Abstract

In this paper, I analyse the hitherto largely ignored social and psychological roots of the philosophy of wholeness in David Bohm and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was Bohm’s strongest philosophical influence throughout his mature intellectual life, however, as demonstrated in the paper, Bohm’s abhorrence of fragmentation and his affection for wholeness, which is prominently reflected in both his physics and his philosophy of science, was actually the realisation of specific social propensities and psychological determinants of his early emotional and intellectual development for which Hegel’s philosophy was a crucial rational catalyst later in his life. These social propensities and psychological determinants of Bohm’s early development are further demonstrated to be strikingly similar to those that also led the young Hegel to engage with the concept of wholeness throughout his life. The article also brings the biographical evidence of Bohm’s lifelong interest in Hegel and analyses the state of scholarship regarding his Hegelianism, the nature of Hegel’s philosophy as reflected in Bohm’s work, and the reasons for the somehow unexpected disciplinary neglect of the crucial influence of Hegel’s philosophy on Bohm.