An Outline of General System Theory (1950)

1 Parallel Evolution in Science As we survey the evolution of modern science, we find the remarkable phenomenon that similar general conceptions and viewpoints have evolved independently in the various branches of science, and to begin with these may be indicated as follows: in the past centuries, science tried to explain phenomena by reducing them to an interplay of elementary units which could be investigated independently of each other. In contemporary modern science, we find in all fields conceptions of what is rather vaguely termed ‘wholeness.’ It was the aim of classical physics eventually to resolve all natural phenomena into a play of elementary units, the characteristics of which remain unaltered whether they are investigated in isolation or in a complex. The expression of this conception is the ideal of the Laplacean spirit, which resolves the world into an aimless play of atoms, governed by the laws of nature. This conception was not changed but rather strengthened when deterministic laws were replaced by statistical laws in Boltzmann’s derivation of the second principle of thermodynamics. Physical laws appeared to be essentially ‘laws of disorder,’ a statistical result of unordered and fortuitous events. In contrast, the basic problems in modern physics are problems of organisation. Problems of this kind present themselves in atomic physics, in structural chemistry, in crystallography, and so forth. In microphysics, it becomes impossible to resolve phenomena into local events, as is shown by the Heisenberg relation and in quantum mechanics. Corresponding to the procedure in physics, the attempt has been made in biology to resolve the phenomena of life into parts and processes which could be investigated in isolation. This procedure is essentially the same in the various branches of biology. The organism is considered to be an aggregate of cells as elementary life-units, its activities are resolved into functions of isolated organs and finally physico-chemical processes, its behaviour into reflexes, the material substratum of heredity into genes, acting independently of each other, phylogenetic evolution into single fortuitous mutations, and so on. As opposed to the analytical, summative and machine [135]theoretical viewpoints, organismic conceptions1 have evolved in all branches of modern biology which assert the necessity of investigating not only parts but also relations of organisation resulting from a dynamic interaction and manifesting themselves by the difference in behaviour of parts in isolation and in the whole organism. The development in medicine follows a similar pattern.2 Virchow’s programme of ‘cellular pathology,’ claiming to resolve disease into functional disturbances of cells, is to be supplemented by the consideration of the organism-as-a-whole, as it appears clearly in such fields as theory of human constitutions, endocrinology, physical medicine and psychotherapy. Again we find the same trend in psychology. Classical association psychology tried to resolve mental phenomena into elementary units, sensations and the like, psychological atoms, as it were. Gestalt psychology has demonstrated the existence and primacy of psychological entities, which are not a simple summation of elementary units, and are governed by dynamical laws.