Book summary “General system theory”: summary

Introduction

You face a world where specialized disciplines often fail to solve complex, interconnected problems. Classical science breaks reality into isolated pieces, but this reductionist approach cannot explain living organisms, social groups, or technological networks.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy introduces General System Theory to provide a transdisciplinary framework that replaces mechanistic reductionism with an organismic worldview of organized complexity. You will discover how structural similarities across physics, biology, psychology, and sociology unify scientific knowledge.

The book traces the evolution of system principles from biological foundations to psychological applications and philosophical perspectives.

• How do open systems maintain steady states unlike closed physical systems?
• What mathematical laws govern hierarchical structures and progressive segregation?
• How does an organismic view reshape your understanding of human behavior and perception?

1. The Quest for a General System Theory

Classical analytical science initiated by Galileo and Descartes resolves an entity into isolable causal trains and atomic units. This analytical procedure works only if parts do not strongly interact and if their relations are linear, ensuring summativity. Systems consist of parts in strong, nonlinear interactions described by simultaneous differential equations, rendering classical analytical procedures insufficient.

Classical analytical science fails when studying organized complexities because it relies on non-interactive linear relations and summativity.

You can observe that classical physics and mechanics relied on unorganized complexity, treating phenomena as the result of unordered statistical events and large numbers of blind molecules governed by probability. Contemporary science increasingly faces problems of organization, wholeness, and dynamic interaction across biological, behavioral, and social disciplines, requiring a general theory of organization.

Trends in Systems Theory

The emergence of General System Theory was driven by the necessity to overcome classical reductionism and address problems of organized complexity. Classical science focused on two-variable problems and unorganized complexity handled by statistical methods. Modern biology, behavioral, and social sciences deal with multivariable problems of organized complexity requiring new conceptual models and interdisciplinary isomorphism.

General System Theory aims to establish a transdisciplinary framework that unifies science by identifying isomorphic laws across diverse disciplines. Ludwig von Bertalanffy observed that systemic processes recur isomorphically in physical, biological, and social realms. The goal of GST is to uncover these general laws and provide a paradigm of thought based on the world as a hierarchically structured organization.

Closed and Open Systems

Completely different disciplines often arrive at formally identical mathematical laws and conceptual models independently. This occurs because phenomena across physics, chemistry, biology, and economics can all be abstracted as systems made of interacting complexes of elements, allowing general system principles to apply universally.

An exponential law of growth applies equally to certain bacterial cells, biological populations, and the progress of scientific research measured by publications.

Examples of isomorphic stabilizing feedback include atmospheric pressure in weather, homeostatic temperature regulation in mammals, and cooperation in family units.

2. The Model of Open Systems

Conventional thermodynamics and physics focus strictly on closed systems isolated from their environment. In these closed systems, entropy increases to maximum disorder and working capacity eventually disappears.

Unlike closed systems that move toward maximum entropy, living organisms maintain steady states and achieve equifinality through continuous matter exchange.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy explains that living organisms are fundamentally open systems. You observe that an open system maintains a steady state of metabolism by importing high-energy complex molecules. This process avoids entropy increase and develops toward higher organization.

Thermodynamics and Negative Entropy

A closed system allows no material to enter or leave. This leads to maximum entropy and zero working capacity once chemical equilibrium is reached. In contrast, living organisms maintain a steady state far from true equilibrium through a continuous flow and exchange of components.

Living systems maintain a state of high order and improbability by feeding on negative entropy through matter import. This continuous import of potential carriers of free energy counteracts the second principle of thermodynamics and enables growth.

Equifinality and Biological Growth

In closed systems, final states are unequivocally determined by initial conditions. Open systems regulate themselves differently, achieving the same final outcome via different initial conditions and pathways.

Embryologist Driesch demonstrated that a normal sea urchin individual can develop from a whole ovum, from each half of a divided ovum, or from the fusion product of two whole ova.

In rat growth experiments, normal growth was temporarily stopped around the 50th day by vitamin deficiency. After reestablishing a normal regime, the animals still reached the normal final weight, showing equifinality.

The Bertalanffy growth equations model body weight increase as the balance between synthesis and degeneration processes in an open system. Acipenser stellatus growth data were calculated with a growth constant of 0.06 derived like chemical reaction constants, and the catabolic rate was calculated at 0.045 per day for the rat.

To apply this growth theory correctly, you must follow specific scientific rules:

• confirm parameters occurring in growth equations by independent experiment;
• derive predictions of yet unobserved facts from the theory.

3. System Concepts in Mathematical and Biological Consideration

System structures develop through progressive segregation, centralization, and hierarchical orders governed by exact mathematical kinetics and allometric equations.

