When we speak of fixed rules and flexible strategies, it is important to make a further distinction between these two factors. The rules on every level function more or less automatically, i.e., unconsciously, or at least pre-consciously in the twilight zones of awareness, whereas the strategic choices are mostly aided by the bright beam of focal consciousness. The machinery which canalises inarticulate thought into grammatically correct channels operates hidden from sight; so does the machinery which ensures the correct innervation of the vocal tracts, and also the machinery which controls the logic of 'commonsense' reasoning, and our habits of thought. We hardly ever bother to have a look at these silent machineries, and even if we try, we are unable to describe their modes of operation, unable to define the rules embodied in them; and yet these are the rules of language and thought which we blindly obey. If they contain hidden axioms and built-in prejudices -- so much the worse for us. But at least we know that those rules which both discipline and distort thinking are only binding for the individual who acquired them, and subject to historical change.
Nevertheless, as far as the individual is concerned, his language and thought are rule-governed, and to that extent determined by automatisms beyond conscious control. But only to that extent. The rules which govern a game like chess or bridge do not exhaust its possibilities, but leave the player at practically each step with a number of strategical choices. These choices, of course, are also determined by considerations of a higher order -- but the emphasis is on 'higher order'. Each choice is 'free' in the sense of not being determined by the rules of the game itself, but by a different order of 'strategic precepts' on a higher level of the hierarchy; and these precepts have an even larger margin ofindeterminacy. We are once more in an infinite regress -- comparable to the endless types of ambiguities of language, each of which can only be resolved by reference to the next higher level of the open-ended hierarchy. This line of argument evidently leads to the problem of freedom of choice, to be further discussed in Chapter XIV.
To conclude, let me revert once more to that Behaviourist lecturer who turns his mouth loose and goes to sleep. I have compared him to a bar pianist reeling off a popular tune. In both cases a single command from a higher level of the hierarchy 'triggers off' a pre-set, more or less automatised performance. The process is comparable to pressing a button on a jukebox. The pianist merely has to say to himself: 'La Cucaracha' or 'Pop goes the Weasel', and let his fingers look after the rest. But even in this routine he is not simply unfolding an S-R chain, where depressing one piano key acts as a stimulus to depress the next. For, as a skilled bar pianist, he is perfectly capable, again at a single trigger command, of transposing the whole piece from C Major into B Flat Major, where the keys and intervals form a totally different chain. The fixed 'rule of the game' in this case is represented by the melodic pattern; the scale -- and the rhythm, phrasing, syncopation, etc. -- are again a matter of flexible strategies.
The 'spelling out' of an implicit command in explicit terms often involves such trigger-releaser operations, where a relatively simple command from 'higher quarters' activates complex, preset action-patterns. These, however, are not rigid automatisms, but flexible patterns offering a variety of alternative choices. To shake hands, to light a cigarette, to pick up a pencil, are routines often performed quite unconsciously and mechanically, but also capable of infinite variations. I would only have to press a single mental button to continue writing this page in French -- or Hungarian; but that does not necessarily mean that I am to be regarded as a jukebox.
III
THE HOLON
I ask the reader to remember that what is most obvious may be most worth of analysis. Fertile vistas may open out when commonplace facts are examined from afresh point of view. L.L. Whyte
The concept of hierarchic order occupies a central place in this book, and lest the reader should think that I am riding a private hobby horse, let me reassure him that this concept has a long and respectable ancestry. So much so, that defenders of orthodoxy are inclined to dismiss it as 'old hat' -- and often in the same breath to deny its validity. Yet I hope to show as we go along that this old hat, handled with some affection, can produce lively rabbits.*
* More than thirty years ago, Needham wrote: 'Whatever the nature of organising relations may be, they form the central problem of biology, and biology will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognised. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the equilibrium of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future'. [1] Yet the word 'hierarchy' does not even appear in the index of most modern textbooks of psychology or biology.
The Parable of the Two Watchmakers
Let me start with a parable. I owe it to Professor H.A. Simon, designer of logic computers and chess-playing machines, but I have taken the liberty of elaborating on it. [2]
There were once two Swiss watchmakers named Bios and Mekhos, who made very free and expensive watches. Their names may sound a little strange, but their fathers had a smattering of Greek and were fond of riddles. Although their watches were in equal demand, Bios prospered, while Mekhos just struggled along; in the end he had to close his shop and take a job as a mechanic with Bios. The people in the town argued for a long time over the reasons for this development and each had a different theory to offer, until the true explanation leaked out and proved to be both simple and surprising.
The watches they made consisted of about one thousand parts each, but the two rivals had used different methods to put them together. Mekhos had assembled his watches bit by bit -- rather like making a mosaic floor out of small coloured stones. Thus each time when he was disturbed in his work and had to put down a partly assembled watch, it fell to pieces and he had to start again from scratch.
