Environment Versus Organism. There seems to be
no difficulty at first glance in differentiating between
organism and environment. As commonly used, the
word “environment” refers to the setting in which the
organism develops and functions; more specifically, it
denotes all the known factors of the external world
as well as those not yet recognized that impinge on
the organism and thus affect its biological nature. Ac-
cording to this definition, the cellular wall, just like
the human skin, sharply separates the organism—
microbe or man—from the external world.
The distinction between organism and environment
becomes quite blurred, however, when one considers
biological nature and external world not as separate
static entities, but as interacting components in com-
plex dynamic systems. Before discussing the knowledge
derived from the natural sciences that bears on the
interplay between environment and organism, it may
be useful to introduce the problem from the opposite
points of view identified (since the seventeenth century,
if we limit ourselves historically to the modern era)
with the philosophies of John Locke and Bishop George
Berkeley.
For the modern philosophers of Locke's persuasion,
all our knowledge comes from sensations and through
ideas of reflection on our sensations. Sensation begets
memory; memory or internal reflection begets ideas.
Since only material things can affect our senses, it
follows that mind cannot be separated from the exter-
nal world. John Locke follows Aristotle and Thomas
Aquinas in believing that there is nothing in the mind
except what was first in the senses. Bishop Berkeley
argued in contrast, that if our knowledge of anything
is merely our sensations of it, and if our ideas are
derived from these sensations, then a “thing” has no
objective reality; so that nothing exists “without the
mind.” A thing is merely a bundle of perceptions—that
is, of sensations that have been classified and inter-
preted by the mind. Matter, as far as we know it, would
then be nothing but a mental construct. Berkeley's
point of view makes it just as difficult as John Locke's
to differentiate between organism and the external
world.
The Locke-Berkeley controversy could be profitably
followed through the views of David Hume, Immanuel
Kant, and all the other philosophers who have tried
to understand how man's mind relates to the rest of
the universe. But on the whole professional scientists
have not been much concerned with these problems.
They believe in the reality of the external world and
in the possibility of making some kind of sense out
of its manifestations. This attitude of pragmatic real-
ism, however, is not without ambiguity as was recently
brought out by Michael Polanyi, who was a scientist
before becoming a philosopher.
The way we see an object, Polanyi points out, (in
a lecture before the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 1968) is determined by events inside our
body of which we are aware only through the position,
shape, size, and motion of the very object to which
we are attending. We are attending from these internal
processes to the things outside; their qualities are what
these internal processes mean to us. We know the
external environment by attending to it from our body,
more specifically from our internal environment. Fur-
thermore, we know our body by attending from its
attributes to the events of the outside world. This is
precisely what it means to live in our body. Our very
participation in the act of knowing then conflicts with
the attitude of scientific detachment and therefore with
objectivity. For this reason, according to Polanyi, bi-
ologists cannot inquire into the functions of organisms
without keeping in mind the purpose these functions
serve in a particular environment; sociologists cannot
ignore the power of ideals in their analysis of social
problems.
The organismic view of biology, as opposed to the
purely chemical view, gives hope that the knowledge
derived from the natural sciences can be related to
the preoccupations of the philosophers who are con-
cerned with the environment versus organism problem.
On the one hand, the very process of living trans-
forms the environment profoundly and lastingly, and
this is particularly true of man's activities. All orga-
nisms impose on their environment characteristics that
reflect their own biological and social nature.
On the other hand, man's perceptual apparatus is
shaped by the environment. Although we obviously
perceive the outside world through our sense organs,
what we perceive, and the way we perceive it, are
conditioned not only by the evolutionary experiences
of the human species, but also by each person's exis-
tential experiences. Because of this inescapable condi-
tioning, the conversion of environmental stimuli into
shapes, colors, sounds, smells, and other purely sensual
impressions can never be completely objective. Since
our individual modes of perception have been produced
during evolutionary development and are continuously
being altered during experiential life, they always in-
tervene between us and the external environment.
