The Holographic View of Argument WILLIAM R. BROWN Dept. of Communication The Ohio State University 154 North Oval Mall Columbus, Ohio 43210-1360 U.S.A.
ABSTRACT: After relating metaphor to knowledge dependent upon argument, the essay discusses the hologram as the metaphor of an holistic version of argument; this view is complementary to elementalism. The essay treats paradox as the prime place for invention and as the key to stasis. KEY WORDS: Argument, holism, hologram, invention, metaphor, paradox, stasis.
With the work of Perelman, scholars saw clearly the beginning of a view of argument truly complementary to the traditional elementalist stress on the division of a question into its parts. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca were holistic rather than elementalist not only in their overall insistence that the province of formal reason was shared by the non-formal logic of rhetoric and therefore that the Kantian conviction-persuasion dichotomy vis-d-vis knowledge was a false one, but also in their vision of human nature. From their holistic vantage point, "The error is that of conceiving man as made up of a set of completely independent faculties."' It followed for Perelman not only that the parts of argument invented by human beings are interdependent but also that argument always occurs in the "totality" of a "comprehensive vision" providing the "overall framework of our knowledge and aspirations." 2 This essay extends this holistic conception of argument by recourse to the hologram, which as metaphor for the nature of argument emphasizes not the knowledge that comes from seeing the parts in a whole but rather that which arises from seeing the whole in each part. Three aspects of the latter face of argument are discussed: metaphor as knowledge, the hologram as metaphor, and holographic argument as knowledge.
METAPHOR AS KNOWLEDGE
As Perelman has noted, for more than a generation Anglo-American scholars have considered the importance of metaphor to philosophical and creative thought.3 To add to what Perelman has said, one notes that Argumentation 1(1987) 89-102. © 1987 by D. Reidel PublishingCompany.
90
WILLIAM R. BROWN
philosophers and theoretical scientists have treated metaphor as the route to knowledge of knowledging. With knowledge considered to be making sense both (1) as meaning for and (2) as experience of the world, these thinkers have expatiated on both the generative and reflective uses of metaphor in the knowledge enterprise. Some, like Black and Berggren, have argued - as in the instance of how the metaphor of hydraulics for electricity generated partial understanding and control of the latter - the extent to which the investigator must self-consciously remain aware that metaphor is active in the reaching of conclusions.4 Others, like Pepper and contemporary physicist Roger Jones, have emphasized - though each for different rhetorical purposes the extent to which the scholar loses sight of generative metaphor in the accumulation of knowledge.5 Jones, at pains to "reject the myth of reality as external to the human mind" and to "acknowledge consciousness as the source of the cosmos," uses his book to expose as forgotten metaphors the categories in physics of causal time, structural space, physical matter, and numbers themselves. 6 Pepper, less concerned with the universal mind as the "real" reality and more interested in promoting enlightened competition in the race to knowledge, advocates four heretofore hidden "root" metaphors as the sources of hypotheses (to him the only alternative to mysticism, animism, and dogmatism): Similarity, the Lever or the Electromagnetic Field, the Historical Act, and the Organism. 7 Through work like this, as one sees the apparently crucial importance either of "live" or '"faded" metaphor to the gaining of knowledge, the possibility arises that both the "live" and "faded" stances on metaphor serve argument and knowledge well. That possibility becomes more credible when one remembers what Perelman suggested in both The New Rhetoric and The Realm of Rhetoric and stated flatly during a colloquium only a year before his death: The domain of rhetoric is that of confused ideas. 8 Ideas are confused not only as between their propositional and valuative dimensions, but also - in the instance of metaphoric ideas between metaphor as reality ("faded") and reality as metaphor ("live"). How this metonymic-metaphoric "confusion" happens relates, in turn, to what anthropologist Edmund Leach calls code switching. Thinking of code both as agreed-upon ways to assign meaning and as culturally derived conventions, he sees the process as one of mixing metaphoric and metonymic codes to produce the conclusion that the non-sensed (metaphor) is the sensed (metonymy), i.e., "real." "By code switching between symbols [with arbitrary connections between index and interpretation] and signs [with intrinsic connections between index and interpretation] we are able to persuade one another that metaphoric non-sense is really metonymic sense." 9 Metaphors "fade" in such an event. And, one might add, that for the "live" metaphor, arguers are able through code switching to persuade and convince others that metonymic sense is really meta-
THE HOLOGRAPHIC VIEW
91
phoric non-sense. Though Leach does not mention the hologram, his position is compatible with that metaphor for argument inasmuch as all of code switching is always present in the "parts" of '"faded" and "live" metaphor. Further, in all cases of code switching, metaphor leads to knowledge defined as making sense of the world, both as meaning (metaphor) and as experience (metonymy). To so relate metaphor and knowledge and to so see both "faded" and "live" metaphor as the outcome of the unified process of code switching leads next to considering the hologram as metaphor for argument.
