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4:30

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

Totalism is driven by the self-sacrifice myth, the libidinal connection to self-hatred. What is brilliant about totalism is how for the first time in history it denies the human being’s feeling that the whole of her is greater than the sum of her many different constituent parts. Totalism appears with reductionism as its faithful side-kick. A whole, according to reductionism, can always be deconstructed into ever smaller components without the phenomenon’s mental weight or value being affected. Thus, the human body can be reduced to just body parts; the body itself has no value as an emergent phenomenon according to the totalists. Therefore, Plato can contend that the body is inadequate to define the human being. He picks out of humans that which arises as an indisputable surplus when the various components are combined, and converts this into a separate magnitude with unique and obviously completely fictitious properties: the soul. If the body parts cannot speak or think for themselves, while the body as a whole and as a unit talks and thinks, it must be a matter of a contribution from the outside. It is this soul, added from the outside, not the emergent body that talks and thinks. After this manoeuvre, Plato returns to the body. The fact that there even exists a feeling or a thought in conjunction with the whole body’s status as – in fact – an entire body only goes to prove, according to this line of argument, the existence of the soul.