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Holism Quotes

Browse 38 quotes about Holism.

Holism Quotes

“Humanity's "progress of knowledge" and the "evolution of consciousness" have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. For the whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all out faculties–intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational–enter the process of knowing. How we approach "the other," and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including out own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate.”

KnowingHolism
Book:Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View
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“The environment is not an "other" to us. It is not a collection of things that we encounter. Rather, it is part of our being. It is the locus of our existence and identity. We cannot and do not exist apart from it. It is through empathic projection that we come to know our environment, understand how we are part of it and how it is part of us. This is the bodily mechanism by which we can participate in nature, not just as hikers or climbers or swimmers, but as part of nature itself, part of a larger, all-encompassing whole. A mindful embodied spirituality is thus an ecological spirituality. An embodied spirituality requires an aesthetic attitude to the world that is central to self-nurturance, to the nurturance of others, and to the nurturance of the world itself. Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human. It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals - and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than any human beings could ever achieve. Embodied spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world.”

EmpathyEcologyHolismRelatednessEmbodied MindEmbodied SpiritualityEcological ConsciousnessEthical ResponsibilityAesthetic Reponsiveness
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
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“Reason is indeed all about identity, or, rather, tautology. Mathematics is the eternal, necessary system of rational, analytic tautology. Tautology is not “empty”, as it is so often characterized by philosophers. It is in fact the fullest thing there, the analytic ground of existence, and the basis of everything. Mathematical tautology has infinite masks to wear, hence delivers infinite variety. Mathematical tautology provides Leibniz’s world that is “simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.” No hypothesis cold be simpler than the one revolving around tautologies concerning “nothing.” There is something – existence – because nothing is tautologous, and “something” is how that tautology is expressed. If we write x = 0, where x is any expression that has zero as its net result, then we have a world of infinite possibilities where something (“x”) equals nothing (0).”

ReasonZeroNothingSomethingRationalismCompleteFullOntological MathematicsTautologyHolism
Book:God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics
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“This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.”

WholeSubstanceInterconnectednessMicrocosmPartHolismSystems TheoryMonadAntireductionism
Book:G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students
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“Truth doesn't exist. Truth is our perception of what does exist; our assessment of it. You will have to find the truth that's appropriate to your own life and also exists in reality. Note that I did not say "your own truth." Individualism is the greatest con job ever. You are the product of those who came before you in your bloodline, and the factors of your life. You do not exist separately from the world and you cannot escape this state. Furthermore, there's no point. Pursue truth as it is evident to you.”

TruthIndividualismNihilismBloodlinesHolismHuman Perception
Book:Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity
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“To recognize the nature of nihilism, we see feces and death as the "dark side" of the mouth, and through that recognize life beyond the human perspective. Humans fear things that disturb them personally, and then assign to those things a universal status, like a monkey trying to convince a tribe that his enemy is its enemy. Escaping this is the essence of nihilism, or a reduction of all value except the inherent and holistic. "Disgusting" is not important; the function of the world and the human body is. Function, measures in real-world changes and results, is more important than sensations or moral judgements,feelings and emotions.”

NihilismDisgustHolismBodily FunctionsHuman PerceptionFunctionalism
Book:Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity
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“In any analysis of any part of the world, it is mandatory to institute a general reasoning in which the whole – the Absolute – is also included. This is what science scrupulously avoids. Science is all about the parts, and ignoring the whole. Science is non-holistic, which is why it cannot arrive at a grand unified, final theory of everything. From the whole you can get to every part, because the whole defines the parts. If you start with the parts, as science does, you can never get to the whole because the parts are necessarily defined piecemeal, heuristically and with no regard to the whole, since the whole is unknown. A bottom-up approach can never work. Only top-down approaches have any chance of working. Empiricists are always parts people and bottom-up people. Rationalists are holistic and top-down. These are opposite worldviews. The PSR is an explanatory, top-down principle. Randomness is a non-explanatory, bottom-up speculation.”

ScienceTheoryConsistentRationalismRandomnessCompleteTop DownHolismPsrBottom Up
Book:God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics
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“We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose.”

