Why parts do not exist and wholes are not ensembles
By: Onur Yuce Gun
Tags: Creativity, Innovation, Education, Philosophy, Design

On a Saturday morning, I am moving my gaze over the things on my desk. I am looking at the notes I took on a small notebook.

The notebook is made of pages. The mug has a handle.

Then there is a pen. It has too many parts including a spring inside. Somebody decided that that would be the best way to make a pen, and so the spring remained there.

The laptop? Looks simpler on the outside, even with so many keys. Inside? Too early to think about the circuits on a motherboard. I move my gaze to the guitar on the wall:

Why are there frets on a guitar? And why are there fretless guitars?

Because we want to flow. Because life is in flux.

Part descriptions remain valid momentarily in the flux of life

Products we design are a reflection of how we mentally process the world. For ages, we have been looking around, making observations and coming up with descriptions and names for the things we see.

Our mental and perceptual capacity taught us to split things into pieces to make our lives easier. As it is impossible to comprehend the total situation¹ at once, we evolved through managing objects and situations in a piece-meal manner.

Here is a small rock, there is a big tree, then a mountain.

A mountain is too big to describe at once. But we know it is made of rocks, trees, and other things.

Knowing that, or thinking that we know it makes life convenient.

But how do we know if the part description we come up with is the correct one?

And how do we switch between part descriptions?

We prefer to see whatever is easier to at a given time. Sometimes we see a tree, sometimes a trunk with branches and leafs, and sometimes only the shade, and the tree disappears.

Where does the trunk end and where do the branches start? Where lies the line that splits the leaf from the tree?

I walk to the tree, I pull a leaf from a branch and it gives me the answer. The part in my hand is the leaf, and the remaining part is the branch.

Now, ask the same question for your arm, hand and fingers. Where do the dividing lines reside?

Our way of finding these momentary part descriptions help us navigate the world, yet they do not necessarily produce a universal part-whole theory. The parts we know of today don’t work tomorrow.

Part descriptions make us forget that everything is in flux.²

The scientific method³ you apply to the branch and the leaf does not work for your finger and your hand. There is no dividing line, all is one.

Photo by Darrell Cassell on Unsplash

Yet we trust in a parted world

When we portray the world as something that is made of its functioning parts, everything looks more manageable.

Today we are dependent on systems that are designed in fragments. Building blocks, digital signals, precisely designed engines, traffic systems have all their respective constituents.

As the civilizations developed, we made our best to craft parts into their perfection.

With the industrial age, it felt so much more convenient for things to be thought and built this way.

We couldn’t manage the whole, we couldn’t find ways to precisely describe the flux of life, and thus we cut everything into pieces with our analytical knife.⁴

Confident and strong.

Are we?

The feeling of being in control of parts not only creates some sort of illusion of sovereignty over the dynamics of the whole, but also leads to a false assurance of stability.

Theoretically, if we know well enough about the parts, we can easily replace the broken parts of a whole to fix it back immediately.

Yet this theory somehow keeps failing.

Engines still break — That’s a small problem.

There are larger problems that are created through this sort of self-assuring way of perceiving the world. When we split the world and our lives into parts, we feel more liberated to overlook the unsolvable parts, moving our gaze to the fixable portions only.

The larger portion remains unresolved: the way we treat ourselves, other species, and our environment. We design wrong products, we use wrong materials, we channel our energy towards an unnatural way of living.

Are we doomed, or can we develop an alternative way to look at things?

The way we look at the world determines the way we make the world⁵

Parts are useful for building things up, for producing wholes through assembly, and yet, the properties and inner-workings of wholes cannot be fully described through the properties of their parts.

Parts also can have contradictory descriptions in different domains. While this proposes a challenge for scientific method and computing, it aligns better with the flux of life.

What does this mean?

Here is a simple example:

We describe a piston through its function in a combustion engine, whereas a brush stroke’s salience on a canvas proves harder to talk about.

But there exist alternative perceptions of the world in which a piston becomes a brushstroke.

Here is how:

Take the combustion engine as the whole. Then the piston can be defined as a part of that engine.

Now, describe it. A piston is…

…a mechanical part that has specific working principles,

Working principle of a 4-stroke engine. Image courtesy of Nafrizatimes.

…an engineering marvel that is made of solid materials and many moving sub-parts,