BEYOND REDUCTIONISM

In his preface to this remarkable volume, Arthur Koestler notes that his main interest over the previous 10 years had been the history and present state of science, and its impact on our view of the world. He had become aware of a certain discontent with the prevailing philosophical bias lingering on as a heritage from the 19th century, 'although the new insights gained by contemporary research have reduced it to an anachronism.' Our recent Galileo report is very much in tune with this 'insufficient emancipation of the life sciences from the mechanistic concepts of 19th-century physics, and the resulting crudely reductionist philosophy.' 50 years on, this mechanistic philosophy is still hugely influential, especially in biology, in spite of conceptual and empirical advances. Invitees to the symposium were personalities in academic life with undisputed authority in their respective fields, who nevertheless shared that 'holy discontent'.

Not surprisingly for the time, all these people were men, but the list is extraordinary distinguished, including Paul Weiss, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Paul Maclean, Friedrich Hayek, CH Waddington, WH Thorpe and Victor Frankl. Notable absentees include Sir John Eccles and Sir Karl Popper. The level of presentation is extremely high, and the interdisciplinary discussion quite remarkable among this group of Renaissance men. Although there have been significant advances since that time, for instance in complexity and chaos theory along with the formulation of Gaia theory, the elements underpinning this thinking are already present. We learn that Weiss had already formulated the concept of a biological system as early as 1924. His initial paper is of extraordinary scope, penetration and brilliance and should be compulsory reading for contemporary biologists, especially those of a mechanistic bent, as he explains the inherent limitations of this approach with remarkable clarity, beginning with the proposition that the universe is in fact an immense cohesive continuum that cannot be adequately understood as a dynamic whole by abstracting isolated elements and trying to put them back together again. Reductionism and holism are complementary within an ordered living hierarchy of open systems.

Weiss criticises what he calls micro-determinism, proposing a complementary macro determinacy and explaining this in a series of 12 coherent propositions (pp. 32-33). He criticises the notion that the gene is the sole ordering principle as based on sheer assertion and 'blind faith in unqualified reductionist preconceptions.' This demonstrates what Hayek later calls the primacy of the abstract, of categories imposed on nature and taken to be real in themselves. Systems themes are taken up in the second presentation from Bertalanffy - these men had already been working for decades in their respective fields. He begins with a discussion of general systems, observing that we are witnessing a change in basic categories of knowledge and that the mechanistic approach leaves out 'just what is specific to living things in life processes', hence the need for an expansion of scientific categories, concepts and models categories such as chreode and homeorhesis introduced by Waddington later in the volume. As he points out, 'the former physicalistic, mechanistic and reductionist approach obscured essential aspects of reality.' (p. 63) Selection is enthroned as ultimate reality. Bertalanffy then lists a number of areas requiring further empirical research and conceptual re-evaluation, including the notion of adaptation and the role of randomness.

Koestler himself provides an elegant introduction to his seminal idea of the holon as both a part and a whole within a hierarchical living system - an idea further developed in the work of Ken Wilber. An important overall quality is the contrast between self-assertion and integration, which can also apply to social systems and broadly resembles Riane Eisler's fundamental categories of domination and partnership discussed elsewhere in this issue. There is a very useful appendix on general properties of self-regulating open hierarchical order. J. R. Smythies follows with an essay on aspects of consciousness, focusing mainly on the then prevalent theories and, interestingly, discussing models proposed by C.D. Broad and H.H. Price, distinguished philosophers both involved in psychical research, although this is not in fact mentioned.

Paul Maclean is famous for his theory of the triune brain, and here he discusses the paranoid streak in man in the light of his model. His most fascinating reflections come on the last page when he is discussing conditions existing in Europe before World War II and events that can transpire when there are widespread, uneasy feelings among whole nations - a condition analysed by Jung at the time. As we know, it is at times like this that a paranoid or xenophobic streak can emerge, then as now. Just as puzzling, he remarks, 'is how a civilised people can be duped into the selection of a deranged leader'. He speculates about the influence of the reptilian brain in selecting such a leader in conjunction with a poorly discriminating limbic brain mistaking 'the caricature of the leader for a genuine leader.' Then comes the revealing sentence: 'particularly deceptive it seems, are the bold, aggressive qualities of the psychopath that make it possible for him to put on a big show and talk louder and longer than anyone else.' (p. 275) Need I say more?

After an informative discussion of the theory of evolution by C.H. Waddington, the effective founder of epigenetics, comes the final contribution on reductionism and nihilism from Victor Frankl, famous for his Man's Search for Meaning, a classic book based on his experience in Auschwitz, and which has sold 9 million copies in multiple languages. His message has lost none of its force in criticism of various 'isms'. When science becomes scientism, biology becomes biologism and psychology becomes psychologism, these disciplines are unwittingly transformed into ideologies and used to generalise a narrow explanation on the basis of the corresponding speciality. He observes that reductionism is in fact a mask for nihilism expressed as 'nothing- butness', corresponding to the reduction of quality to quantity and humans to the subhuman or to things, as C.S. Lewis observed in his Abolition of Man. Frankl regards the existential vacuum as a major challenge to psychiatry and mental health more generally, characterising this as a noogenic neurosis, which he put, even then, at 20% of the total. Interestingly, in his discussion of the will to meaning, he goes beyond self-fulfilment and self-actualisation to self transcendence, which is also the case with Maslow. The unity of the human being, he asserts, cannot be found in the lower dimensions. In the discussion, he notes that there are three ways in which we can find meaning – in terms of action, experiencing the good and the beautiful and the true, but also, as his own experience taught him, 'by shouldering his unavoidable, unchangeable fate in a heroic way, thereby transmitting and turning tragedy into triumph' and in the process lending meaning to suffering.

The richness of content and the exchange in discussion make this a classic volume and its central themes are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. Perhaps it is time to revive an annual Alpbach Symposium as the scientific equivalent of the equally seminal discussions that took place at Eranos in Switzerland. Only yesterday, I was reading a contribution by Schrödinger on the spirit of science to the Eranos volume on Man and Nature. What Koestler in his final remarks calls the four pillars of unwisdom are still alive in terms of emphasis on evolution as nothing but random mutations preserved by natural selection with a corresponding proposition for mental evolution, that we are nothing but passive automata controlled by the environment and reducing our tensions by adaptive responses; and that the only scientific method worth that name is quantitative measurement. So there is still much conceptual work to do in expanding and refining our scientific and philosophical categories.