GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

764 ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
DEGREES OF WHOLENESS AND THEREFORE OF
REALITY IN SOCIETIES. That society is a whole
which is in a certain sense more than the sum of its members
has been conceded; but the whole is never complete.
Some societies are more integrated than others. In an
imperfectly integrated society some parts may wish to
secede and to form societies on their own; others will
refuse to recognize themselves as members of the society;
others, again, from whom recognition of membership is
enforced may, like the Austrian inhabitants of the Italian
Tyrol, still ding to the customs, ways of life and language
appropriate to some other society from which they have
been forcibly separated. In these respects a society is like
a work of art The wholeness of a picture is something
that "becomes"; one tan see it coming into existence as
the picture is painted. When the picture is half painted, .
it is less of a whole than when it is finished, while, even
in the case of finished pictures, the wholeness of some is
more obvious than that of others. The degree to which
hit work has achieved wholeness is, indeed, one of the
oiterions of the artist's success. But in the case of the
human body there are no degrees of wholeness, nor can
it be said that its wholeness "becomes". There is never,
that is to say, a time during its period of growth when
can be said to be more of a whole than
the human body
it was at some preceding time.
All these considerations point to the same conclusion,
which is that the wholeness of a human body is at once
different in kind from, and more complete in degree than,
the wholeness of a society. The rights of a human body in
relation to those of its organs are more clearly established
and better founded than those of a society in relation to
its individual members. Hence there is justification for the
pursuit and realization of the ends of a human body at
the cost of sacrifice on the part of its organs, as when an
inflamed appendix may be removed in the interests of
general health, which docs not exist in the case of a
society which claims to pursue ends that entail sacrifices