Sometimes, someone says something you’ve heard before, lots of times, and it’s like you’re hearing it, really hearing it, for the first time. You know?
This happened to me last week at the eye doctor’s, a stylish spot on Abbott Kinney in Venice with all and only international designer frames, exposed concrete walls and big coffee tables books about LA and California that had me daydreaming even though I live here. (I loved it.) I was reading those letters with one eye covered, alternating, right eye, left eye, as instructed. Then I could see it all again, with both eyes. I think I said something to the optometrist like, whoa, that really makes a difference, to which he responded, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” And I sat there, feeling like I was hearing that for the first time ever, seeing clearly again, and it all felt very profound. Maybe it was adding another sense in that made it all make deeper sense.
I looked up the origin of the quote and it seems as though it’s a misquoted quote of Aristotle’s, as it is really, instead, I guess, about Emergence, the properties of a system, or that which “…refers to the existence or formation of collective behaviors — what parts of a system do together that they would not do alone.” (From the New England Complex Systems Institute. A complex name.) This author says the quote would instead be something like, “The System is something beside, and not the same, as its elements.” (And now I know, thanks to that site, that there’s something called an International Council on Systems Engineering and that one can become certified as a Systems Engineering Professional and this is all feeling very complex, but also makes sense, and I’m reminded of how complex is not a synonym for complicated.)
Things have the meaning we give them, anyway, and I think both quotes, both concepts, both aphorisms, feel special and make sense. Or, makes senses.