Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the founding father of the General System Theory was born on September 19, 1901, in Atzgersdorf (near Vienna).
His life was the life of an intellectual adventurer exploring first in the mystery of the living world, and searching later how to contribute to the reconciliation of science and humanities, materialism and idealism, body and mind.
Along the years he always managed to assemble a diversity of singular and inspired reference points, which allowed him to draw analogies that other thinkers could never identify, simply because their expertise was limited to one or two fields.
In 1926, von Bertalanffy received his Ph. D. from the University of Vienna with a thesis about the pioneering psychophysics of physicist-philosopher Gustav Fechner (1801-1887).
In the 1920s he wrote the book "Theoretische Biologie"(theoretical biology) reflecting his "organismic biology" or "system theory of the organism": a significant contribution towards the scientific development of biology, based on the need of discovering and understanding the laws that govern organismic organization.
It was the very first step towards the General System Theory that Bertalanffy conceived as a culmination of his general systems insights into biological, behavioral, social and epistemological domains, while fighting specifically against the reductionist approaches and the mechanist interpretations that dehumanize human beings through robotomorphism, zoomorphism, scientism and other narrow-minded and shortsighted assumptions that have been used extensively by people without realizing that it is impossible and improper to simplify the complexity inherent to whatever human concern.
The Bertalanffian rationale for building a science of social systems is based on the assumption that social organizations are like living organisms in the sense that both display wholeness, interact with their environment, exhibit strategies of self-maintenance, and experience cycles of birth, growth, maturity and decline. However, the holistic relationship in the societal domain is quite different to the holistic feature of living beings which are the outcome of the evolutionary forces that have created unconsciously the terrestrial nature. The social organizations, as companies, corporations, clubs, governments, unions, leagues, etc., are systems that were designed and are maintained in operation purposefully through human actions organized by means of clever thinking. But societies as communities, cities and nations are in a large measure unconscious outcomes of social organizations interacting among themselves without being aware of what their dynamics affect the whole society. The whole of society exists 'ideally' for the sake of its members, while the humans do not live exclusively for the sake of their society, though every society is an entity constituted by and for individuals, but "man is not only a political creature; he is above all an individual". Then social organizations exist as a means to individual human ends but only for helping them to satisfy their needs, because each individual, having the possibility of creating an imagined world for him or her, makes everyone to believe that he or she has the inalienable right to the pursuit of self-fulfillment, and to assume that he or she may achieve an individual fulfillment on his or her own, without realizing in practice that they are social creatures who should not work simply for social systems though they must unavoidably work with these systems.
As a researcher he was recognized for his discoveries in comparative physiology of metabolism and growth, and the explicit identification of laws governing the processes of growth and adaptation.
In 1972 R. Buckminster Fuller was asked by a committee of French scientists to write a paper on Ludwig von Bertalanffy's nomination for the Nobel Prize. He did so. The nomination went to Oslo, but the committee's effort came just too late. Ludwig died before the nomination of him could be considered by the Nobel authorities. On June 12, 1972: Bertalanffy died of a heart attack. He was buried in Montreal.
Source: http://www.bertalanffy.org
His life was the life of an intellectual adventurer exploring first in the mystery of the living world, and searching later how to contribute to the reconciliation of science and humanities, materialism and idealism, body and mind.
Along the years he always managed to assemble a diversity of singular and inspired reference points, which allowed him to draw analogies that other thinkers could never identify, simply because their expertise was limited to one or two fields.
In 1926, von Bertalanffy received his Ph. D. from the University of Vienna with a thesis about the pioneering psychophysics of physicist-philosopher Gustav Fechner (1801-1887).
In the 1920s he wrote the book "Theoretische Biologie"(theoretical biology) reflecting his "organismic biology" or "system theory of the organism": a significant contribution towards the scientific development of biology, based on the need of discovering and understanding the laws that govern organismic organization.
It was the very first step towards the General System Theory that Bertalanffy conceived as a culmination of his general systems insights into biological, behavioral, social and epistemological domains, while fighting specifically against the reductionist approaches and the mechanist interpretations that dehumanize human beings through robotomorphism, zoomorphism, scientism and other narrow-minded and shortsighted assumptions that have been used extensively by people without realizing that it is impossible and improper to simplify the complexity inherent to whatever human concern.
The Bertalanffian rationale for building a science of social systems is based on the assumption that social organizations are like living organisms in the sense that both display wholeness, interact with their environment, exhibit strategies of self-maintenance, and experience cycles of birth, growth, maturity and decline. However, the holistic relationship in the societal domain is quite different to the holistic feature of living beings which are the outcome of the evolutionary forces that have created unconsciously the terrestrial nature. The social organizations, as companies, corporations, clubs, governments, unions, leagues, etc., are systems that were designed and are maintained in operation purposefully through human actions organized by means of clever thinking. But societies as communities, cities and nations are in a large measure unconscious outcomes of social organizations interacting among themselves without being aware of what their dynamics affect the whole society. The whole of society exists 'ideally' for the sake of its members, while the humans do not live exclusively for the sake of their society, though every society is an entity constituted by and for individuals, but "man is not only a political creature; he is above all an individual". Then social organizations exist as a means to individual human ends but only for helping them to satisfy their needs, because each individual, having the possibility of creating an imagined world for him or her, makes everyone to believe that he or she has the inalienable right to the pursuit of self-fulfillment, and to assume that he or she may achieve an individual fulfillment on his or her own, without realizing in practice that they are social creatures who should not work simply for social systems though they must unavoidably work with these systems.
As a researcher he was recognized for his discoveries in comparative physiology of metabolism and growth, and the explicit identification of laws governing the processes of growth and adaptation.
In 1972 R. Buckminster Fuller was asked by a committee of French scientists to write a paper on Ludwig von Bertalanffy's nomination for the Nobel Prize. He did so. The nomination went to Oslo, but the committee's effort came just too late. Ludwig died before the nomination of him could be considered by the Nobel authorities. On June 12, 1972: Bertalanffy died of a heart attack. He was buried in Montreal.
Source: http://www.bertalanffy.org