The project of general systemology instigated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy Genealogy, genesis, reception and advancement

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1 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at The project of general systemology instigated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy Genealogy, genesis, reception and advancement David Pouvreau Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, Vienna, Austria The project of general systemology 851 Received 7 May 2013 Revised 6 July 2013 Accepted 16 July 2013 Abstract Purpose The paper aims to present the main perspectives and conclusions of a doctoral research in the history and philosophy of science conducted in France and Austria by the author on the project of general systemology (or general system theory ) instigated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Design/methodology/approach A genealogical enquiry accounts for its scientific, philosophical and more generally cultural origins. Its genesis in Bertalanffy s works between 1926 and 1944 is explained. The process that led it to become a collective project is then discussed: the history of the Society for General Systems Research is considered, the ambivalence of its role with regard to general systemology being demonstrated. Finally, the unity of the diverse contributions to the latter s development is asserted in a framework put forward by the author in order to account for its structure and functions. Findings While stating a comprehensive view of its history, the paper characterizes general systemology as the project of a general science of systemic interpretation of the real which remains topical, although it was never fully actualized. Originality/value A new insight is thus provided on the scope and meaning of this hermeneutics: it meets the contemporary need for a better understanding of the foundations of systems research. Keywords Open systems, Philosophy, Systems theory, Mathematical modelling, Systemic thinking Paper type Research paper Introduction This paper is derived from a recently defended doctoral thesis on the history and foundations of so-called general system theory (Pouvreau, 2013). I claim the term general systemology is more relevant to describe the latter, in order to refer to a project of a general science of systemic interpretation of the real, of an original kind of hermeneutics which had various philosophical and scientific dimensions[1]. The instigator of this project was Ludwig von Bertalanffy ( ). Mostly exclusively known through his compendium of papers published in 1968 under the title General System Theory Foundations, Development, Applications, Bertalanffy was trained as a philosopher in Vienna, notably in connection with neo-kantianisms and neo-positivisms. He first oriented his works toward the philosophy of biology ( ) and then developed an organismic theoretical biology ( ). Essentially as a result of his compromising with Nazis, he was forced to emigration after the Second World War and settled in North America from 1949 onwards (Canada and the USA), where he published and promoted his general systemological project. He inspired and cofounded the Society for General Systems Research (SGSR), Kybernetes Vol. 42 No. 6, 2013 pp q Emerald Group Publishing Limited X DOI /K

2 K 42,6 852 the ancestor of the International Society for Systems Sciences, while widening his works and reorienting them mainly towards cancer research, psychiatry, psychology and social sciences. He significantly influenced those disciplines in that way[2]. This paper is structured in four sections. Sections 1 and 2 focus on the genealogy and genesis of general systemology in Bertalanffy s works. Section 3 explains why and how this project became a collective one after the Second World War: it examines the history of the SGSR. Section 4 attempts a reconstruction of general systemology, based on the significant contributions to its advancement. 1. Genealogy of the Bertalanffian project This section accounts for the origins of the reflections which led Bertalanffy to elaborate this project between 1923 and 1937, of the meanings he assigned to it and of the conceptual schemes on which he constructed it. Most crucial has been the role played in the genesis of his humanistic and aristocratic values by a context that was widely experienced as a crisis of culture. These values were rooted in a romanticist idealism stemming from the beginning of the nineteenth century, of which this context had aroused the rehabilitation (Ringer, 1990). This explains the axiological orientations (i.e. value commitments) and ideological positions which permeate Bertalanffy s works to such a degree that one can see them operate in his philosophy of knowledge and some of his epistemological analyses, as well as in several central themes of his systemology. This is the case of his opposition to every form of utilitarianism or materialism; of his elitist conception of education as complete and disinterested formation of mind; of his interpretation of science as an essentially unitarian project, inseparable from the other aspects of culture, the vocation of which would be to contribute to the edification of a consistent world view supplying meanings. His rejection of dogmatic empiricism and of positivisms, as well as his anti-modernist accents and his disdain for a democracy of which the objective function would be the legitimatization of the technocratically organized and ultimately nihilistic reign of commercialism, are major consequences of these values, inherent in his project (von Bertalanffy, 1924, 1957, 1962a, 1964). It is in this context marked by deep questionings giving rise to sharp controversies, which fostered radical relativism as well as thirsts for absolute, that can also be found the sources of what may have been the most powerful driving force of Bertalanffy s thinking: his quest, in a critico-idealist perspective, of a cosmology able to overcome the contradictions of a declining world of which his tormented time would only manifest the ultimate convulsions. One first group of determinants of this cosmology is the omnipresence of philosophies of life, typical of the intellectual climate in which the young Bertalanffy formed his ideas. These philosophies answered to exacerbated existential needs in exalting all the traits judged as characteristic of life, in reaction to the logics of a civilization of the machine regarded as alienating and disastrous. Perpetual movement, spontaneity, creativity, assertion and surpassing of the self, became elevated to the status of an ultimate reality, to the manifestations of which the privilege of a meaning should be reserved. Bertalanffy molded some of his most fundamental conceptual schemes in contact to these fashionable philosophies: the vision of a world in flux in each of its parts, identifying the persistence of an entity to the reproduction of an order of relationships between its changing elements; the attribution of a primary

