Janus (10 page)

 

 

In the routines of everyday existence both tendencies are in constant
interplay. The
self-assertive
tendency is manifested on every
level of the hierarchies of behaviour: in the stubbornness of instinctive
rituals in animals and of acquired habits in men; in tribal traditions
and social customs; and even in a person's individual gait, gestures
or handwriting, which he might be able to modify, but not sufficiently
to fool the expert; the holons of his graphological style defend their
autonomy. It is the
integrative
tendency, equally ubiquitous, which
prevents us from becoming complete slaves of our habits and freezing
into automata; it is manifested in flexible strategies, original
adaptations, and creative syntheses which originate higher, more complex
and integrated forms of thought and behaviour, adding new levels to the
open-ended hierarchy.

 

 

 

2

 

 

The basic polarity is much in evidence in the phenomena of
emotive
behaviour on the individual and social scale. No man is an island; he is a
holon. Looking inward, he experiences himself as a unique, self-contained,
independent whole; looking outward as a dependent part of his natural
and social environment. His self-assertive tendency is the dynamic
manifestation of his individuality; his integrative tendency expresses his
dependence on the larger whole to which he belongs, his partness. When all
is well, the two tendencies are more or less evenly balanced. In times of
stress and frustration, the equilibrium is upset, manifested in emotional
disorders. The emotions derived from the frustrated self-assertive tendencies
are of the well-known, adrenergic,
aggressive-defensive
type: hunger,
rage and fear, including the possessive components of sex and of parental
care. The emotions derived from the integrative tendency have been
to a large extent neglected by academic psychology: one may call them
the
self-transcending
type of emotions. They arise out of the human
holon's need to belong, to transcend the narrow boundaries of the self
and to be part of a more embracing whole -- which may be a community,
a religious creed or political cause, Nature, Art, or the
anima mundi
.

 

 

When the need to belong, the urge towards self-transcendence is deprived
of adequate outlets, the frustrated individual may lose his critical
faculties and surrender his identity in blind worship or fanatical
devotion to some cause, regardless of its merits. As we have seen
earlier on, it is one of the ironies of the human condition that its
ferocious destructiveness derives not from the self-assertive, but from
the integrative potential of the species. The glories of science and art,
and the holocausts of history caused by misguided devotion, were both
nurtured by the self-transcending type of emotions. For the code of rules
which defines the corporate identity, and lends coherence to a social
holon (its language, laws, traditions, standards of conduct, systems
of belief) represents not merely negative constraints imposed on its
activities but also positive precepts, maxims and moral imperatives. In
normal times, when the social hierarchy is in equilibrium, each of its
holons operates in accordance with its code of rules, without attempting
to impose it on others; in times of stress and crisis, a social holon
may get over-excited and tend to assert itself to the detriment of the
whole, just like any over-excited organ or obsessive idea.

 

 

 

3

 

 

The dichotomy of wholeness and partness, and its dynamic manifestation
in the polarity of the self-assertive and integrative tendencies is,
as already said, inherent in every multi-levelled hierarchic system,
and implied in the conceptual model. We find it reflected even in
inanimate nature: wherever there is a relatively stable dynamic system,
from atoms to galaxies, its stability is maintained by the equilibrium
of opposite forces, one of which may be centrifugal -- i.e., inertial
or separative, the other centripetal, i.e., attractive or cohesive,
which binds the parts together in the larger whole, without sacrifice
of their identity. Newton's first law -- 'Every body continues in its
state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled
by a force to change that state' -- sounds like a proclamation of the
self-assertive tendency of every speck of matter in the universe; while
his Law of Gravity reflects the integrative tendency.*

 

* In a science-fiction play, written many years ago, I had a visiting
maiden from an alien planet explain the central doctrine of its
religion: '... We worship gravitation. It is the only force
which does not travel through space in a rush; it is everywhere
in repose. It keeps the stars in their orbits and our feet on our
earth. It is Nature's fear of loneliness, the earth's longing for
the moon; it is love in its pure, inorganic form.'
(Twilight Bar, 1945.)

 

We may venture a step further, and regard the Principle of Complementarity
as an even more basic example of our polarity. According to this principle,
which dominates modern physics, all elementary particles -- electrons,
photons, etc. -- have the dual character of corpuscles and waves:
according to circumstances they will behave either as compact grains
of matter, or as waves without substantial attributes or definable
boundaries. From our point of view, the corpuscular aspect of the electron
-- or any elementary holon -- manifests its wholeness and self-assertive
potential, while its wave-character manifests its partness and integrative
potential.*

 

* Another instance of thc polarity of inanimate nature is reflected
in Mach's Principle, which connects terrestrial inertia with the
total mass of the universe; see below, Ch. XIII.

