Holism is a wonderful word because it resists the temptation to treat language as closed self-reflection. Meaning does not reside in solitary fragments but arises through the whole, parsed and divided against itself. The whole is never intact in presentation: it is displaced, deferred, broken into instances that bear the trace of what they are not. Difference itself becomes the surface upon which the whole leans, and in that leaning the parts appear. This division is not a fracture to be lamented but the very grammar of relation, the way the whole expresses itself through its own dispersal.
Eastern and Western traditions alike have turned toward this insight. The Upanishads tell us that the whole generates the whole, that what appears as division is never severed from unity. In the West, apophatic thought—apophysis—suggested the same by subtraction: to speak of the whole is to unsay, to acknowledge that words dissolve at the edge of what they describe. Both traditions share the recognition that connectivity cannot be captured, only indicated, gestured toward like constellations marked in night sky.
Philosophers and poets alike have pursued this. Spinoza described Nature as one infinite substance. Tagore wrote of the infinite singing through fragments, never diminished. Whitehead insisted that reality is process, each event folding into others. Bateson taught that mind is not bounded by skin or skull but stretches across environment, body, and culture. Prigogine showed that order is born not of stasis but of turbulence, far from equilibrium. These are not separate schools but different contours of the same idea, semantic vectors pointing into a complex space where connection is the grammar of being.
Systems, driven by entropy, always lean toward equilibrium. The space between aspiration and attainment is not failure; it is life itself. The displacement and deferral of the whole—its division into instances—creates the very propulsion of meaning. Kierkegaard described the asymmetry of living forwards and understanding backwards. That same asymmetry holds in every system: the gap is propulsion. What cannot be reached is what generates the movement.
Holism reveals strength here. It shows that equilibrium is not a final rest but an unreachable horizon that gives shape to the journey. It is not dissolution but resonance, not the death of difference but its orchestration. Simone Weil’s attention, Buber’s I–Thou relation, even Sartre’s nothingness—they all point to the same truth: that wholeness does not obliterate the part but situates it, giving it meaning by weaving it into relation.
To live holistically is to embrace that knowledge of the world is never total, that absence of full knowledge is itself the texture of knowledge. Equilibrium is not an end-point but the pulse of existence, the rhythm by which parts and wholes co-create one another. Holism names this wonder: that everything is connected, that the threads never quite still, that the movement toward the whole is the whole itself.
Works Referenced
- Bateson, G., 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Buber, M., 1923. I and Thou. Translated by W. Kaufmann, 1970. New York: Scribner.
- Kierkegaard, S., 1843. Either/Or. Translated by A. Hannay, 1992. London: Penguin.
- Leibniz, G.W., 1714. Monadology. Translated by R. Latta, 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Prigogine, I. & Stengers, I., 1984. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam.
- Sartre, J.P., 1943. Being and Nothingness. Translated by H.E. Barnes, 1956. New York: Philosophical Library.
- Spinoza, B., 1677. Ethics. Translated by E. Curley, 1996. London: Penguin.
- Tagore, R., 1917. The Religion of Man. London: Macmillan.
- Weil, S., 1952. Gravity and Grace. Translated by E. Crawford, 1952. London: Routledge.
- Whitehead, A.N., 1929. Process and Reality. New York: Free Press.
- Whitman, W., 1855. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, NY: Self-published.
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