Reductionism

The first R stands for Reductionism. Its philosophy may be epitomised by a quotation from a recent book in which man is defined, in all seriousness, as "nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism, powered by a combustion system which energises computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information". This is certainly an extreme formulation, but it conveys the essence of that philosophy.

It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to draw analogies between the central nervous system and a telephone exchange, or a computer, or a holograph. The reductionist heresy is contained in the words "nothing but". If you replace in the sentence I have just quoted the words "nothing but" by "to some extent" or "from a certain angle" or "on a certain level of his many-levelled structure", then everything is all right. The reductionist proclaims his part-truth to be the whole truth, a certain specific aspect of a phenomenon to be the whole phenomenon. To the behaviourist, the activities of man are nothing but a chain of conditioned responses; to the more rigid variety of Freudian, artistic creation is nothing but a substitute for goal-inhibited sexuality; to the mechanically oriented biologist the pheomena of consciousness are nothing but electro-chemical reactions. And the ultimate reductionist heresy is to consider the whole as nothing but the sum of its parts—a hangover from the crude atomistic concepts of nineteenth-century physics, which the physicist himself abandoned long ago.