The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

by Fritjof Capra

thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context. In science, this way of thinking is known as “systemic thinking,” or “systems thinking”;

A central characteristic of the systems view of life is its nonlinearity: all living systems are complex – i.e., highly nonlinear – networks; and there are countless interconnections between the biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions of life.

formulate approximate models and theories to describe an endless web of interconnected phenomena, and that we are able to systematically improve our models or approximations over time,

Science advances through tentative answers to a series of more and more subtle questions which reach deeper and deeper into the essence of natural phenomena.

scientists have tended to believe that scientific facts are independent of what we do and are therefore independent of our values. Kuhn exposed the fallacy of that belief by showing that scientific facts emerge out of an entire constellation of human perceptions, values, and actions – out of a paradigm – from which they cannot be separated.

The emerging new scientific conception of life, which we summarized in our Preface, can be seen as part of a broader paradigm shift from a mechanistic to a holistic and ecological worldview.

– a change from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network.

Ever since early Greek philosophy, there has been this tension between substance and pattern.

“While European philosophy tended to find reality in substance, Chinese philosophy tended to find it in relation.”

Greek philosophy and science understood the order of the cosmos to be that of a living organism rather than a mechanical system.

This attitude of seeing nature as a model and mentor is now advanced again, 500 years after Leonardo, in the practice of ecological design

He conceived of form as a pattern of relationships within an organized whole

While organismic biologists encountered irreducible wholeness in organisms, and Gestalt psychologists in perception, ecologists encountered it in their studies of animal and plant communities. The new science of ecology emerged out of organismic biology during the late nineteenth century, when biologists began to study communities of organisms.

general systems theory was developed by a single scientist, the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy,

complexity theory, technically known as “nonlinear dynamics,”

The nature of medieval science was very different from that of our contemporary science. It was based on both reason and faith, and its main goal was to understand the meaning and significance of things, rather than prediction and control.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the medieval outlook changed radically. The notion of an organic, living, and spiritual universe was replaced by that of the world as a machine, and the mechanistic conception of reality became the basis of the modern worldview.

Galileo's program offers us a dead world: Out go sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, and along with them have since gone esthetic and ethical sensibility, values, quality, soul, consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific discourse. Hardly anything has changed our world more during the past four hundred years than Galileo's audacious program. We had to destroy the world in theory before we could destroy it in practice.

As the organic view of nature was replaced by the metaphor of the world as a machine, the goal of science became knowledge that can be used to dominate and control nature.

overemphasis on the Cartesian method has led to the fragmentation that is characteristic of both our general thinking and our academic disciplines, and to the widespread attitude of reductionism in science – the belief that all aspects of complex phenomena can be understood by reducing them to their smallest constituent parts.

all scientific theories are reductionist in the sense that they need to reduce the phenomena described to a manageable number of characteristics. However, science does not need not be reductionist in the Cartesian sense of reducing phenomena to their smallest constituents.)

The whole elaboration of mechanistic science in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, including Newton's grand synthesis, was but the development of the Cartesian idea. Descartes gave scientific thought its general framework – the view of nature as a perfect machine, governed by exact mathematical laws.

The man who realized the Cartesian dream and completed the Scientific Revolution was Isaac Newton (Figure 1.4), born in England in the year of Galileo's death, 1642.

However, whereas in biology evolution meant a movement toward increasing order and complexity, in physics it came to mean just the opposite – a movement toward increasing disorder.

The fallacy of the reductionist view lies in the fact that, while there is nothing wrong in saying that the structures of all living organisms are composed of smaller parts, and ultimately of molecules, this does not imply that their properties can be explained in terms of molecules alone.

the essential properties of a living system are emergent properties – properties that are not found in any of the parts but emerge at the level of the system as a whole. These emergent properties arise from specific patterns of organization – that is, from configurations of ordered relationships among the parts. This is the central insight of the systems view of life.

