Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

1. Reductionism comes in two phases.
   1. First, there is the monistic move where we explain a great range of things as only aspects of a single basic stuff. Thus, Thales says that all the four elements are really just water. Again, Nietzsche says that all motives are really just forms of the will to power, and Hobbes says that mind and matter are both really just matter.
   2. Second, there can follow the atomistic move – made by Democritus and the seventeenth-century physicists – which is slightly different. Here we explain this basic stuff itself as really just an assemblage of ultimate particles, treating the wholes that are formed out of them as secondary and relatively unreal. (I have discussed the various forms of reductionism more fully in Midgley (1995).)
2. Both these drastic moves can be useful when they are made as the first stage towards a fuller analysis. But both, if made on their own, can be absurdly misleading. It is pretty obvious that Nietzsche’s psychology was oversimple. And, if we want to see the shortcomings of atomism, we need only consider a botanist who is asked (perhaps by an archaeologist) to identify a leaf. This botanist does not simply mince up her leaf, put it in the centrifuge and list the resulting molecules. Still less, of course, does she list their constituent atoms, protons and electrons. Instead she looks first at its structure and considers the possible wider background, trying to find out what kind of tree it came from, in what woodland, in what ecosystem, growing on what soil, in what climate, attacked by what predators, and what had been happening to the leaf since it left its tree. And so on.
3. This holistic approach is not ‘folklore’. It is obviously as central and necessary a part of science as the atomistic one. So it is odd that, at present, people seem to entertain a confused notion that science is essentially and merely reductionist, in a sense that includes both the kinds of simplification just mentioned, while ‘holism’ is an old-fashioned superstition. This reductionism is an intellectual fashion, that surely survives quite as much by its imaginative appeal as by its arguments. In a confusing world, such a picture of knowledge as modelled on a simple, despotic system of government, is highly attractive. I think it is no accident that the reductive method had its first great triumphs in the seventeenth century, at the time when the wars of religion filled Europe with terrifying confusion. The monolithic reductionist pattern seemed able to impose order on this chaos just as Louis XIV and the other despotic rulers of the time did. This was a style that accorded with the religious and political notions of the time.
4. In politics, that simple vision no longer commands much respect today. But in the intellectual world it has not yet been fully discredited. There, it seems to offer order and simplicity – which are, of course, entirely proper aims for science – at a low cost, avoiding the complications that often make it so hard to achieve these ideals. If we want to show that this cheapness is illusory, I think that we need striking images. I have already proposed one such image (Midgley, 1996, 2001), and I shall develop it a little more here.