The Great Big (W)hole
It is always nice to blame Aristotle – and yet this one is curiously his fault. In perhaps the most influential philosophy book of all time, De Anima, (of the Soul), Aristotle makes three rather different moves, all of which haunt, in their differing ways, any attempt to encompass environmental change (and humanity’s position within it). Firstly Aristotle launches a theory of wholes. A whole and its parts are radically different things. Skin and bone are, by themselves, not a corpse, nor is a corpse a live human. Secondly and arising out of the last point, it is at the level of the whole, that different ‘functions’ emerge. An eye as an eye is a flexible organic lens. It is sight, that is its function, that defines what that eye actually is. The whole is therefore also the moment of transformation, when another reality emerges. It is this reality that Aristotle thinks of as the Soul. The soul of an eye lies in sight, and not in the eye itself. Or the soul of a body lies in life. Finally there is a key ingredient in Aristotle’s explanation which is often overlooked (including by himself). Each soul encompasses other souls, as a square also contains triangles. It is these other souls which make up the ‘matter’ of the body. The reason why this dimension is ignored is that, from the perspective of Essence (and later Christianity) the world of matter, (to which these subsumed parts belong) felt rather unimportant. The function (and the form) are what matters, not the parts. De Anima will therefore be frequently accused of presenting a picture of order (and it certainly does allow this) that puts humans in the driving seat; An order which allows humans to do what they want. And yet, and yet, whirling away rather silently, these parts are always caught up in their own movements – movements that might be behaving rather differently (and be somewhat freer) than the stuffy world of the whole that follows on from them.
But why does this matter? What turns on this threefold division, and why after all, more than two thousand years later, does it haunt us so? Why the exaggerated claim that the fate of humans in a changing environment rests on an interpretation of Aristotle – as made at the start of this essay? To illustrate this, I will run through each of these moves, showing why it still matter so very much.
The triumph of the whole over the part is a triumph inaugurated by Aristotle, and much trumpeted by philosophy ever since (which always feels a peculiar sense of ownership of this particular move). However there is a hidden underside to any such move. To define a whole is to define, at some point, some inner stability. This inner stability can be of two kinds. On the one hand, a system becomes complete, finished; on the other, one can talk of wholes of movement, and each needs to be considered in turn. Firstly to consider a ‘stable’ (or meta-stable) whole. Take as an example an ecosystem. It is all too easy to portray such a system as a matter of a complex web of exchanges which in the end are stable, and finished, for all time. One talks about a ‘balance in nature’ – or a balance in an environment. The fact that that environment is and must be in a perpetual state of flux, is quietly ignored. Or to give another example, it is all too easy for a society to become a people. That is all the movements, all the little whirlings of law, government, citizens, become easily gathered into a ‘people’. The Whole - the being British, is thereby given as something necessarily apart from everything else, and that ‘whole’ status itself needs defending. Wholes slip into violence designed to defend their integrity, and justify at a level which is never simply manifested in the parts themselves. Reality slips so easily into being beholden to another nature.
From such a perspective, Aristotle is not wrong to name the great book of the whole De Anima – of the soul. There is something eminently religious in his formation. The Environment becomes rather easily a ‘goddess’ – that is whole (call it Gaia) greater than its parts. And environmental collapse becomes about ‘saving’ (or at least not bashing) ‘Mother-earth’. The entire problem of environmental change is thereby transfigured into a doubly human affair. On the one hand it is ludicrously personalized. One saves the earth as one save one’s friend or one’s mother from being attacked. On the other hand, humans conveniently forget that the climate itself needs no saving. It is humanity (and the fluffy animals which we like) that are screwed. Beetles and spiders are probably doing fine (as are microbes).
Secondly it is perfectly plausible to set up a whole, in terms of a movement. The whole is the life, and not the corpse (which by itself lacks life). The whole is whatever unites a single movement, which gives it its status as moving. Being a whole is a matter of power or force – of making and requiring the world to be a certain otherwise; Of bullying or forcing it into its other status, whether it wants to or no. From such a perspective, the merest idea of ‘saving’ the environment is a nonsense. Humans need only to save themselves, as they are humans (in the name of their humanity) and are entitled to whatever it takes to save themselves.
Thus far, Aristotle offers a not very inviting choice. Either wholes are passive (and need defending) – a defending which itself involves a dubious provenance. Or the wholes are dynamic, and there can be no real reason to worry about a whole greater than Mankind and their initiative. Mankind the mover, has the right to do (and so save) what they want, when they want (just so long as they are clever enough). In both of these options humanity is central. The only choice which they offer, is the difference between saving the planet or saving merely ourselves (and screwing up everything else). However De Anima’s second great thesis comes in at more or less this point. It is at the level of the whole that something happens. Some new process enters into the equation. A function. A purpose.
Of all the theories in De Anima this theory is perhaps the most influential. The equation is simple enough, - if you find something that either has a purpose or is capable of acting as if it had a purpose, then it is a whole, no matter what or where it is. Once again, it is perhaps possible to understand this argument in a passive and an active voice.
