Hölderlin Johann Christian Friedrich (1770– 1843), German poet, novelist, and dramatist. He studied at Tübingen, where he befriended Schelling and Hegel, and at Jena, where he met Schiller and Fichte. Since Hölderlin never held an academic position or published any of his philosophical writings, his influence on philosophy was primarily through his personality, conversations, and letters. He is widely viewed as the author of the so-called ‘Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,’ a fragment that culminates in an exaltation of poetry and a call for a new ‘mythology of reason.’ This theme is illustrated in the novel Hyperion (1797/99), which criticizes the subjective heroism of ethical idealism, emphasizes the sacred character of nature, and attempts to conflate religion and art as ‘overseers of reason.’ In his veneration of nature and objections to Fichte’s treatment of the ‘Not-I,’ Hölderlin echoed Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. In his Hellenism and his critique of the ‘philosophy of reflection’ (see Ueber Sein und Urteil [‘On Being and Judgment’]) he anticipated and influenced Hegel. In Hölderlin’s exaltation of art as alone capable of revealing the nature of reality, he betrayed a debt to Schiller and anticipated Romanticism. However, his view of the poet possesses a tragic dimension quite foreign to Schelling and the younger Romantics. The artist, as the interpreter of divine nature, mediates between the gods and men, but for this very reason is estranged from his fellows. This aspect of Hölderlin’s thought influenced Heidegger. D.Br. holism, any of a wide variety of theses that in one way or another affirm the equal or greater reality or the explanatory necessity of the whole of some system in relation to its parts. In philosophy, the issues of holism (the word is more reasonably, but less often, spelled ‘wholism’) have appeared traditionally in the philosophy of biology, of psychology, and especially of the human sciences. In the context of description, holism with respect to some system maintains that the whole has some properties that its parts lack. This doctrine will ordinarily be trivially true unless it is further held, in the thesis of descriptive emergentism, that these properties of the whole cannot be defined by properties of the parts. The view that all properties of the wholes in question can be so defined is descriptive individualism. In the context of explanation, holism with respect to some object or system maintains either (1) that the laws of the more complex cases in it are not deducible by way of any composition laws or laws of coexistence from the laws of the less complex cases (e.g., that the laws of the behavior of people in groups are not deducible by composition laws or laws of coexistence from the laws of solitary behavior), or (2) that all the variables that constitute the system interact with each other. This denial of deducibility is known also as metaphysical or methodological holism, whereas affirming the deducibility is methodological individualism. In a special case of explanatory holism that presupposes descriptive emergentism, holism is sometimes understood as the thesis that with respect to some system the whole has properties that interact ‘back’ with the properties of its parts. In the philosophy of biology, any of these forms of holism may be known as vitalism, while in the philosophy of psychology they have been called Gestalt doctrine.
In the philosophy of the social sciences, where ‘holism’ has had its most common use in philosophy, the many issues have often been reduced to that of metaphysical holism versus methodological individualism. This terminology reflected the positivists’ belief that holism was non-empirical in postulating social ‘wholes’ or the reality of society beyond individual persons and their properties and relations (as in Durkheim and other, mostly Continental, thinkers), while individualism was non-metaphysical (i.e., empirical) in relying ultimately only on observable properties in describing and explaining social phenomena.
More recently, ‘holism’ has acquired additional uses in philosophy, especially in epistemology and philosophy of language. Doxastic or epistemic holism are theses about the ‘web of belief,’ usually something to the effect that a person’s beliefs are so connected that their change on any topic may affect their content on any other topic or, perhaps, that the beliefs of a rational person are so connected. Semantic or meaning holism have both been used to denote either the thesis that the meanings of all terms (or sentences) in a language are so connected that any change of meaning in one of them may change any other meaning, or the thesis that changes of belief entail changes of meaning. See also KÖHLER, METHODOLOGICAL HOLISM , PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY , PHILOSO – PHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES , SEMANTIC HOLIS. L.A.