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Introduction

The notion that the world is a changeless unity at some level can be traced back to Parmenides, although the word in its current form was coined in the early 1920s by Jan Smuts, who defined it as “The tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution”. It is my contention this notion is fundamentally misunderstood at all levels, and that the resulting holism-reductionism debate is in fact no more than a trivial non-issue.

I shall begin this essay by providing a high-level view of some principal areas whose outlook is tantamount to holism. I shall attempt to provide clear examples of the holist position and its supposed reverse, Reductionism.

The second part of this essay will attempt to show how these issues are encapsulated in our understanding of the space around us. In particular, I will examine the notion of abandonment and its place in the development of states and of objects. I will argue that through an understanding of the examples provided, we can come to understand how the debate reduces to an analysis of language - ‘For the philosopher, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them.’ (Ayer, 1946)

Thirdly, I shall draw the threads of the essay together in attempting to show that positing any form of meaningful debate between holism and reductionism results in a failure of rationality, and that such a position is thus devoid of meaning.

Holism : From Gestalt to Emergence

The early Greek atomism of Leucippus and Democritus was a forerunner of classical physics. According to their view, everything in the universe consists of indivisible, indestructible atoms of various kinds. Change is a rearrangement of these atoms. This kind of thinking was a reaction to the still earlier position of Parmenides, who argued that at some primary level the world is a changeless unity.

In the seventeenth century, at the same time that classical physics gave renewed emphasis to atomism and reductionism, Spinoza developed a philosophy reminiscent of Parmenides. According to Spinoza, all the differences and apparent divisions we see in the world are really only aspects of an underlying single substance, which he called God or nature. Based on pantheistic religious experience, this emphasis on an underlying unity is reflected in the mystical thinking of most major spiritual traditions. It also reflects developments in modern quantum field theory, which describes all existence as an excitation of the underlying quantum vacuum, as though all existing things were like ripples on a universal pond.

It was not until the 20th century that the term Holism was first coined. The South African politician Jan Smuts saw that ‘Creative evolution synthesises from the parts a new entity not only different from them, but quite transcending them. That is the essence of a whole. It is always transcendent to its parts, and its character cannot be inferred from the characters of its parts.’ (Holism & Evolution, 192x)

Work by the Gestalt theorists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and others in the early 20th century can be seen quite clearly to belong to the Holist view. It was their position that the classical theories of, amongst others, JS Mill and H von Helmholtz were insufficient in their reduction of the world to atomistic principles. The classical view held that our sensory receptors analyse the energies provided by the world into independent but unnoticeable sensations - Mill, for example, defined matter as ‘the permanent possibility of sensation’. However many perceptual phenomena seem to defy analysis in terms of such independent or atomistic sensations. A melody sounds the same when transposed to a new key - and is thus to perceived as new auditory sensations; objects moving through the field of one’s view display physical constancy despite a changing set of physical receptors; etc.

In addition, the classical theory seemed unable to account for what is known as the ‘figure-ground phenomenon’ - the way in which a given outline can be perceived as very different shapes. Rubin (1921) showed that the area considered to be the ‘figure’ is a definite, bounded space - whereas the ground is less well-defined. This ability to recognise shapes given their setting requires that the form be identified - in the well-known figure-ground example that represents either a vase or two faces talking, we discard information in the first case that we need in the other. Classical theory, reducing the task to its constituent elements, did not appear to account wholly for shape perception.

This perceived failure is part of what drove the Gestalt theorists to claim that form is the most basic element of perception, with properties derived from underlying brain processes configured by a direct response to patterned energies acting on the sensory nervous system. Although this physiological model does not appear to have a great deal of basis in fact, and although the notion of steady-state form-based process models seems inherently flawed - in order to perceive any large object, one’s vision is directed at a number of different places at a rate of four times a second, providing a rapid superimposition of fragmentary information for the hypothesised brain field - there is a lasting impact of the Gestalt school in their ‘laws of organisation’.

Many of these ‘laws’ were proposed: the ‘law of enclosedness’, stating that any enclosed region tends to be perceived as figure; the ‘law of good continuation’, stating that we perceive the organisation that interrupts the fewest lines; etc. This approach does seem to suggest that there are evolved structures or patterns by which we interpret our sensations - a topic which would later receive significant interest with the development of evolutionary psychology as a discipline in the early 90s - but suffer from a failure at the predictive level. The relative strengths of such laws are unknown, and potential conflict cannot be resolved.

Another area which has had increasing visibility in recent years has been the field of Emergence. In the study of complex systems one often sees that a collection of interacting systems shows collective behaviour. This is intuitively what we understand by emergence. Johnson (2001) traces the development of emergence as a field of study back to the development of information theory and the subsequent work by Warren Weaver which divided the world of scientific inquiry into three camps. The first two types of problem - two or three variable problems, such as the rotation of planets, and what he called problems of ‘disorganized complexity’ characterized by millions or billions of variables, had both been fairly well understood. There was, however, a third group of problems which involved a moderate number of variables and which - far from needing the statistical approach that problems of disorganized complexity required - exhibited instead some essential features of self-organization. He called these problems of organized complexity.

Predominantly, these problems display behaviour which comes about not through top-down decision making but through bottom-up accumulative actions. The simplest way to understand these problems is not through the number of variables but through their ability, over iterations, to show behaviour that looks controlled - something often seen, for example, in the insect kingdom

There are many cases where emergent properties can be observed. What is most interesting to us here, however, is the level of similarity between Holism and Emergence. For example, Baas & Emmeche (1997) comment that :

“As we see it here emergence is just the same as holism. An emergent structure is a holistic structure. We should emphasize, that from this refined notion of holism, it does not follow that `the whole’ cannot be analyzed, nor that it is always impossible to deduce the properties of the whole from its constituents and the observational mechanisms.”

In each of these areas and others, the term ‘holism’ is used to discuss wholes whose very existence defies any ordering of the parts making them up; that the meaning of the parts is given if and only if they are combined in the whole. In contrast, the reductionist view is taken to refer to a number of related, contentious theories holding that the nature of complex things can always be reduced to simpler or more fundamental things. This is said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.

What is clear is that so-called reductionism, like so-called holism, can take on many forms. Dennett (1995) coined the term ‘greedy reductionism’ to describe reductionist theories that attempt to explain too much with too little - while it may at some level be meaningful for me to describe the behaviour of my car with reference to sub-atomic particle behaviour, I will lose much of the useful context. Reductionist explanations can be conducted at different levels, maintaining this context - a hierarchic reductionism (Dawkins, 1986) which allows that explanation has meaning at a given level, but not at another.

In considering Holism and Reductionism as two diametrically or philosophically opposed positions, I have touched briefly on three areas of a broadly holist disposition and highlighted how reductionism takes a different approach.

Decline & Fall :