International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

These antithetic concepts are very basic for the understanding of the systemic view of the world.

I. BLAUBERG, V. SADOVSKY and E. YUDIN, who consider both concepts as categories, write:

"The cleavage and opposition of the part and the whole produced the antinomies of wholeness. The principal ones were:

- 1. Thesis: the whole is the sum of parts Antithesis: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (note: or less or other!)

2. The parts precede the whole. The whole precedes the parts

3. The whole is casually determined by its parts.

The wholeness approach is opposed to the causal one and rules it out

4. The whole is cognized through the knowledge of its parts

Parts as a product of division of the whole may be cognized only on the basis of the knowledge of the whole" (1977, p.99-100).

This traditional viewpoint has now been reformulated in a non contradictory way as stated by the same authors: "The solution of the problem lies in that wholeness is characterized by new qualities and properties not inherent in the parts but appearing from their interaction in a certain system of connections…

"… in the relation between the parts and the whole neither side can be considered without the other: a part outside the whole is not a part but quite a different object, since in an integral system the parts express the nature of the whole and adquire properties specific to it; on the other hand, the whole without (or before) the parts is unthinkable, since an absolutely simple, structureless and even mentally indivisible body cannot have any properties or interact with other bodies" (1977, p.100).

Synthetically, a part (or element) within a whole (or system) is itself plus its connections with other parts and less the constraints which result from these connections.

As in many other cases, the old, absolute dichotomies appear now as unduly simplified abstractions.