HOLOGRAM AS METAPHOR
If, as Colin Cherry has said, we can understand fully only those things we create, then the appearance of holographic photography was requisite to the metaphor of hologram as argument. Two aspects of the hologram become in this section what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call the phoros 10 illuminating the theme of argument. They are (1) the presence of the whole in every part of the exposed photographic plate and (2) the interaction of micro- and macro-events in production of the plate, an instance of the transformation of implicate (enfolded) order into explicate (unfolded) order"1 in the image. In what follows, each will be discussed in turn as phoros for the theme or argument. The beholder of a hologram is usually impressed by its verisimilitude. The lifelikeness of the image arises not only from its three-dimensionality but also from its presentation of the sides and back of the imaged subject as the consumer walks about it. The experience of seeing front, sides, and back ("all") in a single image ("part") adumbrates an experience with holograms not so commonly available to audiences. When the holographic plate is broken or torn into fragments, the result is not a jigsaw puzzle requiring re-assembly in order to offer a coherent image. Instead, a coherent, if only a single-perspective, image of the depicted subject is presented in each piece of the original plate. This suggestion of a "real" reality of partlessness, then, in which the hologram participates also would accommodate participation by argument, in at least two senses. First a reality of partlessness becomes what Perelman calls a "structure of reality," 12 which as a worldview will sanction characteristic modes of argument isomorphic with it. In the case of the holographic reality, those modes of argument will likely feature liaisons of coexistence more so than those of succession, as Perelman describes them.l 3 Secondly, in any given argument, its nature as fragment containing the whole of argument means that even if liaisons of coexistence are featured, they must account for, subsume, provide alternatives to, or include arguments of succession. For instance, if one assumes for the
92
WILLIAM R. BROWN
moment that arguments dependent for their conclusions upon systemic interaction are liaisons of coexistence, they would subsume the causal arguments found in reasoning by succession. In the final section of the essay will appear a more detailed discussion of the mode of argument most congenial to a reality in which the part contains the whole. Next, with the holographic plate itself as "part" containing - though more statically and hence less lifelikely - the "whole" of a processual, partless reality, this interaction of micro- and macro-events informs argument as metaphoric theme. Without illumination of the exposed plate by laser light, the beholder sees on the photographic medium only swirls of light and dark, resembling the crossing of waves from two pebbles dropped into water. One is told that these are the earlier registering of laser light being reflected in two directions from the imaged subject and arriving at the same time on the light-sensitive photographic plate - each set of waves interfering with the other, with the capacity, under illumination, to produce a "wave front" event for the beholder. Theoretical physicist David Bohm sees in the photoplate "reality" a metaphor of the universe. Two commentators on Bohm explain his version of holographic (micro) interaction with macro-reality. As Bohm sees it, what happens at the plate is simply a momentary, frozen version of what is occurring on an infinitely vaster scale in each region of space all over the universe. Light and other waves of electromagnetic energy travel infinitely, constantly interfering with each other as they reflect off matter. These interference patterns are endlessly evolving "encodings" of these reflections of matter. Thus the flowing, changing interference patterns traveling through space contain incalculable amounts of information about the objects they've encountered.... Now, a turn of the screw. Remember that matter is also waves. Therefore the very matter of objects is itself composed of interference patterns which interfere with the patterns of energy. What emerges is a picture of an encoding pattern of matter and energy spreading ceaselessly throughout the universe - each region of space, no matter how small (all the way down to the single photon, which is also a wave or "wave packet"), containing - as does each region of the holographic plate - the pattern of 4 the whole, including all the past and with implications for the future.