Bios, on the other hand, had designed a method of making watches by constructing, for a start, subassemblies of about ten components, each of which held together as an independent unit. Ten of these subassemblies could then be fitted together into a subsystem of a higher order; and ten of these subsystems constituted the whole watch. This method proved to have two immense advantages.
In the first place, each time there was an interruption or a disturbance, and Bios had to put down, or even drop, the watch he was working on, it did not decompose into its elementary bits; instead of starting all over again, he merely had to reassemble that particular subassembly on which he was working at the time; so that at worst (if the disturbance came when he had nearly finished the sub-assembly in hand) he had to repeat nine assembling operations, and at best none at all. Now it is easy to show mathematically that if a watch consists of a thousand bits, and if some disturbance occurs at an average of once in every hundred assembling operations -- then Mekhos will take four thousand times longer to assemble a watch than Bios. Instead of a single day, it will take him eleven years. And if for mechanical bits, we substitute amino acids, protein molecules, organelles, and so on, the ratio between the time-scales becomes astronomical; some calculations [3] indicate that the whole lifetime of the earth would be insufficient for producing even an amoeba -- unless he becomes converted to Bios' method and proceeds hierarchically, from simple sub-assemblies to more complex ones. Simon concludes: 'Complex systems will evolve from simple systems much more rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms than if there are not. The resulting complex forms in the former case will be hierarchic. We have only to turn the argument around to explain the observed predominance of hierarchies among the complex systems Nature presents to us. Among possible complex forms, hierarchies are the ones that have the time to evolve.' [4]
A second advantage of Bios' method is of course that the finished product will be incomparably more resistant to damage, and much easier to maintain, regulate and repair, than Mekhos' unstable mosaic of atomic bits. We do not know what forms of life have evolved on other planets in the universe, but we can safely assume that wherever there is life, it must be hierarchically orga
nised.
Enter Janus
If we look at any form of social organisation with some degree of coherence and stability, from insect state to Pentagon, we shall find that it is hierarchically ordered. The same is true of the structure of living organisms and their ways of functioning -- from instinctive behaviour to the sophisticated skills of piano-playing and talking. And it is equally true of the processes of becoming -- phylogeny, ontogeny, the acquisition of knowledge. However, if the branching tree is to represent more than a superficial analogy, there must be certain principles or laws which apply to all levels of a given hierarchy, and to all the varied types of hierarchy just mentioned -- in other words, which define the meaning of 'hierarchic order'. In the pages that follow I shall outline several of these principles. They may at first sight look a little abstract, yet taken together, they shed a new light on some old problems.
The first universal characteristic of hierarchies is the relativity, and indeed ambiguity, of the terms 'part' and 'whole' when applied to any of the sub-assemblies. Again it is the very obviousness of this feature which makes us overlook its implications. A 'part', as we generally use the word, means something fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself would have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, a 'whole' is considered as something complete in itself which needs no further explanation. But 'wholes' and 'parts' in this absolute sense just do not exist anywhere, either in the domain of living organisms or of social organisations. What we find are intermediary structures on a series of levels in an ascending order of complexity: sub-wholes which display, according to the way you look at them, some of the characteristics commonly attributed to wholes and some of the characteristics commonly attributed to parts. We have seen the impossibility of the task of chopping up speech into elementary atoms or units, either on the phonetic or on the syntactic level. Phonemes, words, phrases, are wholes in their own right, but parts of a larger unit; so are cells, tissues, organs; families, clans, tribes. The members of a hierarchy, like the Roman god Janus, all have two faces looking in opposite directions: the face turned towards the subordinate levels is that of a self-contained whole; the face turned upward towards the apex, that of a dependent part. One is the face of the master, the other the face of the servant. This 'Janus effect' is a fundamental characteristic of sub-wholes in all types of hierarchies.
But there is no satisfactory word in our vocabulary to refer to these Janus-faced entities: to talk of sub-wholes (or sub-assemblies, sub-structures, sub-skills, sub-systems) is awkward and tedious. It seems preferable to coin a new term to designate these nodes on the hierarchic tree which behave partly as wholes or wholly as parts, according to the way you look at them. The term I would propose is 'holon', from the Greek holos = whole, with the suffix on which, as in proton or neutron, suggests a particle or part.
'A man', wrote Ben Jonson, 'coins not a new word without some peril; for if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured.' Yet I think the holon is worth the risk, because it fills a genuine need. It also symbolises the missing link -- or rather series of links between the atomistic approach of the Behaviourist and the holistic approach of the Gestalt psychologist.
