The Real Enemy
The Bilateral Attack on Individualism
Mechanicism, Organicism, Romanticism, and…Nationalism?
Right now there is a strong push from many Christians toward a collectivist way of viewing every aspect of life. More accurately, there are many who are pushing theological, political, and cultural doctrines and theories that are derived from a philosophical view known as organicism, whether they are aware of this or not. So what is organicism? What is mechanicism? How are Christians wittingly or unwittingly promoting it? Why should we be aware of it? I will answer these questions in this short article, beginning with the concepts of mechanicism and organicism.
Defining Organicism
Merriam-Webster defines organicism as
…the explanation of life and living processes in terms of the levels of organization of living systems rather than in terms of the properties of their smallest components.1
It is a view that arose in opposition to the mechanical philosophy (viz. mechanicism), espoused by many Enlightenment philosophers, which teaches that
…the material world is composed of small particles (corpuscles, or atoms), whose motion, size, shape, and various arrangements and clusterings provide the theoretical background for the explanation of all happenings in the physical universe.2
This stands in contradiction to the oragnicist position which underscores
…the interrelationship between the natural world and society, and links sociocultural changes with nature, biology, and aesthetic forms in imagining the human being—and society—as organic structures.3
While this may seem a bit removed from the practical considerations of socio-political philosophy, the fact is that philosophical trends rarely, if ever, only remain at the level of abstraction. This is the case with debate between mechanicism and organicism. Whereas previous thinkers espoused a form of mechanicism in which laws determined the functions and roles of existing independent parts, organicists viewed parts as interdependent products of an evolutionary process. And just as mechanicism inspired the formulation of mechanistic theories of man, society, and the relationship between them, so too did organicism.
From Paracelsus to Kuyper
Organicism has a long historical connection to mysticism among pagans, but came into post-Reformation Christian circles largely through the influence of a Roman Catholic German Renaissance philosopher named Theophrastus von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus. Paracelsus, in turn, inspired the nominal Lutheran mystical theologian and philosopher Jacob Boehme whose work would go on to influence the Roman Catholic mystical philosopher Franz Xaver von Baader. Whereas most mystics completely destroyed the Creator/creature distinction by creating an organicist system in which the divine and the created are ontologically connected by degrees of being, Baader attempted to maintain the Creator/creature distinction in his organicist “Christian Theosophy.”
Baader influenced many of his contemporaries who would, in turn, go on to influence the growing anti-Enlightenment organicist philosophers whose thinking has seeped into much of our contemporary political, economic, biological, and religious thinking through the Romantic-Idealist philosophies of Friedrich Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel which provided some of the bases for Marxism and, ultimately, postmodern philosophy. Baader,4 Schelling,5 and Hegel,6 moreover, would influence the socio-political philosophy of Dutch Neo-Calvinist Abraham Kuyper.
This is understandable given that organicism was in the air during Kuyper’s time, and given Kuyper’s pre-conversion admiration of, and commitment to, philosophical Idealism. Philosophical Idealism stood in opposition to the individualism of the Enlightenment, placing great stress on the inter-relatedness of all things and, therefore, the interdependence of persons. Whereas the Enlightenment gave priority to the individual rational subject, Mysticism, Romanticism, and Idealism viewed the subject as a product of an organic process of development facilitated by his interactions with other subjects and objects.
Mitigated Collectivism is Still Collectivism
There have been attempts to situate Kuyper’s thinking between collectivism and individualism, as there have been attempts to interpret Hegel's organicism as not necessarily leading to metaphysical and therefore social holism.7 Indeed, Kuyper believed that he had crafted a "third way" between the binary poles of collectivism and individualism. Yet given that his thinking was influenced by the overall organicist movement of his day, by Mystics and Idealists prior to and contemporaneous with himself, and by Roman Catholic social teaching — all of which oppose individualism and promote collectivism in one form or another — these attempts fall flat.
The situation is quite simple. Either the individual takes precedence in socio-political contexts or he does not. If organicism obtains, then it follows that the individual is merely a product of the organism as a whole, either now, in the past, or in the future. The individual is no longer truly an individual, but an ephemeral product of the confluence of material and/or spiritual forces/processes working to realize the teleological goal of the whole (be it material, historical, economic, biological, social, or spiritual). Kuyper’s doctrine of Sphere Sovereignty is an organicist doctrine and, therefore, an anti-individualist doctrine.
