In Their Own Words
Humour
“The specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less, until he finally knows everything about nothing.”
Similar versions of this joke existed in his time and Bertalanffy used it frequently in his lectures to justify the need for generalists and Systems Theory. Bertalanffy saw humour not as a triviality, but as a biological indicator of human freedom. It was the proof that we are not just biological machines, but symbolic creators who can see the irony in our own existence.
Professional Activities
Ludwig von Bertalanffy was a multifaceted polymath whose professional life bridged biology, philosophy, and social science. As an organismic biologist, he challenged the era’s prevailing views by rejecting both mechanistic reductionism and vitalism. Instead, he proposed that organisms be understood as integrated wholes, a perspective that led to the development of the von Bertalanffy Growth Function, which remains a staple in biological modeling today.
Beyond theoretical work, Bertalanffy was an influential academic and institutional leader. He held prestigious professorships at the Universities of Vienna, Ottawa, Montreal and Alberta, as well as SUNY Buffalo. In 1954, he co-founded the Society for General Systems Research (SGSR) cementing systems science as a formal discipline. His diverse research even extended to oncology at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he developed cytological techniques for cancer diagnosis.
In his later years, Bertalanffy transitioned into a philosopher and social critic. He vocally opposed the robot model of humanity found in behaviorist psychology, arguing that humans are active, symbol-creating beings. By integrating these various roles, Bertalanffy established a wholistic scientific paradigm that continues to influence contemporary thought across multiple disciplines.
Contributions To Canada’s Systems Thinking Literacy
- Helped seed: Canadian systems scholarship. Bertalanffy’s ideas spread through Canadian universities, especially in biology, psychology, and management, where scholars began using systems language more openly.
- Influenced: Canadian interdisciplinary research. His emphasis on wholes, relations, and feedback encouraged scholars to connect environmental, social, and organizational issues rather than study them separately.
- Strengthened: systems thinking in public policy. Canadian planners and policy thinkers used his ideas to think more holistically about health care, education, cities, and resource management.
- Supported: Canadian environmental thinking. His view of organisms as part of larger systems fit well with Canadian concerns about ecology, conservation, and the management of large natural regions.
- Raised: Canada’s systems literacy. By helping make systems theory familiar in Canadian academic and professional circles he contributed to a broader Canadian ability to analyze complex problems.
Contributions To Canadian K-12 Education
Ludwig’s influence on Canadian K-12 education was primarily indirect but foundational, shaping how curriculum is structured and taught.
- Interdisciplinary integration: General System Theory provided the framework for moving away from siloed subjects toward integrated curricula, such as Social Studies, which connect history, geography, and economics as a single system.
- Wholistic science: His concept of Open Systems revolutionized science education, shifting the focus from naming parts to understanding ecosystems and the relationships between organisms and their environments.
Contributions To The Global Systems Thinking Discipline
Ludwig von Bertalanffy rejected both mechanism and vitalism, arguing that neither reductionism nor mystical forces could adequately explain life. Instead, he developed General System Theory rooted in his “organismic biology” of the 1920s and presented at a 1937 University of Chicago philosophy seminar that became cited as the birth of systems science. Although he preferred the term Science of Wholeness that he coined in 1945 he eventually settled on General System Theory as his work gained international traction after moving to North America in the late 1940s.
“Biological systems are stratified with a hierarchy of levels of organization from living molecules to multicellular individuals and supraindividual aggregates. The whole of nature is a tremendous architecture in which subordinate systems are united at successive levels into ever higher and larger systems.”
Bertalanffy’s core premise was that nature is a tremendous architecture of stratified levels, ranging from molecules to complex social aggregates. He proposed that laws governing open systems, which exchange matter and energy with their environment, apply universally across physical, biological, and sociological domains. By focusing on principles such as feedback, equilibrium, and self-organization, he sought to unify fragmented scientific disciplines into a cohesive whole. His life’s work culminated in the 1968 publication of General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications cementing a wholistic paradigm that remains influential today.
Individual Learning and Projects
Apart from the first appearance of the word Cybernetics in a book title in the late 1940’s, it wasn’t until the late 1960’s that publicly available books included the term Systems Thinking or Systems Science in the title. For the first wave of pioneers, beyond thought engagements with the authors in their Personal Learning Sources, Learner Activities were predominantly via living engagements with other people, in organised academia or independent scholars. This included 1) people studying General Systems Theory, 2) people working in the pioneer’s primary discipline, 3) people from other disciplines building interdisciplinary systems thinking skills, and 4) people wanting to stay in tune with the growing Systems Thinking thought community taking shape.
This text uses the word engagement to mean “active involvement and interest”. The term living engagements here includes spoken conversations with another person or group of people and written conversations in academic or professional organisation publications. The living engagement may have been supportive or disputational in nature.
The Projects of these pioneers could include teaching undergraduate university students, teaching and conducting research with graduate/post-graduate university students, or conducting research in learning institutes/foundations. Projects for some of them involved constructing an information sharing network enabling the interdisciplinary communication to occur, or working in diverse business, government and non-government organisations outside academia. Some pioneers chose to work as much as possible outside organised academia and conducted socioculturally impacting projects as independent scholars.
Anchoring themselves in stable spousal relationships and home life enabled each pioneer to sustain day-to-day wellbeing as they evolved their systems thinking skills over many decades. As lifelong learners they remained exceptionally productive and fulfilled in and outside the formal academic setting for much of their lives.
The learner activities and projects listed below are intended as starting points for deeper dives into the full network of people with whom they engaged and the projects they conducted.
Learner Activities
With whom did Ludwig engage most frequently in the Systems Thinking discipline?
Anatol Rapoport, Kenneth Boulding, Raph W. Gerard, Ervin Laszlo, Maria von Bertalanffy
With whom did Ludwig engage most frequently in his primary discipline?
Joseph Henry Woodger Paul Weiss, C.H. Waddington, Joseph Needham, Nicholas Rashevski
With whom did Ludwig engage most frequently from other disciplines?
Karl Menninger, Nicolas Rashevski, Anatol Rapoport, Viktor Frankl, Charlotte Buhler, Erwin Schrodinger, Ilya Prigogine
What role did Ludwig’s spouse play in these engagements?
Maria Bertalanffy (née von Köhler) is the most critical, yet historically under-credited, figure in Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s life and work. She was his primary intellectual partner, research assistant, editor, and manager throughout his entire career. Without Maria, much of Ludwig’s work might have been lost or buried by history, particularly during their turbulent moves during and after World War II (from Vienna to Canada, and later the US). Because Ludwig suffered from chronic health issues later in life and possessed an erratic, intensely focused personality, Maria managed his correspondences, organised his research materials, and edited his drafts daily. While names like Anatol Rapoport, Paul Weiss, and Karl Menninger appear in academic citations as Ludwig’s primary discipline-specific peers, Maria Bertalanffy was the constant, behind-the-scenes collaborator who made Ludwig’s engagement with all of those other scholars possible. She was his true life-long intellectual partner.
Projects
Modern Theories of Development: An Introduction to Theoretical Biology (1933)
The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology (paper, 1950)
Problems of Life: An Evaluation of Modern Biological Thought (1952)
Robots, Men and Minds: Psychology in the Modern World (1967)
General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (1968)
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