As Briggs and Peat point out, an upshot of the micro-macro interaction of hologram-universe events is that the former terms are seen simply as abstractions from the reality of partlessness.l5 They are not polar but are continuous events. One might add that objects such as the hologram and entities such as persons are actually events coming from and yet retaining other events; such micro events are to the whirlwind what the macro events are to the wind.16 The wind, as energy in motion, is metaphor for implicate order; the whirlwind, as energy with interference waves, is metaphor for explicate order. As characterized by this phoros of the hologram, argument as theme finds de-emphasized its historic preoccupation with categories based on
THE HOLOGRAPHIC VIEW
93
the differentiae of defining attributes, holding that concern instead in balance with a new one of construing argument as a continuing flow from an implicate to an explicate order. In other words, the ground of argument in a holographic structure of reality is a boundaryless event." Only by invoking conventions such as Aristotle's causes can arguers make the "whirlwinds" of categories like substantial-insubstantial, cause-effect, formed-unformed, and desirable-undesirable. Only by invoking conventions of linear time appear the categories of argument in support of questions of fact past, of present praise or blame, and of policy for the future. Only by convention do rhetorical proofs of ethos, pathos, and logos separate into categories. Given the balancing concern of an implicate order of argument, theorists and practitioners will recognize the permeability of categories in argument. The proof of character in the rhetor is also one of practical reasoning on the question and of emotional valence vis-d-vis the social relationship between rhetor and audience; the formal argument testifies also to the character of the arguer who would use it and invites aesthetic appreciation; the motivational argument simultaneously reveals or betrays the character of the rhetor in judging the audience and reasons practically from the premise that what persons want is what should be; what persons do not want is what should not be. The reader, of course, has not needed the hologram's implicate order to be reminded of the permeability of categories nor to see that rhetorical proofs are interfused rather than discrete in nature. The hologram as metaphor, however, provides a comprehensive rationale for such notions and sets the scene for discussing a distinctively holographic form of argument in the concluding section of the essay - a form which allows both for continuity and for differentiated categories in the making of arguments. A way of summarizing this passage on the hologram as metaphor is to say that its wholeness in each part and its rhythm between implicate and explicate patterning remind those interested in argument that the latter is framed both on being and becoming. More: Being is becoming and becoming is being. With this awareness, it is time to consider holographic argument as knowledge by examining its characteristic approach to knowledge and its topoi for creating/sharing that knowledge with audiences.
