@nonoise @mahgister -- Agree on the immediacy of the whole. I avoided the word "gestalt" because that word implies the way a thing has been “placed” or “put together." I think we’re all agreeing that this larger whole *starts out* as fundamentally simple.
I also see the OP’s question as a live one, though. How do we take in that whole (whether a complex-simple or a simple-simple) consistently over time? Hard question.
Deep question!
I myself discover the beginning of an answer in many science of philosophical books...
The main one tough was the works of Goethe...
Especially his work on morphology of plants and animals...And his color theory complement that...
His method is nothing short of astounding, like explained it, in many books, the Bohmian physicist Henri Bortoft...
But the clearest explanation was the monumental treatise about animal morphology after Goethe and Rudolf Steiner method...By the biologist Wolfgang Schad, a life changing book...This is the clearest explanation of Goethe natural science method with Bortoft in the last 50 years...
http://www.adonispress.org/threefoldness.php “Do not seek for anything behind the phenomena: They themselves are the theory.”
“The most difficult thing is to see what lies directly before our eyes.”
– J. W. Goethe
The same goes for the sound-musical-experience and for hearing...
How do we perceive the wholenees that is before our own eyes and all around us in sound experience?
By changing the way we observe phenomenon....By becoming "Conscious" observer...
Believe it or not, but there is a method to train ourself to see a phenomenon in his perspectival encompassing dimensions... His wholeness..
All the books i just cited illustrated in DETAILS and explained how....
For the musical consciousness experience and history....
The 2 books which are not explicitly Goethean, are also Goethean implicitly though...
Ernest Ansermet develop a phenomenology of the musical experience inspired by Husserl, which goes hand in hand with the Goethean approach...( Goethe is the first and the greatest phenomenologist way before the mathematician Husserl because his phenomenology is based on natural science not on mathematical logic)
Another book almost unknown this time, which is a doctorate thesis by Akpan J. Essien : Sound sources the origin of auditory sensations complement perfectly Ansermet book this time about sound and not about music first like Ansermet who was also one of the greatest maestro...( Essien comes from Africa and it is not the best place to come from to critic 2000 years of acoustic research in Occident but he succeed in making his doctorate in England and France)
In all These books the manifestation of the WHOLENESS through parts of any phenomenon is explained and a method of observation (for visual experience) and even experiments ( for sound experience) is exposed... The KEY principle here it to know that the relation between part and whole is a dynamical internal process THROUGH the observer and what is observed, not an EXTERNAL static relation between an external observer and an external object.....
I cannot resume these many thousand pages, in plants and animal morphology. in acoustic and in music and other fields in a few words...
My post is here to say yes the wholeness perceived experience is a mystery but not completely hidden or totally veiled for us...
There is only ONE thinker in European history whom was at the same times one of the greatest writer and poet of all times like Homer and Shakespeare and a rival of Newton and Darwin with his mastery of natural science...Nowadays the ideas of Goethe, instead of appearing completely out of date appear in a total new light...
His name is Goethe...
His genius is almost unmatched in history....It is on the same level which was revealed by Da Vinci creative imagination in art and nature and technology and Archimedes founder of the phenomenological physics and almost before Newton creator of the calculus.....The antikhythera mechanism come probably from the archimedean school...Anyway there is a link between the archimedean method in phenomenological and mathematical physics and Goethe and Faraday methods...
