The Whole and Its Parts
joseph agassiEver since I began my philosophical studies, I learned that one of the major issues in perennial philosophy is whether the whole equals its parts or is more than its parts. That never ceased to puzzle me: I had no doubt that we are all agreed that in one sense the whole is the sum of its parts, in another sense not. To give the simplest example let us consider a machine, a simple machine such as a mere clock. The party that says the whole is the sum of its parts says that in a machine there is nothing more to the whole than its parts: to know each and all parts of a machine is to know it all: and their opponents say, oh no: the machine is soulless; we are not. What this little debate amounts to is that both parties agree on two fundamental theses. First that machines are sums of their parts: second, that living things arc mysterious if viewed as more than the sum of their parts. Those who view every whole as the sum of its parts insisted that each whole is nothing more mysterious than a machine, a mere clockwork. They would then view the whole universe as such; they were called mechanists. Their opponents were called organicists. They agreed with the mechanists about the machine: a machine, they conceded, is indeed nothing mysterious and is no more than the sum of its parts. They agreed that a non-functioning organism, a dead animal, a dead person, for example, is only the sum of its parts, yet a living person is more than that: that is to say, the anti-mechanists declared that an animal, particularly a human being, has a soul that is mysterious, because it is not any part of the human being: it is the whole of a human being minus each of his parts. It is the added extra, yet it is not an extra part. Proof: were the soul a part proper, a real entity, then putting body and soul together would make a whole that equals its parts. The organicist's conception of the soul is viewed by all as mysterious, not the mechanist's conception. There is much confusion in the literature about the little that I have thus far said. For example, what I said makes it clear that Descartes was a mechanist, both with respect to the soulless organisms like cats and dogs, and with respect to organisms endowed with souls, namely human beings. Likewise, what l have said makes it clear that those who deny Descartes' view on the existence of the soul may be mechanists who view the human being as a machine more akin to cats and dogs than Descartes thought: but they also may be organicists who simply deny that the soul is a [32)