3 activity to every organized entity, which subordinates to its own logic the re-actions of this entity to its environment; the interpretation of every evolution as an anamorphosis, an intrinsic trend towards an increase of order identified with the expression of a perpetual compulsion to go beyond the present conditions of existence in order to reach the perfection of the self. Bertalanffy found here a motive for his recurrent references to Heraclitus, Leibniz and Goethe, but one should also see the influences of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which operated through the intermediary of some major philosophers of life : Dilthey, Simmel, Bergson and Spengler. There was also an influence on his theory of knowledge of some kind of pragmatism, the emergence of which was connected to the one of the philosophies of life, and the origins of which can be found in Nietzsche s works, in Machian positivism and in a biologicist tradition of interpretation of Kant leading to Vaihinger and von Uexküll: Bertalanffy retained their idea that the categories of experience are instruments of adaptation molded by the necessities of evolution[3]. However, the philosophies of life have in several regards aroused Bertalanffy s opposition, hence also have contributed to the formation of his initial enquiries in that negative way. It was out of question for him to yield to the irrationalism that most of them were inclined to promote. And he was not at all satisfied with the radical ontological, epistemological and methodological gaps they induced, because they contradicted his unitarian tropism: a gap between nature and culture on the one hand, which set an antithesis between sciences of nature and sciences of culture ; a gap between physical world and the world of life on the other hand, which induced a tearing between mechanicist and vitalist biologists notably harbored by psychological analogies deriving from a pseudo-concept of life which was too wide and vague to avoid fallacies. The keynote of the young Bertalanffy s time was especially the ubiquity of the category of wholeness, which passed for the most fundamental category of life (Harrington, 1996). Reconstructing the net of his many scientific and philosophical influences in that regard makes possible to clarify how this context of promotion of holistic ways of thinking has, more deeply than the philosophies of life as such, conditioned his systemological thinking, and to spot the marks that this context has imprinted on his conceptual schemes. Bertalanffy borrowed old philosophies of unity and wholeness, regarding them as forming a tradition. He affiliated himself to Nicholas of Cusa and Leibniz, to the prophets of a romanticist philosophy of nature such as Schelling and Goethe, and to Fechner and von Hartmann. He found in these philosophies food for his inclinations towards a monism identifying mind and matter as manifestations of a single reality, and for his humanistic view of an essentially unified science, dedicated to the formation of the whole man. He could also find in them the inspiration of a monadological view of an integrated world of wholes ruled by universal principles of development, conservation, reproduction and evolution justifying and making necessary the analogical correspondence as a way towards the intelligibility of cosmos. A systematic cartography of the holistic themes in the scientific and philosophical productions from the 1910s to the mid-1930s justifies Bertalanffy s recurrent allegations in that regard: these themes can be found in every academic discipline (although they nowhere imposed their domination) and they were mobilized by some of the most renowned scientists and philosophers of the time. The project of general systemology 853

4 K 42,6 854 The recent transformations of physics as well as the philosophical commentaries they fostered played a prominent role in their promotion. The causes of this role are its desubstantialization process and the unification of its various fields; the assertion of the statistical character of its laws; the rehabilitation of teleology as a formal principle; the questioning of causalism and determinism; and the fact that holistic themes had entered the very heart of the young quantum mechanics. These aspects were essential in the formation of Bertalanffy s ideas concerning the epistemological justification of a scientific holism and the shape it may have. They also considerably influenced the other contemporary architects of holistic thinking who jointly inspired him. In some metaphysics like Whitehead s and Hartmann s, Bertalanffy found rehabilitations of typical themes of the Naturphilosophie tradition to which he sought to set himself up as a heir, but also systematic and original developments taking into account the state of contemporary science, which significantly influenced his ontology and cosmology. This is the case of the primacy of relation on substance asserted by these metaphysics; of the principles of holistic causality and emergence that they introduced; and, at least in Hartmann s, of a stratified construction of the real conciliating the recognition of the specificity of the laws ruling each stratum and the possibility of an unity based on the ubiquity of some fundamental categories. On the other hand, Bertalanffy s silence about Spann s holistic metaphysics reveals his attachment to the determination of a fertile way of conciliation between scientific and holistic thoughts, of which Spann denied the very possibility[4]. This rejection of every wholeness mysticism can be observed in his analogous silence maintained towards Krüger s psychology of wholeness. On the other hand, the Gestalt psychologists have deeply influenced Bertalanffy. While