Free The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler Page B

use the
word, means something fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself would
have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, a 'whole' is considered
as something complete in itself which needs no further explanation. But 'wholes' and 'parts' in this absolute sense just do not exist anywhere ,
either in the domain of living organisms or of social organisations. What
we find are intermediary structures on a series of levels in an ascending
order of complexity: sub-wholes which display, according to the way
you look at them, some of the characteristics commonly attributed to
wholes and some of the characteristics commonly attributed to parts. We
have seen the impossibility of the task of chopping up speech into
elementary atoms or units, either on the phonetic or on the syntactic
level. Phonemes, words, phrases, are wholes in their own right, but
parts of a larger unit; so are cells, tissues, organs; families, clans,
tribes. The members of a hierarchy, like the Roman god Janus, all have
two faces looking in opposite directions: the face turned towards the
subordinate levels is that of a self-contained whole; the face turned
upward towards the apex, that of a dependent part. One is the face of
the master, the other the face of the servant. This 'Janus effect' is a fundamental characteristic of sub-wholes in all types of hierarchies.
     
     
But there is no satisfactory word in our vocabulary to refer to these
Janus-faced entities: to talk of sub-wholes (or sub-assemblies,
sub-structures, sub-skills, sub-systems) is awkward and tedious. It seems
preferable to coin a new term to designate these nodes on the hierarchic
tree which behave partly as wholes or wholly as parts, according to the
way you look at them. The term I would propose is 'holon', from the Greek holos = whole, with the suffix on which, as in proton or neutron,
suggests a particle or part.
     
     
'A man', wrote Ben Jonson, 'coins not a new word without some peril;
for if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused,
the scorn is assured.' Yet I think the holon is worth the risk, because
it fills a genuine need. It also symbolises the missing link -- or rather
series of links between the atomistic approach of the Behaviourist and
the holistic approach of the Gestalt psychologist.
     
     
The Gestalt school has considerably enriched our knowledge of visual
perception, and succeeded in softening up the rigid attitude of its
opponents to some extent. But in spite of its lasting merits, 'holism'
as a general attitude to psychology turned out to be as one-sided as
atomism was, because both treated 'whole' and 'part' as absolutes, both
failed to take into account the hierarchic scaffolding of intermediate
structures of sub-wholes. If we replace for a moment the image of the
inverted tree by that of a pyramid, we can say that the Behaviourist
never gets higher up than the bottom layer of stones, and the holist
never gets down from the apex. In fact, the concept of the 'whole'
proved just as elusive as that of the elementary part, and when he
discusses language, the Gestaltist finds himself in the same quandary as
the Behaviourist. To quote James Jenkins again: 'There is an infinite set
of sentences in English whose production and understanding is part of the
daily commerce with language, and it is clear that neither the S-R nor the
Gestalt approach is capable of coping with the problems involved in the
generation and understanding of these sentences. . . . We can't regard
a sentence as a holistic, unanalysable unit, as the Gestaltists might
maintain one should. One cannot suppose that the sentence is regarded as
a perceptual unity which has welded its elements together in some unique
pattern, as is the usual Gestalt analysis of perceptual phenomena.' [5]
Nor do we find wholes on levels lower than the sentence -- phrases,
words, syllables, and phonemes are not parts, and not wholes, but holons.
     
     
The two-term part-whole paradigm is deeply