A Review of the Dialectical Tragedy of the Concept of Wholeness: Ludwig Von Bertalanffy's Biography Revisited

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

A Review of The Dialectical Tragedy of the Concept of Wholeness: Ludwig Bertalanffy's Biography Revisited written by David Pouvreau reviewed by Jeffrey Goldstein published by ISCE Publishing ISBN 978098 1703282 (2009) Revelations Ludwig Bertalanffy is of course well known as the founder ofthe systems approach known as General Systems Theory (GST), and for his many publications in this area as well as in inaugurating and leading several of the large systems sciences associations. GST certainly ranks as one ofthe important precursors to modern complexity theory by setting the conceptual stage for many important developments in the latter. This excellent biography of Bertalanffy written by David Pouvreau (translated from the French by Elisabeth Schober) was prompted by two precipitating events. The first was the advent of several recent scholarly German language biographies of Bertalanffy written as doctoral theses. This research uncovered aspects of Bertalanffy's early career and work during WWII in Vienna. The second was the accidental discovery in 2004, in a second-hand bookstore in Buffalo, New York, of a large portfolio containing many letters sent by and received by Bertalanffy plus numerous books, preprints and related materials. These two events enabled Pouvreau to avoid a hagiography on the one side and a deprecating trashing of Bertalanffy on the other, an intention that appears, to this reviewer at least, to have been superbly accomplished. But before getting into some ofthe details Pouvreau's biography I feel the need to admit that I came to this review with two dispositions regarding Ludwig Bertalanffy and his work that have affected my reading of the biography. The first is that I have always found general systems theory (GST) to be a bit too, well, general for my tastes. Accordingly, GST has often left me rather cold with its, what I take to be, overly abstract formulations of its basic principles about the dynamics of systems, to such an extent I've often felt a particular dissatisfaction whenever reading anything of Bertalanffy. In that regard, Pouvreau's biography has been very helpful in fleshing-out some of these abstract GST principles by discussing their origin and development during Bertalanffy's long career. One case in point is that, whereas previously I had believed one of the limitations of GST lay in its not only not containing anything like the idea of emergence, I couldn't even see where there was could be any conceptual room in GST for emergent phenomena at all, I was pleasantly surprised to learn from reading Pouvreau's book that Bertalanffy and GST did in fact possess a cognate idea of emergence which he called supra -individual entities or integrations of higher order about which I'll say more about below. There were other similar, pleasant surprises about his work as well which I will also remark upon below. The second confession is that I knew very little about Bertalanffy's life before reading this biography, only the very broad outlines of it in relation to his general systems theory, which, again, never sparked me to want to read more about him. Consequently, much of this biography came as a complete revelation to me, particularly Bertalanffy's undeniably close association with Nazism, an association that appears to have been of one cloth with his overall manipulative, petulant, opportunistic, and entitled personality dynamics, at least as Pouvreau has depicted the latter through his access to the many letters recently discovered. To be sure, Bertalanffy was no rabid Antisemitic Brownshirter denouncing Jews at every opportunity. But he certainly didn't hesitate to emphasize the pure Aryan heritage of his Hungarian nobility forebears (the von of his name), and to manipulate his varied affiliations with Nazism in ambitiously furthering his career in Vienna, and equally manipulative to quickly deny the extent of his flirtation with National Socialism during the denazification period after the War. …