Personalistic Organicism: Paradox or Paradigm?

Summary

Many environmental thinkers are torn in two opposing directions at once. For good reasons we are appalled by the damage that has been done to the earth by the ethos of heedless anthropocentric individualism, which has achieved its colossal feats of exploitation, encouraged to selfishness by its world view—of relation-free atoms—while chanting ‘reduction’ as its mantra. But also for good reasons we are repelled, at the other extreme, by environmentally correct images of mindless biocentric collectivisms in which precious personal values are overridden for the good of some healthy beehive ‘whole’.

My aim here will be to examine this tension between the imperatives of personalism and organicism. I shall argue that although contrasts are sharp, the quest to harmonize vital intuitions reflected by these imperatives is not futile. Their combination may be paradoxical, at first blush, but this paradox admits of coherent resolution. Still more, such a resolution, legitimating the logical possibility of a Personalistic Organicism, may provide a paradigm for resolving other intellectually (and environmentally) dangerous dualisms that sunder civilization from nature, mind from body, and intrinsic from instrumental values.

The Paradox

One side of us strongly affirms Aldo Leopold's classic dictum that the human species should live in its proper place, not as conqueror of the land-community, but as ‘plain member and citizen’ within it (Leopold, 1966, pp. 219–220).