185. The whole and the parts

Analytical thought sees wholes as determined by their parts, and understanding the whole requires taking it apart. Hence the term ‘analytical’.

For example, economic science is governed by the principle of ‘methodological individualism’: economic phenomena should be explained on the basis of individual consumers and producers. In markets, their behaviour is supposed to be coordinated by an  ‘invisible hand’ of competition.

In language, the philosopher Frege posited that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of the words in it. In my discussion of language, in this blog, I proposed that the reverse also applies: meaning is context-dependent; the meaning of a word depends on the sentence it is in, and on the wider action context.

That principle of reverse dependence of the whole and its parts applies more generally. In societies, a group is to be understood as made up from individuals, but vice versa the individuals are constituted by the group. What connects them are mutual dependence, shared views, meanings, customs and practices, and tacit understandings, in Wittgensteinian ‘language games’. Those are  produced by people but also condition them. This is the issue of ‘structuration’ in sociology. It is widely neglected in economics.

The philosopher Henri Bergson claimed that in traditional philosophy, and in language, time is reduced to space. A lapse of time is seen as made up of points along an axis of time. With his notion of duration he claimed the opposite: units of time are experienced as part of an experience as a whole. That is how we experience time as duration.

This is most pronounced in music. A melody is made up from notes but the notes are heard as being part of the melody.

A walk is made up of steps, but the steps have meaning as part of the walk.  

Bergson even proposed that in the number 2 the two ones that constitute it are not the same as the three ones that constitute the number 3[i]. In the first case they are half the number, in and in the second case a third. Three entities have other properties in their relations than two. Two items can gang up on the third[ii].

So we see that the same fundamental principle, of wholes being a function of their parts and vice versa, applies in many walks of life.

The fundamental significance of the principle escalates when seen as part of a fundamental logic of change or transformation. In several places in this blog (items 31 and 35) I argued for a ‘cycle of invention’. There, novelty arises from alternation between unity and variety, abstraction and concretisation: from lifting concepts or ideas out of the practical context of use, shedding particulars and specificities of contexts, and a subsequent re-embedding in new action contexts, where they are clothed anew in the richness of action. In the process they shift their meaning or may acquire new ones.

We saw it also in the discussion of the hermeneutic circle (in item 36), where concepts (paradigms) constitute meaning in sentences (syntagms), and may acquire new meaning from that context.

In terms of wholes and parts: existing entities are injected into unfamiliar wholes, are modified in the process, and yield new entities that define new wholes.  

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[i] See Rebecca Hill, The interval; Relation and becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle and Bergson, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

[ii] The sociologist Georg Simmel emphasized the fundamental change that occurs in going from two to three.