departing from the associationist paradigm, they had demonstrated the possibility of a psychology being at the same time holistic and scientific (Ash, 1995). They had stated laws ruling the structuring and dynamics of perceptive or cognitive forms. Even if he rejected their physicalism, Bertalanffy was especially impressed by Köhler s attempts to expand this psychology in the direction of a general Gestalt theory, where he could find the foreshadowing of a systemology (Systemlehre) devoted to the statement of general system principles based on isomorphisms in mathematical style (Köhler, 1924, 1927). It is nonetheless in biology that Bertalanffy could observe the greatest diversity of holistic works and find the richest source of epistemological reflections as well as the most elaborated matter for the construction and illustration of his own system concepts. The concerned fields covered a wide spectrum: embryology, to the developments of which Bertalanffy particularly turned his attention; morphology, which struck him by its rehabilitation of the typological approach that Goethe had instigated; theories of phylogenetic evolution, heredity and biocenotic systems; as well as several theories concerning the relationships of the organisms with their environment or the preservation of their integrity despite the variations of the latter. The understanding of the multiple levels of biological organization seemed to require a single organismic scheme, variously interpreted: an entity opened to its environment and interacting with it, which hence gains the ability to develop itself and to preserve its integrity while adapting to this environment, the behavior of its parts being only intelligible with regard to this ability. This observation was crucial in the formation of Bertalanffy s conceptions, especially with Weiss attempts, similar to Köhler s ones, to state system laws having a very general biological scope (Weiss, 1925, 1926).

5 Some bio-philosophical developments connected to this holistic movement are also important. Especially the critical rehabilitation of teleology, identified with the expression of the logic of preservation of its integrity ruling the behavior of an organism and of its parts; as well as the legitimization of a methodological vitalism recognizing organic wholeness as a problem inaccessible to meristic[5] approaches and offering a framework that makes possible a nomothetic determination of the bio-holistic traits (Ungerer, 1922). Bertalanffy also very early took care of the evolutions of medicine, where he noticed a significant holistic movement which prolonged the biological one and inspired his later orientations towards psychiatry. So was the case of neuropsychiatry, which Goldstein tried to reconstruct around an organismic scheme (Goldstein, 1934); so was also the case of constitutional typologies and pathologies, as well as the emergence of psychosomatic medicine. As for social sciences, they were also subject to holistic ways of thinking. These sciences have formed on the basis of holistic ontologies, but the trend that Bertalanffy witnessed was a detachment from the organicist analogies in biologicist style that were the hallmark of the nineteenth century. While rejecting this inspiration, he was led to a reflection about the legitimacy, the limitations and the dangers of such analogies, which stimulated his progress towards an abstract and purely formal system concept. The various transpositions of the ideal-typological approach that Goethe had introduced in morphology also had a considerable impact. Very important were Spengler s historical morphology and Dilthey s hermeneutics of cultural systems (Spengler, 1920, 1922; Dilthey, 1922) for Bertalanffy s ideas concerning the possibility and the adequate methodology of a science of the systemic interpretation of the real. One of the essential and tragic characteristics of the German world in the 1920s and 1930s is that philosophies of life and holistic ways of thinking joined in the ideological realm: wholeness was transformed in a vehicle of the ideologization of science which, after having first been dedicated to the uprooting of the mechanicist world view, soon happened to play an essential role in the justification of the national-socialist order; especially holistic biologies, which became one of its pillars (Bäumer, 1990; Harrington, 1996). Bertalanffy s position towards this situation was complex (Pouvreau, 2009, 2013). It largely determined his constant inclination to attribute an ideological scope to his works. And it gave rise to a very ambivalent attitude towards national-socialism, which he as promptly served from 1938 onwards in an opportunistic spirit as he had before 1933 been prompt to attack its instrumentation of biology and the mystical deliria accompanying its rise. Bertalanffy s initial set of problems thus arising in that context paved the way to his general systemology: constructing the logical, epistemological and methodological means of a general and rigorous science of the holistic entities, at once able to set holism free from its confinement to metaphysics or to mystical speculations, and to ground firmly a world view that would be an alternative to a mechanicism judged as scientifically inadequate and ethically unacceptable; and getting involved in that direction through a prior enterprise of theoretical reconstruction of biology, the science of life and wholeness par excellence a pressing requirement, because biology remained deprived of the foundations and force which were necessary if it were to take on the central cultural role that it was called to play, hence becoming the subject of the most dangerous speculations. The project of general systemology 855

