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MAP 47 the Holarchy of Living Nature: the Passionate Pessimism of Arthur Koestler

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MAP 47 the Holarchy of Living Nature: the Passionate Pessimism of Arthur Koestler MAP 47 The Holarchy of Living Nature: The passionate pessimism of Arthur Koestler Koestler does not give us much time. Human beings have always had to live with This map represents a 'holarchy', the 'mind-splitting fear of their own deaths', with a consciousness emerging from Koestler's term for a hierarchically 'a prenatal void and drowning in a post-mortem darkness'. But since Hiroshima we organized, self-regulating, open have had to live with the prospect of the death of our species. Had Hitler been born system of 'boloos' represented by twenty years later how 'final' indeed, might have been his 'solution' and space-ship junctions A to I. Holon is coined from the Greek 'bolos' meaning earth would have been transformed to a 'Flying Dutchman drifting among the stars whole, and 'on' meaning entity, with its dead crew. For who looking dispassionately at the human race from Cro- as in proton or neutron; hence a Magnon to Auschwitz to the Gulag Archipelago can doubt that we are technological holon is a whole to those parts giants yet ethical pygmies, who day by day increase our power to terrify each other beneath it in the hierarchy but a and so overburden our all-too-frail capacities for social understanding? part to those wholes above it At the centre of our problems Koestler sees a confusion of parts versus wholes, Like janus, the Roman god 01 and hence of self-assertion versus integration, egoism versus altruism, competition doorways, a holon looks both versus cooperation, autonomy versus dependence, and aggression versus ways: towards wholes and parts, sexuality. We attempt to seize upon the virtue of one or the other, only to discover cooperation and competition, altruism and egoism, integration that they transform themselves into their opposites at a higher level. For example, and self-assertion. In turn the the 'organization men' who work cooperatively for big corporations allow the latter holarchy itself may be part 01 a to compete, sometimes with ferocity. larger holarchy, lor example the Koestler begins with biology where both holism and atomism have proved to be organism iffustrated here is part 01 culs-de-sac, The constant affirmation that the whole is more than the sum of its a larger social system (indicated parts, 'a rose is a rose is a rose', tends to evade the task of detailed description. The by dotted lines). 'nothing but' reductionism of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory or of The holarchy mapped here is stimulis-response theory in psychology has become sterile and tends to dismantle not solely applicable to biology, it the very organization and relationships that distinguish living material. The concept could as eaSily represent social of the holon transcends parts and wholes in favour of a Janus-faced whole which is organization, anatomy, linguistiCS, technology or the branching 01 also a part, depending on whether it looks down the organic hierarchy (mapped knowledge. For the holarchy is opposite) to the parts of which it is the whole, or whether it looks up the hierarchy best regarded as a conceptual to the whole of which it is a part. Since hierarchy has connotations of bureaucracy tool, not as an end in itself but as and militarism, and since Koestler'S model can have permeable, reorganizable a key capable 01 opening some of divisions with countless feedback loops and flexible strategies, he suggests the word nature's combination locks which holarchy. stubbornly resist other methods. The particular holarchy illustrated here reaches from organisms at the highest level to entities which are smaller than the sub-atomic. Each nodal point is a holon, which cannot be reduced to, nor predicted by, the parts beneath it. These 'sub- wholes' not only help to organize those parts beneath them, but have high degrees of autonomy from the wholes above them. The human heart, for example, has back-up pacemakers which will take over from each other in cases of strain or difficulty. Each level has its own built-in codes of rules, the mitochondria, for example, are tiny power-plants which extract energy from nutrients by a chain of chemical reactions involving fifty steps. A single cell may have up to five thousand such power plants. This tree diagram could equally well represent a locomotor holarchy of 'limbs, joints, individual muscles, and so on down to fibres, fibrils and contractile proteins'. We are all familiar with the autonomous nature of our own body parts. The way our hearts thump in emergencies, the 'cold sweat' anxiety and the sexual organs that rise (or not) to the occasion. Often these give a more accurate account of our feelings than do our words. Koestler does not intend to restrict his holarchy to biology or anatomy. The 'three brains' in Map 24 are organized as a holarchy, as is the need hierarchy in Map 33, the life-stages in Map 37, the moral judgement levels in Map 38, the logical types in Map 39, and the Chomskyan linguistics in Map 41. 