CONCEPT
The Whole-Animal Argument
Midgley's insistence that a living being is not an assemblage of components — and that the properties that matter most are properties of the whole, not of any part.
The whole-animal argument is the load-bearing commitment running through all of Midgley's work: a human being is not an assemblage of components. A human being is a whole — a living, integrated, caring, wondering whole — and the aspects of human life that matter most are properties of the whole, not of any component. The argument is directed against a culture that has been moving, with increasing speed and decreasing self-awareness, toward the component view: that a person is a language module plus a pattern recogniser plus a problem solver plus a creativity engine, and that replicating the components produces the person. Midgley's response is that a pile of car parts is not a car. The car is the system that emerges when the parts are integrated in a specific way, and the system has properties — it can drive — that no part separately possesses.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The argument is grounded in Midgley's training in ethology and