6 K 42, Genesis of the Bertalanffian project We now turn to how Bertalanffy answered this questioning, in recounting the steps of the construction of his systemological project. His perspectivist theory of knowledge played a key role, although von Bertalanffy (1955, 1966) only left scattered commentaries about it, without any systematization. Its influences were numerous and various[6]. It was rooted in a philosophical anthropology characterizing man as a symbolic animal and seeking to explain the origins of this specific status as well as to state the principles ruling the symbolic universes that this animal is led to create. This perspectivism can be characterized as a constructivist, relationalist, evolutionist, transactionalist and genetic theory of knowledge, that partook of a neo-critical idealism congruent to Cassirer s one. It recognized a biological and cultural relativity of categories and established the fundamental principle of the interpretative and necessarily incomplete character of every knowledge; however, it did not renounce to the principle of objectivity, redefined as the power to reveal structural and ultimately mathematical invariants, through a convergence of various perspectives constructed in order to grasp the same object. The consequences of this perspectivism for Bertalanffy s philosophy of science were substantial, particularly for his system concept. It explains his insistence upon the necessity of theoretical thinking, as well as his conception of its nature and aims, and of the criteria enabling to judge the value of the theoretical constructs. Bertalanffy advocated the substitution of a science of principles to a science of images and early identified theorization with the building of a hypothetic-deductive system his position concerning the possibility of mathematical theorizations outside physical science remaining nonetheless undetermined until the beginning of the 1930s. His perspectivism led Bertalanffy to understand science as an art of omission expressing some aspects of the real in those interpretative constructions that he called theoretical models. He developed in the context of this modelism substantial elements of an epistemology of models and modeling, where the famous concept of nomic isomorphism which was to become a pivot of his general systemology took his natural place. Bertalanffy s perspectivism enabled him to rehabilitate the holistic styles of thinking under a critical form related to structuralisms, in realizing the transition from a concept of wholeness remaining subject to metaphysical controversies because of its realistic ontology, towards a system concept arising out of a constructivist ontology: there is no system in itself, there are only systemic constructions of objects which structure symbolic representations of some aspects of the phenomenal world in conformity to some holistic schemes of theoretical interpretation, the objectivity of which refers to the relational invariants revealed by the isomorphisms that aroused them. The problem hence became for Bertalanffy to construct a framework aiming at elaborating such schemes and at making them operational, in such a way that systemic theorizing would provide a credible and fertile alternative to the meristic logics and methodologies of a normal science confronted with impasses as soon as it ventures into the realm of organized complexity. This framework was destined to merge the hypothetic-deductive and hermeneutical methods, to conciliate the search for exactness and the quest for meanings with the idea that the meaning of one thing is the expression of its function in a holistic structure into which it is integrated. However, the idea and the understanding of this systemological hermeneutics were not

7 engendered by the sole perspectivism of Bertalanffy: he found in the contemporary biology the other driving forces of its genesis. One can account for the whole set of aspects of the organismic biology he mostly elaborated between 1926 and 1937 in describing it as a biological systemology connecting two poles (von Bertalanffy, 1932, 1937): a philosophy of biological nature; and a theoretical biology including a philosophy of biological theorizing, a scientific program setting up its goals, and a conceptual framework enabling to implement this program. This theoretical biology was supposed to confer a conceptual and methodological unity on biology, while promoting the latter to the rank of exact science. Understood in the perspective of a methodological vitalism, it should have a hypothetic-deductive character, its task being the determination of the laws of biological entities as systems at all levels of the world of life (from cells to biocenosis), and the elaboration of general system principles enabling this determination. Bertalanffy formulated such principles in the form of two theoretical schemes of organismic interpretation: the open system to matter exchanges directed towards (or maintained in) a flux equilibrium ; and the progressive hierarchization of structures and functions, which had several modalities (differentiation, specialization, centralization, mechanization) and to which were connected other principles such as trigger action. As a result of his effort to relate his two schemes, Bertalanffy was led to a conceptual model of which he tried to establish the very general scope, the organized system : a system which, thanks to its openness, can structure itself and function in a more and more complex manner, until it becomes a hierarchical order of open systems in flux equilibrium and enhances in that way both his autonomy with regard to its environment and its ability to fit the latter s changes. Insofar as they aimed at guiding system modeling at all levels of biological organization and at showing a formal unity between these levels, these theoretical schemes and this model anticipated essential aspects of general systemology. As for Bertalanffy s philosophy of biological nature, it was based on three philosophical schemes of organismic interpretation: the primacies of wholeness upon part, of dynamical order upon structural-machinalist order and of activity upon reactivity. Although they could not by themselves contribute directly to system theorizing of the phenomena, these schemes aimed at providing the latter with a heuristic and a framework enabling to find out its general meanings, and at making possible fertile connections between organismic biology and the scientific disciplines that were likely to appropriate its schemes. Bertalanffy did not yet clearly understand exactness as mathematic in 1932: how can be explained his unwillingness in that regard and the remarkable evolution that led him five years later to state the constitutive character of mathematics in system theorizing, not only in biology, but in the framework of a general systemology? Powerful motives traditionally stood in the way of the conciliation of scientific biology, holistic thinking and mathematics. But in discovering the first developments of mathematical biology and in contributing himself to its progress, Bertalanffy departed from tradition and was led in that direction. The works of D Arcy Thompson, Przibram, Rashevsky, Lotka, Volterra, Donnan and Woodger brought to his mind the essential ingredients for his general systemology that were still missing in 1932 in his early biological systemology: the possibility of qualitative mathematics (topology, mathematical logic) adequate to the relational problems raised by system theorizing; the resources offered to the latter even by more classical quantitative mathematics The project of general systemology 857

