Preface

As the twenty-first century unfolds, it is becoming more and more evident that the major
problems of our time – energy, the environment, climate change, food security, financial
security – cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means
that they are all interconnected and interdependent. Ultimately, these problems must be
seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It
derives from the fact that most people in our modern society, and especially our large social
institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality
inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world.
There are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple.
But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And, indeed,
we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in science and
society, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican revolution. Unfortunately, this
realization has not yet dawned on most of our political leaders, who are unable to “connect
the dots,” to use a popular phrase. They fail to see how the major problems of our time
are all interrelated. Moreover, they refuse to recognize how their so-called solutions affect
future generations. From the systemic point of view, the only viable solutions are those that
are sustainable. As we discuss in this book, a sustainable society must be designed in such
a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies do
not interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life.
Over the past thirty years it has become clear that a full understanding of these issues
requires nothing less than a radically new conception of life. And indeed, such a new
understanding of life is now emerging. At the forefront of contemporary science, we no
longer see the universe as a machine composed of elementary building blocks. We have
discovered that the material world, ultimately, is a network of inseparable patterns of
relationships; that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. The view of the
human body as a machine and of the mind as a separate entity is being replaced by one
that sees not only the brain, but also the immune system, the bodily tissues, and even each
cell as a living, cognitive system. Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for
existence, but rather as a cooperative dance in which creativity and the constant emergence
of novelty are the driving forces. And with the new emphasis on complexity, networks, and
patterns of organization, a new science of qualities is slowly emerging.

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https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511895555.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

This new conception of life involves a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of
relationships, patterns, and context. In science, this way of thinking is known as “systemic
thinking,” or “systems thinking”; hence, the understanding of life that is informed by it is
often identified by the phrase we have chosen for the title of this book: the systems view of
life.
The new scientific understanding of life encompasses many concepts and ideas that are
being developed by outstanding researchers and their teams around the world. With the
present book, we want to offer an interdisciplinary text that integrates these ideas, models,
and theories into a single coherent framework. We present a unified systemic vision that
includes and integrates life’s biological, cognitive, social, and ecological dimensions; and
we also discuss the philosophical, spiritual, and political implications of our unified view
of life.
We believe that such an integrated view is urgently needed today to deal with our
global ecological crisis and protect the continuation and flourishing of life on Earth. It will
therefore be critical for present and future generations of young researchers and graduate
students to understand the new systemic conception of life and its implications for a broad
range of professions – from economics, management, and politics to medicine, psychology,
and law. In addition, our book will be useful for undergraduate students in the life sciences
and the humanities.
In the following chapters, we take a broad sweep through the history of ideas and across
scientific disciplines. Beginning with the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, our
historical account includes the evolution of Cartesian mechanism from the seventeenth to
the twentieth centuries, the rise of systems thinking, the development of complexity theory,
recent discoveries at the forefront of biology, the emergence of the new conception of life
at the turn of this century, and its economic, ecological, political, and spiritual implications.
The reader will notice that our text includes not only numerous references to the literature,
but also an abundance of cross-references to chapters and sections in this book. There is a
good reason for this abundance of references. A central characteristic of the systems view of
life is its nonlinearity: all living systems are complex – i.e., highly nonlinear – networks; and
there are countless interconnections between the biological, cognitive, social, and ecological
dimensions of life. Thus, a conceptual framework integrating these multiple dimensions is
bound to reflect life’s inherent nonlinearity. In our struggle to communicate such a complex
network of concepts and ideas within the linear constraints of written language, we felt that
it would help to interconnect the text by a network of cross-references. Our hope is that the
reader will find that, like the web of life, this book itself is also a whole that is more than
the sum of its parts.

fritjof capra, Berkeley

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511895555.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press