Further to my earlier Posts on Music Experience: I had been talking often
about 'components' of a music experience without saying much about my views on
them. These views are very close to those of H. Maturana and E.von
Glasersfeld ('close to' being an elegant way of saying that they are
'borrowed' from them).
If we think of, say, a Music Experience, as a 'composite unity', we may
proceed to distinguish, or bring forth from it, a certain number of Components.
If we do this we find that the Components have a peculiar relationship with
that unity and between them .This peculiarity results in "the whole being
greater than the sum of its parts".
What is important to emphasize is that a component is a component only as
long as it is integrating a composite unity. If we separate it from the
composite it is no longer a component. "There are no free components hanging
around the world" (Glasersfeld). Some thing is a component only in composition.
Why is it important to emphasize that? For no other reason that, although
we might agree with this way of looking at components, in practice we tend to
forget it.
The process of distinguishing components and parts in a composite unity
is a way of thinking about things which is quite useful and convenient in
certain domains. However, when this mode of thought is applied to man's
thinking and feeling, we tend to see and experience as if his world were
actually constituted of separately existing fragments. Thus we overlook that it
was ourselves that, acting according to this 'mode of thought', have brought
about a fragmentation that somehow acquires an autonomous existence. (see
Bohm's "Wholeness and the Implicate Order")
If, for instance, we were to distinguish Awareness as a Component of the
Music Experience we could try to discern its relations with other components
(Sensibility, Recognition, etc) and with the unity, as 'a way of thinking-of'
the unity. But, if we were to separate Awareness from the Experience, then it
will cease to be a component and the Experience would have been transformed
into something else. (The underlying assumption being that the relations with
the whole or with other components do not affect the nature of the Awareness).
Hence the advantages of the jigsaw puzzle representations that I have been
discussing here: A slab of a picture has a role to play in the composition of
the composite unity (the whole picture) as long as it is inside it; by taking
it away we transform it into something else, devoid of its relations with other
slabs and its roles in the whole.
(Note: There are many features in common between the above views and
Koestler's holons and holarchies. They seem to differ mainly in the question
of hierarchical ordering as opposed to the more general , "structure and
organization" as proposed by Maturana and Varela).
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