8 K 42,6 858 (differential and integral calculus); the possibility to study abstract systems of relationships in order to establish typologies of a priori possible systemic behavior and to use them in order to construct theoretical models of specific phenomena; and the use of mathematical analogies in order to guide modeling, but also to construct new concepts and hence enrich a theoretical corpus that was still under-developed in comparison with physics. Bertalanffy s great interest in the first bio-mathematical works stemmed from the necessity he felt in 1933 to demonstrate the relevance, the interest and the fecundity of his organismic biology, and that implied to prove its ability to provide an operational framework for the construction of bio-systemic models deserving their qualification as theoretical. It is during the period of his study of the existing bio-mathematical works (from 1933 onwards to 1941) that he himself undertook this task in parallel. The construction of his mathematical model of animal global growth was a success (von Bertalanffy, 1934, 1941b). Elaborated in perfect conformity to the organismic perspective, it overcame the considerable difficulties met until that time by those who had tried to provide a satisfying mathematical description of this phenomenon, while relating two biological fields hitherto largely disconnected (physiology of metabolism and study of growth). Beyond the implementation of the organismic program, it was nonetheless also important for the genesis of Bertalanffy s general systemology: in constructing this model, he could also observe the theoretical value that may have the analysis of a set of purely abstract relationships; moreover, this model resulting in a typology integrating all animal organisms remarkably illustrated the power of formal unification that may have mathematical system theorizing. These considerations explain why Bertalanffy could formulate and present his project of general systemology as early as 1937 in a seminar (at Chicago). But they do not explain the motives and functions of his works in-between this date and the late 1940s, when he published it. These works met two aims: furthering and deepening the implementation of the organismic program; and providing substantial arguments in order to create the conditions of a successful promotion of his more general project. Bertalanffy s dynamical morphology should satisfy two needs: making operational the connection between his two theoretical schemes of organismic interpretation; and demonstrating with regard to the problem of organic form the ability of the organismic program to grasp efficiently all the fields of biology (von Bertalanffy, 1941a, 1942). This morphology did not as a whole succeed in fulfilling these tasks: the Bertalanffian treatment of animal growth is the only part of this morphology that significantly contributed to their realization. It was otherwise essentially limited to an original framework of qualitative interpretation of morphogenetic phenomena, which had the merits to generate relevant critics of the researches concerning that problem and to formulate hypotheses and explanation suggesting credible alternative researches. As for the outline of formal theory of open systems he published in 1940, it was initiated in 1938 in connection with Rashevsky s school of mathematical biophysics, just after the vehement critics that his first presentation of his general systemological project arose. The spirit of this special systemology limited to systems engaged in material exchanges with their environment was similar to the one of Lotka s general kinetics (Lotka, 1925; von Bertalanffy, 1940, 1942). It aimed at completing the organismic bio-theoretical enterprise in suggesting the possibility to deduce from their openness some of the most fundamental characteristics of all biological systems. In view

9 of Bertalanffy s obvious effort to derive a priori from a formal open system some system laws of which he could mention many concretizations in biology, chemistry and demography, it nonetheless appears that the main vocation of his enterprise was to provide to general systemology a convincing paradigm that would then enable him to explain better the theoretical function of the latter, and to illustrate its ability to establish fertile and empirically relevant results. But this Bertalanffian theory did not carry out his expectations: he came up against serious formal difficulties preventing him to derive enough significant results; and the kinetic point of view to which he confined himself did not allow to grasp the problems of structural and functional organization which are characteristic of biological systems. The study of the relationships between Bertalanffy s works on open systems and the young thermodynamics of irreversible processes shows that there was here an important problem that he never solved. The project of general systemology General systemology as a collective project This section considers the destiny of the general systemological project once it had been published by Bertalanffy. His first presentations, from 1948 to 1953, created some difficulties from which arose many misunderstandings: they condensed in a few pages bold ontological postulates and epistemological points of view without discussing their necessary justifications; they remained essentially programmatic, keeping dark most of the methodological ways that one would have to take in order to enable general systemology to come up with the ambitious tasks that Bertalanffy assigned to it, particularly the task of structuring system modeling (von Bertalanffy, 1949, 1950, 1951a). Notwithstanding their apparent very speculative form, those presentations reached their goal: critics remained marginal