Note 303

He or she who wants to view organismic wholeness as the exclusive and pure (constructed) effect of its components [which is the reductionistic view of organisms] -- formally one may, of course, always do this -- cannot get round from taking all the processings, actions and effects of the components to be finally ordered [i.e. ordered to a definite (biological) function, and thus ordered to a definite result, and ultimately ordered to the whole (and this is the holistic view of organisms)] and must therefore postulate a comprehensive organismic  finality. And this postulate would then have come from precisely that side [reductionism] that wants to be as far away as possible from admitting final causality, i.e. that wants everything to be explained as causally mechanically determined.

He or she, on the other hand, who acknowledges the organismic wholeness to be an unimolecular central phenomenon [I presume in the sense of primary phenomenon, in contrast to secondary phenomenon], holds in his hands the one and only true cause involved in all organismic processes. Unimol takes the original entelechial wholeness-concept [a concept referring to an immaterial guiding principle] into the range of the familiar mechanical. In this way also causality and finality are neither opposites nor range-dependent views, but only the result of the original view of the organismic. [This last sentence may also refer, not to the (original)  v i e w  of the organismic, but to the original  c o n d i t i o n  of the organismic (at the time of the origin of life).].

Back to main text