Safe Haven

Holism

THE CUCKOO IN THE CLOCK

I have fond memories from when I was a very little boy, of watching my Swiss‐German grandpa working away, a loupe over one eye, in the cramped basement workshop of his upstate New York home. A retired doctor, Grandpa took up clockmaking with a passion, true to his roots (though it might also have been an excuse to steal away from Grandma to his workshop). I recall one particular big day when he went to work on an old prewar cuckoo clock. He dissected the box—more like a wooden chalet with a goat head carved into its gable—and meticulously removed all its guts. I spent hours looking over the little parts spread across the table. All those tiny gears and levers, the tattered bellows, and the lifeless wooden cuckoo bird looked like scattered pieces of old scrap to be swept into the bin. Seeing those separate parts, I had no way of knowing their former splendor when they were together as an interacting whole.

None of the parts, on its own, can even track the time—not even close! A reductionist might say that putting them all together in an old wooden box with its carved goat head and hanging it on the wall won't change that, either. So, why shouldn't the properties of a thing be explainable by looking at the properties of the things that make it up?

Reductionism didn't work well for me with cuckoo clocks. The reason? The functional value of the individual ...