Seeing the Whole Picture
33
The psychologist Julian Jaynes found that the concept of consciousness is absent
from the ancient Greek epics, and suggested that the very realization that living
beings are conscious had not yet entered collective awareness.
The same is true today with the idea that we see and think in Gestalts—for
example, that when I look at my rosebush I perceive it all together as one
thing, and the meaning of “a cat is on the sofa” forms one unit in awareness.
(The six words join together to form one meaning.) Those things are just as
evident as the fact that you’re conscious: Nobody, for example, would deny
that they see in Gestalts. But there’s a difference between not denying it and
being committed to it. One may judge something to be undeniably true, yet
ignore it. That appears to be the status of Gestalt in much of contemporary
thinking.
There is no word in the English language to refer to Gestalts, and that
is the reason we are obliged to adopt a word from the German. A dictionary
definition of the word Gestalt is as follows: Something that is made of multiple
parts, yet when considered as a whole, it is more than (and different from) the
sum of its parts. Since everything we see, hear and think is a Gestalt, it is
hard to understand why there is no word in our language to express it. Even
in German, the word Gestalt does not have the same meaning as the English
dictionary gives it. The German word is used worldwide to express something
for which there was no word in any language prior to the 20th Century.
It appears that nobody today—not psychologists, not philosophers, not
thinking laymen—are fully aware of how “magical” it is to see in Gestalt
wholes. It gives us knowledge of many things in the same moment, all bound
together in one act of conscious awareness. It presents us with an almost godlike
overview of wide, stretched-out vistas. Gestalt vision can bring us a view of a
whole vast landscape of rivers, villages and distant mountains, all in a single
glance. Actually, it does far more than that: A Gestalt picture does not merely
bind separate objects together, but creates an entirely new complex entity which
did not exist before. It creates a new world of hierarchically structured new
objects—a world which could not exist without Gestalt perception.
A paradigm example of a Gestalt is a simple pattern such as the pattern
of seven stars forming the Big Dipper. The stars are merely points of light:
the pattern emerges when they are seen together, spread out in a particular
configuration. All seven points must be seen simultaneously in order for the
pattern to emerge. Each point must be noticed, and all seven must be taken
into account at the same time, along with the way they are laid out spatially.
Every one of these details, without exception, must be present in awareness
together.
33
The psychologist Julian Jaynes found that the concept of consciousness is absent
from the ancient Greek epics, and suggested that the very realization that living
beings are conscious had not yet entered collective awareness.
The same is true today with the idea that we see and think in Gestalts—for
example, that when I look at my rosebush I perceive it all together as one
thing, and the meaning of “a cat is on the sofa” forms one unit in awareness.
(The six words join together to form one meaning.) Those things are just as
evident as the fact that you’re conscious: Nobody, for example, would deny
that they see in Gestalts. But there’s a difference between not denying it and
being committed to it. One may judge something to be undeniably true, yet
ignore it. That appears to be the status of Gestalt in much of contemporary
thinking.
There is no word in the English language to refer to Gestalts, and that
is the reason we are obliged to adopt a word from the German. A dictionary
definition of the word Gestalt is as follows: Something that is made of multiple
parts, yet when considered as a whole, it is more than (and different from) the
sum of its parts. Since everything we see, hear and think is a Gestalt, it is
hard to understand why there is no word in our language to express it. Even
in German, the word Gestalt does not have the same meaning as the English
dictionary gives it. The German word is used worldwide to express something
for which there was no word in any language prior to the 20th Century.
It appears that nobody today—not psychologists, not philosophers, not
thinking laymen—are fully aware of how “magical” it is to see in Gestalt
wholes. It gives us knowledge of many things in the same moment, all bound
together in one act of conscious awareness. It presents us with an almost godlike
overview of wide, stretched-out vistas. Gestalt vision can bring us a view of a
whole vast landscape of rivers, villages and distant mountains, all in a single
glance. Actually, it does far more than that: A Gestalt picture does not merely
bind separate objects together, but creates an entirely new complex entity which
did not exist before. It creates a new world of hierarchically structured new
objects—a world which could not exist without Gestalt perception.
A paradigm example of a Gestalt is a simple pattern such as the pattern
of seven stars forming the Big Dipper. The stars are merely points of light:
the pattern emerges when they are seen together, spread out in a particular
configuration. All seven points must be seen simultaneously in order for the
pattern to emerge. Each point must be noticed, and all seven must be taken
into account at the same time, along with the way they are laid out spatially.
Every one of these details, without exception, must be present in awareness
together.