Holistic Panendeism

Cross posted from another forum :

Quote :

What percentage of panendeists do you feel/think subscribe to the holism view. I know what I see, but I would love to read your thoughts on this.

I haven't taken a poll of Panendeists, but whether they know it or not, the all-in-one concept is inherently holistic. God is the whole, everything else is a part. Yet the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Your question may refer though, not to the philosophical implications, but to the actual understanding of professing Panendeists. Based on my gut "feeling", I would bet that few of them have any familiarity with or understanding of the precise name, meaning and implications of Jan Smuts' theory of Scientific Holism, as distinguished from New Age Holism. But by choosing the PED term to describe their worldview, they indicate to me an intuitive feeling for a holistic "redeality", with its essential role for an intangible whole, known generally as God.

Nevertheless, from your self-declared intuitive perspective, you may "see" hints of a Scientific Reductionist bias (aka Rationalism) expressed in their posts. But I'm hoping it's due more to the appeal of freethinking modern Science [as contrasted to whatever authoritarian religion that repressed their childlike rational/intuitive curiosity about mysterious matters of Faith] than to any animus against the natural faculty of intuition itself.

However, there may be a historical reason for the critical/analytical inclination of Deists in general. For authoritarian religious regimes in the Renaissance era, passive introspective Intuition was relatively harmless, but aggressive deconstructive Reason was dangerous, hence persecuted. Yet since the ascendance of reductive Science, intuitive types may now feel marginalized.

I think it will take some time for all of us from that kind of reason-repressing background to learn to trust anything that seems to be off-limits to analytical critical reasoning. Unfortunately, that includes holistic Intuitionism by default.


Redeality : a holistic understanding of physical spacetime Reality as the manifest portion of eternal metaphysical Ideality.

I'm not sure that it really means anything but it struck me as interesting that the word is spelled "holism" (as with a holon) rather than "wholism" (as with a whole). I wonder why that is?

Aaron wrote:

I'm not sure that it really means anything but it struck me as interesting that the word is spelled "holism" (as with a holon) rather than "wholism" (as with a whole). I wonder why that is?

I suppose Jan Smuts coined the scientific term "holism" directly from the Greek holos, as did Arthur Koestler with "holon". But those technical terms were quickly appropriated by anti-reductionist New Agers as religious terminology, to imply that intuition or meditation were somehow tapping into the occult secrets of the universe.

I picked-up the idea from my youthful dabblings in New Agery. But the popular association with some far-out mystical notions prompted me to make a distinction by spelling it "wholism", after I appropriated the idea to represent an emerging evolutionary stage (Consilience) in modern understanding : a reconciliation between Science & Religion. But that was before I discovered the long-forgotten Smuts book---in a shabby used-book store---which was closer to my own understanding of a natural fact rather than a magical power.

I suspect that the English "w" spelling would be more evocative for those who are not familiar with the Greek or Scientific meanings. But I'm not quite as hostile to New Wackery now, so I can swing both ways.