SHARE Magazine, Philosophy Sharing Foundation, Issue 21 | January 2025
Thomas O. Scarborough is a Congregational minister, author, and former UK philosophy editor. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa and holds two Master’s degrees spanning four fields: theology, linguistics, and local and global leadership. He has published in peer-reviewed journals across six disciplines: philosophy, theology, electronics, gnomonics, organology, and optics. He is also the author of Everything, Briefly: A Postmodern Philosophy and This Town: A Complete Metaphysics and has been invited by the Philosophy Sharing Foundation to deliver the annual philosophy lecture on 20 March 2025, focusing on the theme of holism. In this interview, Ian Rizzo engages Thomas O. Scarborough in a discussion about his philosophy and insights into this vital aspect of metaphysics.
This interview is to appear shortly in (click here) SHARE Magazine, January 2025.
1. Where did your interest in holism begin?
My interest in holism may well have started in my childhood. I was born to parents whose contexts were worlds apart, having grown up in democratic and fascist countries respectively. Then, before I turned five, I had visited four continents, and lived in various cultures old and new. I began to wonder how it all fitted together. By the time I entered university studies, I was on a serious quest.
2. How would you describe the core of your thoughts on holism?
To put it simply, imagine that a professor writes an “x” on the blackboard. Let us assume, too, that he defines it. As soon as he does that, his x rigorously and ruthlessly excludes everything that is not x. To imagine this, we may draw a circle around the x. Everything outside this circle is now unnamed and undefined. This unnamed and undefined, I call the nameless Whole. However, this is to put it too simply. Our world contains, so to speak, many x’es. Yet even if one multiplies x’es, they collectively exclude everything they do not name and define.
3. You make a distinction between two kinds of whole. Could you expand on this?
We tend to define a whole in terms of its parts. This is the kind of whole that one tends to find in dictionaries. I shall call it a finite whole. As an example, the Collins Dictionary states that a whole is “a single thing which contains several different parts”. With this kind of whole, we can name the parts, and define them. We can even name the whole: “This whole is the environment,” or “This whole is an engine.” The nameless Whole is quite the opposite. It is everything that is not named, and not defined. Therefore it cannot have any parts, because parts have names and definitions. We now have two kinds of whole. The nameless Whole (capitalised), and the finite whole (not capitalised). The nameless Whole lies beyond all finite wholes.
4. In holistic thinking, how do we objectively define what constitutes ‘the whole’?
My view of the whole differs from the standard view of the whole. Encyclopedia Britannica offers another definition of the whole as “having all the parts”. My own definition is far more expansive. One could describe reality as a photo with a photo negative. The standard view sees only the whole that is the photo. My concept of the whole includes both the photo and the photo negative. It is a rough analogy. We can objectively state that the terms and concepts we use (the photo) exclude everything they do not include (the photo negative). Unfortunately it is not easy to determine what the “photo negative” is. It requires effort. But once we see the need to understand this, we apply the effort.
5. It has been said, intriguingly, that you unite Eastern and Western thought. How is this?
Lao Tzu said, “The Nameless is the beginning of the ten thousand things.” The origin of things is beyond names. It is beyond definitions. Out of this Nameless, then, the ten thousand things emerge. That is, uncountable things, since Lao Tzu had little idea of any figures larger than ten thousand. Let us call those things which emerge from the nameless Whole x’es. Everything beyond our x’es is unnamed and undefined. In one way or another, we find this written all over Western philosophy. For example, contemporary philosopher Brian Cronin writes, “Data of sense … is undifferentiated, unquestioned, preconceptual, unnamed …’ Thus with the help of the simple logic of x and not x, we unite the “Nameless” of the East with the “unnamed” of the West.
6. You have said that this is not about mere abstractions, but applies to the world as we know it.
Philosophy needs to apply to the world, otherwise it can not be of much use to it. I think the reason why many people find, say, Aristotle or Kant so interesting is that they see how the thought of these philosophers applies to the world. A part of one’s growing maturity in philosophy is one’s growing understanding of what all the abstractions mean in our everyday lives.