HOLOGRAPHIC ARGUMENT AS KNOWLEDGE
As long as and to the extent that knowledge is referential to a world separable from the observer, knowledge is. When knowledge is constitutive of a world inseparable from the observer, it is becoming. As indicated a moment ago, the knowledge involved in holographic argument grows from the premise - given a picture of reality as patterned implicately and explicately - that knowledge concerns at once both the
94
WILLIAM R. BROWN
is-ness of being and the process of becoming. It is clear by now that the characteristic approach to knowledge by holographic argument is paradox. The discussion turns now to paradox as inventional topic for the stasis of argument and for the stuff of argument, with the latter first. A catalog of claims made by theoretical scientists in popular discourse provides illustrations of holographic paradox, just as jurisprudential practice contributed to Perelman's holistic theme that the convictionpersuasion dichotomy is false. Among members of the cognitive minority comprised of holistic natural philosophers, paradox is at least what Perelman calls an argumentative figure; in another view it is the very architectonic principle in a holographic structure of reality. To David Bohm, for instance, appears the paradox that in an implicate-explicate reality everything causes everything else. 8 To theoretical chemist Ilya Prigogene, his "dissipative structures" which are "far from equilibrium" are themselves dissipative of dissipating entropy.19 To three theoretical biologists - Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Ricardo Uribe living systems are autopoietic, literally self-producing; then- the paradox doubles back upon itself: The very autonomy of self-production is derived from interdependence with the environment. 2 0 To biologist Rupert Sheldrake, interested in the growing of form and the forming of growth, reality includes "morphogenetic fields" which form - and are formed by - developing entities. 2 1 To neuroanatomist Karl Pribram, "what is organism (with its component organs) is no longer sharply distinguished from what lies outside the boundaries of the skin."22 To Pribram, the brain is a hologram as mirror picture of the world as hologram. Were it not that all these natural philosophers are, as scientists, interested in collecting experiences supportive of or subversive to these paradoxes, they would be compared to mystics. Indeed, Bohm became a friend of the Indian mystical philosopher, J. Krishnamurti, and carried on intense dialogues with him in a mutual effort to discover convergences between the realities intuited by mystics and those argued for by the theoretical physicist.2 3 As paradox such convergences resolve contradictions between ways of knowing. So while comparisons are inescapable between mysticism and holistic argument, as different resolutions of the implicate order, they contrast. A helpful way to describe their difference and yet be mindful of their similarity is to say that expression of the holistic mystic reality depends upon language as language, while that of holistic, holographic reality depends upon language as argument. In the latter case, then, it can be said that overt loci for argument are requisite, while in the former such topoi remain covert in the languaging itself. Semiotician Charles W. Morris has already developed a notion of paradox as the universal language of mystics, urging that its utterance arises from the multiple role-taking made possible by language signs as signs. 24 Morris' is a behavioristic view of
THE HOLOGRAPHIC VIEW
95
paradox as outcome of language as language. A quasi-formistic explanation would point, complementarily, to the possibility that a term participates in more than one level of abstraction, as in Bohm's own statement that "it is the particular that is the abstraction,"2 5 of which more will be said at the end of the essay. Considering now the places for argument conceived holistically, one finds the bridge between paradox as language and as argumentation in a reflective examination of metaphor. Writing a half-century ago, I. A. Richards saw in the doctrine of metaphor the axiom that disparities turn out to be similarities. "Once we begin 'to examine attentively' interactions which do not work through resemblances between tenor [theme] and vehicle [phoros], but depend upon other relations between them including disparities, some of our most prevalent, over-simple, ruling assumptions about metaphors ... are soon exposed," 2 6 he wrote. The resources of language as language enable the poet to speak of crying as shedding dry leaves, as Dylan Thomas did. Argument, in this example the making present the overt linkages among what had been thought to be separate "parts" of reality, enables the rhetor (whether poet, critic, or reader) to conclude that disparities between falling leaves and flowing tears turn out to be, paradoxically, similarities. When the "fragment" of leaf-fall is seen to contain the "whole" that includes tear shedding, the latter is seen - as is the former - as temporary death. By paradoxical comparison, explicate dissimilarity is seen as implicate similarity. As this glance at poetic metaphor shows, holographic argument relies