Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Holism
/ˈhoʊlɪzəm/noun
The principle that a system must be understood as a whole, because its parts do not explain it separately.
The Greek roots
ὅλος
hólos
whole, entire
Literally: “the doctrine of wholes”
Follow a root:ὅλος5 words
The story of the word
Jan Smuts coined it in his 1926 book Holism and Evolution, from ὅλος, whole, arguing that nature keeps assembling wholes that outrun the sum of their parts. He dropped the w on purpose. The word then travelled far past his philosophy into ecology, medicine and management, detached from an author who spent his political career building the legal machinery of South African segregation.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1926
Same family
holisticcatholichologramholocaust
In a sentence
Ecology is holism with data attached.
The holism of the argument makes it hard to test any single piece of it.