The Philosophy Behind Holistic Training

Last time I wrote about what holistic training means to me. I used the biopsychosocial model and Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) to explain my approach to holistic training. While I went into some detail, I left some things on the backburner regarding the theoretical foundations that not only make holistic training practically and empirically useful, but also philosophically rigorous.

In this blog post, I will be discussing important philosophical influences on DST as well as key concepts such as holism, processism, contextualism, determinism versus probability, and anti-reductionism. While it may seem like this material requires academic training to grasp, I will present it in an accessible way. First, allow me to discuss some philosophers who had important influences on the development of DST.

Key philosophers influencing DST

There have been a number of philosophers who have had significant impacts on DST, including (but not limited to) Friedrich Nietzche, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Alfred North Whitehead. Nietzche's metaphysics emphasizes “becoming” over “being”, which anticipates DSTs emphasis on process. Bertalanffy's work on open systems, which involve the exchange of energy between systems and their environments, is now a core concept in DST. Whitehead is of special importance, so I will spend more time describing his work. 

Whitehead's philosophy is unique in that he uses it to argue against the objective-subjective split between the objectivity of the sciences and the subjective domain of aesthetic, moral, and religious values. Entities are seen as interdependently existing processes. A critical feature of an entity is its ability to act and to be acted upon. Whitehead conceives of every entity as having a physical and mental pole. In other words, every entity is some combination of physical and mental. This not only includes humans, but also non-human animals and inanimate objects.

With respect to inanimate objects, Whitehead does not argue that they have the same kind of mentality equal in complexity and degree to people. Rather, mentality is considered as a continuum with inanimate objects containing some properties that could give rise to full blown self-consciousness, but lack anything that we would recognize as conscious experience. Non-human animal life is an example of kinds of entities that occupy some space in the continuum between inanimate objects and human people. While some organisms might have primitive feelings (perceptions without the ability to think about them) others have more complex mental lives.

Holism 

This is the view that systems are more than merely the sum of their parts. For instance, to understand how a word is being used, it helps to understand the sentence (and, even better, the surrounding sentences being used) as a whole. Without the whole sentence, what a word means can be unclear. The same is true for sentences as a whole, i.e., one cannot understand the whole meaning of a sentence without understanding the meanings of individual words. Like the interdependence between individual words and sentences, holism emphasizes the interdependence of individual parts and wholes. It implies that one must also understand the whole in order to understand the parts and vice versa, as opposed to reductionism which seeks to understand systems by reducing them to their fundamental parts. 

An important feature of holism is emergence, which implies that new properties and behaviors can arise in a system that are not predicted by the properties or behaviors of the individual parts. Other characteristics of emergence include irreducibility, and self-organization. Irreducibility simply means that emergent properties cannot be reduced to the properties of individual parts and self-organization is the spontaneous character of emergence. It occurs without any externally imposed control.

Examples of emergence include economic markets, language development, and consciousness. In each example, there is no central authority dictating the behaviors of the individual parts. Instead, they organically come together to create a kind of spontaneous order. These examples show how self-organizing complex patterns and behaviors emerge from the interactions of component parts. These interactions often involve causal feedback loops.

Processism and contextualism 

Processism is fundamental to DST. It emphasizes change over time and it posits that systems are continually evolving. Human development is an important example that will help us understand it. But first, let me introduce a helpful metaphor in the form of Heraclitus's river.

Consider the phrase: “You never step into the same river twice.” This is a version of a saying that is often attributed to Heraclitus, the Ancient Greek philosopher whose doctrine of change is central to his ideas about the nature of reality.

It at first seems obvious that I can approach the Mississippi River at 10:00 am on a particular date, put my foot in it, remove my foot and then put it back in one minute later at 10:01 am. In other words, it seems obvious that the river I stuck my foot in at 10:00 am is the same river that I stuck my foot in at 10:01 am, so what is the issue?

Consider the idea that each time I stepped in the river, I came into contact with different objects whether they were water molecules, bacteria, grains of sand, etc. Each instant came with slight differences and not all the conditions that were present at 10:00 am were present at 10:01 am. The river continuously flows and changes, if ever so slightly. Also consider that my actual act of putting my foot in the water also changes it, even if just a little bit. My foot disrupts the flow of water and redirects it. I may leave an impression on the bed of the river, or move a few stones that are constantly being formed, eroded and moved very gradually over time. Like a river, everything is changing, including us.

The first volume of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science: Theory and Method contains an essay titled "Processes, Relations, and Relational-Developmental-Systems" written by Willis F. Overton. It contains an outline of a framework that helps practitioners better understand human development. He introduces processism and contrasts it with a mechanistic Cartesianism. For instance, while Cartesianism asserts independent existence, processism asserts interdependent existence. Processism is also committed to activity, while Cartesianism is committed to fixity. Cartesianism is associated with stasis and Being, while processism is associated with change and Becoming.

His model of the organism (or a human being for our purposes) is influenced by contextualism, which is the view that systems are influenced by their environment. It assumes that understanding a system depends on the perspective and context of the observer, what Overton refers to as a standpoint. 