for invention on paradoxical similarities. Further, it depends upon the conception of similarities that turn out to be disparities.2 Without the latter half of the prescription, not only would holographic argument be antagonistic rather than complementary to the tradition of elementalist argument, but it also would be committed to uniting all disparities. Just as Perelman understood that dissociation 2 8 as well as reasoned association was key to argumentative strategy, so the holographic arguer understands that in the inventional topic of paradox, similarities contain differences; differences contain similarities. Not to be so aware would be confusion, as described by Bohm: "confusion means 'melting together.' Things that are different are seen as one and things that are one are seen as broken up into many."2 9 To forestall such confusion in holistic invention, implicate similarity is seen as explicate difference. The place for inventing argumentative content is, then, paradoxically finding similarities among conventional differences and differences among conventional similarities. How does the arguer conceptualize which is to be which? So the ancient question of the nature of stasis recurs, even in argument formed on a structured reality of partlessness. In rhetoric, the places for invention include topics for determining stasis. For example, with Perelman, the hinge issue in association-dissociation is whether two events
96
WILLIAM R. BROWN
are essentially alike, in which case they are to be dealt with in essentially similar fashion,3 0 which is his rule of justice. To the extent that "essence" and "essential" refer to an implicate or enfolded order of reality and that manifestation of essence refers to an explicate or unfolded order, the rule of justice suffices as topic for stasis in holographic argument. To the extent, however, that Perelman's own structure of reality puts more stress on is-ness rather than on becoming-ness, as well, another topic for stasis is needed. In a processual, partless reality visualized as an overall flow with explicate events emerging as patterns of interference in energy, how can the rhetor conceptualize the way a similarity becomes a difference, analogously to the way an Escher drawing of a staircase has steps which at once are continuous and yet suddenly are leading downward instead of upward? The question gains urgency as one reads Bohm on the practical necessity for being able to see the difference between paradoxical similarities and paradoxical differences to avoid the confusion arising from conventional attempts to divide the indivisible. This can be seen especially clearly in terms of groupings of people in society (political, economic, religious, etc.) The very act of forming such a group tends to create a sense of division and separation of the members from the rest of the world but, because the members are really connected with the whole, this cannot work. Each member has in fact a somewhat different connection, and sooner or later this shows itself as a difference between him and other members of the group. Whenever men divide themselves from the whole of society and attempt to unite by identification within a group, it is clear that the group must eventually develop internal strife, which leads to a breakdown of its unity. Likewise when men try to separate some aspect of nature in their practical, technical work, a similar state of contradiction and disunity will develop. The same sort of thing will happen to the individual when he tries to separate himself from society. True unity in the individual and between man and nature, as well as between man and man, can arise only in a form of action that does not attempt to fragment the whole of reality. 31
Further, confusion results when the many are conventionally seen as the one. As metaphor of this ignoring of differences, Bohm speaks of the live oak, "which never loses its foliage. The leaves are continually forming and some are dropping off at the same time, so that it looks as if it's a constant tree. But it's from the nonmanifest [implicate order] that the tree is continually forming [explicate order] and into the nonmanifest that it is dying. And therefore you don't understand the tree by considering it to be static or more or less a static object which is just manifest at this moment to our concepts." 32 The holographic topic for stasis, hence, has to recognize discontinuity amidst continuity. This is to say that discontinuity must be continuous with continuity, as the whirlwind is continuous with the wind. Not the establishing of boundaries between categories but the interpenetration of boundaries has to be conceptualized. Such movement may be so gradated
THE HOLOGRAPHIC VIEW
97
