Sum of the Parts: Omelettes and Eggs

The adage 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs' has been used as an analogy for sometimes having to destroy to build. It could also be said to be a whole (omelette) made which is more than the sum of its parts (the eggs). It could also mean that an omelette can only exist in the future because of the past existence of chickens and their eggs. Or that the independence of an individual has to be cracked to form the bonds of a group or team. Or it can just be an observation on a recipe regarding the key ingredients for an omelette.

Whatever way the omelette and eggs analogy works it is dependent on context. Aristotle saw how language provided some of this context and provided us with some definitions to aid our thinking, as I mentioned in Sum of the Parts: Bricks and Walls.

Language, of course is another example of the eggs and bricks that go to make our omelettes and walls. Words are put together, organised and shaped into structures, from sentences, to paragraphs to prose, to poetry and lyrics. They are written and spoken and thought. 

The whole of language is more than the sum of its parts.That is the point. It would not communicate if it wasn't. If it did not become more than its component parts it would not serve its purpose. 

So eggs may be cracked for an omelette to illustrate:

• Building needs destruction
• A whole can have parts
• The future is built on the past
• Individuals bond in teams
• An omelette recipe

Whatever the reason, nobody will care without the context, which language provides as content and product ie. the eggs and the omelette. And we certainly, in this situation, can answer the age-old question: Which came first the chicken or the egg? If there is a first, then the chicken had to come first because the egg became part of an omelette which meant it didn't have the opportunity to become a chicken.

Such is the power of the components of language that it can put forward the most ridiculous of arguments.

Sum of the Parts: Bricks and Walls

'The whole is more than the sum of the parts'

Attributed to Aristotle (350 BCE), this quote is but a crude summary of the Greek translation of the following discussion of a 'difficulty which has been stated with respect both to definitions and to numbers, what is the cause of their unity?' (Metaphysics, Book VIII, Part 6).

Aristitle (Ibid) outlines it thus:

'In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something beside the parts, there is a cause; for even in bodies contact is the cause of unity in some cases, and in others viscosity or some other such quality' (Ibid).

Aristotle (Ibid) considers the difficulty lies with the language we use to define the problem:

"Clearly, then, if people proceed thus in their usual manner of definition and speech, they cannot explain and solve the difficulty. But if, as we say, one element is matter and another is form, and one is potentially and the other actually, the question will no longer be thought a difficulty.'

So we differentiate with description of form using language, calling something what it is in terms of shape, function or other such quantiiative and qualatitive measuremnet...what it actually is . And the matter has the potential to be shaped or organized into the form. Encyclopedia Britanica describe it as follows: 'bricks and mortar are the matter that, given one form, become a house, or, given another, become a wall.'

Does that make the 'whole' the form and the 'parts' the matter?

Should then the adage read:

'The form is more than the sum of matter'?

Is the house more than the walls, the walls more than the bricks and the brick more than the clay?
Or if as Aristotle put it 'the whole is something beside the parts' and whether it is for the purpose of a brick, wall or house, it is simply the form in which the matter has been orgainzed and the 'the cause of unity'.

Aristotle (350 BCE) Metaphysics, Translation, Ross, W. D., Online Version, [Accessed April, 4th, 2015]

More on bricks & walls: On Writing & Finishing