A View of Reality as a Whole

The Magical Flower of Winter is an essay series exploring reality and our relationship to it. It deals with philosophy, science and our views of the world, with an eye on the metacrisis and our future. Sign up to receive new essays here:

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Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into the Whole.

Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution

I should take little comfort in a world without books, but reality is not to be found in them because it is not there whole.

Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian

The first phase of this project draws to a close, and this essay will be an attempt to summarize the work so far, to give a tentative outline of a view of reality as a whole. As I have tried to show in several ways, there is a limit to what can be said, a point we need to be mindful of, as there can be no finite set of encapsulating statements. Furthermore, this project, the magical flower of winter, should itself be understood as a whole, each piece a part that stands against the background of the other pieces, and must be seen in the light thereof. This is the only way, for there are no «first principles», no independent foundation from which the whole can naturally and sequentially be derived. We are in it, always already immersed in reality, an immersion which makes the reductionistic and foundational first principles approach to secure knowledge impossible - we must presuppose something in any endeavor we take part in, whether intellectual or experiential, and most often what has to be presupposed is exactly the intellectual or experiential, without which we could endeavor nothing. Circularity has for long been abhorred, but any attempt to avoid it just pushes the circle down or up a level, and is as such in vain when it comes to the foundational questions. A view of reality as a whole must embrace the circle. 

Inevitably, any attempt at summarizing can only be provisional, and will leave some aspect out. Regardless, here is one attempt at an abstract of my view in the briefest possible way: First, all is in/of experience. Second, experience is immersive, thus holistic. Third, reality is the whole of all experience, of which each of our experiences are a part. Fourth, the ontic, the that-ness of experience is irreducible. Fifth, the epistemic, the what-ness of experience is reducible by epistemisation. Sixth, the epistemic must answer to experience, but, by the first point, it also shapes experience. This last point, properly conceived, I believe is the most novel but poorly acknowledged and understood aspect of reality: by the epistemic we shape our world view, and in turn we shape our experience. Living is an active enterprise, but not only are our actions active, so is our thinking about and epistemic structuring of our experience, for how we order the past impacts the present. This process is transparent to us because at any and all times we experience reality through our world view, which just as ourselves is cumulatively changed in the experience. There is no yardstick we can hold up between the past and now in order to compare our experience and world view, for we see the past experience and our previous world view through the lens of our current one. We can set out on a quest, but our starting point will have changed in the process of journeying. That the starting point remains what it was is a projection we do, but when we return to what was the starting point we will have changed. We cannot as such fully close the circle. No matter how brutally or discontinuously our reality changes, it is soon enough assimilated and normalized, because our view of things changes in turn, permanently layering on top of the past. There is no stable and untouchable core, and where this normalization fails we see trauma. This is another way of viewing immersion - we cannot separate ourselves from our context, and it goes both ways. This is how reality and experience is co-creative. 

All our questioning about life, being and reality is on the surface simple, but when we go further in our analysis to foundational questions we see that all domains of knowledge are involved in the questioning: there can be no psychology without sociology, no physics without metaphysics, no metaphysics or neuroscience without epistemology, and so on. On the broken dream of knowledge as foundational, based on first principle and reduction, this interdependence complexifies things enormously, and may at least in part be the reason for the narrow, ultra-rationalistic tendency in such schools of thought like analytic philosophy and the “Shut up and calculate!”-variant of physics. But there is an alternative conception of knowledge and its relation to us and reality which takes us back to the simplicity of our questioning: what I have alternately called holism or a view of reality as a whole. Each discipline requires interpretation against a background of other disciplines, but this background is neither solid nor unchanging. Some concepts or questions cannot be investigated «to bottom», because to do so would shift the very investigation one is attempting to do. This is the realization that all analysis or investigation is performed against a background, but that this background can itself shift as a consequence of the investigation. Holism is the stance that the background is itself shifting, and necessarily so, because our questioning does not require a firm foundation, but a whole in which it coheres. This is also the nature of our experience: our experience at some moment, seen as an abstracted piece of a ceaselessly changing and always novel process, is what it is in relation to the whole of experiencing. Your experience now is inseparable from, and defined by, all that came before it, and will gain a compounding reinterpretation by everything that comes after. Just the same, meanings, language, theory, the epistemic, both in its abstracted individuals and as cumulative wholes are inseparable from, and defined by, all that has come before, and will also gain a compounding reinterpretation by everything that comes after. The web, the whole, is more than the sum of the parts. Each part is what it is by virtue of its relations in the web. Thus, akin to Indra’s net, each part carries something of all the others. The web is self-upholding, groundlessly grounded in itself, and is thus background independent as a whole. Like stones in an arch we do not require anchoring to a solid ground, because everything is anchored in everything else. Isolation of a part of the web is a projection of this part against the background of the rest of the web. Isolation of a part makes something new: the observed is changed, but so too is the observer. “The web” here is just an image, but one that may claim to demonstrate at least some of the holistic aspects of the self-upholding, co-varying and interdependent. 

