Smutsian Holism - A Centenary Appraisal - Holism and Evolution (1926): Chapter II of The Reformed Concepts of Space and Time

For a century Chapter II of Smuts’s Holism and Evolution (Macmillan, 1926) has been read as scientific modernisation: the chapter in which Smuts updates the concepts of space and time by reference to relativity so that the later argument of the book may rest on contemporary physical foundations. That reading is false. It inverts the direction of the chapter and has stood uncorrected for one hundred years. The chapter’s own logic requires an immanent reading; only that reading is followed here. Smuts does not receive relativity and adjust his concepts to it. He takes the critical position already fixed in Chapter I—the errors of analysis and abstraction that arise when a concrete datum is reduced to its clear centre and the centre is treated as primary—and subjects the concepts of space and time to that position. Relativity is the arena in which the test is conducted, not the source of the argument. The chapter proceeds by an eight-step deduction. Separate space and separate time are shown to be “mere abstractions.” Succession without spatial endurance “would perish at each step”; coexistence without temporal succession “would stop at its first step.” From this mutual necessity the argument moves, under the compulsion of its own terms, to the concrete Space-Time continuum of events. Events are the units of reality and involve Action. The identical critical operation is then applied across three domains: independent space and time are replaced by the continuum; homogeneous Euclidean space is dissolved through the gravitational field, empty space being exposed as a “form of empty nothingness”; Newtonian, Kantian and Leibnizian conceptions are rejected as “metaphysical abstractions” and “limiting pseudo-concepts.” These movements leave no alternative designation. Space and Time are never given apart. Their conjoint reality is the differentiated structure of events. That structure is the inmost form of the real world. The position forced by the chapter’s own logic is therefore Einsteinian Conjoint Realism. The culminating statement—“Structure, real differentiated structure, becomes the inmost form of the real Space-Time world”—is the necessary terminus of the argument, not a summary of external science. The reading uses only the chapter’s own terms until the logic of those terms itself requires the designation. It separates what the chapter demonstrates from what it defers and marks which of its scientific references are period-bound. The architectural consequence is exact. Chapter II is not background. It is the first place where the argument already stated in Chapter I is tested against the structure of the concepts themselves, and the first demonstration that the critique of abstraction already generates positive ontological results. Chapter II of the 1926 first edition is appended.