From the former perspective, the idea of finding function, finding purpose has haunted science, just as it haunted religion before it. All one has to do, the great claim runs, is define a layer or level to which ‘purpose’ can be applied, and then one KNOWS (although exactly what one KNOWS remains rather mysterious). This is the claim of the likes of Dawkins, who seek to replace divine purpose with a gene, whose only definition is that it has a ‘function’ (it does something which effects its survival chances), a function which can be bequeathed to subsequent generations. That is, the merest possibility that a random length of DNA might have a ‘function’ – a use beyond its immediate chemistry, is thereby seen to be enough for that fraction of reality to qualify as a ‘whole’. This is admittedly an extreme example, but the general principle of defining a zone of matter or a series of reactions in terms of a function elsewhere, is clearly animating much of neuroscience, (the brain lights up when…) as well as much of ecology (useful bacteria).
By itself this theory is ’passive’ in the sense that the ‘whole’ itself and the function are separate. The function is merely what it does to something else. An eye by itself does not see (although its soul lies in sight). The principle becomes active, as soon as humanity wishes to seize control of that whole, and fiddle with its function. That is, as soon as humanity sees in genetics the power to change what a human is (usually expressed in that promise of eternal life); or the power in neurology to rewire our own thought processes. The Whole thereby becomes thought of as the ‘stage before’ thought; The stage at which one can generate solutions for free (eg. change the brain chemicals to cure obesity). Function and its relation to a whole is in a sense, curiously inverted. And yet that inversion remains steeped in functions themselves. One rewires one’s brain, in the name of the function – and not in the name of the wiring...
The suspicion here, is that this is merely an extra twist or a strange refinement in the basic problem which got humanity into this mess in the first place. That is, the problem of the environment’s essentially turning upon human’s desires for functions (whatever the consequences). The economy is in a sense based on the right to these functions. To design a new product is to create a new function, which people then take up into their lives, and use to act with. Capitalism (as Marx knew it must) has become the engine house for producing new and yet newer functions. The promise of genetics merely hopes to extend these functions back into the very process that allowed them to be in the first place. The ‘whole’ becomes directly modified in the name of the eventual end. Whole and function become curiously merged – in one conceptual (genetic) conjunction. It is this merging, which, the promise runs, is meant to solve everything. It is meant to ensure that a production process is both not overly wasteful, and also not likely to produce too many ‘unintended consequences’.
However it is this last hope that appears impossibly optimistic. Or perhaps impossibly Aristotelian. For this to be true, the link between the function, and the whole in which it arises would really have to be straightforward. An eye’s soul really would need to be sight. The role of genetics is merely to correct those irregularities that spring up from time to time in this relation. That is, it operates by back dating into the whole, the functions, and does so in the interest of the effects of those functions themselves. - In effect it is to claim the right to rather elaborate reverse temporal engineering. This would only work, if the time which lead from cause to cause (whole to function to effect) was of the same stuff as time that went the other way (from effect to function to whole). And yet the entire weight of human history, surely would suggest that hindsight (although wonderful) is so very different from foresight…. Or to put it another way, the suspicion that genetic engineering might have strange unforeseen consequences (for example a new virus) is perhaps dubious (it can sound rather too like ‘tainting the blood’), and yet the disquiet which animates the suspicion is still warranted. The entire claim upon which genetical explanations are based is somewhat problematic and certainly (even if the process ever worked reliably) would not be able to forecast any unintended consequence.
The final move which Aristotle makes, revolves around matter, and the constituent movements which allow the soul to function in the first place. Once again Aristotle here presents a case nuanced in active and passive voices. Passively, he claims that all souls contain other subsidiary souls, as a triangle contains a square. Animals likewise contain plants, and plants contain geometry. Each body always has other processes which are doing rather different things (even if those things are contained within the whole itself – and are so subsumed). ‘Genetical’ understanding. offers the promise that these other dimensions of the soul can be bought more into line with the entire soul itself. The fear expressed above, is of course that these other vegetables, these other animals, may well, when fingered in the interests of a whole removed from them, cease to simply be a part of the whole of which they are a part, and might demand their own world beyond it (what else is a virus?). Contra Aristotle, our methodology appears to problematize the simple relations of containment nested into a soul – and threatens to move their order elsewhere. Likewise the ‘threat to the environment’, caused by man, is less a threat to the environment itself, so much as an augmenting of the powers (and abilities) of various integral elements within it.
And yet at this point Aristotle indicates another approach, one that he barely develops, and yet which surely needs to be listened to. He suggests that the action of the soul upon the body, is not to be thought of in any direct terms. The soul controls the body, indirectly, as a rudder controls a ship. It works not by moving the way it is meant to go, but rather through other mediums, and quite counter intuitively. A result always depends on something quite elsewhere. Thence souls and their wholes, cease to possess any easy ‘fixed’ relations. On the contrary, they present the extreme poles of an axis, which also incorporates a multitude of parts, any one of which might be doing something quite different. The simple hegemony of soul and whole is thereby shifted into something rather more dynamic and flexible….
Aristotle’s theory of wholes and their souls/functions is a theory that has at once blighted our times but also offers a strange blessing, and hope. It creates on the one hand an axis in which consequences can be ignored (or subsumed into rather woolly thinking), as long as a function is duly revered. On the other hand, even as it makes this claim, it breaks up the simple relations of whole and soul, and demands that other relations are also there. It is these relations – this unfixing of body and its essence, that surely form the deep problem of our times.
