Selma you said:
It seems to me this whole discussion is about
specialization and fragmentation as vs. 'wholeness', whether you all agree
that there is such a thing as 'wholeness' for a community, or
not.
Ray:
I suspect it is even more basic that the
whole. I think we are talking about particles and wave forms and
those being in one can't imagine the other. Wholeness is
beyond the either/or.
Selma: Exactly. David Bohm's *Wholeness and
the Implicate Order* is about this issue.
One thing the discussion suffers from IMHO,
is that it is based on and either/or mentality. I have long believed that it
is possible to have human communities in which there is specialization without
fragmentation as long as the specialization is kept in context and treated the
way we treat tools. There is absolutely no reason why, if some people are
expert at some specialized task, their lives should be fragmented in the
way this is true in our society.
Ray:
I agree. Would you talk a
little more about "fragmentation."
Selma:
Our lives are fragmented in just about every way
one can think of: we think in terms of the separation of body and soul;
emotions and intellect; physical and psychological; individual and
social.
To go into one example just a little bit: all
human beings are born both male and female. Women and men have both male and
female hormones and the differences within one sex in many ways are more
profound that the differences between the two sexes. When women fragment the
maleness in them from the rest of their being and when men fragment the
femaleness in them from the rest of who they are we end up with an inability
to know ourselves or each other because we are alienated from a piece of
ourselves.
I could give examples like this in every area of
our lives, from the way we separate ourselves from nature to the way we put
aesthetics in one box and rationality in another, etc. etc.
David Bohm says it so much better than I ever
could that I am going to take just one quote from his book that I mentioned
above; this is from the first chapter which is entitled 'Fragmentation and
Wholeness'
"The title of this chapter is 'Fragmentation and
Wholeness'. it is especially important to consider this question today, for
fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in
each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the
mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our
clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve
most of them.
Thus art, science, technology, and human work in
general, are divided up into specialties, each considered to be separate in
essence from the others. Becoming dissatisfied with this state of affairs,
men(sic) have set up further interdisciplinary subjects, which were intended
to unite these specialties, but these new subjects have ultimately served
mainly to add further separate fragments. Then, society as a whole has
developed in such a way that it is broken up into separate nations and
different religious, political, economic, racial groups, etc. Man's natural
environment has correspondingly been seen as an aggregate of separately
existent parts, to be exploited by different groups of people. Similarly, each
individual human being has been fragmented into a large number of separate and
conflicting compartments, according to his different desires, aims, ambitions,
loyalties, psychological characteristics, etc., to such an extent that it is
generally accepted that some degree of neurosis is inevitable, while many
individuals going beyond the 'normal' limits of fragmentation are classified
as paranoid, schizoid, psychotic, etc.
The notion that all these fragments are
separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot
do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt
to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate
is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises
that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has
brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature,
over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder, and the creation
of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for
most of the people who have to live in it, Individually there has
developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of
what seeems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces going beyond
the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up
in it.
Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both
necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to
separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions, for
evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole
of reality all at once, we would be swamped . So, in certain ways, the
creation of special subjects of study and the division of labour was an
important step forward. Even earlier, man's first realization that he was not
identical with nature was also a crucial step, because it made possible a kind
of autonomy in his thinking, which allowed him to go beyond the
immediately given limits of nature, first in his imagination and
ultimately in his practical work.
Nevertheless, this sort of ability of man to
separate himself from his environment and to divide and apportion things
ultimately led to a wide range of negative and destructive results, because
man lost awareness of what he was doing and thus extended the process of
division beyond the limits with which it works properly. In essence the
process of division is a way of thinking about things that is useful
mainly in the domain of practical, technical and functional activities (e.g.,
to divide up an area of land into different fields where various crops
are to be grown). However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly
to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives (i.e.,to his
self-world view), then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as mereley
useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his
world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments. Being guided
by a fragmentary self-world view, man(sic) then acts in such a way as to try
to break himself and the world up so that it seems to correspond to his way of
thinking. Man thus obtains an apparent proof of the correctness of his
fragmentary self-world view although, of course, he overlooks the fact that it
is he himself(sic), acting according to his mode of thought, who has brought
about the fragmentation that now seems to have an autonomous existence,
independent of his will and of his desire.
Men(sic) have been aware from time immemorial of
this state of apparently autonomously existent fragmentation and have often
projected myths of a yet earlier 'golden age' , before the split between man
and nature and between man and man had yet taken place. Indeed, man has always
been seeking wholeness-mental, physical, social, individual."
*Wholeness and the Implicate Order* by David
Bohm
(London and New York: Routledge, 1980) pp
1,2.
Keep in mind that Bohm is a physicist. He goes on
to discuss the physical world and the way in which it is a whole.
Note: I refrained from putting a 'sic' in front
of every incorrect reference to the human race as constituted entirely by men.
However, I do believe it is important to be aware of that error.
Selma
