The whole and the parts

The whole and the parts 

Cycling through the Dutch countryside, wondering why the flocks of Canadian geese haven't left yet, despite the time of the year, despite the temperature that has been around the freezing point for some time now, I listen to a podcast of The infinite monkey cage about ghosts. Its enjoyable but predictable, until Neil deGrasse Tyson remarked that we shouldn't be talking about bodies without heads but about heads without bodies; not "off with his head" but "off with his body". It's a clever remark: there are too many prejudiced embodied in our languages and our ways of thinking. We know that the head is the critical part of a person but we insist on talking about it as if it were a secondary limb. We equate the body with the person rather than seeing it as an extension of the head. Looking around, I have to acknowledge that similar biases exist everywhere, mostly in favour of the interfaces through which we interact with things: computer screens are the computer (especially now that many respond to touch); the tabletop is often the table. But with bodies and heads, it's different and more intriguing. Is it just that the biggest of the two dominates or does it have with old ideas like Plato's belief that the head is just a blood cooler? I think it's more than that. We don't often fall in love with just a head but falling in love with just a body is rather common. In the domain of intricate relations between the whole and the parts, bodies occupy a particular position.