 

 

4

 

 

Needless to say, the manifestations of the two basic tendencies appear
in different guises on different levels of the hierarchy, according to
the specific codes -- or 'organizing relations' -- characteristic of that
level. The rules which govern the interactions of sub-atomic particles
are not the same rules which govern the interactions between atoms as
wholes; and the ethical rules which govern the behaviour of individuals
are not the same rules which govern the behaviour of crowds or armies.
Accordingly, the manifestations of the polarity of self-assertive and
integrative tendencies, which we find in all phenomena of life, will
take different forms from level to level. Thus, for example, we shall
find the polarity reflected as:

 

integration <--> self-assertion
partness    <--> wholeness
dependence  <--> autonomy
centripetal <--> centrifugal
cooperation <--> competition
altruism    <--> egotism

Let us further note that the self-assertive tendency is by and large
conservative in the sense of tending to preserve the individuality of the
holon in the here and now of existing conditions; whereas the integrative
tendency has the dual function of coordinating the constituent holons of
a system in its present stage, and of generating new levels of complex
integrations in evolving hierarchies -- whether biological, social
or cognitive. Thus the self-assertive tendency is present-orientated,
concerned with self-maintenance, while the integrative tendency may be
said to work both for the present and towards the future.
5
As the polarity of the self-assertive and the integrative tendencies
plays a crucial role in our theory and will keep cropping up in later
chapters, a brief comparison with Freud's metaphysical system, which
achieved such immense popularity, may be of some interest.
Freud postulated two basic
Triebe
('drives', or loosely, 'instincts')
which he conceived as mutually antagonistic universal tendencies inherent
in all living matter: Eros and Thanatos, or libido and death-wish. A close
reading of the relevant passages (in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Civilisation and its Discontents
, etc.) reveals, surprisingly, that both
his drives are regressive: they both aim at the restoration of a past
primeval condition. Eros, through the lure of the pleasure principle,
tries to re-establish the erstwhile 'unity of protoplasm in the primordial
slime', while Thanatos aims even more directly at a return to the inorganic
state of matter though the annihilation of self and other selves. As both
drives are attempting to turn the clock of evolution backward, one is left
wondering how it came about that it moves forward nevertheless. Freud's
answer seems to be that Eros is forced to make a long detour in gathering
'the dispersed fragments of living substance'
^[1]
into multicellular
aggregates with the final aim of restoring protoplasmic unity; in other
words, evolution appears as the product of inhibited regression, the
negation of a negation, a backing forward, as it were.
As a curiosity one may note Freud's rather dim view of the working of Eros.
According to this view, pleasure is always derived from 'the diminution,
lowering, or extinction of psychic excitation' and 'un-pleasure*
from an increase of it'. The organism tends towards stability;
it is guided by 'the striving of the mental apparatus to keep the
quantity of excitations present in it as low as possible or at least
constant. Accordingly, everything that tends to increase the quantity of
excitation must be regarded as adverse to this tendency, that is to say,
as unpleasurable.' [2]

* Unlust, dysphoria, as distinct from physical pain.

Now this is of course true, in a broad sense, in so far as the frustration
of elementary needs like hunger is concerned. But it passes in silence
a whole class of experiences to which we commonly refer as 'pleasurable
excitement'. The preliminaries of love-making cause an increase in sexual
tension and should, according to the theory, be unpleasant -- which they
decidedly are not. It is curious that in the works of Freud there is no
answer to be found to this embarrassingly banal objection. The sex-drive
in the Freudian system is essentially something to be disposed of --
through the proper channels or by sublimation; pleasure is derived not
from its pursuit, but from getting rid of it.*

* One might argue that in Freud's universe there is no place for
amorous love-play because Freud, like D. H. Lawrence, was basically
a puritan with a horror of frivolity, who treated sex
'mit tierischem Ernst'. Ernest Jones says in his biography:
'Freud partook in much of the prudishness of his time, when allusions
to lower limbs were improper.' He then gives several examples --
such as Freud 'sternly forbidding' his fiancée to stay 'with
an old friend, recently married, who as she delicately put it,
"had married before her wedding" '. [3]