at that time and did not shock the numerous enthusiasms aroused by a project that promised to meet the many expectations relative to the theoretical needs felt in non physical sciences as well as to the widely felt necessity to counter excessive specialization and to increase interdisciplinary communication, or to the ethical scope and social functions of science. Ralph Gerard, Anatol Rapoport, James Miller and Kenneth Boulding were among the first researchers to put efforts into the defense and development of general systemology. Their role in the foundation of the SGSR raised the question of the reasons of their convergence in this project in In response to a particular political context, Chicago University (which these researchers and Bertalanffy frequented to various degrees) and the Ford Foundation had created a favorable ground for this convergence in supporting research programs of which the epistemological orientations and the praxeological (i.e. praxis-oriented) ambitions were similar to the ones characterizing the Bertalanffian project (Hammond, 2003). Gerard s, Rapoport s, Miller s and Boulding s works prior to their contact with the latter reveal three major agreements with Bertalanffy: a wish to give to their works some axiological and praxeological significance, with the intention to contribute to the resolution of the huge problems posed to humanity according to them; a strong taste for analogical reasoning going with a deep concern for the unification of scientific fields; and the conviction that developing operational holistic conceptual schemes and methodologies is the adequate way in order to serve efficiently these purposes. Some significant divergences (which soon were to become problematic) are nonetheless manifest. Bertalanffy had much more deeper affinities with Rapoport and Boulding than with Gerard and Miller: a concern for a balance between the search for unity and the respect for diversity, that is between a

10 K 42,6 860 principle of emergence (understood in a critical perspective) and a quest for isomorphic system models, which led the former to reject the biologicism or the physicalism to which Gerard and Miller were inclined when the specifically human levels of organization were concerned; and an ethic that was too much concerned with the problem of conciliating the fulfillment of the individual and social and ecological harmonies to tolerate their technocratic scientism flirting now with the industrial-military complex, now with totalitarian temptations. These affinities were rooted in similar and sometimes identical influences. Most certainly, Rapoport essentially headed for general systemology on the slope of mathematization of biological systems and theory of knowledge, while Boulding especially did the same on the slope of ethics and hermeneutical approach of social systems. But there was thus a complementarity between them, which could then blossom in the project that Bertalanffy instigated (Pouvreau, 2013). The SGSR could hardly have had any future if several research movements, here called cybersciences, had not joined it. Especially because of the great number of scientists involved in these other system sciences and because the latter were historically connected to practical problems and to structures of political or managerial decision-making: such aspects carried promises of expansion and institutionalization for SGSR. The connections of information theory, cybernetics and operations research with general systemology were the most important for the history of the SGSR. There were profound differences between general systemology and cybersciences from the point of view of their scientific, philosophical, ethical and ideological origins and inspirations: their association in the SGSR should not hide them. Many common epistemological and scientific-philosophical traits nonetheless enable to explain the possibility of their rapprochement. Ashby s (1952, 1956, 1958) works played a very important role in that regard. The catalysts of their association in the SGSR were a shared need of institutionalization and the necessity to remedy their respective shortcomings. Stanford s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) was the birth place of the SGSR, not only because Bertalanffy, Rapoport, Boulding and Gerard met there and decided at the end of 1954 to create this scientific society, but also because much common work was undertaken there with other scientists in : this work constituted a first step in the actualization of the systemological project. His year spent at the CASBS had a strong impact on Bertalanffy. He became aware of the multiplicity of systems research currents and of its consequences for his project: the urge to affirm its vocation and ability to integrate all those currents, while guaranteeing the organismic schemes that he prioritized a prominent place, especially in comparison with cybernetic schemes that he judged less general and often inadequate. The details of the constitution of the SGSR, the manner its founder initially understood its vocations, the characteristics of its head office (Ann Arbor s Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI)), as well as the geographical and disciplinary origins of its first members, have been studied (Hammond, 2003; Pouvreau, 2013). At its beginnings, the SGSR was almost entirely composed of North-Americans. The scientists coming from social sciences, psychology and biology were in large majority. And the cyberscientists constituted most certainly a small minority that was nonetheless already significant (in number as well as in view of the reputation of its representatives). The growth of SGSR membership, together with moderate internationalization, was rapid during the first years of its existence, but underwent an inflexion as early as 1963 and tended towards stabilization from the end of the 1960s onwards, in consequence of a