As Kuyper himself states —
The political case is a general interest of the nation. The one who crushes that authority in the atoms of each private interest, undermines each being of the State, transforms authority into utility, and lowers national order, which is created by God, to an instrument, that serves the seeking of one’s own advantage.8
The “general interest” of “the peoples,” i.e. the interest of the whole/the common good, overrides the interests of the individual. We may, perhaps, call the doctrine of Sphere Sovereignty a form of mitigated collectivism, in the way that Roman Catholicism’s doctrine of Subsidiarity is a form of mitigated collectivism, but it is nonetheless a form of collectivism. And collectivism, as I’ve mentioned throughout my series on Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, is one of the underlying philosophical assumptions of postmodernism and its various philosophical, ideological, and socio-political offspring. One cannot fight fire with fire; yet, those who are stringently fighting against individualism and appealing to traditionalism, ethnic-heritage, and nationalism are attempting to do just that.
Who is Actually Being Opposed?
Postmodernism, whose effects we are still experiencing today, is a philosophical movement stringently opposed to essentialism, individualism, and truth. It is not an individualistic philosophy, but Christian thinkers have taken to calling it such for a while. The reason for this, I think, is that a lot of criticisms of postmodernism in academia came from either (a.)the hard sciences which have no explicit interest in religion, (b.)analytical philosophers who largely took a hard stand against claims that could not be verified empirically (including many of the same ideas that postmodernists were attacking, e.g. universal metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and religious claims), or (c.)religious philosophers who viewed postmodernism as the inevitable logical consequenceof the Enlightenment.
Religious criticisms of postmodernism largely identified its origins in the rebellious spirit of the Enlightenment thinkers, laying the blame primarily at the feet of individualism. This was easy to do, seeing as prominent religious thinkers had established this criticism of the Enlightenment long ago. One of the chief exponents of that criticism of the Enlightenment was none other than Abraham Kuyper. He — following the organicist, Romanticist, Idealist thinkers I mentioned above — viewed society as disintegrating under the influence of Enlightenment inspired individualism. As Anna Herman explains —
The individualism Kuyper recognized in society resulted from the ideals of the French Revolution. Kuyper shared the sentiments of Edmund Burke, a late-18th-century political conservative, who saw the French Revolution as promoting an individualist notion of liberty that was “solitary, unconnected, individual, and selfish” and based upon unrestrained enjoyment of life, liberty, and property.
[. . .]
Kuyper believed, in the words of Da Costa, that “society is ‘not a heap of souls on a piece of ground’ but a God-willed community, a living, human organism.” Kuyper argued that this view contrasted with the “individualism of the French Revolution,” which was “born from its denial of human community.” Kuyper opposed individualism as being contradictory to the gospel and instead called for Christ-centered lives, which promote connection among the different spheres of society and result in gospel witness and an exaltation of Christ.9
Kuyper’s prioritization of the collective over and against the individual was echoed by the secular and Roman Catholic anti-Enlightenment thinkers of his day, both of which served as influences on the postmodern philosophy which is now being implemented at much more visceral level.
The problem here should be evident to anyone paying attention. In this scenario, it is not the postmodernists who are under attack by Kuyperians, Christian Nationalists, and Roman Catholics. It is not the culture of postmodernist ideologues and activitists. Rather, it is their shared perceived enemy — Enlightenment ideas that were derived from Christian teaching, and the people who are unwilling to abandon those ideas for the sake of achieving “the common good.”
https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/organicism. (emphasis added)
See Friesen, J. Glenn. “The Mystical Dooyewerd Once Again”, in Ars Disputandi, 3:1 (2003), 344-348. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15665399.2003.10819803.
See Pahman, Dylan. “F. W. J. Schelling: A Philosophical Influence on Kuyper's Social Thought”, in The Kuyper Center Review, Vol. 5 (2015), 26-43.
See Pahman, Dylan. “Like Bright Stars Abraham Kuyper on the Nature and Vocation of the Scholarly Sphere”, in Journal of Markets & Morality Vol. 23, No. 2 (2020), 391–411.
See Quadrio, Philip A., “Hegel’s Relational Organicism: The Mediation of Individualism and Holism”, in Critical Horizons, 13.3 (2012), 317-336.
Quoted in Bussemaker, Jet. “Feminism and the Welfare State: On Gender and Individualism in the Netherlands”, in History of European Ideas, Vol. 15, No.4-6 (1992), 665.
“Love Your Neighbor: The Church's Response to Individualism's Impact on Interpersonal Engagement”, in Pro-Rege Vol. 51, No. 1 (Sept., 2022), 19-20.