"But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence"
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“Nowadays” is doing a lot of work here: Bohm isn’t just defining a term, he’s diagnosing a cultural habit of mind. He’s pushing back on the loose, modern tendency to call anything “whole” just because it’s large, harmonious, or neatly assembled. For Bohm, “whole” is a stricter, more unsettling claim: parts don’t merely interact; they co-create each other’s identity. Their “meaning” and even their “existence” aren’t portable. Remove a part from the system and you haven’t isolated a component; you’ve changed what it was.
That insistence tracks with Bohm’s wider project in physics and philosophy, especially his discomfort with fragmentation as the default worldview. In quantum theory, the observer can’t be cleanly separated from the observed; in Bohm’s own thinking (later framed through his “implicate order”), what looks like distinct objects may be surface features of a deeper, enfolded continuity. The quote reads like a warning label: if you keep treating the world as a pile of separable units, you’ll misunderstand not only nature, but language, society, and the self.
The subtext is quietly radical: interdependence isn’t a sentimental ethics; it’s an ontological constraint. “Mutual action” is the easy part, the network diagram everyone can draw. Bohm’s sharper point is that meaning itself is relational, so the quest for purely self-contained definitions, identities, and “objective” standpoints is structurally flawed. In an era that loved systems talk but still worshipped individual parts, he’s arguing that the real whole is not a sum. It’s a condition where separation becomes a convenient fiction rather than a neutral fact.
That insistence tracks with Bohm’s wider project in physics and philosophy, especially his discomfort with fragmentation as the default worldview. In quantum theory, the observer can’t be cleanly separated from the observed; in Bohm’s own thinking (later framed through his “implicate order”), what looks like distinct objects may be surface features of a deeper, enfolded continuity. The quote reads like a warning label: if you keep treating the world as a pile of separable units, you’ll misunderstand not only nature, but language, society, and the self.
The subtext is quietly radical: interdependence isn’t a sentimental ethics; it’s an ontological constraint. “Mutual action” is the easy part, the network diagram everyone can draw. Bohm’s sharper point is that meaning itself is relational, so the quest for purely self-contained definitions, identities, and “objective” standpoints is structurally flawed. In an era that loved systems talk but still worshipped individual parts, he’s arguing that the real whole is not a sum. It’s a condition where separation becomes a convenient fiction rather than a neutral fact.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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