11 high renewal rate that was partly related to dissatisfactions caused by the relative importance of philosophical concerns with regard to practical applications. The 1960s were a period of expansion and diversification of the SGSR s activities (coordination of research works, organization of meetings, publications, relationships established with other institutions), but some limits inherent in its mode of functioning and funding stood out as soon as the end of this decade. Moreover, although the number of scientists coming from biology, psychology and social sciences always remained at a similar level, the relative weight of the various research orientations changed: an excessive representation of the cybersciences among the presidents of the society is noticeable and symptomatic of a trend to marginalize the Bertalanffian project. This trend went with a movement which asserted itself in the mid-1960s and grew stronger during the following decade: a quest for respectability and institutionalization that progressively led a majority of members to prioritize a focus on systems researches applied to the solution of specific practical problems, to the detriment of an interest for general theoretical constructions and logical, methodological or philosophical questions. This is a major rift in the SGSR, which had ideological declinations and to which were superimposed several epistemological splits. The global analysis of the content of the 28 General Systems Yearbooks shows that the trend in question remains imperceptible in this publication of the SGSR. This manifests an effort of the editors of these volumes, Bertalanffy and Rapoport, to maintain a balance between the various currents, particularly in order that the project of general systemology could keep on being significantly represented in all its aspects: General Systems was the place of their resistance to a systems research having an instrumentalist inspiration and dedicated to a concrete and immediate action on the human world, which tended to take the place of a systems research mainly aimed at interpreting and understanding of the world in general. The trends to which Bertalanffy, Rapoport and Boulding were opposed did not express themselves either in the Behavioral Science journal directed by Miller, which played like General Systems the role of a forum of the SGSR and had essentially the same editorial line. However, the institutional background of this journal was decisive: the MHRI which, also directed by Miller, was the publication place of General Systems and Behavioral Science, turns out to have been an institution which, after having served the promotion of general systemology, became as early as the end of the 1950s the place of its subversion, in encouraging researches that contradicted the main ideals that Bertalanffy, Rapoport and Boulding judged as constitutive of the society. It is at the MHRI that the growing influence in the SGSR of operationalists, management scientists and systems analysts, took root; there also where system scientists like Miller and Gerard could, without engaging in soul-searching, confuse behavioral sciences with the sciences of the manipulation of the behavior (or behavior engineering ); and there that an alliance between the industrial-military complex and some kinds of systems researches was born, in the cold war context. Bertalanffy, Boulding and Rapoport vigorously but unsuccessfully reacted against the scientist inclinations, the technocratic temptations and the careerism of the concerned systems scientists, who represented according to them all the more a danger for the promotion of general systemology that they affiliated themselves to it. It appears that this project, after having been the initial catalyst of the SGSR, was quickly reduced to a current of the latter. This current most certainly remained significant, but it soon represented a minority, the member of which were condemned to The project of general systemology 861

12 K 42,6 862 reassert recurrently the specificity. Although it had promised to become a vehicle of the unification of sciences, the project instigated by Bertalanffy paradoxically did not even succeed in unifying a systems research of which the various currents remained unable to find durably in the SGSR the opportunity of a constructive coexistence. 4. The advancement of general systemology General systemology was nonetheless significantly developed during the period of existence of the SGSR, in a relative continuity with its original inspiration. Despite their very diverse points of view and aims, I regard them as complementary expressions of a single systemological hermeneutics, of which the structure and functions are schematized in Figure 1 where the arrows must be read as informs. General systemology has been represented as structured in four poles, two of them sharing the realm of ontological, logical and methodological questions. (1) Philosophical systemology One of its functions, mainly served by von Bertalanffy (1951b, 1956, 1962b, 1965, 1972) and Rapoport (1960, 1966, 1969, 1972, 1973a), was the elaboration of the anthropological, Formal sciences Mathematics Mathematical logic General systemology Basic theoretical systemology Uninterpreted general systems Transdisciplinarily interpreted general systems Systemological logic Systemological methodology Systems ontology Philosophical systemology Perspectivism Philosophy of science Philosophical anthropology Metaphysics Axiology Systemic technology Ideology Applied theoretical systemology Theoretical systemic models in the «sciences of the real» Resolution of systemically interpreted concrete problems Action social economical political Figure 1. Sciences of the real Physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, medicine, psychology, linguistics, economy, sociology, anthropology, political sciences Concrete problems physico-technological, ecological, social, economical, political

