A HIERARCHY OF ENVIRONMENTS
Let us carry this inquiry into the meaning of current terminology a step further, and ask just what that convenient word 'environment' is meant to signify. When I am driving my car, the environment in contact with my right foot is the accelerator pedal, its elastic resistance to pressure provides a tactile feedback which helps keeping the speed of the car steady. The same applies to the 'feel' of the wheel under my hands. But my eyes encompass a much larger environment than my feet and hands; they determine the overall strategy of driving. The hierarchically organized creature that I am is in fact functioning in a hierarchy of environments, guided by a hierarchy of feedbacks.
One advantage of this operational interpretation is that the hierarchy of environments can be extended indefinitely. When the chess-player stares at the board in front of him, trying to visualize various situations three moves ahead, he is guided by feedbacks from imagined environments. Most of our thinking, planning and creating operates in such imaginary environments. But -- to quote Bartlett [19] -- 'all our perceptions are inferential constructs', coloured by imagination, and so the difference is merely one of degrees. The hierarchy is open-ended at the top.
MECHANIZATION AND FREEDOM
A skilled activity, such as writing a letter, branches into sub-skills which, on successively lower levels of the hierarchy, become increasingly mechanized, stereotyped and predictable. The choice of subjects to be discussed in a letter is vast; the next step, phrasing, still offers a great number of alternatives, but is more restricted by the rules of grammar, the limits of one's vocabulary, etc.; the rules of spelling are fixed, with no leeway for flexible strategies, and lastly, the muscle contractions which depress the typewriter keys are entirely automacized. Thus a sub-skill or behavioural holon on the (n) level of the hierarchy has more degrees of freedom (a larger variety of alternative strategic choices permitted by the canon) than a holon on the (n-1) level.
However, all skills tend with increasing mastery and practice to become automatized routines. While acquiring a skill we must concentrate on every detail of what we are doing; then learning begins to condense into habit as steam condenses into drops; with increasing practice we read, write, type, drive 'automatically' or 'mechanically'. Thus we are all the time transforming 'mental' into 'mechanical' activities. In unexpected contingencies, however, the process can be reversed. Driving along a familiar road is an automatized routine; but when that little dog crosses the road, a strategic choice has to be made which is beyond the competence of automatized routine, for which the automatic pilot in my nervous system has not been programmed, and the decision must be referred to higher quarters. The shift of control of an on-going activity from one level to a higher level of the hierarchy -- from 'mechanical' to 'mindful' behaviour -- seems to be the essence of conscious decision-making and of the subjective experience of free will.
The tendency towards the progressive mechanization of skills has its positive side: it conforms to the principle of parsimony. If I could not hit the keys of the typewriter 'automatically' I could not attend to meaning. On the negative side, mechanization, like rigor mortis, affects first the extremities -- the lower subordinate branches of the hierarchy, but it also tends to spread upward. If a skill is practised in the same unvarying conditions, following the same unvarying course, it tends to degenerate into stereotyped routine and its degrees of freedom freeze up. Monotony accelerates enslavement to habit; and if mechanization spreads to the apex of the hierarchy, the result is the rigid pedant, Bergson's homme automate. As von Bertalanffy wrote, 'organisms are not machines, but they can to a certain extent become machines, congeal into machines'. [20]
Vice versa, a variable environment demands flexible behaviour and reverses the trend towards mechanization. However, the challenge of the environment may exceed a critical limit where it can no longer be met by customary routines, however flexible -- because the traditional 'rules of the game' are no longer adequate to cope with the situation. Then a crisis arises. The outcome is either a breakdown of behaviour -- or alternatively the emergence of new forms of behaviour, of original solutions. They have been observed throughout the animal kingdom, from insects onward, through rats to chimpanzees, and point to the existence of unsuspected potentials in the living organism, which are inhibited or dormant in the normal routines of existence, and only make their appearance in exceptional circumstances. They foreshadow the phenomena of human creativity which must remain incomprehensible to the S-R theorist, but appear in a new light when approached from the hierarchic point of view.
SELF-ASSERTION AND INTEGRATION
The holons which constitute an organismic or social hierarchy are Janus-faced entities: facing upward, toward the apex, they function as dependent parts of a larger whole; facing downward, as autonomous wholes in their own right. 'Autonomy' in this context means that organelles, cells, muscles, neurons, organs, all have their intrinsic rhythm and pattern, often manifested spontaneously without external stimulation, and that they tend to persist in and assert their characteristic pattern of activity. This self-assertive tendency is a fundamental and universal characteristic of holons, manifested on every level of every type of hierarchy: in the regulative properties of the morphogenetic field, defying transplantation and experimental mutilation; in the stubbornness of instinct rituals, acquired habits, tribal traditions and social customs; and even in a person's handwriting, which he can modify but not sufficiently to fool the expert. Without this self-assertive tendency of their parts, organisms and societies would lose their articulation and stability.
