Ludwig von Bertalanffy

We have to pay attention to the relationships between the pieces.

That idea has a long intellectual history, but one of the people most closely associated with modern systems theory was the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy.

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century and eventually laying out his ideas in his 1968 book General System Theory, Bertalanffy argued against the tendency to understand everything through reductionism, break something into smaller and smaller pieces, understand each piece, and eventually you'll understand the whole.

Sometimes that works beautifully, but sometimes the relationships between those pieces matter just as much as the pieces themselves.

Around the same period, mathematician Norbert Wiener was developing the field of cybernetics, looking at communication, control, and especially feedback, the idea that what a system produces can circle back and affect what it does next.

Wiener's work was elaborated and taken up by a number of other thinkers, some of whom did put it on a most rigorous focused foundation.

These included Heinz von Forrester, W. Ross Ashby, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, although these refinements tended to transform cybernetics into other entities, most notably general systems theory, which took pains to distinguish themselves from Wiener's original.

Gonna pause for a moment there.

So essentially, it's a matter of semantics.

Why is it necessary if it's not real?

So in the mid twentieth century, Ludwig von Bertalanffy introduced what's called general systems theory

Okay

And this was a direct reaction against the idea that you could understand complex organic phenomena just by breaking them down into isolated mechanical parts

You see, what happened in the 1920s is that The movement towards a more holistic view through morphogenetic fields was developed and written about quite widely.

One of the people who read about it was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who in his Modern Theories of Development, 1926, talked about morphogenetic fields.

He then went on to say it became controversial because people then immediately saw that this was very close to Driesch's vitalism.

And so people got terribly frightened.