Freud's concept of Thanatos -- the
Todestrieb
-- is as puzzling as
his Eros. On the one hand, the death-wish 'works silently, within the
organism towards its disintegration' by catabolic processes, breaking down
living into lifeless matter. This aspect of it may in fact be equated
with the Second Law of Thermodynamics ** -- the gradual dispersion of
matter and energy into a state of chaos. But, on the other hand, Freud's
death-instinct, which works so quietly within the organism, appears,
when projected outward, as active destructiveness or sadism. How these two
aspects of Thanatos can be harmonized and causally connected is difficult
to see. For the first aspect is that of a physico-chemical process which
tends to reduce living cells to quiescence and ultimately to dust; while
the second aspect shows a coordinated, violent aggression of the whole
organism against other organisms. The process by which the silent sliding
towards senescence and disintegration is converted into the infliction of
violence on others is not explained by Freud; the only link he provides
is the ambiguous use of words like 'death-wish' and 'urge to destruction'.

** We shall see later that this famous law applies only to so-called
'closed systems' in physics, and not to living organisms; but this
is a relatively recent discovery which Freud could not know.

Not only is the connection between these two aspects of the Freudian
Thanatos missing, but each in itself is highly questionable. Taking
the second aspect first, nowhere do we find in nature destruction for
destruction's sake. Animals kill to devour, not to destroy; and -- as
already mentioned -- even when they fight in competition for territory
or mates, the fight is ritualized like a fencing bout and is hardly ever
carried to a lethal end. To prove the existence of a primary 'destructive
instinct', it would have to be shown that destructive behaviour regularly
occurs without external provocation, as hunger and the sex-drive make
themselves felt regardless of the absence of external stimuli. To quote
Karen Horney (once an eminent, but critical psychoanalyst):
^[4]

Freud's assumption implies that the ultimate motivation for hostility
or destructiveness lies in the impulse to destroy. Thus he turns into
its opposite our belief that we destroy in order to live: we live
in order to destroy. We should not shrink from recognizing error,
even in an age-old conviction, if new insight teaches us to see it
differently, but this is not the case here. If we want to injure or to
kill, we do so because we are or feel endangered, humiliated, abused;
because we are or feel rejected or treated unjustly; because we are
or feel interfered with in wishes which are of vital importance to us.

It was, after all, Freud himself who taught us to seek out in apparently
wanton, unprovoked acts of destructiveness, by disturbed children or
adults, the hidden motive -- which usually turns out to be a feeling
of being rejected, jealousy, or hurt pride. In other words, cruelty
and destructiveness are to be regarded as pathological extremes of the
self-assertive tendency when frustrated or provoked beyond a critical
limit -- without requiring the gratuitous postulate of a death-instinct,
for which there is not a trace of evidence anywhere in biology.
Turning once more to the other aspect of Freud's Thanatos, the outstanding
characteristic of living substance is, as already mentioned, that it seems
to ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics, instead of dissipating its
energy into the environment, the living animal extracts energy from it,
eats environment, drinks environment, burrows and builds in environment,
sucks information out of noise and meaning out of chaotic stimuli.
'Neither senescence nor natural death are necessary, inevitable
consequences of life,' as Pearl summed it up
^[5]
; the
protozoa are potentially immortal; they reproduce by simple fission,
'leaving behind in the process nothing corresponding to a corpse'. In
many primitive, multicellular animals senescence and natural death are
absent; they reproduce by fission or budding, again without leaving any
dead residue behind. 'Natural death is biologically a relatively new
thing'
^[6]
; it is the cumulative effect of some, as yet little
understood, deficiency in the metabolism of cells in complex organisms
-- an epiphenomenon due to imperfect integration, and not a basic law
of nature.
Thus Freud's primary drives, sexuality and the death-wish, cannot claim
universal validity; both are based on biological novelties which appear
only on a relatively high level of evolution: sex as a new departure
from asexual reproduction and sometimes (as in certain flatworms)
alternating with it; death as a consequence of imperfections arising
with growing complexity. In the theory proposed here there is no place
for a 'destructive instinct' in organisms; nor for regarding sexuality
as the
only
integrative force in human or animal society. Eros
and Thanatos are relatively late arrivals on the stage of evolution;
a host of creatures which multiply by fission (or budding) are ignorant
of both. In our view,
sexuality is a specific manifestation of the
integrative tendency, aggressiveness an extreme form of the self-assertive
tendency
; while Janus appears as the symbol of the two irreducible
properties of living matter: wholeness and partness, and their precarious
equilibrium in the hierarchies of nature.
To say it once more, this generalized schema is not based on metaphysical
assumptions but built in, as it were, into the architecture of complex
systems -- physical, biological or social -- as a necessary precondition
of the coherence and stability of their multilevelled assemblies
of holons. Not by chance did Heisenberg call his autobiographical
account of the genesis of modern physics
The Part and the Whole
.*
Where indeed in micro-physics do we find the ultimate 'elementary'
parts which do not turn out to be composite wholes? Where in the
macro-world of astro-physics do we locate the boundaries of our universe
of multi-dimensional space-time? Infinity yawns both at the top and
bottom of the stratified hierarchies of existence, and the dichotomy
of self-assertive wholeness and self-transcending partness is present
on every level, from the trivial to the cosmic. The earthiest aspect of
hierarchic order is reflected in what one might call 'Swift's paradigm';

