less representational forms, finally to that which is wholly speculative reason, or reason reflecting only reason, as the unity of idea and reality.24 But there was no such thing as “natural” religion or “natural” theology. The majority of people he influenced in the later nineteenth century and twentieth century (Feuerbach, Marx, Strauss, Nietzsche, and others) have either been interested only in the process of thought he elaborated, or they have been critics who saw religion simply as a projection of the human species or human predicament, but not providing any truth about some “God” or human’s relation to that God, much less to some bifurcation of humanity by God. For example, in Marx’s treatment of Hegel, the estrangement within humanity occurs not by some spiritual power, but by an economic division in which the people who are disproportionately left out have no solace but religion whose eschatology can serve as an opiate for them.
Parts That Make Whole, a Whole Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
Can humanity move beyond what seems to be such an arbitrary bifurcation of humanity? Can we actually see ourselves and all others as vital, interdependent parts of the whole? Can we envision that not only as an ideal but as a reality, a symbiotic inclusive relationship? The naturalist John Muir once said, when we try to take some element of nature and isolate it, we discover that it is connected to everything. But what about humans? That points to an old cliché, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” One can illustrate that by listing parts of the human body, of an automobile, a book, a computer, or a galaxy. There is no doubt that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so the parts must be joined as a whole. Separately, they are elements whose full potential has not been actualized.
Each part must be related to other parts within a whole, although the parts and whole can vary in size from a microscopic object not visible to the naked eye, to galaxies and more galaxies and the expanding universe of which all those galaxies are but small parts. Our scientists have observed and calculated that the universe continues to expand, creating a continually larger whole, and some like Sean Carroll speculate there may be yet other universes.25 On the other hand, extremely tiny organisms can be spoken of as “wholes” since by microscopic or other means such as MRIs we are able to distinguish “parts” that comprise them as relatively self-sustaining.
Even when we think only spatially, we are aware that any number of perspectives would give us quite different pictures of specific parts and specific wholes. The human perspective is always very relative or relational. If our ancestors objected to earth being anything but flat, so everything seen was upright, they did so because they could not conceive of humans or other living species living on the “bottom” side without falling off into space.26 But these days we are aware that gravitational power comes into play to give us a new perspective, even though it is possible only by imagination to think of others on a “bottom” side as really not being on a “bottom” after all, that there is no “bottom” or “right side up.” Wherever we travel within this gravitational power, we still see people in our visible world as standing upright without bodies, buildings, frogs, and bulldozers flying off it, and when we go to the “other side” we still see others standing upright without falling away. In our presence, they are always standing erect without having to hold on to Mother Earth in order not “fall down” (fall away); our imagination comes into play only when we are on one side of the globe, trying to envision what it is like opposite to where we are. We now know that in space, beyond the gravitational grasp, directions such as east, west, north, south, or even up and down are insufficient directions. Even within the power of gravity, we know that commercial pilots learn to trust their instruments rather than their own senses when they fly at several thousand feet and find themselves lacking visible markers to indicate whether they are right side up or upside down, ascending or descending, and so forth.
That does not mean that our senses often deceive us, as Descartes suggested, for which Nietzsche ridiculed him.27 But every spatial location provides a different sensation, a different perspective, so when one sees a city from an airplane window up 30,000 feet, it looks nothing like it does when one is on the ground. Nevertheless, we learn through observation, analogies, and various means of comparison to “make corrections” as we synthesize sensations from different angles, at least to give the entity sensed a single identity and then name it. While the name may be very arbitrary, connecting with nothing else we know, the thinking of the identity, as a unity produced from disparate single sensations, can be meaningful as one learns to relate the parts to form the whole. It is even more complex than Kant’s terms indicated, but he seems to have been correct that the final product is a synthetic unit pieced together by one imagination.
However, one must also think of changes caused by time. While we continue to take “still” photos, we know that nothing is still, that a “still” camera itself is actually in movement with both its operator as well as the object being photographed as the earth moves around its sun in different angles. It is all relative. If one views a person’s baby photo and compares it to the person’s portrait when he was seventy, if one has not known the person during those years, there may not be enough similarities in the shapes seen to make their identity as the same person. The spatial and temporal perspectives can be very complex but are necessary to any understanding.
Kant had emphasized that what we can “understand” requires not merely a sensible experience, which supplies information to our mind, but our mind itself has certain a priori categories that sensible experience must meet to be “understood.” These included time and space, as the conditions necessary for any intuition, but also the logical a priori categories of judgment of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. He explained that the individual sensations that meet these criteria are grouped together in a sequence to form a synthetic a priori picture.28
Even if one cannot accept Kant’s entire explanation, whether Kant was correct in all respects about what is a priori and what is not, one can still experience the ability to conceive things as parts or wholes. We do know that the human mind is a complex repository of stimuli which senses and perceives, but also classifies, compares, accepts and rejects, stores, and retrieves data for a person’s usage. We understand through experiments that the brain does this rapidly, utilizing different sections of the brain for different jobs, and that it often intensifies impressions it receives by adding dopamine to make it emotionally loaded. Further, we know that the brain operated in this fashion prior to forming or capturing any language, that its ability to receive, classify, and recall music was probably even earlier than its language hard-wiring.29
For the point I am illustrating, it matters not whether those categories are determined as a priori as long as they seem logical. There definitely is a process that goes on. We do know that the human mind can imagine or visualize things that are both real or sheer fantasy. It can form realistic composites or even concoct surrealistic images as a composite of a variety of different data, which gets mutilated or is assembled in an unusual if not startling position, none of which might represent reality as we sense it. Many people experience these surrealistic things in dreams, under heavy sedation, or even as great art as in works of Georgio de Chirico, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, or others. So the mind can do all kinds of things with “parts” and “wholes.”
This process of synthesizing a whole from manifold single sensations seems reasonable.30 But the process must meet certain conditions of common experience to be realistically meaningful. What those conditions are might be illustrated today, encompassing both the elements of space and time, as well as vision and sound, by simply reviewing the process of making a “sound movie” (more easily illustrated with the old celluloid films, which had to be processed). If one wanted to film a story for a movie of ninety minutes duration, and the projector was set to run sixteen frames per second, then, in order to make the connections and movement “realistic,” one would also set the camera at sixteen frames per second. So the number of still frames that would be needed would be 86,400. (If the projector were to run at speeds more or less, the realistic picture would be obtained only by setting the camera to that particular speed. Any variation by the camera speed presents either a very
