The part is always, in a sense, greater than the whole. Whenever you have a whole consisting of two or more parts, the nature of the whole is the nature of both or all of the parts taken together. Which means that the nature of each part is diminished when it is taken as part of a whole compared to when it is taken alone, because the presence of the nature(s) of the other part(s) dilutes it.
And the more parts a whole has, the smaller the proportion each part makes up of the whole is.
For example, if a whole has 6 parts, each part is 1/6 of the whole, whereas if a whole has 64 parts, each part is only 1/64 of the whole, and so on.
What I’m saying is obviously correct. Perhaps the title was misleading. I do not actually believe that a part is greater than a whole quantitatively. In a quantitative sense, I acknowledge that wholes are always greater than parts, in the sense that they have quantitatively more components.
What I mean is that, comparing a part of a whole to the whole itself, the whole is greater in terms of quantity, but the part is greater in terms of proportion.
Here’s an example:
It is very common for scientists to talk of the size of a creature’s brain size IN PROPORTION TO its body size. Clearly, if you were to enlarge a human’s body to the size of a blue whale’s, but kept the size of the brain the same, the larger human would be proportionately far less brainy than the smaller one.
In the same way, using the same logic, my head is proportionately far more brainy than my body as a whole.
It is clear that, the more parts a whole has, the smaller each part is proportionately. For example, the state of Arizona is part of the country the United States which is part of the continent North America. But Arizona makes up a larger proportion, or percentage, of the United States as a whole than it makes up of North America as a whole, because North America also includes Canada and Mexico and Central America, which dilutes the presence of Arizona.
So the United States is proportionately more “Arizona-ish” than North America is, precisely because it is smaller. So being smaller allows each of its parts (it applies to any part equally; Arizona was just an example) to make up a greater proportion of the whole.
So what I’m saying is that more parts = each part is smaller proportionately, and less parts = each part is greater proportionately. So the fact that the larger whole has more parts is balanced out by the fact that the smaller whole has each part be proportionately greater.
And in the hypothetical case of a simple, an object composed of no parts whatsoever, although it would be the smallest in quantity, it would be the greatest proportionately (it would consist 100% of itself, obviously).
I hope I explained this in a way that can be more easily understood and makes sense. Basically, I’m defining “greater” in a different sense. A whole is always quantitatively greater than a part, but a part is always proportionately greater than a whole.