Today I was going to write a short post about the phrase “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” However, when I went to look it up, I learned that it is actually a misquote! It’s a mashup of two quotes.
The first, from Aristotle (source):
the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts
The second, from Euclid (source):
The whole is greater than the part
I’ve learned something today. Which makes it a good day.
I like considering these two quotes together, though, now that I’ve found them. The whole being both greater than the part (singular) and besides the parts (plural) is an interesting pairing. Collecting parts together into “a mere heap” gives you quantitatively more stuff, but functionally you just have the same pieces, in a new location. But some whole that is not a mere heap is giving you something that is not quite an amalgamation of the parts. It may be hard to say a priori if it is better or worse, more or less, from a functional or metaphysical perspective. But it is “besides the parts.” It is different.