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum . . .
* Der Teil und das Ganze in the German original.
In the English translation this was changed to
Physics and Beyond.

6
I am aware that this chapter may have seemed to oscillate between the
over-obvious and the apparently abstract and speculative; yet one of
the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
There is a further difficulty inherent in the subject. The postulate
of a universal self-assertive tendency needs no apology; it has an
immediate appeal to commonsense, and has many forerunners -- such as
the 'instinct of self-preservation', 'survival of the fittest', and
so forth. But to postulate as its counterpart an equally universal
integrative tendency, and the dynamic interplay between the two as
the key to a general systems theory, smacks of old-fashioned vitalism
and runs counter to the Zeitgeist, epitomized in books like Monod's
Chance and Necessity
or Skinner's
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
.
It may therefore be appropriate to wind up this chapter with a few
quotations from a recent book by an eminent clinician, Dr Lewis Thomas
(President of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre), who can hardly be
accused of an unscientific attitude. The passage starts with a fascinating
description of the parasite
myxotricha paradoxa
, a single-celled
creature which inhabits the digestive tract of Australian termites:

At first glance, he appears to be an ordinary, motile protozoan,
remarkable chiefly for the speed and directness with which he swims
from place to place, engulfing fragments of wood finely chewed by his
termite host. In the termite ecosystem, an arrangement of Byzantine
complexity, he stands at the epicenter. Without him, the wood,
however finely chewed, would never get digested; he supplies the
enzymes that break down cellulose to edible carbohydrate, leaving
only the nondegradable lignin, which the termite then excretes
in geometrically tidy pellets and uses as building blocks for the
erection of arches and vaults in the termite nest. Without him there
would be no termites, no farms of the fungi that are cultivated by
termites and will grow nowhere else . . . [7]

But this tiny creature inside the termite's digestive tracts turns out to
consist of whole populations of even tinier creatures living in symbiosis
with each other, yet retaining their autonomous individuality. Thus . . .

. . . the flagellae that beat in synchrony to propel myxotricha
with such directness turn out, on closer scrutiny with the electron
microscope, not to be flagellae at all. They are outsiders, in
to help with the business: fully formed, perfect spirochetes that
have attached themselves at regularly spaced intervals all over the
surface of the protozoan. [8]

Thomas then enumerates the various types of other organelles and bacteria
which form a kind of cooperative zoo inside
myxotricha
, and cites evidence
that the cells which constitute the
human body
evolved by a similar
process 'of being made up, part by part, by the coming together of just
such prokaryotic animals'. Thus the lowly
myxotricha
becomes a paradigm
for our integrative tendency.
The whole animal, or ecosystem, stuck for the time being halfway along
in evolution, appears to be a model for the development of cells like
our own. . . . There is an underlying force that drives together the
several creatures comprising myxotricha, and, then drives the assemblage
into union with the termite. If we could understand this tendency, we
would catch a glimpse of the process that brought single separate cells
together for the construction of metazoans, culminating in the invention
of roses, dolphins, and, of course, ourselves. It might turn out that
the same tendency underlies the joining of organisms into communities,
communities into ecosystems, and ecosystems into the biosphere. If this
is, in fact, the drift of things, the way of the world, we may come
to view immune reactions, genes for the chemical marking of self, and
perhaps all reflexive responses of aggression and defense as secondary
developments in evolution, necessary for the regulation and modulation
of symbiosis, not designed to break into the process, only to keep it
from getting out of hand.