Janus by Arthur Koestler Read Free Book Online

into
the 'tree of life'; or the stepwise differentiation of tissues and
integration of functions in the development of the embryo. Anatomists
use the tree diagram to demonstrate the locomotor hierarchy of limbs,
joints, individual muscles, and so down to fibres, fibrils and filaments
of contractile proteins. Ethologists use it to illustrate the various
sub-routines and action-patterns involved in such complex instinctive
activities as a bird building a nest; but it is also an indispensable
tool to the new school of psycholinguistics started by Chomsky. It is
equally indispensable for an understanding of the processes by which the
chaotic stimuli impinging on our sense organs are filtered and classified
in their ascent though the nervous system into consciousness. Lastly,
the branching tree illustrates the hierarchic ordering of knowledge
in the subject-index of library catalogues -- and the personal memory
stores inside our skulls.
     
     
The universal applicability of the hierarchic model may arouse the suspicion
that it is logically empty. I hope to show that this is not the case,
and that the search for the fundamental properties, or laws, which all
these varied hierarchies have in common amounts to more than a play on
superficial analogies -- or to riding a hobby horse. It should rather be
called an exercise in General Systems Theory -- that relatively recent
inter-disciplinary school, founded by von Bertalanffy, whose purpose is
to construct theoretical models and discover general principles which
are universally applicable to biological, social and symbolic systems
of any kind -- in other words, a search for common denominators in the
flux of phenomena, for unity-in-diversity.
     
     
As early as 1936, Joseph Needham wrote:
     
The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon
    compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes,
    will perhaps be the leading idea of the future. [7]
     
Even earlier Lloyd Morgan, C. D. Broad, and J. Woodger among others
emphasized the importance of recognizing hierarchically ordered 'levels of
organization', and the emergence on each higher level of new 'organizing
relations' between (sub) wholes of greater complexity, whose properties cannot be reduced to, nor predicted from, the lower level . To quote
Needham again:
     
Once we adopt the general picture of the universe as a series of
    levels of organisation and complexity, each level having unique
    properties of structure and behaviour, which, though depending on the
    properties of the constituent elements, appear only when these are
    combined into the higher whole, we see that there are qualitatively
    different laws holding good at each levels. [8]
     
But such a multi-levelled view went against the materialist Zeitgeist,
because it implied that the biological laws which govern life are
qualitatively different from the laws of physics which govern inanimate
matter, and that accordingly life cannot be 'reduced' to the blind dance
of atoms; and similarly, that the mentality of man is qualitatively
different from the conditioned responses of Pavlov's dogs or Skinner's
rats, which the dominant school in psychology considered as the paradigms
of human behaviour. Harmless as the word 'hierarchy' sounded, it turned
out to be subversive. It did not even appear in the index of most modern
textbooks of psychology or biology.
     
     
Yet there have always been voices in the wilderness, insisting that the
concept of hierarchic organization was an indispensable prerequisite --
a conditio sine qua non -- of any methodical attempt to bring unity
into the diversity of science, and might eventually lead to a coherent
philosophy of nature -- which at present is conspicuous by its absence.
     
     
To this minority chorus there was also added the small voice of the
author, expressed in several books in which 'the ubiquitous hierarchy'
[9] played a major, and often dominant part. Taken together, the relevant
passages would add