7. Could you give us some examples as to how the nameless Whole applies to reality?
Most basically, it means that there are things which exist beyond our x’es which are unnamed and undefined – if then we may still call them “things”! They are out of the picture. They are off the charts. They are out of the discussion. One may take, as a major example, language – and every kind of language – say, the languages of maths, science, or ordinary English. Imagine language as a great assemblage of x’es – or a great assemblage of words. Words are like x’es, in that they, too, rigorously and ruthlessly exclude everything that does not belong to them. Given that this is true, whenever we speak words, we cut off a vast amount of our reality. All of a sudden, we realise that we exclude dangerous amounts of things from our thinking.
8. Could you make this more concrete?
A major example is big data. Science, within our own generation, has quietly entered a major new phase. We had Newtonian physics, Einsteinian physics, quantum mechanics, and now, big data – which is extremely large data sets which we analyse computationally. The more data we have, and the more processing power, the more perfectly we can tailor any number of things and processes to our needs and desires. Insurances, medicines, travel routes, and so on. But our computations – our algorithms – are interested only in those things that the algorithms include. Everything else, they cut off. It is excluded from our thinking, and from the thinking of our machines. This means that nature is excluded, which suffers greatly as a result.
9. How does your view of the finite whole apply to reality?
I focus in particular on the tendency of finite wholes to be myopic – which is to say, short-sighted. Finite wholes lose touch with the nameless Whole. They forget, as it were, that there is anything which exists beyond their own names and definitions. To give us some examples of such finite wholes, I take ethics, education, and God. Ethics may become myopic – for instance, focusing only on my own self, my own tribe, on elites, ideologies, and many other x’es. Education may become myopic, where the words that we find in textbooks cut off the world. So may arguments for God – focusing very narrowly on the bare existence of God. In the process, they lose a God who could ever be relevant to us.
10. Is there something good in all of this?
Yes, certainly. We have run into enormous troubles in our time, because we have failed to look up and see the limitations of finite wholes, and failed to see the nameless Whole beyond them. All that glitters has not been gold – and careful consideration of the nameless Whole suggests why. As soon as we understand our blindness to things unnamed and undefined, we may begin to understand what our problems are. And when we understand what our problems are, we begin to work on better solutions.
11. In today’s world of hyper-specialisation, how can holistic thinking maintain relevance without diluting the depth of knowledge required in specific disciplines?
Everywhere, we have specialisation and hyper-specialisation. A hyper-focus omits everything it does not include. This poses a huge threat especially to nature, but also to society. An early problem was the internal combustion engine. We discovered that our specialised focus on the engine missed a Pandora’s box of problems. Since then, we have many more examples, such as radioactive contamination, and SF6. While we may try to remedy the narrow focus we had, this only goes so far. I propose that we hand over nature to itself, to such a large extent that our specialisation is too small for it to matter what humans are doing. This has been proposed before, with different reasoning, for example by Edward O. Wilson.
12. Considering the vastness of the whole, do you think focusing on it risks overwhelming us, making it difficult to know where to begin? Would starting with the study of particulars offer a more grounded approach to understanding the whole?
It often happens in life that we make a finite whole our focus. We erase all other things from our awareness. We focus on a tree, for instance. We focus on a motor car, or a camera. And all too often, we let a pot boil over because our focus was too narrow! Sometimes, it is necessary to have a narrow focus. However, I emphasise in my philosophy that we dare not exclude that which lies outside entities or concepts – outside terms and words – that we use when we focus. We must always be aware of the pot on the stove. It is about awareness.
13. Considering the interconnectedness of systems, doesn’t a holistic approach sometimes slow down decision-making due to its complexity? How do you propose leaders or policymakers balance holistic understanding with the need for timely decisions?
In my philosophy, all of our thinking is reduced. Even so called holistic thinking is reduced. It is reduced because its terms and concepts are named and defined, and deliberately limited. They exclude all that lies outside them. In fact, to try to open ourselves up to all considerations is impossible. We must reduce. The interconnectedness of systems may make things impossibly complex – yet I know from leadership that seemingly simple judgement calls may draw on vast intuition. We need to develop the ‘holistic’ minds that fuel the intuition.
14. What significance might your thinking have for Malta?
Malta seems to me to be an enormously diverse and cultivated society. One can hardly imagine a place with a greater richness of history, culture, and industry. Malta could reach out to the unnamed Whole by introducing philosophy as a required subject in schools.
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