What does kitchen logic have to do with holism?

I guess we all experience awkward moments from time to time, seeing simple, basic truths behind complicated explanations. Buzzwords like “circular economy”, “sharing economy,” or “universal basic income” are nowadays among the most frequent. There is an abundance of such buzzwords in management consultancy when an old concept slips into something that sounds new, fancy, and clever, but only complicates ancient wisdom. “Strategic management” becomes “change management,” as if management were something other than managing the change forced by the unknown in our surroundings. (Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning, does not elaborate on management, but he tells about management more than any contemporary management bestseller.)

Nothing is wrong with new concepts and new insights. But if there is nothing new to be found behind such new buzzwords, then not only do we waste time, but we also often obscure simple/complex truths with unnecessary complications. Complications are the main enemies of complexity. The more complex something is, the less complicated it is.

In the following couple of posts, I am going to show the simple complexity behind often indigestible complications.

Medicine

Medicine is one of the first associations with holism. That western medicine is not holistic and that some eastern practices are is a sort of truism.

Is it?

The term holism was introduced in medicine around 1970 to conceptualise psychosomatic phenomena. Instead of charting one-way causal links from psyche to soma, or vice versa, it aimed for a systemic model in which multiple biological, psychological, and social factors were seen as interlinked. Such memetic introduction of holism opened the way to various new-age alternative medicine practices that were supposed to be holistic but are still rejected by official Western medicine as non-scientific.

This correct accusation of various alternative medicine practices drags us back a couple of centuries. The Renaissance opened the way for scientific methods grounded in the falsification principle, not only in medicine but also across all domains of human activity. The enormous success of scientific methods, or to be more correct, the success of results that were enabled largely by post-Renaissance science, is unquestionable. Success forced the evolution of science and technology to focus on increasingly small details within the commonly accepted mechanistic ideology that, if you control parts of a mechanism, you control the whole machine. That same evolutionary stable ideology forced medicine to manage (treat or heal) smaller and smaller parts of the human body and soul. Humans were (are) understood as complicated machines, and medicine as a tool that fixes if a part of that machine fails. Medicine thus treats disease separated from a human being.

Western medicine is thus deeply not holistic. But does that mean that non-scientific practices are holistic only because they are non-scientific?

Let us start with a simple rationalisation. If any medicine is not scientific, then it is not truly holistic, for holism, by definition, implies an all-encompassing practice. A practice that does not adopt a scientific approach cannot be holistic by definition.

The fact that Western medicine got stuck in the details, not knowing how to deal with complex living entities, does not entitle anyone to regress to pre-scientific methods such as wodoo, Paracelsus, or Galen. The science behind contemporary Western medicine is as integral to humans as the notion that it is wrong for the surgeon to decide on an individual’s overall status. As much as it is wrong for me to comment on physics from the standpoint of specialised physics, it is a must for any human being as a sense-making being to conceptualise to make sense of that same physics from a holistic standpoint.

Ayurvedic medicine serves as a good example of a better comprehension of holism. Ayurvedic doctors who undergo 5 years or even longer study would never treat a broken leg or acute cancer with Ayurvedic methods. Such diseases are treated with Western methods even in India. But this only proves that neither Ayurveda nor the Western method is holistic. We are still waiting for a method that would unify all existing medicines under the umbrella of a living creature that exists only for the sake of being holistic.

Holistic medicine should be reconceived as a general philosophy of the human body and mind for individual risk management. It should reunite genetic and memetic human ontology based on the coevolution of genes and memes. The medicine should become a homonistic risk management practice based on integrated management and integrated reporting systems.

Science and philosophy

The main obstacle to understanding what holism really means lies in confusion between »complicated« and »complex«.

Due to the intoxication of mechanistic ideology introduced in the Renaissance and propagated later by an ideology of science (scientism in contrast to science), we live in dreams that when we see/understand the smallest particle of the complicated atom and even more complicated molecule (and so on), we will be able to chart universal logic/construction digitally. We are, in fact, searching for solutions to complications even though the reality is complex, not complicated.

The reality is not the real. The reality we experience, observe, and comprehend is always already symbolized as real. Even if the real is complicated, which we cannot know by definition, the reality as a symbolic construction is always complex. The challenge is thus to implement scientific dissection of natural complications into intuitive/philosophical comprehension of life as a complex/holistic entity. The challenge is to follow unavoidable basic principles consistently while not compromising scientific scrutiny.

And where else than in the kitchen can we find the most common, basic, and universal principles?

The Kitchen

We all know that the chemistry behind cooking processes is extremely difficult and poorly understood. It is extremely instructive in this respect to read Robert R. Wolke’s book, What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained.

Not only is it impossible for amateur cooks to understand the chemistry at work when they cook, but scientific ignorance does not even prevent master chefs from creating magnificent dishes. They follow holistic (analogue) principles (values), but they cannot understand the chemistry they imply, since even top chemists do not fully understand it. Cooks know some basics, though those basics are far from scientific.

That it is not a prerequisite to explain what you are doing if you intend to do something well is often a neglected fact. This fact is extensively supported by recent discoveries in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, which clearly place the human limbic system as the one that does (well) even before cortical brains reflect it. We are humans distinct from animals only as sense-making creatures. But the sense does not overplay limbic reactions. And as we shall see later, science does not make sense. Science describes objects of science. Objects of science have to be exposed to sense-making activity as much as a lion creates a specific sense for a zebra.

The kitchen teaches us to distinguish between knowing how (limbic practical know-how) and knowing what (cortical activity, as reflected in recipes or even in science). Every good cook will tell you that following a recipe is a sure way to disaster. A cook should “feel” the types and quantities of ingredients and timing. Cooks who start with recipes have to make an effort to detach themselves from a digitally recipe-driven practice.

We are such cooks in all other respects. We are bombarded by recipes, by complications in every human activity. It is quite a challenge to find know-how behind layers and layers of knowing what. To make sense of what we are doing, we first have to remove the complications in those layers.

I have coined the term “kitchen logic” to denote this first step in the holistic sense-making process. Kitchen logic does not contradict science. It only understands that science alone does not make any sense, that sense cannot come directly from science, as much as health does not come directly from surgery.

Integrated reporting

When discussing holism, one should never forget to take it from a management perspective. As much as health or kitchen cannot (should not) be reduced to its particles, management of companies or any other social structures is holistic, or it is not management at all.

The recently established Integrated Reporting, unfortunately abandoned after the European Commission introduced the stupid ESRS Directive(*), is an excellent example of how management seeks to re-establish itself from the predominant mechanistic ideology, as medicine does.

The word »integrated« signals an ambition to develop reporting that integrates the management of all managerial processes that, as part of the business model, add to overall corporate value. It rests on understanding a company as constructed by 6 capitals and integrating these into a single report. Such a concept still presupposes that it is possible to integrate mechanical entities back into totality, just as it is possible to decompose an aeroplane and then compose it back into the same functional entity. It thus still exhibits mechanistic ideology. But due to a memetic drag on the concept of integration, especially integrated thinking as the mantra behind integrated reporting, I guess that holism will prevail eventually.

(*) The shift the EU made from Integrated reporting to the ESRS Directive leads in the perfect opposite direction of holism and integration. The Directive tries to dissect something holistic into distinct reporting entities that are perfectly unlinked. The result, for obvious reasons, is senseless and adds no value.