some last thoughts before I move onto holism and that
is that the battle between competing and conflicting values,
or competing goods as defined by Barrett in his book, “The Irrational Man”
as espoused by the different systems can be confusing…
but that is what we use philosophy for, to sort the competing claims
and find out if the truths they proclaim are valid claims… thus
the economic system claim that money/profits are the highest values
to be pursued and the legal system that justice is the highest value to
be pursued… this is the very role of philosophy, the understanding
of values and science, the role of science is the understanding of facts…
they pursue different things, science and philosophy…
and we return to our topic at hand, holism…
holism emphasizes the priority of the whole of it parts…
and every system does emphasize the priority of the whole over its parts…
look at the human body, that system…every single cell in the human body
is replaced every 7 years, the parts are replaced and yet, we still hold
to our body as existing whole since our birth…we lose blood and replace blood
and yet we still hold that we are whole…
the parts come and go and yet, we still believe ourselves to be a whole system…
the human race has existed for a million plus years and yet, parts of the human race,
the individual parts of the human race have come and gone, many thousands of
generations have come and gone since the beginning… I too shall, at some point,
die and leave the scene of the human beings existence and yet, the human race
shall go on, the system shall go on, regardless of whether or not I am here…
the whole, the human race, shall go on, even as part, individual parts like me,
shall come and go… so the whole does have more priority over the parts and yet,
and yet, the parts do have a role and a value within the whole…
we individual human beings, do have a role within the whole, the human race…
the parts are just as important as the whole because without the parts, there is
no whole… the whole needs the parts and the parts need the whole…
the individual cells of the human body need the whole, the human body
needs the individual cells just as much… the whole needs the part and the parts needs
the whole…
as we need both, we need to begin to emphasize both, the whole as well as the parts…
the economic system of capitalism is a whole system which depends on its parts, the
worker and the consumer to survive, the parts the worker and the consumer need
the whole, the economic system to survive, also and this is important,
the economic system doesn’t have to be capitalism…
the human race has had 8 economic systems since the beginning of existence
and we can replace economic systems before we can replace the parts,
the individual parts that make up the system…
so think about what economic system best fits the values of the human being…
or the best political system that best fits the values of human beings…
instead of making human beings try to fit their values into the system,
try to make the systems fit the values of the human beings…
make the systems fit the values of human beings instead of the other
way around…
Kropotkin