Holism

Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Will to Power

You may ask me to positively state my view, and I shall have to say two things: that the nature of reality is holistic, and that by stating this, by naming it so, I have taken all the power out of it. It is like, upon being asked how to win at chess, one gets the reply “To win at chess you have to mate your opponent's king”. But this only tells you of some criteria that must be met for winning, not of how you go about satisfying the criteria. What you are after lies not in the criteria or any singular event or set of events, any description, any name, but in the whole that is the way of going there. And this no one can state positively, because any attempt to do so will only ever be limited, a finite set of descriptions or instructions, reductive, exactly in contradiction to what our aim was! The nature of language, of explanation, stands opposed to the nature of that which language and explanation are supposed to capture. Our only means of signifying precludes the signified. The mind that holds all things will still not hold itself.

This view of reality as a whole is not so much a finished product, but a way of thinking, dynamic, itself a process. We cannot ever say that philosophy or science, epistemology or ontology, are ever solved. They are not problems that require a solution, they are practices, processes, quests. There is no cauldron of gold at the end of the rainbow, the rainbow is it. And we can see that the very expectation of the existence of solutions comes from the same ontic projection as when we intuit that the ceaseless change and tension out of which we all exist requires some terminal objects between which to be in tension. As we now have seen¹ this latter is an abstraction. In this we also glimpse some of the symbolism I am trying to evoke by the magical flower of winter. It grows out of itself, it is that never-ending and self-subsisting growth and creation, continuously made out of itself and no other. 

This way of thinking, of conceiving ourselves as intimately dependent on each other and the world we co-create, should shake and break our conviction that our responsibilities and our worlds end at the surface of our skin. We are responsible for our experience, and this includes that of our experience beyond our bodies. A view of reality as a whole cannot succeed without an eye on what makes life worth living. The epistemic is our creation, but it is co-dependent and covariant with experience. It is a representation, never capable of fully capturing the ontic, forever a model, but not just a representation, for we act on it just the same as the ontic. This is a consequence of epistemisation. The evidence in judgment of the epistemic is not evaluated on criteria of rationality or “truth”, but criteria that are subject to the purpose and value it serves to our lives. Anything less yields an incoherent epistemic, an incoherent world view, which in its imbalance leads to self-destruction. What purpose? What values? We don’t have to invent these answers anew, these have been known forever, though they are disconnected from our world view in our modern technological civilization of quantity. Importantly, purpose and values are not quantities. They are not extrinsic metrics, reducible, independent, this utilitarianism is a legacy of the particularist paradigm. We cannot optimize them, they are not end states for us to achieve. They are processes, journeys, that acquire their value in their making, not their completion (they are infinite, not finite, games). These processes need to be flexible and open in order to provide the space in which their value can spring forth, because just like the unspeakable evaporates when spoken, too much control destroys the very thing we exert control over. A view of reality that is centered on our experience, that aims to connect value and purpose to its conception of reality itself cannot avoid teleology. That it is frowned upon to speak in terms of purpose intrinsically, that the whole both in time and space is more than the parts, is also a particularist legacy we need to rid ourselves of. A view of reality as a whole cannot succeed without an eye on what makes life worth living: love, beauty, goodness, purpose. The belief in something sacred to which we can aspire is not something to be explained or explained away. To call this naive is to have misunderstood the purpose of the statement: I do not intend glorification of something unknown, but recognition of our limitedness, that we are the manifestations of something vast we cannot truly know, only be, as limited parts. And of course this is grating on our ears, we cannot connect to this by our “normal” mode of thought, due to no other reason than our culture’s dogmatic and particularist world view, which I argue there is a coherent and richer alternative to. 