13 epistemological, ontological, logical and methodological foundations of the systemic knowledge of the real. Another function, especially developed in Boulding s (1956, 1961, 1966) and Rapoport s (1973b, 1974, 1976) works, was the discussion of the values conveyed by this knowledge and of the ways it can contribute to a practical transformation of the human world. The construction, on the basis of this knowledge, of an inductive metaphysics exposing a system cosmology, was also a part of philosophical systemology, to which Laszló (1972a, b) and Bunge (1968, 1979) significantly contributed. The latter two aspects have aroused more or less explicit affinities with definite ideological discourses (ecologism, pacifism and an internationalist view of political action). As a whole, philosophical systemology carried a very original humanism, insofar as it ultimately relied on mathematics and therefore depended for its coherence on the other poles of general systemology. However, the ontological, logical and methodological aspects of the systemological hermeneutics did not only partake of philosophical systemology. As a matter of fact, they constituted an interface between the latter and a second pole. The project of general systemology 863 (2) Basic theoretical systemology This pole was dedicated to become a guide for the construction of theoretical systemic models applicable in the sciences of the real. It sought to reach this goal in gathering in structural equivalence classes the existing theoretical models of various kinds of systems, in constructing purely formal general systems representing those classes, and then in theorizing those systems with the means provided by the formal sciences in order to derive systemic principles and laws that would a priori be applicable to all their particular interpretations. Bertalanffy, Rapoport and Ashby have contributed to the development of this pole, but the most significant contributions were Mesarović s, Rosen s and Klir s in the USA, and Delattre s and Le Moigne s in France (Mesarović, 1968; Mesarović and Takahara, 1975; Rosen, 1968, 1977; Klir, 1969, 1981; Delattre, 1971; Le Moigne, 1977). Another theoretical pole played an essential role of pivot. (3) Applied theoretical systemology It got its perspectives and means from (1) and (2), and informed them back while interacting permanently with the sciences of the real, to which it was supposed to provide theoretical models: it provided (2) with the necessary material for the construction of general systems and enabled (1) to maintain alive and fertile its contact with the sciences of the real. The procedure of systemic modeling constitutive of this applied theoretical systemology has been elaborated by Klir and Orchard (Klir, 1969; Orchard, 1972) and I have proposed a systematization of this procedure in my thesis (Pouvreau, 2013, pp ). Bertalanffy s theoretical models of global or relative growth, the various interpretations of his general organized system model in psychiatry, psychology and social sciences (von Bertalanffy, 1967; Katz and Kahn, 1966), and Richardson-Rapoport s mathematical model of arms race (Rapoport, 1957), are some typical products of applied theoretical systemology. In the end, the latter informed a fourth pole. (4) Systemic technology It was the place of concrete application of the considerations developed in the other systemological poles, in order to find efficient solutions to the practical problems to which contemporary civilization is confronted, once those problems are reinterpreted

14 K 42,6 864 as systemic ones. Bertalanffy, Rapoport and Boulding recognized its legitimate place in general systemology, but always tended to remain suspicious of its productions, with regard to their values and in connection to their critics of technocratic orientations in systems research. The most emblematic contributions to systemic technology may be Miller s and Gerard s works laying the bases of internet (Brown et al., 1967; Heterick, 1998), and Mesarović s direction of the second report to the Club of Rome on limits to growth (Mesarović and Pestel, 1974). All the contributions to the development of general systemology appear as moments of a process of maturation of this project. But although the latter was partially actualized through those works, one cannot pretend that it reached its maturity. The study of its posterity (Pouvreau, 2013), from the mid-1970s onwards, nonetheless shows that the shortcomings concerning its exposition and its development were not essential causes. On the other hand, such causes can be detected in some unfavorable historical circumstances. The sudden explosion of the number of its critics in the 1970s can mainly be explained by the conjunction of three historical elements: the technocratic functions held by some system scientists during the previous decade and the negative judgment passed on their efficiency and their legitimacy; the ideological heterodoxy of the reports to the Club of Rome ; and a widespread will in the universities, especially in social sciences, to protect disciplinary territories judged as threatened by the intrusion of system scientists. As a matter of fact, very few criticisms were justified in principle: most of them originated either in a lack of knowledge of the works concerning general systemology, or in the lacks of precision and systematicity of the discourses of its defenders when they undertook to explain its meaning and foundations (shortcomings which can be corrected). But these criticisms mined the chances for a perennial development of general systemology, because they went with a trend, which became more and more in majority among the system scientists themselves, to marginalize this project because of a concern for respectability that those criticisms exacerbated. The end of this process which has in fact few to do with the real content of general systemology is that despite the SGSR, and maybe partly because of this society, it has not succeeded in institutionalizing itself. Conclusion However, the project initiated by Bertalanffy is not condemned to wander like a dead star. Its themes are still relevant, although it is widely forgotten as a historically situated project, as show contemporary systems biology and more generally widespread discourses on complex systems. The state of the contemporary world, from the scientific, philosophical, social, ecological, economical, political and ideological points of view, does not at all seem less favorable to a future of general systemology than the circumstances that permitted its ephemeral success more than half a century ago. Several requirements are nonetheless necessary in order to allow such a future to occur: that contemporary workers in systems research cultivate a precise memory of its history and, in particular, correctly judge the values and the scopes of the Bertalanffian project and of the works which contributed to its actualization; that they seriously re-examine this project on the basis of constructive responses to the few legitimate critics that have been formulated against it; that the multitude of various contributions to systems research at last finds its unity in the new systemological framework that may have been generated by these efforts; and finally, that a clear awareness emerges