The Uniting Principle of Homeostatic Balance in All Aspects of Life and Study

The information you are about to receive is a DGB integration of a number of different influential scientific, psychological, and philosophical sources: 1. Cannon ('homeostasis'); 2. Freud and Psychoanalytic Learning Theory; 3. Cognitive Theory and Therapy (Ellis, Beck, Branden...); and 4. the 'cognitive, language, semantics, and epistemology philosophers' (Locke, Hume, Russell, Wittgenstein, Korzybski, Hayakawa...). The integration starts out like this.

1. Homeostasis

Walter Bradford Cannon wrote a now classic book in biology called, 'The Wisdom of The Body' (1932). It is probably as important as Hegel's 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' (1807) which talks about basically the same type of process, Hegel in philosophy, history, and culture; Cannon mainly in biology which then became applied to psychology. Cannon called this process 'homeostasis'; Hegel's philosophy became known as 'dialectic philosophy' or 'the dialectic cycle' (thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis). I have also added the terms 'dialectical wholism' and 'dialectical evolution' to Hegel's work. Both Hegel and Cannon were writing from different vantage points about the process of 'homeostasis' or 'optimal balance'. The history of this idea goes back a lot further than both Cannon and Hegel -- back to the Han Philosophers concepts of 'yin' and 'yang', and back in Ancient Greece to the dialectic philosophies of Anaxamander and Heraclitus, followed to some extent by Plato (The Symposium).

Here is an excerpt from Cannon's 'Wisdom of The Body'.

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The ability of living beings to maintain their own constancy has long impressed biologists. The idea that disease is cured by natural powers, by a vis medicatrix naturae, an idea which was held by Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.), implies the existence of agencies which are ready to operate correctively when the normal state of the organism is upset. More precise references to self-regulatory arrangements are found in the writings of modern physiologists. Thus the German physiologist, Pflüger, recognized the natural adjustments which lead toward the maintenance of a steady state of organism when (1877) he laid down the dictum, "The cause of every need of a living being is also the cause of the satisfaction of the need." Similarly, the Belgian physiologist, Léon Fredericq, in1885 declared, "The living being is an agency of such sort that each disturbing influence induces by itself the calling forth of compensatory activity to neutralize or repair the disturbance. The higher in the scale of living beings, the more numerous, the more perfect and the more complicated do these regulatory agencies become. They tend to free the organism completely from the unfavorable influences and changes occurring in the environment." Again, in 1900, the French physiologist, Charles Richet, emphasized the remarkable fact. "The living being is stable," he wrote. "It must be so in order not to be destroyed, dissolved or disintegrated by the colossal forces, often adverse, which surround it. By an apparent contradiction it maintains its stability only if it is excitable and capable of modifying itself according to external stimuli and adjusting its response to the stimulation. In a sense it is stable because it is modifiable – the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism. (See Cannon, Homeostasis, on the internet.)

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The 'dialectic' -- ideally speaking -- can be viewed as a rhetorical, philosophical, political, legal, social, cultural, economic, religious, biological, psychological and/or phenomenal process aimed at achieving 'homeostasis' in its widest sense of the word -- i.e. optimal balance. This is the philosophical meeting ground for Hegel, Darwin, and Cannon. This is the rationale behind my concept of 'dialectic wholism and evolution'.

2. Learning