Note 277

Certainly, the concept of wholeness is one of the most important concepts at all, and always has played a decisive role in biological matters. Critique cannot begin with it itself, but only with an accidental (contingent) definition [a definition (one of many) happened to be encountered], and without doubt the past has not payed sufficient attention to it.
But one should not, in defining the concept of wholeness, come up with "shapes" [Gestalten], and the like.
Two things have, for many authors, compromised the concept of wholeness :

But he or she who doesn't want to acknowledge our concept of wholeness [wholeness constituted by the chemical bond], a concept avoiding every non-accurate vagueness and equivocity, - and thus believing that it isn't about wholes, or that one cannot apply the concept to anything, he or she should have to abandon this concept at all, because then, from atom to Universe there would be nothing to which it would apply.

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