General Systems Theory and Creativity

Abstract

The biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy declared in the 1930s that a general systems theory could be applied to ‘any “whole” consisting of interacting “components”’ (1981, p. 109). This declaration was premised on the understanding that one couldn’t fully comprehend how material or social systems worked by simply taking a mechanistic and atomistic view of them. One needed to look at the relationships and interactions involved rather than just simply isolating the component parts. However, the idea that the universe was like a giant machine had a firm grip on the imagination of many thinkers. Following Descartes, this mechanistic understanding:

guided all scientific observation and the formulation of all theories of natural phenomena until twentieth century physics brought about a radical change. The whole elaboration of mechanistic science in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, including Newton’s grand synthesis, was but the development of the Cartesian idea. Descartes gave scientific thought its general framework — the view of nature as a perfect machine, governed by exact mathematical laws. (Capra and Luisi 2014, p. 25)

This conception of ‘an exquisitely designed giant mechanism, obeying elegant deterministic laws of motion’ (Laszlo 1972, p. 11) was a largely reductionist notion applied to what was thought to be a highly ordered, primarily static clockwork universe.