The opposite aspect of the holon is its integrative tendency to function as an integral part of an existing or evolving larger whole. Its manifestations are equally ubiquitous, from the 'docility' of the embryonic tissues, through the symbiosis of organelles in the cell, to the various forms of cohesive bonds, from flock to insect state and human tribe.
We thus arrive at a polarity between the self-assertive and the integrative tendency of holons on every level. This polarity is of fundamental importance to the SOHO concept. It is in fact implied in the model of the multilevelled hierarchy, because the stability of the hierarchy depends on the equilibration of the two opposite tendencies of its holons. Empirically the postulated polarity can be traced in all phenomena of life; in its theoretical aspect it is not derived from any metaphysical dualism, but may rather be regarded as an application of Newton's Third Law of Motion (action and reaction) to hierarchic systems. We may even extend the polarity into inanimate nature: wherever there is a relatively stable dynamic system, from atoms to galaxies, stability is maintained by the equilibration of opposite forces, one of which may be centrifugal or separative or inertial, and the other a centripetal or attractive or cohesive force, which keep the parts in their place in the larger whole, and hold it together.
«attractors»
Perhaps the most fertile field of application of the SOHO schema is the study of emotions and emotional disorders on the individual and social scale. Under conditions of stress, the affected part of an organism may become overstimulated and tend to escape the restraining control of the whole. [21] This can lead to pathological changes of an irreversible nature, such as malignant growths with untranimelled proliferation of tissues that have escaped from genetic restraint. On a less extreme level, practically any organ or function may get temporarily and partially out of control. In rage and panic the sympathico-adrenal apparatus takes over from the higher centres which normally coordinate behaviour; when sex is aroused the gonads seem to take over from the brain. The idée fixe, the obsession of the crank, are cognitive holons running riot. There is a whole gamut of mental disorders in which some subordinate part of the mental hierarchy exerts its tyrannical rule over the whole, from the insidious domination of 'repressed' complexes to the major psychoses, in which large chunks of the personality seem to have 'split off' and lead a quasi-independent existence. Aberrations of the human mind are frequently due to the obsessio
nal pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were the whole truth -- of a holon masquerading as a whole.
If we turn from organismic to social hierarchies, we again find that under nonnal conditions the holons (clans, tribes, nations, social classes, professional groups) live in a kind of dynamic equilibrium with their natural and social environment. However, under conditions of stress, when tensions exceed a critical limit, some social holon may get over-excited and tend to assert itself to the detriment of the whole, just like an over-excited organ. It should be noted that the canon which defines the identity and lends coherence to social holons (its laws, language, traditions, rules of conduct, systems of belief) represents not merely negative constraints imposed on its actions, but also positive precepts, maxims and moral imperatives.
The single individual constitutes the apex of the organismic hierarchy, and at the same time the lowest unit of the social hierarchy. Looking inward, he sees himself as a self-contained, unique whole, looking outward as a dependent part. No man is an island, he is a holon. His self-assertive tendency is the dynamic manifestation of his unique wholeness as an individual; his integrative tendency expresses his dependence on the larger whole to which he belongs, his partness. Under normal conditions, the two opposite tendencies are more or less evenly balanced. Under conditions of stress, the equilibrium is upset, as manifested in emotional behaviour. The emotions derived from the self-assertive tendencies are of the well-known aggressive-defensive, hunger, rage and fear type, including the possessive component of sex. The emotions derived from the integrative tendency have been largely neglected by contemporary psychology; one may call them the self-transcending or participatory type of emotions. They arise out of the human holon's need to be an integral part of some larger whole -- which may be a social group, a personal bond, a belief-system, Nature or the anima mundi. The psychological processes through which this category of emotions operates are variously referred to as projection, identification, empathy, hypnotic rapport, devotion, love. It is one of the ironies of the human condition that both its glory and its predicament seem to derive not from the self-assertive but from the integrative potentials of the species. The glories of art and science, and the holocausts of history caused by misguided devotion, are both nurtured by the self-transcending emotions.
