Reductionism can mean a number of things, but here I mean quite simply the outlook that assumes that the only way to understand the nature of anything we experience is by looking at the parts of which it appears to be made, and building up from there. By contrast I believe that the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’, and that, except in the case of machines, there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world. For this reason it is every bit as true that what we call the parts can be understood only by understanding the
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Not everything can be reduced to its parts. In fact, contrary to the spirit of reductionism, in certain things, the whole can properly be said to be prior to its parts if such things never existed as isolated parts. Certain things grow, not by assembly of parts, but by an internal drive to fructify and become its telos.