In the context of the nature-nurture debate, biologists, psychologists, and sociologists all occupy different standpoints when observing the human organism. He claims,

"Biology and culture no longer constitute competing alternative explanations; rather, they are two points of view on an object of inquiry that has been created by, and will be fully understood only through, multiple viewpoints. More generally, the unity that constitutes nature, the organism, and development becomes discovered only in the diversity of multiple interrelated lines of sight" (2015, p. 43).

He asks readers to visualize a triad with biology, culture, and person representing three corners of a triangle that have bidirectional causal relations. For him, each is a synthesis representing a standpoint, meaning that biology is the synthesis of culture and person and that culture is the synthesis of biology and person while the person is the synthesis of biology and culture. He then explains, "At the synthesis, then, a standpoint coordinates and resolves the tension between the other two components of the relation." With respect to the physical and sociocultural, the person is the synthesis that coordinates these two systems. One's lived experience is the process of this tension unfolding and resolving itself. The same is true of the sociocultural coordinating the physical and the person and the physical coordinating the sociocultural and the person.

In other words, biology and culture are an interdependent, indissoluble complimentarity manifesting itself in the living person. For this reason, he concludes, “The character of any contemporary behavior…is 100% nature because it is 100% nurture; 100% biology because it is 100% culture” (2015, p. 41).

Determinism versus probability 

DST makes room for both deterministic physical laws and randomness. It involves deterministic chaos, which occurs when small changes in the system produce drastic outcomes over time. This makes long-term predictions quite difficult.

Anti-reductionism 

Anti-reductionism is the perspective that denies the proposition that systems can be reduced to their component parts. DST is anti-reductionist because of its assertion that wholes are greater than the sums of their parts, which come together to spontaneously produce emergent phenomena that cannot be properly understood by examining parts in isolation.

Reductionism is often associated with physicalism, the view that everything in existence is physical and that all causation is describable in terms of physical laws. The authors of The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease: New Philosophical and Scientific Developments claim that it “can be expressed in terms of physics + chemistry” (2019, p. 40). They attribute the emergence of physicalist reductionism to “the mechanisation of nature,” which “created mind-body dualism, because the thing that never seemed to be physical was immediate experience…physicalism and dualism are twins, one born straight after the other, the one supported by the great edifice of modern mechanics, the other known immediately by experience, battling ever since” (2019, p. 41).

While DST may be opposed to reductionism, thus denying physicalist reductionism, this does not mean it is incompatible with non-reductionist variations of physicalism. Indeed, physicalism by no means rules this out. For example, the mental properties involved in immediate experience supervene on physical properties. This simply means that any changes in mental properties must be accompanied by changes in physical properties. This does not mean that mental properties are reducible to physical properties. 

Embodied Cognition 

Some of you may have noticed that DST tends to undermine the traditional understanding of the mind's relationship to the body. Rather than conceiving of mind and body as independent of one another, mind is embodied. 

Embodied cognition is concisely captured in what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the Embodiment Thesis:

“Many features of cognition are embodied in that they are deeply dependent upon characteristics of the physical body of an agent, such that the agent’s beyond-the-brain body plays a significant causal role, or a physically constitutive role, in that agent’s cognitive processing.”

Most researchers in this field view the body in one, or some combination, of three ways: As a constraint, as a distributor, or as a regulator. 

The body as a constraint is fairly straightforward. The physical body constrains the nature and content of cognition. In other words, cognition for a dog is going to be very different in nature and content from the cognition of a human due to differences in bodily characteristics.

Thinking of the body as a distributor implies thinking of the body outside of the brain as taking on some of the cognitive load that traditional researchers think of as reserved for the brain. For example, a person doing mathematical computations with the assistance of a pencil, paper, and/or calculator is distributing the demands of the task across their brain, body, and tools. Some would even take it as far as suggesting that all those various parts constitute the cognitive system itself.

The body as regulator conception is exactly how it sounds: the body serves to regulate cognitive processes and coordinate cognition and action. Feedback is especially important in this view of the body and since it and body as constraint are so similar, they have been especially present in DST research.

Key takeaways 

We have now covered DST and its philosophical underpinnings in addition to its applications to strength training as outlined in the previous post. Here are a few key takeaways:

1. 
   DST has developed from rich and rigorous philosophical traditions.
2. DST is a holistic approach to understanding the behavior and development of systems that emphasizes the interdependence of component parts, their wholes, and their environment along with the emergence of new properties from their interactions.
3. Context is important:

• For training, this includes the training environment, access to equipment, client history, the client’s overall psychological states, social factors affecting their training, etc. 

1. DST can be applied to strength training by:

• Considering trainees as a whole, rather than focusing on isolated muscle groups.
• Recognizing that strength gains occur in phases and are influenced by several factors.
• Emphasizing the importance of recovery.
• Applying feedback.
• Respecting the relationship between mind and body by recognizing the impact of motivation, confidence, and stress on performance.

Therefore, DST is a powerful approach for coaches and trainers to optimize performance in trainees and athletes.