Animals were still machines, although they were much more complicated than mechanical clockworks, as they involved chemical and electrical phenomena. Thus biology ceased to be Cartesian in the sense of Descartes’ strictly mechanical image of living organisms, but it remained Cartesian in the wider sense of attempting to reduce all aspects of living organisms to the physical and chemical interactions of their smallest constituents.

social scientists tried very hard to gain respectability by adopting the Cartesian paradigm and the methods of Newtonian physics.

On the other hand, the Puritans abhorred all but the most frugal consumption, and consequently the accumulation of wealth was sanctioned, as long as it was combined with an industrious career. In Weber's theory these religious values and motives provided the essential emotional drive and energy for the rise and rapid development of capitalism.

a social result would be achieved that was independent of individual intentions, and thus an objective science of economic activity was made possible.

One of the difficulties in applying these mechanistic concepts to social phenomena was the lack of appreciation for the problem of friction.

Because the phenomenon of friction is generally neglected in Newtonian mechanics, Smith imagined that the balancing mechanisms of the market would be almost instantaneous. He described their adjustments as “prompt,” “occurring soon,” and “continual,” while prices were “gravitating” in the proper direction. Small producers and small consumers would meet in the marketplace with equal power and information.

Economics, Mill wrote, had only one province: production and the scarcity of means. Distribution was not an economic but a political process. This narrowed the scope of political economy to “pure economics,” later to be called “neoclassical,” and allowed a more detailed focus on the “economic core process,” while excluding social and environmental variables in analogy to the controlled experiments of the physical sciences.

Marx was “the first to discover a whole mode of inquiring that would forever after belong to him.” Marx's mode of inquiry was that of social critique.

Like most nineteenth-century thinkers, Marx was very concerned about being “scientific,” using the term constantly in the description of his critical approach. Accordingly he often attempted to formulate his theories in Cartesian and Newtonian language. Still, his broad view of social phenomena allowed him to transcend the Cartesian framework in significant ways.

economic equilibrium states were “special cases,” exceptions rather than the rule in the real world.

To determine the nature of government interventions, Keynes shifted his focus from the microlevel to the macrolevel – to economic variables like the national income, total consumption and total investment, the total volume of employment, and so on.

At best the Keynesian approach can provide a set of possible scenarios but cannot make specific predictions.

Economists generally fail to recognize that the economy is merely one aspect of the whole ecological and social fabric.

They neglect this social and ecological interdependence, treating all goods equally without considering the many ways in which these goods are related to the rest of the world, and reducing all values to the single criterion of private profit making.

The fragmentary approach of contemporary economists, their preference for abstract quantitative models, and their inability to see economic activities within their proper ecological context have resulted in a tremendous gap between theory and economic reality. As a consequence, economics today is in a profound conceptual crisis.

As the metaphor of organizations as machines took hold, it generated corresponding mechanistic theories of management with the aim of increasing an organization's efficiency by designing it as an assemblage of precisely interlocking parts – functional departments such as production, marketing, finance, and personnel – linked together through clearly defined lines of command and communication.

As Morgan (1998) puts it, “Organizations that used machines became more and more like machines.”

The principles of classical management theory have become so deeply ingrained in the ways managers think about organizations that for most of them the design of formal structures, linked by clear lines of communication, coordination, and control, has become almost second nature. This largely unconscious embrace of the mechanistic approach to management has now become one of the main obstacles to organizational change.

configuration and relationship as two important aspects of organization, which were subsequently unified in the concept of “pattern of organization” as a configuration of ordered relationships.

Indeed, an outstanding property of all life is the tendency to form multileveled structures of systems within systems. Each of these forms a whole with respect to its parts while at the same time being a part of a larger whole. Thus, cells combine to form tissues, tissues to form organs, and organs to form organisms. These in turn exist within social systems and ecosystems. Throughout the living world, we find living systems nesting within other living systems.

The double role of living systems as parts and wholes requires the interplay of two opposite tendencies: an integrative tendency to function as part of a larger whole, and a self-assertive, or self-organizing tendency to preserve individual autonomy

“organized complexity”

thinking in terms of connectedness, relationships, patterns, and context. According to the systems view, the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have.

Although we can discern individual parts in any system, these parts are not isolated, and the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts.