty ultimately speaks of figure and horizon.^[7] A full explanation of this point would require a discussion of the concept of the horizon, which must be left for another essay. Goldstein lacks the concept of the horizon (which also comes from Husserl). His philosophizing about the world remains planted on solid grounds, and does not reckon with the groundlessness of the lifeworld.

This connects directly to the final point. Goldstein states throughout the book that this work is primarily methodological in nature. That is, his holism is not motivated by any a priori theoretical concept of the organism, but arises organically, so to speak, from applying a certain method to the examination of biological data. This holistic method is that of actively taking account of the total organism, of not confining one’s analysis to an isolated part of the organism in an isolated segment of time, but having a wide scope that attempts to form an integral picture of the whole. However, it is also on the methodological front that he ultimately remains limited in his scope. Goldstein (1939) states that as a methodological discussion (rather than a theory-driven exposition), this book “does not attempt to provide a presentation of the living world but to discuss the means by which we may arrive at its comprehension” (p. 506). And yet, the only instrument that he finds at his disposal, in order to gather the data upon which to implement his holistic method, is “the isolating method of empirical investigation” (p. 510). His idea of comprehending the world is therefore grounded in analysis. The results of his research are expressed in the style characteristic of science: it is objectivist. There is another means of access to the facts which is not derived from the isolating method, which is practiced by perception itself, and which is presupposed throughout Goldstein’s inquiry. The perceptual access to the world is not rendered clear by his approach. It requires a different mode of reflection, which is not isolating and grasping, which lets the things be, which is aware of itself as a phenomenon – a hyper-reflection.^[8]This manner of reflecting is expressed in Merleau-Ponty’s works, first in Phenomenology of Perception (1945/2012) as radical reflection (réflexion radicale), later in The Visible and the Invisible … Continue reading Goldstein clearly indicates his awareness of his own inquiry as an organismic event when he discusses the nature of biological knowledge. And yet, there is a feeling that he does not quite come full circle, that his work is not “fully self-aware”, that it drops the reader into a world of theoretical understanding rather than plunging them into this living world and articulating an understanding from within. The latter one finds expressed in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. Only after breaching into this level of non-dual understanding may we properly catch sight of the problem of incarnation, that is, of “being flesh”, of inhabiting in perceptual experience the body which we factually are.

As must be clear by now, all my “objections” against Goldstein’s work have to do with the divergence between his approach and that of Merleau-Ponty. Considering the fact that Merleau-Ponty is hugely indebted to Goldstein in developing his understanding of the organism, we can hardly discredit Goldstein for these issues. Merleau-Ponty manages to integrate his holistic biological insights with the philosophical clarity of phenomenology.

Concluding remarks

I wish not to leave the reader with the impression that Goldstein is but a stepping stone to Merleau-Ponty. After having studied Merleau-Ponty for years, I feel that The Organism has been a valuable read in its own right, especially in elaborating my understanding of the biological side of living beings. Learning to think of biology holistically will be an essential step in cultivating a non-dual grasp of existence – that is, a perspective which takes account of both the knower and the known, the subject and the object. It is, however, not the only step. Goldstein’s insight into the wholeness of being finds itself masterfully articulated onto the plane of biological science, but it ultimately calls for a more profound conceptual revolution, one which frees our thought from its fixture in the ground of science, and adjusts it to the free-fall of life. Goldstein is certainly not a dualist or a materialist; his holistic intuition pushes him beyond dualism, towards a non-dual perspective. But this non-dual whole, which he calls “the organism”, is investigated in the manner of science, which determines, objectifies, and concludes. Moreover, he seems to take for granted a division between an objective world and a subjective world – a commonplace assumption in the scientific milieu. As a result, his non-dual holistic insight is conveyed in a way that has – to use Goldstein’s vocabulary – not yet completely actualized its potentiality. Nevertheless, the intention behind The Organism might not have been to actualize a non-dual way of thinking; Goldstein is simply explaining the holistic approach to biology that has emerged through his clinical practice. Merleau-Ponty seems to be a thinker who sensed the potential of incorporating Goldstein’s analyses into a phenomenological approach. This leads him to a wholeness not just recognized intellectually but lived in the embodied, perceptual experience, taking him from an “objective holism” to a situated, phenomenological holism, from the abstract non-duality of the organism to the operative non-duality of flesh, from the certainty of grounds to the inexhaustible depth of horizons.

One thought briefly expressed in this book, during two different passages, intrigued me. Goldstein states that his holistic approach considers the organism as a functional whole, but that he only stops at the individual organism for practical reasons: “we halt with the individual as a preliminary whole, simply because we here arrive factually at a relatively satisfactory result” (p. 393). As he says later on: “In deliberate limitation of our textual scope, we have regarded the organism primarily as individual Being. Here we halt, and confine ourselves to an understanding which, of course, is only preliminary. Many phenomena of the organism point beyond the individual” (p. 517). In other words, he suggests a continuity between organism and environment, so that the “functional whole” is not just the mass of cells which make up a body, but encompasses more than the body, perhaps integrating the organism into the world as one of its members. This, to me, hints at an understanding that parallels Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world, namely that the functional whole is Being itself, that there is not just the “flowering” of organisms, but a flower of life, a blossoming of the world. Goldstein quotes the following statement by Goethe: “In the human mind, just as in the universe, there is no top or bottom. All parts have an equal claim upon a common center which manifests its hidden existence in the harmonious relationship of the parts to it” (p. 479). These words evoke the sense that mind and universe, organism and world, are equally anchored in a hidden center, echoing Goldstein’s holistic principle.

References

Goldstein, K. (1939). The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man (Original work published 1934). American Book Company.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). The structure of behavior (F. L. Alden, Trans.; Original work published 1942). Beacon Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible: Followed by working notes (C. Lefort, Ed.; A. Lingis, Trans.; Original work published 1964). Northwestern University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.; Original work published 1945). Routledge.