The whispering pond Book

A nice discussion of how Newton's materialistic world came to be associated with everything bad in modernity, so that the descendants of Kant's and Goethe's holistic views of the world came to promise both a potent new science and a political ideology that would re-enchant life with meaning. In some sense, German thought (defended by the nazi state) has a final stand against the dead mechanistic universe of "jewish science". Therefore the war is also a clash of worldviews.

The book shows how science has both a "natural" and "cultural" side and how the natural can be reformulated in order to give us cultural significance. Many of the holistic views that are presented in this book live on, but many died in the fires of 1945.

This story gets told through four biographies: the first one is about the anti-darwinian biologist Uexküll, who sought to reconcile science with the Goethean holistic ideal. The other three are about the holistic sciences of Gestalt psychology and neurology. Particularily interesting to me was the chapter on Kurt Goldstein, who tried to understand pathologies (such as the famous case of Schneider) through a holistic theory of the organism. This case of his becomes of central importance to Merlea-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, perhaps the most stimulating text of contemporary philosophy.