The Gestalt school has considerably enriched our knowledge of visual perception, and succeeded in softening up the rigid attitude of its opponents to some extent. But in spite of its lasting merits, 'holism' as a general attitude to psychology turned out to be as one-sided as atomism was, because both treated 'whole' and 'part' as absolutes, both failed to take into account the hierarchic scaffolding of intermediate structures of sub-wholes. If we replace for a moment the image of the inverted tree by that of a pyramid, we can say that the Behaviourist never gets higher up than the bottom layer of stones, and the holist never gets down from the apex. In fact, the concept of the 'whole' proved just as elusive as that of the elementary part, and when he discusses language, the Gestaltist finds himself in the same quandary as the Behaviourist. To quote James Jenkins again: 'There is an infinite set of sentences in English whose production and understanding is part of the daily commerce with language, and it is clear that neither the S-R nor the Gestalt approach is capable of coping with the problems involved in the generation and understanding of these sentences. . . . We can't regard a sentence as a holistic, unanalysable unit, as the Gestaltists might maintain one should. One cannot suppose that the sentence is regarded as a perceptual unity which has welded its elements together in some unique pattern, as is the usual Gestalt analysis of perceptual phenomena.' [5] Nor do we find wholes on levels lower than the sentence -- phrases, words, syllables, and phonemes are not parts, and not wholes, but holons.
The two-term part-whole paradigm is deeply engrained in our unconscious habits of thought. It will make a great difference to our mental outlook when we succeed in breaking away from it.
Social Holons
In Chapter II I discussed the hierarchic structure of language. Let us now briefly turn to a quite different kind of hierarchy: social organisation.
The individual, qua biological organism, constitutes a nicely integrated hierarchy of molecules, cells, organs, and organ systems. Looking inward into the space enclosed by the boundaries of his skin, he can rightly assert that he is something complete and unique, a whole. But facing outward, he is constantly -- sometimes pleasantly, sometimes painfully -- reminded that he is a part, an elementary unit in one or several social hierarchies.
The reason why any relatively stable society -- whether of animals or humans -- must be hierarchically structured, can again be illustrated by the watchmakers' parable: without stable subassemblies -- social groupings and subgroupings -- the whole simply could not hold together.
In a military hierarchy the holons are companies, battalions, regiments, etc., and the branches of the tree stand for lines of communication and command. The number of levels which a hierarchy comprises (in this case from commanding general to individual soldier) determines whether it is 'shallow' or 'deep'; and the number of holons on any given level we shall call (after Simon) its 'span'. A primitive horde of tribesmen is a very shallow hierarchy with perhaps two or three levels (chieftain and lesser chieftains), and a large span to each. Conversely, some Latin-American armies of the past are said to have numbered one general to each private soldier -- which would be the limit case of a hierarchy turning into a ladder (page 24). The efficient working of a complex hierarchy must obviously depend, among other things, on the proper ratio of depth to span -- something analogous to the Greek sculptor's golden section, or rather to Le Corbusier's hierarchic 'modulator' theory.
A society without hierarchic structurings would be as chaotic as the random motions of gas molecules flying, colliding, and rebounding in all directions. But the structuring is obscured by the fact that no advanced human society -- not even the totalitarian state -- is a monolithic structure, patterned into one single hierarchy. This may be the case in some very 'unspoilt' tribal societies, where the exigencies of the family-kinship-clan-tribe hierarchy completely control the individual's existence. The medieval church and modern totalitarian nations have tried to establish equally effective monolithic hierarchies, with only limited success. Complex societies are structured by several types of interlocking hierarchies, and control by higher authority is only one among them. I shall call these authority-fielding hierarchies 'control hierarchies'. Obvious examples are government administrations, military, ecclesiastic, academic, professional and business hierarchies. Control may be vested in individuals or in institutions -- 'bosses' or anonymous treasury departments; it may be rigid or elastic; it may be guided to a greater or lesser extent by feedback from the lower echelons: electorate, employees, student-bodies; but each hierarchy must nevertheless display a well-articulated tree-structure, without which anarchy would result -- as it does when some social upheaval puts an axe to the trunk of the tree.
Entwined with these control hierarchies are others, based on social cohesion, geographical distributio
n, etc. There are the family -- clan -- sub-caste -- caste hierarchies, and their modern versions. Interlocking with them are the hierarchies based on geographical neighbourhood. Old towns like Paris, Vienna or London have their quartiers, each of them relatively self-sufficient, with its local shops, familiar cafés, pubs, milkmen and sweeps. Each is a kind of local village, a social holon, which again is part of a larger division -- Left Bank and Right Bank, City and West End, amusement centre and civic centre, parks, suburbs. Old towns, notwithstanding their architectural diversity, seem to have grown like organisms, and to have an individual life of their own. Towns which have mushroomed up too fast have a depressing amorphousness because they lack the hierarchic structure of organic development. They seem to have been built not by Bios but by Mekhos.