Holistic Science Journal (HSJ)

The HSJ was started in 2010 with the intention of bringing together the many thinkers, philosophers, scientists, psychologists and world-explorers researching into a different way of seeing. The tendency in human thought is to fix on something as a cause, to encapsulate the potential of a situation within a single concept, to take the living world and to render it within a particular mode of representation.

The movement in Holistic Science, is to counteract the tendency of human perception to fix potential in a particular form, by cultivating a mode of inquiry that is sensitive to the living dance of potential and form that takes place in every being.

At the same time as Holistic Science is spoken of as a new science, the original Greek Science was based totally upon holistic principles. From Pythagoras on to Aristotle, the arithmos or original mathematics was predicated upon first encountering the one or unity as quality of the stone in nature before one could give any meaning to the notion of five stones. The science of the Greeks was all about expressing a living proportion in its temples, a beautiful harmony in the universe, finding in geometry the origin of perfect forms.

In the rediscovery of Greek science by the great Arab culture translating these original texts, algebra made its first appearance, in which number was substituted by an abstract symbol. The goal of algebra was still in discovering the essential beauty of the world, but now the inquiry was broadened into the abstract realm. In the Renaissance, however Descartes made the dramatic step of separating number into a generalised realm, quite distinct from the world it described. Number became the language by which the parts measured themselves by exact laws into the whole forms of the world.

Holistic Science found new ground in startling discoveries made within science in the twentieth century. In the exploration of non-equilibrium living systems, the patterns of colony or organisms appear through the simple interactions between members or cells.  In physics, relativity and quantum theory presuppose a wholeness – the absolute place of light or whole-system knowledge - imposing itself upon the results of specific measurement.

These physical theories clearly contradicted the flat reductive way of seeing the world; scientists as David Bohm saw an opportunity to reformulate the very notion of our participative place in the universe. David Bohm inspired many others who worked with him, such as physicist Basil Hiley, writer David Peat and philosopher Henri Bortoft, who have done much to encapsulate this thinking in a dynamic holistic approach to science.  Mainstream academics including Brian Goodwin have added to this movement, shifting the focus of their inquiry to a living exploration.

Unique place of the HSJ

The Holistic Science Journal is transformative in starting out from the unique way life presents itself in the wonder of the particular. Instead of the wow factor or the calamity index of life being an aside to the analytical argument of a theory, it is the unique wonder of each individual, the wholeness that manifests in each form differently, that is the starting point of the inquiry. The premise of a new way of seeing is taken as basis for a holistic scientific world view.

The beauty of the buttercup when looked at closely is the way its potential is constantly transforming into new expressions of leaf, petal, sepal, carpel; as we learn to follow this dynamic, then we encounter a living quality of potential actively forming itself as something inherently alive.

It was Goethe in the 18^th century who developed a methodology of a mode of inquiry into this active way of being, that reflected the miracle of the buttercup in the subtlety of our mode of perception. The inquiry begins in the potential of discovery and finds a path for the form to impress the quality of the living nature as meaningful symbol. The world is transformed from a dull place of objects, all explained, understood, fully expressed into a synchronous unfolding of potentials interpreting each other within an alive generation of emerging form.

The current world questions, instead of being problems requiring analytical solutions, form themselves dynamically from within their potential. As solutions to an ill earth, or a failing economy or the overuse of energy lead only to absurd measures divorced from actual human reality, so the HSJ explores issues of education, health, science by starting from the generative unity within every individual and living system to manifest itself out of its own dynamic appropriate to context.  

The current issue of HSJ on Knowing featuring articles by Emilios Bouratinos, Henri Bortoft and Iain McGilchrist, lays definitive ground of a different way of seeing the world. The HSJ is here seen to realise its purpose in bringing together these three great thinkers on a common platform uniting their diverse and previously separated perspectives of Greek mythical tradition, philosophy of science, and psychology. From many different perspectives, HSJ goes from the living exploration into the different ways we find to express our participation in an exciting universe. 

Modern discovery returns scientific inquiry full circle back to the original questions of the Greeks: what is the living quality of the One? How do we meet the One in life, art and our relationship to the world?

HSJ returns to the potential of the world as the starting point for interpreting how the dynamic of form manifests, in each being and in every context differently.

Philip Franses

October 2011