ABSTRACT
In this chapter, John Mackey reviews three perspectives (Macmurray, von Wright and Pauli/Jung) that serve to demonstrate that holisms never describe the whole. Macmurray carefully builds a case from a base of immediate experience that three unique “sciences” exist. He calls them unity patterns and they apply to different areas of human experience. Von Wright considers two main traditions in the history of ideas that he calls Aristotelian and Galilean. The Galilean tradition came to its full flowering with the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. Known as ‘positivism’, its tenets are methodological monism or the unity of method across the subject matter studied and the view that the exact natural sciences set a methodological standard for all other sciences. The second tradition goes back to Aristotle’s idea of a final cause. The third perspective is dual-aspect monism. We see this perspective emerge in the collaborative efforts of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli. One of the fruits of this collaboration was a perspective that Harald Atmanspacher calls dual-aspect monism.
Commonalities and differences of the three perspectives are examined. The specific example of the psyche as described by complexity theory and Jung’s psychology shows holisms incapable of describing the whole.
