Janus (5 page)

2
Nevertheless, reductionism proved an eminently successful method within
its limited range of applicability in the exact sciences, while its
antithesis, holism, never really got off the ground. Holism may be defined
by the statement that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The
term was coined by Jan Smuts in the 1920s in a remarkable book
^[4]
which for a while enjoyed great popularity. But holism never got a grip
on academic science* -- partly because it went against the Zeitgeist,
partly perhaps because it represented more of a philosophical than an
empirical approach and did not lend itself to laboratory tests.

* Except indirectly through Gestalt psychology.

In fact both reductionism and holism, if taken as sole guides, lead into
a cul-de-sac. 'A rose is a rose is a rose' may be regarded as a holistic
statement, but it tells us no more about the rose than the formulae of
its chemical constituents. For our inquiry we need a third approach,
beyond reductionism and holism, which incorporates the valid aspects of
both. It must start with the seemingly abstract yet fundamental problem
of the relations between the whole and its parts -- any 'whole', whether
the universe or human society, and any 'part', whether an atom or a
human being. This may seem an odd, not to say perverse, way to get at
a diagnosis of man's condition, but the reader will eventually realize,
I hope, that the apparent detour though the theoretical considerations
in the present chapter may be the shortest way out of the labyrinth.
3
To start with a deceptively simple question: what exactly do we mean by the
familiar words 'part' and 'whole'? 'Part' conveys the meaning of something
fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself has no claim to autonomous
existence. On the other hand, a 'whole' is considered as something complete
in itself which needs no further explanation. However, contrary to these
deeply ingrained habits of thought and their reflection in some philosophical
schools, 'parts' and 'wholes' in an absolute sense do not exist anywhere,
either in the domain of living organisms, or in social organizations,
or in the universe at large.
A living organism is not an aggregation of elementary parts, and its
activities cannot be reduced to elementary 'atoms of behaviour' forming
a chain of conditioned responses. In its bodily aspects, the organism
is a whole consisting of 'sub-wholes', such as the circulatory system,
digestive system, etc., which in turn branch into sub-wholes of a lower
order, such as organs and tissues -- and so down to individual cells,
and to the organelles inside the cells. In other words, the structure
and behaviour of an organism cannot be explained by, or 'reduced to',
elementary physico-chemical processes; it is a multi-levelled, stratified
hierarchy of sub-wholes, which can be conveniently diagrammed as a pyramid
or an inverted tree, where the sub-wholes form the nodes, and the branching
lines symbolize channels of communication and control: see diagram
.

 

The point first to be emphasized is that each member of this hierarchy,
on whatever level, is a sub-whole or 'holon' in its own right -- a stable,
integrated structure, equipped with self-regulatory devices and enjoying
a considerable degree of autonomy or self-government. Cells, muscles,
nerves, organs, all have their intrinsic rhythms and patterns of activity,
often manifested spontaneously without external stimulation; they are
subordinated as parts to the higher centres in the hierarchy, but at
the same time function as quasi-autonomous wholes. They are Janus-faced.
The face turned upward, toward the higher levels, is that of a dependent
part; the face turned downward, towards its own constituents, is that
of a whole of remarkable self-sufficiency.

 

 

The heart, for instance, has its own pacemakers -- actually several
pacemakers, capable of taking over from each other when the need arises.
Other major organs are equipped with different types of coordinating
devices and feedback controls. Their autonomy is convincingly demonstrated
by transplant surgery. At the beginning of our century, Alexis Carrell
showed that a minute strip of tissue taken from the heart of a chicken
embryo and put into a nutrient solution will go on pulsating for years.
Since then, whole organs were shown to be capable of functioning as
quasi-independent wholes when taken out of the body and kept in vitro,
or transplanted into another body. And as we descend the steps of the
hierarchy to the lowest level observable through the electron microscope,
we come upon sub-cellular structures -- organelles -- which are neither
'simple' nor 'elementary', but systems of staggering complexity. Each of
these minuscule parts of a cell functions as a self-governing whole in its
own right, each apparently obeying a built-in
code of rules
. One type,
or tribe, of organelles looks after the cell's growth, others after its
energy supply, reproduction, communication, and so on. The mitochondria,
for instance, are power plants which extract energy from nutrients by a
chain of chemical reactions involving some fifty different steps; and a
single cell may have up to five thousand such power plants. The activities
of a mitochondrion can be switched on or off by controls on higher levels;
but once triggered into action it will follow its own code of rules. It
cooperates with other organdies in keeping the cell happy, but at the
same time each mitochondrion is a law unto itself, an autonomous unit
which will assert its individuality even if the cell around it is dying.