One of the main theses of this project is that our science and philosophy shape our world view, which in turn shapes our culture, politics, economy, psychology etc., but that all these domains of life are in reality non-separable, so that all of them are mutually shaping each other in all directions. This is holism, as a view of reality as a whole in which all parts, whether experiential or abstracted, are continuously co-creative, co-dependent and both mutually adapting and shaping. That they are separable is a rationalist assumption that while fruitful for the sciences individually is detrimental for life at large. And thinking in terms of systems, life, complexity, integral frameworks and so on cannot «solve» this, only attempt to improve upon it. The whole resists any framing. And this must be the nature of the science of the future: holistically informed improvements on the particularist paradigm, because there is no such thing as a proper holistic science, as the wholes of reality are irreducible to the epistemic without loss of the very aspects that make them wholes.

Holism is the structure of structure - the meta-framework in which the plurality of structures takes place. In order for holism to cohere with the plurality of world views we need to think of the structure as evolutionary. The web is continuously evolving. On holism as evolutionary, structures co-evolve: they mutually adapt to and change each other. Structures must here be understood in the broadest sense: structures of order, life, discourse. It is senseless to speak about the primacy or priority of one structure over another, because they have both evolved from the same antecedents. The primary criterion is coherence. Experience is given, it is what is primary, and we construct an epistemic, a web of structures, that coheres with and explains the experience we find ourselves with. In such a way both the world and our representations of it co-evolve. And in such a way, teleology is inevitable. Any theory requires interpretation, but there can be no interpretation except by connection to the whole. It is impossible to articulate a coherent view of reality without reference to experience, and us as experiencers, and that the epistemic answers to this as a final end. But it is of course not a choice between purely causal explanation or purely teleological explanation, we need both. 

Experience and Reality

Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them… You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.

Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

The world is made of breath only. Crucially, breath is not a collection of molecules expelled from your lungs. The collection of molecules expelled from your lungs is a model of breath. Breath is experiential. The critique of realism, materialism and reductionism, a conglomerate of views I have wrapped up in the term particularism, can be traced centuries back. We have seen some reasons for this in Philosophy for our Future and The Plurality of Experience. In the latter I also attempted to make plausible the primacy of the tension out of which we abstract polarities. What about the dichotomy between the epistemic and the ontic that I am seemingly fond of? The ontic is the tension, and the epistemic is all that we abstract out of it.

All is in experience. Nothing you have thought, felt, seen, touched, smelled, hit, spoken, written, read, dreamt or imagined has been outside of experience. It is the stage on which everything plays out, all of what we name reality, however much we disagree about its meaning. To say that there is an external and independent world that gives rise to all this is to take something in our experience, turn everything on its head, and posit that this something precedes the experience of it. To say that all this is in our heads is to do the same, for our heads are equally something in our experience. Of course we need to speak about the things in our experience as if they have a separate existence, because in no other way can we connect our individual experiences. And of course the things in our experience follow a coherent and ordered structure, for if it were otherwise, what kind of experience would we have? A disordered experience works for the solipsist, but our pluralistic reality is not the making of any single experience². It is useful to talk about a world of objects, and it is useful to talk about experience in our heads, but none of these ways of talking are able to acknowledge that what is primary is experience. Part of the reason for this is of course that experiencing is immersive, and it becomes transparent to us. Experience is the background against which the things and events of the world take place, and we forget the medium by which these things and events come to be. It is undoubtedly simpler and more parsimonious to speak of objects for particular purposes in isolation, but if we take objects as fundamental when inquiring of the whole we self-mutilate with Occam’s razor.

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

Frank Herbert - Dune

The whole cannot be understood, only experienced. What can be understood are parts of the whole, that in their parthood are by definition fragmentary abstractions. The parts, however conceived, do not sum to the whole, that is, to be a part is to be reduced in a subtracted way. Why is this? Because there will always be a remainder left in the context, in the subsuming whole. Reality as matter is one such partial reduction, and so is reality as mind. These are two extremes of an axis along which we analyze experience, but experience itself is the whole out of which the analysis and its contents is no more than as scaffolding to the cathedral. My own being, other minds, «the world in itself», will never be found in language, only in experience. The «proof» of the ontic cannot be found in the epistemic. But the whole is not hidden! It is the source of all, yet it is becoming co-creatively through us, but it is not prior to, or outside experience. Experience is it, is all there is. 

