Bertalanffy-The History and ...

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The History and Status of General Systems Theory
Ludwig Von Bertalanffy
The Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4, General Systems Theory (Dec.,
1972),407-426.
Stable URL:
15%3A4%3C407%3ATHASOG%3E2.O.C0%3B2-4
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Thu Apr 1 18:56:49 2004
The History
and Status
of
General
Sytems Theory
Center for Theoretical Biology,
State University of New York at Buffalo
HISTORICAL PRELUDE
In order to evaluate the modern "systems approach," it is advisable
tolook at the systems idea not as an ephemeral fashion or recent technique,
but in the context of the history of ideas. (For an introduction and a survey
of the field see
[15],
with an extensive bibliography and Suggestions for
Further Reading in the various topics of general systems theory.)
In a certain sense it can be said that the notion of system is as old as
European philosophy. If we try to define the central motif in the birth of
philosophical-scientific thinking with the lonian pre-Socratics of the sixth
century B.C., one way to spell it out would be as follows. Man in early cul-
ture, and even primitives of today, experience themselves as being "thrown"
into a hostile world, governed by chaotic and incomprehensible demonic
forces which, at best, may be propitiated or influenced by way of magical
practices. Philosophy and its descendant, science, was born when the early
Greeks learned to consider or find, in the experienced world, an order or
kosmos which was intelligible and, hence, controllable
by
thought and
rational action.
One formulation of this cosmic order was the Aristotelian world view
with its holistic and Telelogical notions. Avisfotie's statement, "The whole is
more than
the
sum of its parts," is a definition of the basic system problem
which is still valid. Aristotelian teleology was eliminated in the later deveiop-
ment of Western science, but the problems contained in it, such as the
order and goal-dlfecfedness of living systems, were negated and by-passed
rather than solved. Hence, the basic system is still not obsolete.
A more detailed investigation would enumerate a long array of thinkers
who, in one way or another, contributed notions to what nowadays we call
systems theory. If we speak of hierarchic order, we use a term introduced
by the Christian mystic, Dionysius the Aeropagite, although he was specu-
* This article is reprinted, with permission, from George J. Mlir, ed., Trends
in
Genera!
Systems Theory (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1972).
LUDWIG VON BERTALANFFY
408
Academy of Management Journal
December
lating about the choirs of angels and the organism of the Church. Nicholas
of Cusa
[5],
that profound thinker of the fifteenth century, linking Medieval
mysticism with the first beginnings of modern science, introduced the notion
of the coincidentia oppositorum, the opposition or, indeed, fight among the
parts within a whole which, nevertheless, forms a unity of higher order.
Leibniz's hierarchy of monads looks quite like that of modern systems; his
mathesis universalis presages an expanded mathematics which is not limited
to quantitative or numerical expressions and is able to formalize all con-
ceptual thinking. Hegel and Marx emphasized the dialectic structure of
thought and of the universe it produces: the deep insight that no proposition
can exhaust reality but only approaches its coincidence of opposites by
the dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Gustav Fechner,
known as the author of the psychophysical law, elaborated in the way of
the nature philosophers of the nineteenth century supraindividual organi-
zations of higher order than the usual objects of observation; for example,
life communities and the entire earth, thus romantically anticipating the
ecosystems of modern parlance. Incidentally, the present writer wrote a
doctoral thesis on this topic in
1925.
Even such a rapid and superficial survey as the preceding one tends
to show that the problems with which we are nowadays concerned under
the term "system" were not "born yesterday" out of current questicns of
mathematics, science, and technology. Rather, they are a contemporary
expression of perennial problems which have been recognized for centuries
and discussed in the language available at the time.
One way to circumscribe the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth-
seventeenth centuries is to say that it replaced the descriptive-metaphysical
conception of the universe epitomized in Aristotle's doctrine by the mathe-
matical-positivistic or Galilean conception. That is, the vision of the world
as a telelogical cosmos was replaced by the description of events in causal,
mathematical laws.
We say "replaced," not "eliminated," for the Aristotelian dictum of
the whole that is more than its parts still remained. We must strongly empha-
size that order or organization of a whole or system, transcending its parts
when these are considered in isolation, is nothing metaphysical, not an
anthropomorphic superstition or a philosophical speculation; it is a fact
of observation encountered whenever we look at a living organism, a social
group, or even an atom.
Science, however, was not well prepared to deal with this problem.
The second maxim of Descartes' Discours de la Methode was "to break
down every problem into as many separate simple elements as might be
possible." This, similarly formulated by Galileo as the "resolutive" method,
was the conceptual "paradigm"
[35]
of science from its foundation to
 1972
The History and Status
of
General Systems Theory
409
modern laboratory work: that is, to resolve and reduce complex phenomena
into elementary parts and processes.