that differences do not make a difference; in the midst of such continuous, calculus-like change, however, there must be the possibility of boundary unfolding which is a difference which makes a difference. Rather, then, of thinking of stasis as a hinge on which resolution of a categorizing question turns, or rather than thinking of stasis as the apogee of a rising object representing the most extreme reach of a category boundary, it is helpful to think of stasis as a catastrophe, i.e., sudden and discontinuous change in a field otherwise marked by continuous change. This is precisely the task, without the name of stasis, undertaken by mathematician Ren6 Thom, whose seven catastrophe models qualitatively and theoretically take into account "control factors" varying in number from two to four, in relation to either one or two "behavior axes." 3 3 Important for the practical reasoner is the conception that the control factors and behavior axes form a graphlike "field" on which an event or system can, metaphorically, be "located" - not, presently, according to mathematic scale but rather only according to relationship such as "more" or "less." "As long as the system [or event] 'occupies' one of these points, its behavior is continuous - but when it leaves the line or surface, it is unstable and must return, sometimes at a point far distant from the initial point." 34 To visualize holographic stasis as catastrophe, Thom's cusp model serves well. In argument as well as most social-science fields, the cusp is appropriate, one is told, because only one axis of behavior is involved (in this example events being seen as continua versus events being seen as differentiated categories) and because only two control factors are posited (differences seen as similarities and similarities seen as differences). In Figure 1, changes are gradations of each other, when thought of as being at "A" and "B", even though in the case of "B" clearly there is a greater tendency for similarities to be seen as differences than at "A". Since "A" and "B" are continua, however, no stasis as catastrophe is involved in movement between them. On the other hand, in comparing "B" and "D", one sees events differing not in degree but in kind. While changes including "B" "above the fold" relate to each other as continua, changes such as "D" and "E" "below the fold" relate to each other as discrete categories. Stasis as catastrophe, hence, arises with events "C" and "F", located "on the fold" or "off the edge" and unstable as to similarities as differences or differences as similarities. "At the margins of precision," Max Black has said, "the universe wavers." The cusp model, via its fold, makes precise the imprecision of argumentative stasis, considered as catastrophic instability. For example, with regard to Bohm's earlier description of the unity which confusedly divides (that event of group identity which separates the members "from the rest of the world"), the stasis of paradoxic argument is the catastrophic change depicted by the D-F-B path in the cusp model. As
98
WILLIAM R. BROWN
Behav
Stasis: from continuity to discontinuity b-D (C= instability) from discontinuity to continuity D-B (F= instability) Fig. 1. The Cusp Catastrophe Model of Holographic Stasis.
long as more similarities between sect members, on the one hand, and humankind at large, on the other, are seen as differences, human groupings are discrete categories and remain so even with less and less seeing of similarities as differences - until suddenly the unstable event of "F" marks a discontinuity in seeing changes as discrete categories. Then with less of seeing similarities as differences (for instance, less attention to the varieties of human conscience and more attention to the omnipresence of human conscience), the unity, itself, which divides breaks suddenly down, to be replaced as at "B" with a unity based on division (such as "E Pluribus Unum"). Bohm explains such stasis in his own argument expounding his pronouncement quoted earlier, that the particular is an abstraction. BOHM: ... You see, if we accept the idea of the explicate order of everything outside of everything else, everything manifest, then it becomes absurd to think of human beings all becoming one, and so on, you know the universe as one whole. But now we say that the earlier view itself [i.e., the explicate order as the ultimate or whole of reality] was a tremendous abstraction. It was really very coarse, gross, and that by following science itself we have been led to a view which is compatible with the wholeness of mankind, or its holiness, if you want to call it that. Mankind has now splintered and fragmented into countless bits, not only nations and religions and groups, but each individual is in many fragments; and this tremendous fragmentation
THE HOLOGRAPHIC VIEW
99
gives rise to chaos, violence, destruction and very little hope of any real order coming about. And now that is supported by the general view of everything, you know, that the basic reality consists of little bits, all outside of each other. WEBER: Atomistic? BOHM: Atomistic. In other words, that gets its confirmation and its reinforcement, so when people have this fragmentation, when they look at science they see a confirmation of the necessity of this fragmentation, right? And that strengthens it. If we look at science in this other [explicate] way, we say we are fragmented, but when we look at the material world we see that we are really totally out of line with the material world. There's no justification for our fragmentation in the material world whatsoever. 3 5
