The order of the whole cannot be reduced to parts

The idea of a Gestalt is central to Ian McGilchrist’s book The Matter with Things. The form of the whole cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature.¹ The flow of the universe is always creative. The world is always a matter of responsiveness, a process of creative co-creation.² All our experience is a complex flow, a contantly unfolding, responsive, reciprocal dance.

We interact with one another and the world in a myriad of ways without having more than limited control of the outcome. What comes to be does so through interaction.³ It is unique. It is what is is because of me, and I am what I am because of it.⁴ There is no recipe, no procedure, no algorithm, for getting it right. We can specify what it is not, but not what it is.⁵

The world is a seamless, always self-creating, self-individuating, and simultaneous self-uniting, flow that is only truly knowable as ‘it’ comes to be known.⁶

Notes:
1. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, p. 25.
2. Ibid..
3. Ibid., p. 26.
4. Ibid., p. 27.
5. Ibid., p. 28.
6. Ibid., p. 29. ‘It’ might not be the appropriate pronoun.

Update 2022-10-03: Page numbers changed. Typo corrected.

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Wholeness is not breakable into parts