38 Ethics and Systems Thinking
of the systemist – where systemists are to systems as economists are to economies
- is both the ‘it’ and the ‘other’ as well as the relationships between the two. In fact,
systemists typically think in three ‘it/other’ dimensions – the part (subsystem), the
whole (the system of interest), and the higher order whole (the environmental
supra-system of the system) of which the system is itself a subsystem – plus all the
sets of interactions within and between these three levels. The significance of this
‘tri-hierarchical’ or ‘holarchical’ conceptual organization of systems-of-systems lies
with the belief that at each ‘level’, surprisingly novel properties, that are unique to
that level, emerge as a function of the interrelationships between its component
subsystems and the environment that its higher order system presents to them.
The fundamental assumption of ‘holism’ therefore, is that no system can be known,
nor its total characteristics nor properties predicted, through a study of any of its
component subsystems in isolation from each other or from the system itself: an
assumption that is in direct opposition to the basic premise of reductionism.
The systems idea is far from new within the natural sciences of course. Indeed
while an appreciation of the significance of what might be termed an ‘essence of
wholeness’ seems to pervade a wide range of ‘indigenous cultures’ and can be asso-
ciated with an intellectual heritage from ancient Greece, most especially through
the insights of Aristotle (Russell, 1961), some of the earliest formalizations of
thinking in ‘systems terms’ can be found among scientists writing about biological
phenomena and the ‘nature of nature’. Smuts (1926), for instance, was the first to
formally write about ‘holism’ – which he defined as ‘the tendency in nature to
produce wholes’ – and of the significance of that to ‘the internal organization’ of
organisms and to the evolution of their species. In the same era, Woodger (1929)
further extended these ideas through his emphasis on the hierarchical nature of
organization within organisms, while both Canon (1932) and Henderson (1941)
reflected on the significance of the capacities of organisms as ‘living systems’ to
adapt in order to maintain their own integrity in the face of challenges from the
turbulent environments in which they had to exist.
Perhaps the most influential biologist with respect to the application of the
systems idea to biology, however, was von Bertalanffy who took some of the key
concepts of these early pioneers and further extended them into the formulation
of what he eventually referred to as a General Systems Theory (GST) (von Berta-
lanffy, 1968). Earlier, he had made the vital distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’
systems (von Bertalanffy, 1950) with regard to their respective relationships with
their environments. Central features of the ‘open systems’ of von Bertalanffy
included the need for ‘cybernetic regulative processes’ that were essential for main-
taining their ‘steady state equilibria’. Tellingly, the concept of the ‘ecosystem’, as it
was introduced by Tansley (1935), was a much looser notion of a ‘living system’
than that developed by von Bertalanffy and his ‘systems’ predecessors, referring, as
it did, to a relatively unbounded set of structural and functional relationships
between a biotic community and some circumscribed abiotic features. The integ-
rity of such a system was held to be maintained in a state of equilibrium through
the flows of energy and matter between its parts. This key focus on the structural