Stasis comes in the shift of attention, 3 6 then, involved in the "unblinding" from seeing similarities as differences, to seeing what were differences as similarities. Such a revision of classical stasis is holographic in the two senses developed in the second portion of this essay. First, throughout the graphlike field, each point (the "part") represents the meeting (and patterns of interference in) of the whole comprised of paradoxical similarities and differences. Next, the areas above and below the '"fold" are reverse images of each other -- as are the micro-macro interactions of the explicate and implicate orders. Further, this version of stasis allows both for continuity and for differentiated categories in the making of arguments. It schematizes, also, the human consciousness as hologram by making easier the discernment of similarities among conventional differences and of differences among conventional similarities. All are present in each act of human categorizing. In all these ways, then, the holographic perspective on holistic argument balances the traditional concern in elementalistic argument with division. What, by way of a parting glance, may be the ramifications of this approach to argument? First, regardless of whether philosophers of argument find its categories of invention theoretically fruitful, practitioners of argument are drawing upon them for the discovery and constitution of knowledge in a variety of fields additional to theoretical physics, chemistry, biology, and neuroanatomy. A futurist urges that models of holographic thinking be adopted as means for the development of artificial intelligence.3 7 A psychiatrist adapts holographic reasoning to treatment of patients. 3 8 An art critic develops an aesthetic theory based on holographic thinking.3 9 And theologians, or those interested in theology, divide from each other in their support of holographic thinking - with "process theologians" leaning toward it and with spokespersons for "new thought" theology leaning away from it on grounds that it achieves holism at the cost of reductionism.4 0 Next, in the realm of argumentation theory, the prospect of holographic reasoning raises these questions in its own context. Is circularity of argument a fallacy? The part that contains the whole and the rhythm of implicate-explicate order together suggest that circularity may not amount to question begging. Further, what happens to the law of identity and the
100
WILLIAM R. BROWN
principle of non-contradiction? In the holographic structure of reality, A is B; B is A. Is the answer that identity and non-contradiction hold only "below the fold" of the cusp model of stasis? Again, what happens to the concept of equivocation? Paradox, ordinarily thought to be depending upon different levels of abstraction being applied to the same term, tends paradoxically to disappear in the non-hierarchical structure of reality in holographic argument. What heretofore undescribed fallacies does holographic argument prompt an awareness of? And, finally, what moral and ethical systems unfold from the conception of a partless "real" reality? Pursued by the routes both of applied and theoretical argumentation, the perspective of holographic argument may have its uses in a world increasingly aware of its common fate for all people and all life - and at the same time continually attending to the divisions among its people. Potentially, in light of this paradox, the holographic view of argument lends new depth to Kenneth Burke's dictum that rhetoric is compensatory to division. That such is a useful view of rhetoric without its becoming the crusade for perfection is clear, finally, when the holographic view of argument is seen to promote a wise humility regarding the limits of argumentative power. Bohm argues the nature of that limitation with the aid of paradox. Following development of holographic argument, "Thought will now take the words, 'the nonmanifest' and form the idea of the nonmanifest; and therefore, thought thinks the manifest plus the nonmanifest together make up the whole, and that this whole thought is now a step beyond thought, you see. But, in fact, it isn't. This nonmanifest that thought imagines is still the manifest, by definition, because to imagine is also a form of thought." 41 Arguers as change agents compensating rhetorically for division will do well to remind themselves of the fragmentary nature of their holistic perspective on argument.
NOTES The author gratefully acknowledges the help of his research assistant, Susan Opt Whitlock, and thanks Polly Joan Lacy for additionalhelp. ' Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind, 1969, pp. 28-30; p. 47. A pioneering study of Perelman by a rhetorician in speech communication is Ray Dearin, 'The Philosophical Basis of Chaim Perelman's Theory of Rhetoric,' QuarterlyJournalof Speech 55 (1969), 213-24. 2 Chaim Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric, trans. William Kluback, introd. by Carroll C. Arnold, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1982, p. 33. Further references will be shortened to Realm. 3 Perelman, Realm, p. 124. Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language as Philosophy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y.; 1962 Douglas Berggren, 'The Use and Abuse of Metaphor,' The Review of Metaphysics 16 (1962), 237-58.
