Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

1 Philosophy

In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something beside the parts …

(Aristotle n.d., 350 BCE, VIII: line 1)

1.1 Introduction

Fritjof Capra (1975) has, for some time, been pointing to similarities between the holistic understanding of the world supplied by Eastern philosophy and the findings of modern science. Churchman regarded the I Ching, with its emphasis on dynamic changes of relationship between interconnected elements, as presenting the oldest systems approach (Hammond 2003, p. 13). Boulton et al. (2015) claim Daoism, with its sense of interconnection and co‐creation, as a precursor of complexity theory. This book will restrict itself to the Western intellectual tradition. It is upon Western sources that systems practitioners have, probably to their detriment, almost exclusively drawn. As with so much in this tradition, we owe the first attempts to use systems ideas to the ancient Greeks. von Bertalanffy (1971) and Prigogine (1997) cite the pre‐Socratic philosopher Heraclitus as an influence. More specifically, Aristotle (n.d.) 350 BCE was the first to imply that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Indeed, he reasoned, the parts only obtain their meaning in terms of the purpose of the whole. The parts of the body make sense because of the way they function to support the organism. Individuals can only find meaning in helping the state to achieve ...