How Can Anything Be More Than The Sum Of Its Parts?

When Duke Ellington wrote his famous composition: “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” in 1931, he wasn’t just writing about a newly emerging genre in jazz music that came to be known as “The Swing Era” of the 1930s and 1940s. That was a style of music which ― in technical terms ― could be described as one where the musicians placed an emphasis on the off-beat, to be played with a loose, laid back feel that emphasised the syncopated, rhythmic side of the music, as much as (if not more than) the melodic and improvisational aspects, and couldn’t be reproduced by rote. No, what Ellington was getting at in naming his composition in that way, was much closer to the answer to the question: “What is jazz?” later given by Fats Waller: “If you hafta ask, you ain’t never gonna know”. By this, Fats meant that one had to experience the joy of jazz music to understand it; intellectual descriptions could only take one so far, a view that Ellington also shared.

Swing, for Ellington, was that ingredient in the band’s performance that made it cook, jell, something ‘played as one’, whole, inspired. There were nights when it was more present in the performance than on others. When it was less evident, this was through no lack of effort on the part of the musicians; rather, it reflected a side to human creativity that couldn’t be reduced to the merely technical, and couldn’t adequately be explained by the purely rational. 

That same side to human creativity can often be discerned in the way football is played. Sometimes, it is as if the team is playing as one: organic, unified, intuitively connected, and beautiful, as Pelé was to describe it in his autobiography of 1977, My Life and the Beautiful Game. Other times, it is as if the team is disconnected, formless, uninspired and ugly. For both types of performance it can be the same eleven players on the pitch; but for the latter type, it has them playing as individuals, not playing as a team.  

Conspicuously, the audience also seems to play a part in all of this. The more they shout encouragement, the more likely the players are to respond with a heightened level of performance. On the occasions when this happens, it is as if the audience is part of the team performance, as integral to it as those kicking the ball, as if the whole has become more than the sum of its parts.  However, from an Enlightenment, rationalist perspective, how can the whole ever be more than the sum of its parts? What is the whole that is not being produced by the sum of its parts? Yet, it seems to me, that there is a discernible difference between the whole and the sum of its parts in the quality of the performances we have been discussing; one that, as an observer, I have experienced on an individual level: emotional, aesthetic, intellectual, and, on a collective level, when I have sensed that the audience has become more than the sum of its parts ―in other words, when the experienced reality couldn’t plausibly be reduced to its physical elements.   

Recently, I experienced this sense of the whole becoming more than the sum of its parts, when, over the Christmas period, I worked as a volunteer for a charity that provides food and accommodation for the homeless in Sheffield. I had done it before, and so I knew some of the guests from previous Christmases. However, on this occasion, one of the volunteers had brought in a karaoke machine, and, after the midday meal, had invited our guests to try out their singing. Within minutes, the atmosphere in the room was transformed, from what had been a fairly raucous affair, to one of silence, in response to one of our guests taking to the microphone. I have never heard a more beautiful rendition of “The Green Fields of France”; the song about the tragic loss of life during the First World War, written by Eric Bogle. I was not the only one with tears rolling down my cheeks at the end of the performance; the whole room seemed to be in tears, mesmerised by what we had just witnessed. There was a sense that we had experienced a side to our homeless friend that we never knew he possessed; a beauty to his singing voice that was as stunning as his interpretation of the song’s lyrics; a collective sense that we had shared in something special; a performance that had made us feel more than the sum of our parts.

It is in moments such as these that I am reminded of why I am a theist. I acknowledge that Enlightenment rationalism has added enormous value to our knowledge about life and its possible explanations/meanings. It has produced an indispensable, positivist, methodological approach to the study of subjects such as History, Sociology, Psychology and the Physical Sciences; one that has enhanced our understanding of life, and has led to improvements in a range of human activities. However, it is in moments such as these, that I am reminded of how human creativity, of the kind that we had experienced in that basement room in the centre of Sheffield, can, in my view, never be reduced to purely rational explanations, but instead points me in the direction of the Divine, the Holy.

Dr Joseph Forde is Chair of Sheffield’s Church Action on Poverty. He researches and writes on welfare and Christianity, and is author of: “Before and Beyond the ‘Big Society’: John Milbank and the Church of England’s Approach to Welfare” (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2022).