Something deep and challenging is going on in the Western psyche, and there is no lack of books around that attempt to articulate the nature of the perceived change and its implications for life on earth. The perspective is global but the problem is local – us, and our relationship to nature. For a lucid survey of the scientific concepts that are currently unfolding in the attempt to wrestle with these issues, and their recent history, there cannot be a better source than Fritjof Capra’s latest book, The Web of Life. It starts off with the perception that our worldview is undergoing a paradigm shift from the mechanistic model that has dominated modernity to a holistic perspective that is best characterized intuitively by deep ecology. Again, this is not a novel perception. What gives the book its brilliance is the exposition that follows, an unfolding of current insights from earlier attempts to resolve the knots in the psyche that have been tied by our 400 year infatuation with rationality in the service of prediction, control, and domination of nature. This book still celebrates rationality, for Capra remains pre-eminently a scientist, but in the service of something else: the magic creative power by which the world is created in the divine play of Brahman. The book begins and ends on this note; and in between there is a rich and fascinating intellectual journey.

This journey starts with systems theory, initiated by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1930s as an attempt to think scientifically about wholes and process simultaneously – a natural preoccupation for a life scientist. I got involved in this as a biology student in the 40s and 50s, but grew out of it by the 60s when new ideas were coming on line. Capra describes the information revolution of the 50s that accompanied cybernetics (literally the art of steersmanship – still in the control mode) and gave rise to artificial intelligence. This saw the mind as a problem-solving system that used complex informational networks of the type that operated in the new technology of the time – computers. But a novel set of ideas had begun to emerge in the 60s based on the concept of self-organization, and it is the ramifications of this and related ideas that form the core of Capra’s book.

The players in this drama are diverse, coming from both biology and physics and leading towards a new marriage of the two. Here we meet the work of Prigogine, Haken, and Eigen from physics, Lovelock, Margulis, Kauffman, Maturana and Varela from biology, to name but a few. To follow the ideas involved, Capra takes the reader through a lucid tutorial in the qualitative mathematics of complexity, since self-organizing systems are necessarily complex and the problem is to understand how order emerges out of the chaos of complex dynamics. We encounter fractals and strange attractors, dissipative structures in chemical and physical systems that generate order from fluctuations and energy flows, and the whole spectacle of living order that has emerged through evolution. Capra recognizes that, while Lovelock, Margulis, and Kauffman demonstrate how unexpected, counterintuitive order emerges from interactions between components of living systems that are as much co-operative as they are competitive, mainstream biology has marched resolutely in the opposite direction, celebrating selfish genes as the agents of evolution and reductionism as the method of unraveling nature’s mysteries. This book continuously focuses on concepts and models that allow us to transcend these dualisms.

The difficulty that now leaps off the page is how we are going to account for mind, and more generally the self, which is doing the organizing while being organized. Somehow the Cartesian split between mind and matter has to be transcended so that mind becomes embodied. Capra follows the lead of Maturana and Varela: Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. To live is to know, and to know is to act meaningfully whether you are an amoeba, a rose, or a dolphin. Organisms are patterns of relationships that close on themselves, resulting in coherence within and openness to their surroundings. As coherent wholes, organisms extend their natures by creating coherent, meaningful worlds from their interactions with one another and the environment.

And so we get back to creative play, the exploration of ever-new patterns of meaning within the never ending fluidity of process, with nothing fixed or certain except change and creation. Deep ecology expresses, for Capra, the appropriate relationship between humans and such a world, a relationship whereby the knots in the psyche can be untied and our divisions healed. Inevitably there are gaps and inconsistencies in this story; otherwise there would be no continuing creation for us to participate in. As Blake put it, and Capra quotes:

May God us keep
From single vision
And Newton’s sleep.

Categories: Philosophical