 

 

 

4

 

 

Science is only just beginning to rid itself of the mechanistic
preconceptions of the nineteenth century -- the world as a billiard
table of colliding atoms -- and to realize that hierarchic organization
is a fundamental principle of living nature; that it is 'the essential
and distinguishing characteristic of life' (Pattee)
^[5]
; and that
it is 'a real phenomenon, presented to us by the biological object,
and not the fiction of a speculative mind' (P. Weiss).
^[6]
It is at the same time a conceptual tool which on some occasions acts as
an Open Sesame.
All complex structures and processes of a relatively
stable character display hierarchic organization
, regardless whether
we consider galactic systems, living organisms and their activities,
or social organizations. The tree diagram with its series of levels
can be used to represent the evolutionary branching of species into
the 'tree of life'; or the stepwise differentiation of tissues and
integration of functions in the development of the embryo. Anatomists
use the tree diagram to demonstrate the locomotor hierarchy of limbs,
joints, individual muscles, and so down to fibres, fibrils and filaments
of contractile proteins. Ethologists use it to illustrate the various
sub-routines and action-patterns involved in such complex instinctive
activities as a bird building a nest; but it is also an indispensable
tool to the new school of psycholinguistics started by Chomsky. It is
equally indispensable for an understanding of the processes by which the
chaotic stimuli impinging on our sense organs are filtered and classified
in their ascent though the nervous system into consciousness. Lastly,
the branching tree illustrates the hierarchic ordering of knowledge
in the subject-index of library catalogues -- and the personal memory
stores inside our skulls.

 

 

The universal applicability of the hierarchic model may arouse the suspicion
that it is logically empty. I hope to show that this is not the case,
and that the search for the fundamental properties, or laws, which all
these varied hierarchies have in common amounts to more than a play on
superficial analogies -- or to riding a hobby horse. It should rather be
called an exercise in General Systems Theory -- that relatively recent
inter-disciplinary school, founded by von Bertalanffy, whose purpose is
to construct theoretical models and discover general principles which
are universally applicable to biological, social and symbolic systems
of any kind -- in other words, a search for common denominators in the
flux of phenomena, for unity-in-diversity.

 

 

As early as 1936, Joseph Needham wrote:

 

The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon
compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes,
will perhaps be the leading idea of the future. [7]

 

Even earlier Lloyd Morgan, C. D. Broad, and J. Woodger among others
emphasized the importance of recognizing hierarchically ordered 'levels of
organization', and the emergence on each higher level of new 'organizing
relations' between (sub) wholes of greater complexity, whose properties
cannot be reduced to, nor predicted from, the lower level
. To quote
Needham again:

 

Once we adopt the general picture of the universe as a series of
levels of organisation and complexity, each level having unique
properties of structure and behaviour, which, though depending on the
properties of the constituent elements, appear only when these are
combined into the higher whole, we see that there are qualitatively
different laws holding good at each levels. [8]

 

But such a multi-levelled view went against the materialist Zeitgeist,
because it implied that the biological laws which govern life are
qualitatively different from the laws of physics which govern inanimate
matter, and that accordingly life cannot be 'reduced' to the blind dance
of atoms; and similarly, that the mentality of man is qualitatively
different from the conditioned responses of Pavlov's dogs or Skinner's
rats, which the dominant school in psychology considered as the paradigms
of human behaviour. Harmless as the word 'hierarchy' sounded, it turned
out to be subversive. It did not even appear in the index of most modern
textbooks of psychology or biology.

 

 

Yet there have always been voices in the wilderness, insisting that the
concept of hierarchic organization was an indispensable prerequisite --
a
conditio sine qua non
-- of any methodical attempt to bring unity
into the diversity of science, and might eventually lead to a coherent
philosophy of nature -- which at present is conspicuous by its absence.

 

 

To this minority chorus there was also added the small voice of the
author, expressed in several books in which 'the ubiquitous hierarchy'
[9] played a major, and often dominant part. Taken together, the relevant
passages would add up to a fairly comprehensive textbook on hierarchic
order (which may see the light some day). But this is not the purpose
of the present volume. As already said, the hierarchic approach is a
conceptual tool -- not an end in itself, but a key capable of opening
some of nature's combination-locks which stubbornly resist other methods.*

 

* Cf. also Jevons: 'The organisation hierarchy, forming as it does a
bridge between parts and whole, is one of the really vital, central
concepts of biology.' [11]

 

However, before attempting to use the key, it is necessary to gain some
insight into the way it works. The present chapter is meant to convey
some of the basic principles of hierarchic thought in order to provide
a platform or runway for the more speculative flights that follow.

 

 

 

5

 

 

To say it once more: if we look at any form of stable social organization,
from the insect state to the Pentagon, we shall find that it is
hierarchically structured; the same applies to the individual organism,
and, less obviously, to its innate and acquired skills. However, to prove
the validity and significance of the model, it must be shown that there
exist specific principles and laws which apply (a) to all levels of a
given hierarchy, and (b) to hierarchies in different fields -- in other
words, which define the term 'hierarchic order'. Some of these principles
might appear self-evident, others rather abstract; taken together,
they form the stepping stones for a new approach to some old problems.

 

 

'A good terminology', someone has said, 'is half the game.' To get
away from the traditional misuse of the words 'whole' and 'part',
one is compelled to operate with such awkward terms as 'sub-whole', or
'part-whole', 'sub-structures', 'sub-skills', 'sub-assemblies', and so
forth. To avoid these jarring expressions, I proposed, some years ago
^[10]
, a new term to designate those Janus-faced entities
on the intermediate levels of any hierarchy, which can be described
either as wholes or as parts, depending on the way you look at them
from 'below' or from 'above'. The term I proposed was the 'holon',
from the Greek
holos
= whole, with the suffix
on
, which,
as in proton or neutron, suggests a particle or part.