Smutsian Holism - A Centenary Appraisal - Holism and Evolution (1926): Chapter IV of The Cell and the Organism

This paper argues that the scholarly consensus reading of Chapter IV of Smuts’s Holism and Evolution (Macmillan, 1926) is incomplete: the chapter is not a cytology survey or metaphysical preamble but the third test of his immanent critique of abstraction, where life is identified as an organism of reciprocal structure (*von Mohl–Darwinian Reciprocal Realism). The paper reconstructs an eight-step argument that runs from unit to function to threshold. The cell is "the second fundamental structure of the universe" (p. 59), "the unit of the world of life" (p. 61), and "the real innovation" (p. 64). Its mark is metabolism, "the process which above everything distinguishes living from non-living matter" (p. 67), and the physical and chemical changes "seem to be merely the mechanisms or instrumentalities used by a deeper organic process" (p. 67). Cell-division has "an extraordinary semblance to electrical situations" (p. 60), and "originally it possibly was electrical, as it still is in appearance" (p. 71). Mind is refused: "The cell has not yet mind" (p. 77). Teleology is refused: the chapter will "steer clear of all ideas of plan, purpose or teleology" (p. 79), leaving open whether co-operation is "spontaneous or controlled" (p. 78). The whole "is itself an action factor like its parts, and it appears to be in definite relation with them, influenced by them and again influencing them" (p. 80); restitution shows "the power of the organism as a whole" (p. 81), and reproduction "the principle of sacrifice, of the subordination of part to the whole" (p. 82). Hence co-operation is "superadded" to structural order (p. 82), and the interaction is "so intimate... that it is almost impossible to say where the influence of the one ends and the other begins" (p. 81). The organism is therefore reciprocal structure — whole and parts each action factors, mutually determining. The threshold is named, not determined: "an entirely new phenomenon, which we call life" (p. 66). And the factor it expresses remains "some inner factor in Evolution which requires identification and description" (p. 61). The construction retains the physical account and adds something more to it, bounded by refusals and by a question deliberately left open. It is categorical in its description — "There could be no doubt as to the answer" (p. 78) — open on the characterisation of co-operation (p. 78), and hedged on the origin (p. 71). The evidence is accumulated across three chapters — "in this and the two preceding chapters" (p. 84). The old concept of the organism as "a mere accidental result of their individual uncontrolled reactions" (p. 78), or as an arithmetic of parts that can be "added or subtracted or otherwise expressed arithmetically" (p. 80), is the abstraction; and the evidence — reproduction's sacrifice — re-describes the gap it produced, narrowing it toward reciprocal structure. Each states what it can and cannot say: the whole is "in some indefinable way" an action factor (p. 80); the interaction is intimate past the point of drawing a boundary (p. 81); and the organism is "fundamentally a society" (p. 83), yet the cell's ideal is offered "anticipating the language of later developments" (p. 83). The chapter points back to "the first chapter" (p. 61) and to "the last chapter" (pp. 61, 65, 71, 84), and ends at the deferral it names: identification and formulation "will be attempted in the next chapter" (p. 61). The conclusion is conditional: "When we find later, on the mental and spiritual levels of development, still clearer expressions of a similar tendency, we shall be justified in concluding that we are face to face with something real and causal in the form of a natural operative factor of a fundamental and universal character" (p. 84). The factor is real and causal, but its identity is not determined. Structure and function are concluded; the threshold is acknowledged; the name belongs to Chapter V. The third domain is supplied, its structure determined, the threshold named but not determined. Chapters II and III determine their domain structures in substantial terms; Chapter IV determines the reciprocal structure and establishes the condition of naming the factor all three express. Chapter IV of the 1926 first edition is appended.* the four structural determinations the immanent reading yields.