'All complex structures and processes of a relatively stable character display hierarchic organization regardless of whether we consider galactic systems, living organisms and their activities, or 162 MAP 47!LEVEL 7 social organizations.' Knowledge branches out from disciplines, in technology or in 'Perhaps it is we, the screamers, library catalogues. Evolution is itself a climb to ever higher levels of complexity. who react in a sound and healthy A familiar example of holarchic function is everyday speech. We have a non- way to the reality which verbal idea of what we want to convey and must try, sometimes struggle, to express surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter around it. The idea triggers, stepwise, a series of functional holons, which transforms our in a screened fantasy world meaning into strings of sentences with well-formed grammatical and syntactical because you lack the capacity to structures, furnished with words, spaces and sounds, which in turn trigger face the facts. Were it not so this coordinated muscular contractions of tongue and vocal cords. The potential war would have been avoided, autonomy of lower levels is illustrated by exceedingly fluent speakers, who, with and those murdered within sight seeming ease, trigger whole sub-assemblies of ideas. Others like Billy Bud may of your day-dreaming eyes would struggle to find words and lash out physically instead. We can be prisoners alike of still be alive: over-facile phrases or desperate inhibition. 'The Yogi and the Commissar' Speech also enables us to distinguish fixed codes or canons of rules, from flexible Arthur Koestler strategies allowing choice. All comprehensible speech must obey rules of syntax 'On my first day at school. aged and grammar, yet within such rules an infinite number of lawful sentences can be five, in Budapest, Hungary, I was created (see Map 41). Such freedom has nothing to do with randomness or asked by my future class-mates a resistance to 'science'. Freedom versus determinism is itself Janus-faced, involving crucial question. "Are you MTK at one and the same time the autonomy of the holon and its integration with lawful or an FTC?" These were the relationships. Hence the pianist gives personal interpretation to music written for initials of Hungary's two leading him, and the poet evokes our admiration by a freedom of expression which seems soccer teams, perpetual rivals for unforced by the real constraints of metre, rhythm and rhyme. In short, that the team championship, as every venerable dividing line between freedom and determinism, mind and body, whole schoolboy knew - except little and part, autonomy and cooperation has dissolved into a plurality of degrees. As me, who had never been taken to a football match. However, to one moves to the top of the human holarchy higher degrees of freedom are confess such abysmal ignorance experienced, but we are necessarily constrained by our own needs for personal and was unthinkable so I replied with social integrity, 'No man is an island. He is a holon'. haughty assurance "MTK of The holarchic human condition isfull of psychological insight. A large number of course!" And thus the die was mental disturbances consist of subordinate parts of the human hierarchy splitting cast; for the rest of my childhood themselves off from the whole and exercising a kind of 'backlash' or tyranny. For in Hungary, and even when my example, trembling, compulsions, phobias, paranoid delusions, hysterical reactions, family moved to Vienna, I rage, panic and manic activities, can all be seen as the breakaway of a particular remained an ardent and loyal holon from control by and integration with the larger holarchy of the individual, as supporter of MTK; and my heart well as the individual's integration within the social holarchy. But Koestler is chiefly still goes out to them, all the way across the Iron Curtain .. .' concerned with even wider sociocultural manifestations of malaise, what he calls 'Janus: A Summing Up' the 'infernal dialectics' of self-assertion versus integration (or self-transcendence). Arthur Koestler Cultural harmony requires that these two tendencies remain in equilibrium, but there are three major forces that endanger and periodically upset this equilibrium. First, we tend to see the two inseparable aspects of the Janus-face in absolute moral terms and to isolate one from another, 50 that we split the human endowment between cooperation and competition, pitting 'heroic' self-interest against state- subsidized 'altruism' in holy wars. Koestler sees this as a defect of language made worse by the plurality of tongues. Second, we confuse integration and the chronic child-like yearning learned in the many years of infant dependency for fusion and symbiosis with figures of authority.
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