The Sacred

Unrelinquished, unattained,

Unannihilated, not permanent,

Unarisen, unceased:

This is how nirvana is described.

Nāgārjuna - The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way

The Tao [Way] that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching

The ontic, the that-ness of experience is unsayable, but it is in the ontic that reality reveals itself. Words cannot capture it, for it resists all epistemisation. This makes it natural to say what the ontic isn’t, akin to apophatic or negative theology: one gets closer to the unsayable (God in theology) by negating concepts. Here is McGilchrist’s take on what I have named the ontic:

Being, then, is mysterious. The problem is that if we are to say anything about it, we still need some sort of placeholder, within language, for all those aspects of Being that defy direct expression, but which we sense are greater than the reality which language is apt to describe, almost certainly greater than whatever the human mind can comprehend[...] What we need, in fact, is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word. This is no doubt why in every great tradition of thought - and perhaps beyond that, in every language of every people - there is such an un-word. It holds the place for a power that underwrites the existence of everything - the ground of Being; but, as I shall suggest, it holds a place for more than that, otherwise some such phrase as 'ground of Being' would itself be enough. To Heraclitus it was the logos; to Lao Tzu the tao; to Confucius li; in Hinduism Brahman, and to the Vedic tradition rta; in Zen ri; to Arabic peoples, since pre-Islamic times, Allah; to the Hebrews YHWH. And in the Western tradition it is known as God.³

A circuitous path to ancient wisdom indeed. But we must take care: the un-word, the ontic, God, “the ground of Being” (which is a bad phrase as it sets up a new dichotomy) while they sound like some separate existence all-together, aren’t. “It” is everything, and everything is it. By the ontic as the that-ness of experience we may finally come to see that there is no other, something behind or below or above it all. The ontic is unreachable, a limit to the epistemic, not because it is some “reality in itself” infinitely far over there, or behind it all, but because it fundamentally is all, the whole, while the epistemic, what we can say about it, is fundamentally discrete, fragmented, parts of it, and can never be or become the whole in the complete sense that makes the ontic whole. So the metaphor of the ontic as the ideal limit of the epistemic must not be thought of mathematically: the limit is never reached. A comment is in order about the term «God», as it carries connotations, personifications and associations that reach deeply into our historical, religious and cultural roots, perhaps more so than any other term in any language. It perfectly exemplifies polysemy, meaning plurality, and it is impossible to use the term without causing either confusion or conflict. We might perhaps be better served by avoiding such a term, and I much prefer “the ontic”, so as to avoid dragging in millenia of conflict. 

πάντα ῥεῖ - panta rhei - all flows

Heraclitus

The Greek panta can be translated as everything and all, the former obviously putting weight to a materialist interpretation I would like to avoid. Heraclitus also wrote “Yet all things follow from the Word… For wisdom, listen not to me but the Word, and know that all is one.”⁴ Logos is the term the Greeks used for Word, and furthermore “Logos indicates not only the lexical word, but also all means of making ideas known, as well as ideas themselves, the phenomena to which ideas respond, and the rules that govern both phenomena and ideas.”⁵ The parallel between Logos and what I have termed the epistemic should be clear. We also have John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word [Logos] was with God, and the Word [Logos] was God.” What I think both the Greeks and John got wrong is that the unity of all things are not found in the Word, Logos or the epistemic, but in the ontic, the that-ness of experience. The whole is precisely to where the epistemic cannot reach.

We are partners in the creation of the universe, in the flow, the becoming of reality through experience. This gives us a responsibility for what we create, not only «out there» materially, but also epistemically - what ideas and stances we create and shape reality by. Our thoughts are not isolated from the world, they shape us, they shape our ideas, they shape our world view, and thus reality and our experience of it. This quickly turns into platitudes, but let us not allow ourselves to think and epistemise ourselves into self-destruction anymore. I think this gets new meaning when seen against the background of our path here. We must be the change we want to see in the world. It might now be tempting to reduce the entire project down to a return to “the sacred”, and brush it under the carpet. If this is our reaction we have learned little. There is no destination to be reached, the project and process is the aim itself, the whole, and I only hope to have contributed to showing this. 

The Magical Flower of Winter

A world, a glimmer or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.

