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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".


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