Characteristics of a complex are either summative or constitutive. Summative characteristics remain the same within and outside the complex. Constitutive characteristics depend on specific relations among parts.

Physical characteristics like molecular weight represent sums of atomic weights. Chemical characteristics like isomerism depend on the arrangement of radicals.

General system equations can formally derive universal growth laws, such as the exponential law for unlimited increase and the sigmoid logistic curve for growth with limiting values. Retaining the first term of a Taylor series expansion yields the exponential law of natural growth or Malthusian population increase. Retaining two terms yields the logistic curve, describing autocatalytic chemical reactions and population growth with limited resources.

The exponential law applies to compound interest, bacterial division, and radioactive decay. The logistic curve describes Verhulst's law of population growth with limited resources and autocatalytic reactions.

Wholeness and Mechanization

Biological wholes typically develop through progressive segregation, where an initial unitary system splits into independent causal chains, resulting in progressive mechanization and loss of regulability. Physical systems often form by assembling pre-existing elements. Biological wholes build up through differentiation.

Embryonic development moves from equipotential germ regions capable of regulation to fixed organ determinations. Primitive communities with interchangeable roles transition to highly differentiated social structures.

Complex systems often feature centralization around leading parts or triggers, where energetically insignificant changes are amplified across the entire system through instigation causality. When interaction coefficients of a specific element are large compared to others, that element acts as a leading part or trigger. This challenges conservation causality with instigation causality, driving progressive individualization.

In embryology, leading parts act as organizers, and central nervous systems shift from diffuse nerve nets to subordination under dominant leading centers.

Allometric Growth and Competition

The allometric equation mathematically expresses how the relative growth rates or proportions of parts within a system remain in a constant proportion. Derived by eliminating time from growth equations, the allometric relation shows that an organ's growth is a power function of another organ or the total organism. This functions as a distribution process where an organ takes a share proportional to its metabolic capacity.

Basal metabolism increases with a coefficient of 2/3 with respect to body weight in wide groups of animals. Pareto's law describes national income distribution using a similar power function.

The allometric equation is the simplest law of relative growth, expressing the harmonization and interdependence of physiological processes across varying body sizes. When you plot one variable logarithmically against another, a straight line results because the ratio of their relative increases is constant. This explains why metabolic processes relate to body size without requiring magic numbers.

Rubner's 1880 data on dogs showed that metabolic rate decreases per unit weight but remains approximately constant per unit surface.

4. General System Theory in Psychology and Psychiatry

Contemporary psychological theories share a demonstrably false robot model of human behavior rooted in physical and technological universes. Behaviorism, computer models, psychoanalysis, and even existentialism rely on robotic concepts such as the S-R scheme, environmentalism, the equilibrium principle, and the economy principle, which reduce human action to mere adaptation and tension reduction.

Rejecting the stimulus-response robot model of man, organismic psychology views the psychophysical system as intrinsically active and dominated by symbolic universes.

The Active Personality System

A new psychological model views man as an active personality system characterized by holistic orientation and inherent creativity. Emerging currents in developmental, neo-Freudian, ego, and humanistic psychology focus on the creative side of human beings and individual differences that transcend biological values of subsistence and survival.

The psychophysical organism is an intrinsically active system rather than a passive mechanism reacting solely to external stimuli. Autonomous activity of the nervous system is primary in evolution and development, with reactive mechanisms superimposed upon primitive rhythmic-locomotor activities. External stimuli merely modify processes in an autonomously active system rather than causing them in an inert system.

Exploration, play, and rituals in animals, rats looking for problems as observed by Hebb, and human pursuits of self-realization demonstrate behavior performed for its own sake beyond primary or secondary drives.

Psychopathology and Logotherapy

Human behavior and culture are dominated by symbolic activities that cannot be reduced to biological drives, instincts, or reinforcement mechanisms. Man is a symbol-creating being living in symbolic universes. Unlike animals bound by biological needs, human motivations involve time-binding, anticipation of the future, value realization, conscience, and self-transcendence.

Scientific notions, art, religion, idealistic devotion, and existential neurosis stem from symbolic activities rather than basic self-preservation.

Viewing personality as an active system provides a coherent framework for redefining mental illness, diagnosis, and psychotherapy. Mental disease is a disturbance of system functions rather than isolated symptoms. Therapy based on this model emphasizes evoking creative potentialities, reintegration, future-oriented symbolic anticipation, and logotherapy for existential meaninglessness over passive adjustment.

Logotherapy addresses the noogenic neurosis arising from the loss of value orientation and the experience of life's meaninglessness.

5. The Relativity of Categories and Perspectives

Cognitive categories and world views are biologically relative and culturally determined, leading to a perspectivistic view of the unity of science.

Biological Relativity and Umwelt

Benjamin Whorf argued that the common belief in an independent logical structure underlying all human cognition is erroneous. Indo-European languages emphasize substance, attributes, and time. Languages like Hopi signify events as wholes and focus on validity rather than tenses. Navaho emphasizes types of activity.

Hopi language does not distinguish past, present, and future tenses. It uses terms like wari for running as an occurrence or warikngwe for a general law, possessing no notion of a smooth-flowing time continuum. Linguistic patterns determine what individuals perceive and how they think, leading to fundamentally different world views across different language groups.

Every living organism extracts a specific slice of reality based on its psychophysical organization, forming a subjective ambient or Umwelt.

Jakob von Uexküll demonstrated that animals are surrounded by a specific ambient defined by the characteristics and stimuli to physical receptors and effectors, rendering the rest of the environment nonexistent. A tick relies on only three signals. It uses the odor of butyric acid from a mammal, thermal sense of a warm body, and tactile sense to find a hairless spot, reducing its rich environment to a scanty configuration.

Konrad Lorenz showed that innate cognitive categories function like instinctive behavioral schemata, evolved through natural selection. They do not mirror the real universe completely, but they must be isomorphic to it to allow biological orientation and adaptation. Schizophrenics sharing illusions or Plato's prisoners seeing shadows cannot adapt to real outside situations, proving that categories must correspond to reality to avoid elimination.

Perspectivism and Coincidentia Oppositorum

Science progressively de-anthropomorphizes the world picture by eliminating specifically human sensory limitations through artificial instruments and mathematical symbolisms. Through the replacement of natural sense organs with artificial recording instruments and the convergence of independent research methods, science moves away from direct human intuition and secondary qualities into a universally committal system of mathematical relations. Physics expands observation from visible light to the entire electromagnetic spectrum using artificial apparatus like cosmic ray detectors and radio telescopes, going beyond the wave length range of visible light spanning from 380 to 760 millimicra.

All knowledge is perspectivistic, mirroring certain aspects of reality through chosen symbolisms while leaving ultimate reality as a unity of opposites. Because human thinking operates largely through opposites and symbol systems influenced by biological and cultural factors, discursive thinking can never exhaust the infinite manifoldness of ultimate reality, which is a coincidentia oppositorum where each relative perspective holds true from its specific viewpoint. Physical dualisms like corpuscle and wave, structure and process, or mass and energy demonstrate that phenomena must be described through complementary aspects.

Conclusion

General system theory unites disparate scientific disciplines by identifying structural isomorphisms that cut across physics, biology, psychology, and sociology. Ludwig von Bertalanffy demonstrates that complex realities require an organismic framework rather than mechanical reductionism. You can apply these principles to navigate organizational and personal challenges effectively.

1. Treat your organization or project as an open system that must continuously exchange energy, information, and resources with its environment to survive.
2. Recognize that complex systems possess equifinality, meaning you can achieve the same final state from different initial conditions and through various developmental paths.
3. Abandon rigid stimulus-response models in human relations by acknowledging that individuals are intrinsically active agents driven by internal organization and symbolic universes.
4. Account for hierarchical order and progressive segregation in your planning, ensuring that centralization and differentiation grow together as structures develop.
5. Adopt a perspectivistic view of science and problem-solving, knowing that your categories and world views are culturally and biologically relative rather than absolute.

10 Key Ideas

1. Classical analytical science fails when studying organized complexities because it relies on non-interactive linear relations and summativity.
2. General System Theory aims to establish a transdisciplinary framework that unifies science by identifying isomorphic laws across diverse disciplines.
3. Unlike closed systems that move toward maximum entropy, living organisms maintain steady states and achieve equifinality through continuous matter exchange.
4. Living systems maintain a state of high order and improbability by feeding on negative entropy through matter import.
5. System structures develop through progressive segregation, centralization, and hierarchical orders governed by exact mathematical kinetics and allometric equations.
6. The allometric equation mathematically expresses how the relative growth rates or proportions of parts within a system remain in a constant proportion.
7. Rejecting the stimulus-response robot model of man, organismic psychology views the psychophysical system as intrinsically active and dominated by symbolic universes.
8. Human behavior and culture are dominated by symbolic activities that cannot be reduced to biological drives, instincts, or reinforcement mechanisms.
9. Every living organism extracts a specific slice of reality based on its psychophysical organization, forming a subjective ambient or Umwelt.
10. All knowledge is perspectivistic, mirroring certain aspects of reality through chosen symbolisms while leaving ultimate reality as a unity of opposites.