James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

We are immersed in a flow which we epistemically break down into things and steps, but the flow respects no such reduction. The image of reality as a clockwork mechanism breaks down when the number of gears is taken to infinity - «everything is connected», but we have to replace «everything» by the seamless whole, thus «connected» is no longer meaningful for lack of any «things» to connect. The whole is. The true force of our immersion is the realization of experience, and thus reality, as a whole and seamless flow, and not parts interlinked. We cannot step out of the flow of time, and we cannot extricate ourselves from space, these provide the primordial layers of our immersive context. Things, the divided, are derivative of experience, the undivided. Experience is substantial, not things. Immersion further is a statement about the nature of co-evolution, co-development, co-dependence and co-arisal of experience and everything in it. The world and our experience of it, and the world and our theories of it do not stand in a relationship where one precedes the other: they are mutually becoming, and as such are both mutually shaping and adapting. Nothing is truly separable from anything else, so by taking things out of their immersive context, we inevitably make them something they originally are not. We make of them something else, a new symbol, concept, representation or image, and this new something now has its own existence, its own status. By mistaking our bottom-up reconstruction of the world for the world, we have entered into a narrow world view, which as fanatics we deny the narrowness of. Science in its dominant particularist mode is a success, yes, but one we have fooled ourselves into thinking of as omnipotent. On the contrary we find our experience infinitely richer than the reconstructed parts in it, we find that no closure can be made between the that-ness of our experience and the substrate of science, except to see the latter as a co-creative product of the former, and that this is integral to science being what it is, and not a statement about our current knowledge. Our reality is shaped by our world view, and at no point in time is a reality shift more pressing than our current age. 

I started this project by asking «What is reality?». I hope to have contributed to showing that reality is our experience. Certainly, part of that experience is structured in such a way that it can be discoursed about and manipulated, but only part. The whole that is our experience finds no complete counterpart in the word. The world is no thing, but not «nothing», not a void nor a negative. It is unnamable in that the act of naming it makes it otherwise. In the end, when we have seemingly managed to outline the way of things, when we recognise the holistic character of it all, when reality has been glimpsed, the magical flower known, then still the reality of it will remain ineffable. We cannot capture it, the truth of it as a whole is something we can only be, and we can only be it when we try not to, because in trying we unavoidably frame it, and thus it slips from our hands. Epistemically we have reduced only its outline, it is the outline that has become part of our web, what the outline stands against eludes capture. And further, as is the case with everything, both the trace and what has been traced is ever-changing, always new because reality is always new, no piece of it fixed. The web is always changing, but this as well is just an image. Philosophy and science does not end. 

There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

Roberto Bolaño - 2666

There is no language outside language, no philosophy outside philosophy. Experience however subsumes both language and philosophy. The epistemic cannot transcend itself, but we as experiencers can transcend the epistemic. The magical flower of winter is an image, albeit not a logical one, because the reality that it is an image of, our reality, is not solely logical: the flower growing ceaselessly of itself, its roots embedded in its own flowerhead, source and culmination same, yet different, always renewing. It is the fountainhead whose flow is fed by its own waters. There are no levels here, start or end, no bottom or top, no front or back, the flower flowingly unfolding is all there is, with no background to it. This is holism. The most valuable lesson this view of reality affords us is of the power of our world views - through them we shape reality. Becoming aware of this, renewing our understanding of our experience and our own agency in reality, this is the magical flower of winter.

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References

Bergson, H. (1998). Creative Evolution. Dover Publications. [1907]

Bolaño, R. (2009). 2666. Picador. [2004]

Tzu, L. Tao Te Ching. URL=Lao Tzu - Oxford Reference 

Heraclitus (2003). Fragments (Transl. Haxton, B.). Penguin Classics. 

James, J. (2003). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin Classics. [1916]

James, W. (1909). A Pluralistic Universe. Longmans, Green & Company.

McCarthy, C. (2010). The Crossing. Pan McMillan. [1994]

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things. Perspectiva.

Nāgārjuna (1996). The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Transl. Garfield, J. L.). Oxford University Press. 

Nietzsche, F. (2017). The Will to Power. Penguin Classics [1901]

Yourcenar, M. (2005). Memoirs of Hadrian. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [1951]

1. The Plurality of Experience.

2. What about psychosis and hallucination? Individually disordered experience cannot impact the order of the experience of others, because their reality is already ordered. A shared disordered experience would require mass psychosis.

3. McGilchrist (2021) p. 1200.

4. Heraclitus (2003).

5. From the translator's notes in Heraclitus (2003).