THE HOLOGRAPHIC VIEW
101
5 Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1970; Roger S. Jones, Physics as Metaphor, New American Library, New York, 1982. 6 Jones, pp. ix, 51-170. 7 Pepper,pp. 151-316. 8 The Ohio State University, Department of Communication, Autumn Quarter, 1982; in Realm, see pp. 161-162; in New Rhetoric, pp. 130-38. 9 Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols are Connected,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976, p. 22. 10 The New Rhetoric, pp. 373 ff. " The latter terms come from theoretical physicist David Bohm and are derived not from the hologram as static image but from Bohm's own metonymy-as-metaphor of the dye droplet in fluid, which when dissipated and rendered invisible by one direction of movement within a cylinder is part of the "implicate" order and when reconstituted and made visible by another direction of movement is part of the "explicate" order. See interview of Bohm with Renee Weber in Ken Wilbur, ed., The Holographic Paradigmand OtherParadoxes,Shambhala, Boulder, Col., 1982, pp. 4 6 - 7 . 12 Realm, pp.81-105. 13 Realm,'p. 81. Cause-effect argument is an example of succession; any form of essenceto-manifestation (person and acts) is a liaison of coexistence (p. 89). 14 John P. Briggs and F. David Peat, Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1984, p. 111. ]5 Briggs and Peat, p. 147. 16 Bohm's favorite analogy seems to be this: Micro events are to a vortex what macro events are to a flowing stream. 17 The effort has been made to represent logically the paradox that opposites at boundaries are identical, i.e., boundaryless. See Thomas E. Bearden, Solution of the Fundamental Problem of Quantum Mechanics (Alexandria, Va.: 1977) and 'A Fundamental Correction to Classical Logic,' as part of 'The Military Aspects of Psychokinesis,' in a symposium at Harvard Science Center, May, 1977, sponsored by Interface. These works are cited by Lawrence F. Berley, HolographicMind, Holographic Vision: A New Theory of Vision in Art and Physics, Lakstun Press, Bensalem, Pa., 1980, pp. 69-72. 18 Briggs and Peat, p. 96. For an elaborated list of Bohmian paradoxes growing from this one, see pp. 145-48. 19 Briggs and Peat, p. 169. 20 Briggs and Peat, pp. 178-79. 21 Briggs and Peat, pp. 220-21. 22 Karl H. Pribram, 'What the Fuss Is All About,' in Wilbur, p. 34. 23 J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm, The Ending of Time, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1985. 24 Charles W. Morris, 'Mysticism and Its Language,' in Ruth Nanda Anshen, ed., Language: An Inquiry into Its Meaning and Function, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1951, pp. 179-87. 25 Krishnamurti and Bohm, p. 268. 26 I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Oxford University Press, New York, 1936, pp. 107-8. 27 "Bohm says a general way of perceiving what is meant by order (not a definition, mind you) is to say that order means 'to give attention to similar differences and different similarities,"' Briggs and Peat, p. 106. 28 New Rhetoric, pp. 411--60; Realm, pp. 126-37. 6 29 Bohm to Weber, in Wilbur, p. 1. 30 New Rhetoric, pp. 218-20; Realm, 64-70. 31 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1983, p. 16.
102
WILLIAM R. BROWN
32 Bohm to Weber, in Wilbur, pp. 80-1.
33 Alexander Woodcock and Monte Davis, Catastrophe Theory, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1978, p. 43. 34 Woodcock and Davis, p. 33. 35 Bohm to Weber, in Wilbur, pp. 71-3. 36 William R. Brown, 'Attention and the Rhetoric of Social Intervention,' The Quarterly Journalof Speech 68 (1982), 17-27. 37 Derek de Solla Price, 'Speculations: 3-D Intelligence,' Science Digest (January 1982), pp. 40,116. 38 Edgar A. Levenson, 'A Holographic Model of Psychoanalytic Change,' Contemporary Psychoanalysis 12 (1975), 1-20. 39 Berley. 40 John V. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1976; Ken Wilbur, 'Physics, Mysticism, and the New Holographic Paradigm,' in Wilbur, pp. 157-86. 41 Bohm to Weber, in Wilbur, p. 63.
Editor: Marx Wartofsky Guest Co-Editor: David Goldberg VOLUME XV11:2-3 Winter-Spring 1987 $7.50
EID
in South Africa SUBSCRIPTIONS $12 per year for individuals $35 per year for institutions + $3 for foreign subscriptions $7.50 for special back issues Philosophy &the Holocaust, Philosophy & Economics, Sociobiology Please send checks or money orders to: the philosophical forum P.O. Box 239-F Baruch College of CUNY 17 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10010