Apr 2, 2026 06:43 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 2, 2026 10:31 PM by Magical Realist.)
Between the breaking down into components that is reductionism and the combinational summing of them into one whole that is holism there must be a dynamic interplay. On a daily basis we use both ways of understanding the world, going back and forth between them with no problem. Logically speaking they are contradictory and mutually exclusive.
But in reality they are merely the end stops of a knob we keep turning up and down. Neither represents the true situation. It is the turning itself that is reality--the phenomenal experience of the alternating disjunction and conjunction of things and events not as some objective static third state but as one dialectical activity by which we live in the world.
Hence we develop in our lives a fundamental intuition or visceral "feel" for how the explainability of the world which is science and the meaningfulness of experience which is spirituality work together even if we can never rationally grasp how. We learn to live understandingly in a reality that somehow perfectly blends the two rival worldviews into one experiential and poetic unity.
I actually found this online long after I wrote this:
"Like cognitive psychologists, cultural psychologists distinguish between two ways of thinking, which they refer to as “holistic thinking” and “analytic thinking” (Koo et al., 2018; Nisbett et al., 2001; Norenzayan et al., 2002; Yama & Zakaria, 2019). Holistic thinking is thereby commonly correlated with Asian religions that focus on a non-dualist union of opposites, such as Taoism and Buddhism, while analytic thinking is correlated with European philosophies and sciences that focus on the laws of identity and non-contradiction, such as Aristotelian logic and Newtonian physics (Nisbett, 2003; Peng et al., 2006; Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2018; Wong, 2006; Yama & Zakaria, 2019).
According to Peng and Nisbett (1999, pp. 741–742), Asians and Euro-Americans think differently, particularly in their reactions to contradictions. They recognize four psychological reactions to contradictions, namely: denying there is a contradiction, discounting pieces of information that suggest a contradiction, differentiating between contradictory pieces of information by preferring one over another, and reconciling with the equal truth of contradictory pieces of information. Peng and Nisbett typically describe this fourth reaction of a reconciliation of contradictions as “dialectical thinking.”-- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...4241245147
The difference between their view and mine is that they see the dialectic of analytical and holistic thinking in terms of another kind of thinking whereas I see this dialectic as a lived and experiential process occurring over a period of time. My view suggests the Jungian model of the archetypal conjunction of opposites that occurs thru the psychic synthesis of reductionistic thinking and holistic intuition. It is a lived and largely transformative process often expressed symbolically and metaphorically in our lives and can't be parsed out into either analytical or holistic terms. It is neither secular nor spiritual but rather creative and phenomenal.
But in reality they are merely the end stops of a knob we keep turning up and down. Neither represents the true situation. It is the turning itself that is reality--the phenomenal experience of the alternating disjunction and conjunction of things and events not as some objective static third state but as one dialectical activity by which we live in the world.
Hence we develop in our lives a fundamental intuition or visceral "feel" for how the explainability of the world which is science and the meaningfulness of experience which is spirituality work together even if we can never rationally grasp how. We learn to live understandingly in a reality that somehow perfectly blends the two rival worldviews into one experiential and poetic unity.
I actually found this online long after I wrote this:
"Like cognitive psychologists, cultural psychologists distinguish between two ways of thinking, which they refer to as “holistic thinking” and “analytic thinking” (Koo et al., 2018; Nisbett et al., 2001; Norenzayan et al., 2002; Yama & Zakaria, 2019). Holistic thinking is thereby commonly correlated with Asian religions that focus on a non-dualist union of opposites, such as Taoism and Buddhism, while analytic thinking is correlated with European philosophies and sciences that focus on the laws of identity and non-contradiction, such as Aristotelian logic and Newtonian physics (Nisbett, 2003; Peng et al., 2006; Spencer-Rodgers et al., 2018; Wong, 2006; Yama & Zakaria, 2019).
According to Peng and Nisbett (1999, pp. 741–742), Asians and Euro-Americans think differently, particularly in their reactions to contradictions. They recognize four psychological reactions to contradictions, namely: denying there is a contradiction, discounting pieces of information that suggest a contradiction, differentiating between contradictory pieces of information by preferring one over another, and reconciling with the equal truth of contradictory pieces of information. Peng and Nisbett typically describe this fourth reaction of a reconciliation of contradictions as “dialectical thinking.”-- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...4241245147
The difference between their view and mine is that they see the dialectic of analytical and holistic thinking in terms of another kind of thinking whereas I see this dialectic as a lived and experiential process occurring over a period of time. My view suggests the Jungian model of the archetypal conjunction of opposites that occurs thru the psychic synthesis of reductionistic thinking and holistic intuition. It is a lived and largely transformative process often expressed symbolically and metaphorically in our lives and can't be parsed out into either analytical or holistic terms. It is neither secular nor spiritual but rather creative and phenomenal.