This method worked admirably well insofar as observed events were
apt to be split into isolable causal chains, that is, relations between two
or a few variables. It was at the root of the enormous success
of
physics
and the consequent technology. But questions of many-variable problems
always remained. This was the case even in the three-body problem of
mechanics; the situation was aggravated when the organization of the living
organism or even of the atom, beyond the simplest proton-electron system
of hydrogen, was concerned.
Two principal ideas were advanced in order to deal with the problem
of order or organization. One was the comparison with man-made machines;
the other was to conceive of order as a product of chance. The first was
epitomized by Descartes'
bete machine,
later expanded to the
homme
tnachine
of Lamettrie. The other is expressed by the Darwinian idea of
natural selection. Again, both ideas were highly successful. The theory of
the living organism as a machine in its various disguises-from a mechani-
cal machine or clockwork in the early explanations of the iatrophysicists of
the seventeenth century, to later conceptions of the organism as a caloric,
chemodynamic, cellular, and cybernetic machine
1131
provided explanations
of biological phenomena from the gross level of the physiology of organs
down to the submicroscopic structures and enzymaiic processes in the cell.
Simiiarly, organismic order as a product of random events embraced an
enormous number of facts under the title of "synthetic theory of evolution"
including molecular genetics and biology.
Nothwifhstanding the singular success achieved in the explanation of
ever more and finer life processes, basic questions remained unanswered.
Descartes' "animal machine" was
a
fair enough principle to explain the
admirable order of processes found in the living organism. But then, accord-
ing to Descartes, the "machine" had God for its creator. The evolution of
machines by events at random rather appears to be self-contradictory.
Wristwatches or nylon stockings are not as a rule found in nature as products
of
chance processes, and certainly the mitochondrial "machines"
of
en-
zymatic organization in even the simplest cell or nucleoprotein molecules
arc inccrnparably more complex than a watch or the simple polymers which
form synthetic fibers. "Surival of the fittest" (or "differential reproduction"
in modern terminology) seems lo lead to a circuitous argument. Seid-
maintaining systems must exist before they can enter into competition,
which leaves systems with higher selective value or differential reproduction
predominant. That self-maintenance, however, is the explicandum;
it
is not
provided by the ordinary laws of physics. Rather, the second law of thermo-
dynamics prescribes that ordered systems in which irreversible processes
take place tend toward most probable states and, hence, toward destruction
of existing order and ultimate decay
LIB].
 470
Academy of Management Journal
December
Thus neovitalistic currents, represented by Driesch, Bergson, and
others, reappeared around the turn of the present century, advancing quite
legitimate arguments which were based essentially on the limits of possible
regulations in a "machine," of evolution by random events, and on the
goal-directedness of action. They were able, however, to refer only to the
old Aristotelian "entelechy" under new names and descriptions, that is, a
supernatural, organizing princip!e or "factor."
Thus the "fight on the concept of organism in the first decades of the
twentieth century," as Woodger
[56J
nicely put it, indicated increasing
doubts regarding the "paradigm" of classical science, that is, the explana-
lion of complex phenomena in terms of isolable elements. This was ex-
pressed in the question of "organization" found in every living system; in
the question whether "random mutations
cum
natural selection provide all
the answers to the phenomena of e
These problems were in
KG
way limited to biology. Psychology, in
gestalt theory, similarly and even earlier posed the question that psycho-
logical wholes (e,g., perceived
gestalten)
are not resolvable into elementary
units such as punctual sensations and excitations in the retina. At the same
time sosiology 1.49, 501 came to the concibrsion that physicalistic theories,
modeled according to the Newtenian paradigm or the like, were unsatis-
factory. Even the atom appeared as a minute "organism" to !Whitehead.
FOUNDATlQNS
OF
GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY
In the late 1920's von Bertalanffy wrote:
Since the fundamental character of the living thing is its organization, the ccs-
tcinary investigation of ihe single parts and processes cannot provide a complete
explanation of the vital phenomena. This investigation gives us no information
about the coordination of parts and processes. Thus the chief task of biology
niust be to discover the laws of biological systems (at all levels of organizsiionj.
We beiieve that the attempts to find a foundation for theoretical biology point at
a fundamental change in the world picture, This view, considered as a method
of investigation, we shall call "organismic biology" and, as an attempt at an
explanation, "the system theory of the organism"
17,
pp. 64 ff., 190, 46, con-
densed].
Recognized "as something
ncw
in biological literature"
1431,
the organ-
ismic program became widely accepted. This was the germ of what later
became known as general systems theory. If the term "organism" in the
above statements is replaced by other "organized entities," such as social
groups, personality, or technological devices, this is the program of systems
theory.
v
The Aristotelian dictum of the whole being more than its parts, which
was neglected by the mechanistic conception, on the one hand, and which
led to a vitalistic demonology, on the other, has a simple and even trivial
olution
n
I321
and thus of the organization
of living things; and in ihe question of goal-directedness, which may be
denied bui in some way or other still raises its ugly head.
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