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 noveltie
s 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.
If it is in the nature of living things to pool resources, to fuse when possible, we would have a new way of accounting for the progressive enrichment and complexity of form in living things. [9]
III
THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF EMOTION
1
Emotions can be described as mental states accompanied by intense feelings and associated with bodily changes of a widespread character -- in breathing, pulse, muscle tone, glandular secretion of hormones such as adrenalin, etc. They have also been described as 'over-heated' drives. They can be classified, in the first place, according to the nature of the drive which gives rise to them: hunger, sex, curiosity (the 'exploratory drive'), conviviality, protection of the offspring, and so on.
In the second place, a conspicuous feature of all emotions is the feeling of pleasureableness or unpleasureableness, the 'hedonic tone', attached to them. In the third place, there is the polarity between the self-assertive and self-transcending tendencies which enter into every emotion.
We thus arrive at a three-dimensional conception of human emotions. I have proposed* a coarse but homely analogy for it: imagine your mental scenery transformed into the saloon bar of a tavern, equipped with a variety of taps, each serving a different kind of brew; these are turned on and off as the need arises. Then each tap would represent a different drive, while the pleasure-unpleasure rating would depend on the rate of flow through the tap -- whether it is nice and smooth, or gurgles and splutters because there is too little or too much pressure behind it. Lastly, the ratio of self-assertive to self-transcending impulses in emotive behaviour could be represented by the acid-alkaline scale. This is not a very engaging metaphor, but it may help to visualize the three variables (or parameters) of emotion which the present theory suggests. Let us take a closer look at each, and particularly at those features which distinguish it from other theories.
* In The Ghost in the Machine, Ch. XV.
2
One of the difficulties inherent in the subject is that we rarely experience a pure emotion. The barman tends to mix the liquids from the various taps: sex may be combined with curiosity and with virtually any other drive. The point is too obvious to need further discussion.
The second variable, the pleasure-unpleasure scale or 'hedonic tone', also gives rise to ambiguous, 'mixed fee
lings'. Earlier on (in Chapter II) I quoted Freud's dictum that pleasure is always derived from 'the diminution, lowering or extinction of psychic excitation and unpleasure from an increase of it'. This view (which was held throughout the first half of our century by the major schools in psychology, including American behaviourism* and Continental psychoanalysis) is no doubt true for the frustration of 'over-heated' primitive drives which arise, for instance, from the pangs of starvation; but it is palpably untrue for that class of complex emotions encountered in everyday life, which we call pleasurable excitement, thrill, arousal, suspense. Reading an erotic passage in a book leads, in Freud's words, to an 'increase in psychic excitation' and should therefore be unpleasant; in fact it arouses a complex emotion in which frustration is combined with pleasure.
* Where Thorndike's 'Law of Effect', which asserted the same fallacy, reigned as supreme dogma.
The answer to this paradox lies in the important part played by imagination in human emotions. Just as an imagined stimulus in an erotic reverie is sufficient to arouse physiological impulses, so, vice versa, imagined satisfaction may lead to a pleasurable experience -- the 'internalized' consummation of those components in the complex drive which can be lived out in fantasy.
Another gateway through which imagination enters into the emotional drive is anticipation of its reward. In the previous example the reward was fictional, yet emotionally real, i.e., pleasurable; now we are talking of the imagined anticipation of the factual reward. When one is thirsty, the sight of the publican pouring beer into one's glass is pleasurable, although it 'increases psychic excitation'. The same applies to the preliminaries of love-making, or watching a thriller: the anticipation of the happy ending mediates the 'internal consummation' of some components of the emotive drive while the excitation of other components increases; we are impatient to get over the preliminaries which at the same time we enjoy.