The whole and the parts
When we begin to relate totalities we create
levels of visualization. It's like to visualize a landscape:
the sand, the stones, the sea, the waves, the horizon, the clouds,
people wandering.
The non-perception of these levels is responsible
for a longing of globalization, which is a creator of unilateralizations.
To perceive totalities without globalize them, is so elemental
as the associationism. In this sense, the holistic vision is
also elementaristic, as it supposes a whole, a totality, and
looks for exemples, gathers experiencies to reach the postulated
whole. In 1912, Koehler, Koffka and Wertheimer (Gestalt Psychologists),
did not accept to be called holistic, and use to say that the
whole is a structured and configurative gestalt, it is not an
emergence (something which emerges). The whole is not a resultant,
it is a configurative unity, that only when globaly apprehended,
totalize itself. Holism, now a days, is synonym of the whole
as the sum of parts. The elementarism of the holistic attitude,
has operationalized and instrumentalized so much the idea of
the whole, of totality, that it has unmasked itself. We see the
disaster of the elementaristic-associationistic attitude in astrology,
psychology and medical science: "you are an individuo formed
by your education, your culture, your experiencies, your symbols,
your personal story, your martian, plutonian and netunian functions
etc"; and more "your organism is a totality which results
from your food intake, your idiosyncrasies, your genetic constitution
etc". Holos in greek, is an adjective and an adverb, it's
a manner, a way of. The holistics have utilized the whole as
adverb. In Gestalt, the whole is the adjective which expresses
the perceptive form parcialized, distorted, or globalized without
distortion. This explains, for exemple, the causalistic, deterministic
and dualistic ideas. In Psychology, the Gestaltism is a clear
demarcation (Koffka, Koehler and Wertheimer through the concept
of Figure-Ground): the possibility to apprehend the globality.
The context of what happens and of the perceiver, in the relation,
does establish the levels of perception and, as a consequence,
does establish the thought and the experience of the phenomenos.
When one perceives the totality as part of another totality,
of another unity, one creates a perceptive distortion. It is
like as if the law of better direction (fig.A) would not be effective
because of the interference of factors of simmilarity (fig.B):
A clear exemple of this has happened when
the objective and the subjective were considered as complementaries,
as restaurateurs of the human unity. This part/whole distortion
has created the classical dualism among the social sciences,
where the man is sometimes view through his subjective aspect,
sometimes through his objective aspect, always through an excludent,
antagonistic or complementary way.
The same occurs on the Theory of Knowledge.
The same occurs on our day-to-day life when we think that the
haven or the hell is the other one.
To speak of complementarity, antagonism or
polarity, we are supposing contexts, we are supposing totalities.
We must to focus these poles, complementarities and antagonisms
as parts which have to be perceived from the whole, which is
their configurative context. In our case, to speak of subject
and object as polarities pressuposes the totality, the human
essence.
Of course in other contexts this totality,
human essence, may be a part. And in this sense we may are with
a partial view. For exemplo: if we are focusing the cosmic totality,
the human essence would be a part and it is already a distortion
to transform it in an unity which possibilitates resultants.
It is important to emphasize that, from the psychological point
of view - the man as a transcendence of his organic dimension
- everything begins and ends in the perception: it is the context
from where we think, we understand, we love, we hate, we accept
and from where we do not accept the limits of being in the world.
Everything which is psychological, behavioural, results from
the perception. Even the relations established with oneself,
with one's organic structure, happens on the relational perceptive
context and it is through the perception itself that the levels
of existence of the Being are established.
These levels establish themselves as survivel,
function immanence and as existence, contemplation, transcendence.
According to the Gestalt Psychologists, any
perception happens in terms of Figure-Ground - and there is a
reversibility, that means, the Figure becomes Ground and the
Ground becomes Figure - but what is perceived is the Figure.
The perceived being the Figure, we can synonymize the perception
as understanding of the manifest, as equivalent to the manifest,
equivalent to the explicit, the expression. These, necessarilly
would suppose the implicit, the subtil, the non-manifest and
even the occult. In this sense, it is possible to understand
without dualism, what would be the levels of manifestation and
of the occult.
It is worthy of note that an age-old problematic
between idealism and materialism, material and spiritual, dense
and subtil, occult and manifest, could be understood through
Figure-Ground. The idea that the human being can transcend the
level of survivel and reach the level of contemplation-existential,
is the idea of changing itself. It is the unique manner to realize
the freedom, transcending one's constituent limites and reaching
humanized and occult dimensions, dimensions which are not explicit
or that are wrapped by the fights for survivel. It's equivalent
to the passage from crawl to walk. It is the authonomy in relation
to the definer limits. It's when I break the positions of subject
and object, being here and now with me and in this way, being
with the other one. In this way, I'm able to integrate the contemplative
dimension and this possibilitates to me the disponibility responsible
for the infinit reversibility and for the continue and enchained
apprehention of the Figure in the successive transformations
of Figure-Ground. I integrate myself. I do not coagulate positions,
I do not self-referentiate, I'm with the other one and with myself
in this way in the world. This state of non-compromising is what
viabilizes the freedom, which is no more than the exercise of
the human possibilities. To realize freedom it is fundamental
not-be limited, not-be limited even to one's own perception.
This is only possible in the existential level where the slipping
configurates the exercise of the possibility of to-exist. While
we are attached to results, to the fruits of our work and enterprizes,
we will be mixing the referentials and will be dedicating ourselves
to the polarities. In this way we will achive realizations, but
to the cost of being exiled from our totality and definer unity.
But it happens that we live inside limits, since the limit of
age, of phisical time, until the limit of space. This is why
to dedicate oneself, to contemplate, creates the infinit and
recuperates the imprisoned totality. A simple exemple can be
seeing when we perceive that we do not have a problem but that
we are the problem. To dedicate oneself to this questioning,
that means, why we are a problem, and not to be willing not be
a problem, is something which amplifies, diversifies and transforms
ou perception, our relations, our behaviours.
[Extracted from the
book "Terra e Ouro são
Iguais" - pgs.19,20,21,22]
After the reading of this text, it becomes
ease to figure out the distorted perception, the error of Perl:
he never desisted from the idea of internal and external realities,
as, in spite of Gestalt be, for him, a word that indicates/denotes
totality, the totality was apprehended in an elementaristic context
of unconscious, goal, instinct, and the whole (the totality)
for him becomes the sum of the parts. It's not by chance that
his followers speak of "open gestalt, close gestalt".
|