The Way Things Are and Why They're That Way

Sincere question: why isn't the philosophy of holism more popular? Since it is self-evident to me, there must be a flaw in it somewhere.

If reductive science analyzes wholes into parts, holism situates the parts in the whole and the whole in the parts, and why not? For practical purposes everyone is a holist, since we don't treat people as aggregates of mechanical parts, much less as ghostly fields of insubstantial energy. 

However, now that I'm thinking about it, psychotic persons are prone to just these tendencies, perceiving reality as an incoherent jumble of disconnected parts haunted by ethereal projections of ghostly forms, i.e., hallucinations. Are they the sane ones after all?

Gosh. Now that I'm thinking about thinking about it, there was a movement in the 1960s that tried to do just this, not only normalizing psychosis but regarding it as a kind of higher mystic awareness of reality. 

Before ever undertaking the formal study of psychology, I remember reading R.D. Laing, who "regarded schizophrenia as a normal psychological adjustment to a dysfunctional social context," 

a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler could return from the journey with important insights...

Mental patients aren't crazy, rather, the world is. 

Two words: Luigi Mangione.

Good point: large segments of the left regard him as a hero instead of a psychopathic killer. "As you would expect, Democrats are most likely to condone cold-blooded murder." 

And as you would expect, "Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of the New Left." 

Our larger point is that if the quantum world were the real world, and if we were adapted to this world, we would literally be psychotic. 

Indeed, if we were to even put everyday scientism into practice, we would undoubtedly be arrested or hospitalized. Scientism isn't a rational map of the world, rather, a metaphysical disease. Its cure is holism.

But one hesitates to even call the latter an "ism," because it's just the way a normal human sees the world. For example, we effortlessly see faces without having to add the sum of mouth + nose + eyes. 

We don't assemble parts into the whole, rather, we have to disassemble the whole in order to see it otherwise.

Of course, another characteristic of mental illness is the perception of "false wholes," for example, a conspiracy theory that imposes connections between things that aren't connected at all. Candace Owens is the reigning champion, although Tucker Carlson isn't far behind.

(Un)fun fact: I'm reading a book on Nazi Germany and the Jews, and in the 1930s, some Germans were so unhinged that they thought Nazism not only didn't go far enough, but was controlled by the Jews.  

Our next chapter is on the subject of irreducible wholeness, and if we're on the right track, then the attempt to reduce irreducible wholeness is a kind of insanity. For example, it would be a kind of "musical insanity" to reduce a symphony to a series of isolated notes, and regard these as more real than the symphonic whole.

Nevertheless, this is "the rationale of our fundamental science -- physics namely -- to break entities conceptually into the smallest spatio-temporal fragments and thenceforth identify them with the resultant sum":

Our very conception of "science" -- of rationality almost -- entails the reduction of wholes to an assembly of parts.... the implicit denial of irreducible wholeness has virtually become a mark of enlightenment (Smith).

The cure is rather simple, really: don't elevate scientific methodology to an ontology. In reality, there is a complementary relationship between part and whole, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, one and many, left brain and right. 

It all starts with nominalism, which denies the existence of universals -- of essences -- regarding the latter as mere names of things. This "became the implicit credo of the modern age -- its religion almost, one might say -- at least in the Western world" (ibid.).

Which is again a crazy ideology that no one could actually put into practice and avoid prison or institutionalization. One assumes that even Richard Dawkins doesn't treat his wife as a skin-encapsulated melange of selfish genes. Then again, he's been married three times, so perhaps this is the issue. Maybe his current wife's genes are less selfish? 

But Dawkins is hardly alone, for

to minds steeped in the Zeitgeist of our age, the very idea that there may be something "beyond" the spatio-temporal smacks of the unbelievable, the utterly fantastic (ibid.).

Nevertheless, some form of holism not only "makes sense" but "may well be in essence the only ontology that does."  

Really, it comes back to the question of the one and the many, and which is more real? I'm with Peter Kreeft: "The Trinity is the ultimate reconciliation of the one and the many." It implies a dynamism of parts in the whole and the whole in the parts, and that's just the way it is, and why it's that way.

Eh, we didn't get far today, but it's time to disembark from the bus...