To conclude, even this fragmentary outline ought to make it clear that in the SOHO model there is no place for such a thing as an aggressive or destructive instinct in organisms; nor does it admit the reification of the sexual instinct as the only integrative force in human or animal society. Freud's Eros and Thanatos are relative latecomers on the stage of evolution: a host of creatures that multiply by fission or budding are ignorant of both. In the present view, Eros is an offspring of the integrative, destructive Thanatos of the self-assertive tendency, and Janus the symbol of the polarity of these two irreducible properties of living matter -- that coincidentia oppositorum which von Bertalanffy is so fond of quoting, and which is inherent in the open-ended hierarchies of life.
SUMMARY: SOME GENERAL PROPERTIES OF SELF-REGULATING OPEN HIERARCHIC ORDER
1. The Holon
1.1 The organism in its structural aspect is not an aggregation of
elementary parts, and in its functional aspects not a chain of
elementary units of behaviour.
1.2 The organism is to be regarded as a multilevelled hierarchy of
semi-autonomous sub-wholes, branching into sub-wholes of a lower
order, and so on. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy are
referred to as holons.
1.3 Parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domains
of life. The concept of the holon is intended to reconcile the
atomistic and holistic approaches.
1.4 Biological holons are self-regulating open systems which display both
the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties
of parts. This dichotomy is present on every level of every type of
hierarchic organization, and is referred to as the 'Janus phenomenon.
1.5 More generally, the term 'holon' may be applied to any stable biological
or social sub-whole which displays rule-governed behaviour and/or
structural Gestalt-constancy. Thus organelles and homologous organs
are evolutionary holons; morphogenetic fields are ontogenetic holons;
the ethologist's 'fixed action-patterns' and the sub-routines
of acquired skills are behavioural holons; phonemes, morphemes,
words, phrases are linguistic holons; individuals, families, tribes,
nations are social holons.
2. Dissectibility
2.1 Hierarchies are 'dissectible' into their constituent branches,
on which the holons form the nodes; the branching lines represent
the channels of communication and control.
2.2 The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises is a measure of its
'depth', and the number of holons on any given level is called its 'span'
(Simon).
3. Rules and Strategies
3.1 Functional holons are governed by fixed sets of rules and display
more or less flexible strategies.
3.2 The rules -- referred to as the system's 'canon' -- determine its
invariant properties, its structural configuration and/or functional
pattern.
3.3 While the canon defines the permissible steps in the holon's activity,
the strategic selection of the actual step among permissible choices
is guided by the contingencies of the environment.
3.4 The canon determines the rules of the game, strategy decides the
course of the game.
3.5 The evolutionary process plays variations on a limited number of
canonical themes. The constraints imposed by the evolutionary canon
are illustrated by the phenomena of homology, homeoplasy, parallelism,
convergence and the loi du balancement.
3.6 In ontogeny, the holons at successive levels represent successive
stages in the development of tissues. At each step in the process
of differentiation, the genetic canon imposes further constraints
on the holon's developmental potentials, but it retains sufficient
flexibility to follow one or another alternative developmental
pathway, within the range of its competence, guided by the
contingencies of the environment.
3.7 Structurally, the mature organism is a hierarchy of parts within parts.
3.8 Functionally, the behaviour of organisms is governed by 'rules of
the game' which account for its coherence, stability and specific
pattern.
3.9 Skills, whether inborn or acquired, are functional hierarchies,
with sub-skills as holons, governed by sub-rules.
4. Integration and Self-Assertion
4.1 Every holon has the dual tendency to preserve and assert its
individuality as a quasi-autonomous whole; and to function as an
integrated part of an (existing or evolving) larger whole. This
polarity between the self-assertive and integrative tendencies
is inherent in the concept of hierarchic order; and a universal
characteristic of life.
The self-assertive tendencies are the dynamic expression of the holon's
wholeness, the integrative tendencies of its partness.
4.2 An analogous polarity is found in the interplay of cohesive and
separative forces in stable inorganic systems, from atoms to galaxies.
4.3 The most general manifestation of the integrative tendencies is the
reversal of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in open systems feeding
on negative entropy (Schrödinger), and the evolutionary trend towards
'spo
ntaneously developing states of greater heterogeneity and complexity'
(Herrick).
4.4 Its specific manifestations on different levels range from the symbiosis
of organelles and colonial animals, through the cohesive forces in herds
and flocks, to the integrative bonds in insect states and primate
societies. The complementary manifestations of the self-assertive
tendencies are competition, individualism, and the separative forces
of tribalism, nationalism, etc.
4.5 In ontogeny, the polarity is reflected in the docility and
determination of growing tissues.
4.6 In adult behaviour, the self-assertive tendency of functional holons
is reflected in the stubbornness of instinct rituals (fixed
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