By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among
intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and
in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher
purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old
science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists
thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic"
science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to
"reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this
holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the
way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne
Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a
politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances
with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational
processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race,
healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic
science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the
costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi
sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring
humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics,
nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to
the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how
metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the
laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and
porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.
Les mer
Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780691218083
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter