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Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
The Principle of Holarchy and
the Interplay of Horizontal and Vertical Relationships - 2
Holism and a hierarchy of levels
The official trend in modern science is still mainly atomistic and focuses considerable
attention on horizontal relationships — a focusing which is even more dominant in
sociology, politics, and popular psychology. The new trend toward the holistic approach
offers a logical basis on which a more inclusive concept of vertical relationships can
develop. A passage from the book Accent on Form by L. L. Whyte, a British philosopher of
science, may be worth quoting here, because it provides apt characterizations of these two
approaches. According to Whyte, the "Atomistic School" of knowledge has been
represented in the European past by "Leucippus, Democritus, Gassendi, Newton, Boyle,
Dalton and contemporary atomic physicists" (his book was written in 1953); among the
leaders of the "Holistic School" he lists "Goethe, Bergson, the Gestalt psychiatrists,
Whitehead, and Jan Smuts." 39
The classical atomistic doctrine asserts that the universe is made up of ultimate particles,
each of which is simple, indivisible, and permanent. All observable changes are due to the
reversible spatial rearrangements of these particles resulting from their motions and
mutual influences. The particles although small must be of a finite size or effectively
occupy a definite volume of space, since a finite number of them make up ordinary
objects. Moreover if atomism is to work there must be very few different kinds of ultimate
particles, for the aim is to simplify our view of nature. The complexity of observed
phenomena is to be accounted for as the result of the motion of units which are each
simple and permanent. This program had the great advantage that it gave physical
measurement and mathematic reasoning something to grip. . .
The holistic view . . .regards the universe as a great hierarchy of unities, each following
its own path of historical development. Each pattern, whether it is a crystal, an organism, a
community, the solar system, or a spiral nebula, possesses its own internal order and is
part of a more extensive order, so that the universe is recognized as a System of systems, a
Grand Pattern of patterns. Every whole with all its parts is subject to developmental
changes which cannot be adequately represented as the mere reversible motions of
independent particles. 40
These two schools of thought are not mutually exclusive; Whyte foresaw their
harmonization in a "School of Elegant Structure combining an intuition of the whole with
the analytical recognition of detail." Since the late 1960s, an important group of
philosophers of science, including Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Erwin Laszlo, has indeed
been developing a "general system theory" and a "systems philosophy" in which what I
call a "whole of being" is more generally and abstractly referred to as a "system." The two
39 Jan Smuts, the South African philosopher-statesman prominent during the formulation of the League of
Nations at the end of World War I, wrote in 1926 a seminal book, Holism and Evolution, which provides a
new interpretation of evolution in the broadest sense of the term. It was Smuts who coined the words holism
and holistic; the popular use of the latter may or may not always be justified.
40 Accent on Form by L. L. Whyte (New York, 1954) pp. 53f
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