PatternHolismInteractive UnityRelational Models Of Form
Book:Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
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“I want to use this practice: Whenever I express my views, thoughts or anything I deeply believe, I will welcome any opposing view or thought. I will listen with caring attention to what the other says, accepting it no matter how different or antagonistic it seems to be. I will also deeply and sincerely thank them. I will abstain from feeling accused or judged. I will acknowledge the other as my shadow, an integral part of me who has accepted to relate with me. I believe that a vision in order to manifest requires its opposite, the other polarity. If my vision is truly holistic, I am not in a condition to oppose any alternative vision. I intend to learn to accept what appears to be opposite, no matter how unpleasant or contrary it is. I believe that only in the paradox of this acceptance, in releasing the urge to be right, unity can be experienced and manifested. I have tried all other options, and they have not worked, and this is the only I have left. And for this purpose I am open to be patient, promoting the gestation of this healing process, for I know that all is one.”

OppositesReconciliationHolism
Author:Franco Santoro
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“We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and "fundamentally real," while our most intimate experiences are labelled "mere appearance" and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind. Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why should not these colours and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only "in my mind," then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things? Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from "higher grade" to "lower grade" organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.”

ExperienceAbstractPhenomenonMechanismConcreteReductionismHolismVitalism
Book:The illusion of technique: a search for meaning in a technological civilization
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“The properties of mind are not purely mental: They are shaped in crucial ways by the body and brain and how the body can function in everyday life. The embodied mind is thus very much of this world. Our flesh is inseparable from what Merleau-Ponty called the "flesh of the world" and what David Abram refers to as "the-more-than-human-world." Our body is intimately tied to what we walk on, sit on, touch, taste, smell, see, breathe, and move within. Our corporeality is part of the corporeality of the world.”

MindBodyHolismEmbodied MindMind World RelationRelational Identity
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
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“God’s perfection lies in the domain of Being. In the domain of Becoming, he is totally fragmented and on a mission to put himself back together again. God shatters himself into infinite pieces then puts them all back together again to make a perfect whole. We are all tiny images or reflections of God. We are all cells of God. We are all mirrors of God.”

PhilosophyGodBecomingPerfectionIdealismBeingMirrorRationalismHolismPanentheism
Book:God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics
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“The idea that there is something necessarily wrong with circular logic is itself a logical fallacy. If there is nothing wrong with the starting premises then the conclusions are necessarily correct too. In fact, only circular logic can be correct. Only such logic can offer total holistic coherence and analytic closure, i.e. perfect tautology – provided it is the correct circular logic, which means it must have the correct starting premise: the PSR itself.”

PhilosophyWholeCompletenessTautologyHolismPsrLogical FallaciesPrinciple Of Sufficient ReasonCircular LogicLinear Logic
Book:Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality
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“Conservation is in a bad way because it has failed to see the whole of communities and the many concentric circles of wholes they contain; it has failed to see that management is a partnership based in community and not a dictatorship based in control; and, if I can go this far, it has failed because it never learned how to stop, to see, and to speak the language of the wind—it has never learned to be wild like flowers.”

ConservationNature ConservationHolismConservation QuotesNature QuoteHolism Quotes
Book:Wild Like Flowers
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“It is not that a whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts themselves are redefined and re-created in the process of their interaction. So the reductionist sociobiologists argue that individual human limitations place constraints on society, but, in fact, social organization is the negation of individual limitations.”

Philosophy Of ScienceDialecticsReductionismSocial OrganizationHolismSociobiologyThe IndividualThe Corpse In The Elevator
Author:Richard Lewontin
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“To go back to architecture, whats organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.”

WholeBigsRoomsBreakIssuesDesignFieldsIdentityObjectsProductsArchitectureScalesRealmsBreaking DownProduct DesignSmall RoomsHolism
Author:Greg Lynn
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“Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.”

FeelsStatesSeemsCoursesNaturalUnitedPartyTroubleFrontsMembersCapitalismConnectionsSocialismCosmosNeedyOffspringUnfaithfulMilitarismVanguardCyborgHolismUnited Front
Author:Donna J. Haraway
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“General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.”

IfsStillsRealityCultureCausesSimpleBrainTakenModernEffectsTheoryConceptsStructureCellsRelatedRatsCause And EffectVariablesHolismSystems Theory
Author:Marilyn Ferguson
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“When the study of the household (ecology) and the management of the household (economics) can be merged, and when ethics can be extended to include environmental as well as human values, then we can be optimistic about the future of humankind. Accordingly, bringing together these three ‘E's' is the ultimate holism and the great challenge for our future.”

HumansWellsTogetherValuesThreeChallengesStudyEthicsEconomicsUltimateManagementEnvironmentalOptimisticOur FutureHumankindHouseholdEcologyHuman ValuesBeing OptimisticHolism
Book:Ecology and our endangered life-support systems
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