Ludwig von Bertalanffy on Life

"The stream of life is maintained only in continuous flow of matter through all groups of organisms."

"A general proof is difficult because of the lack of general criteria for the existence of steady states, but it can be given for special cases."

"The characteristic of life does not lie in a distinctiveness of single life processes. , but rather in a certain order among all the processes."

"It is an empirical rule that living, evolutionary, psychological, social, etc., systems tend toward increasing differentiation and organization."

"General Systems Theory... possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost."

"Wholeness , Gestalt, is the primary attribute of life."

"It is necessary to study not only parts and processes in isolation, but also to solve the decisive problems found in organization and order unifying them, resulting from dynamic interaction of parts, and making the the behavior of the parts different when studied in isolation or within the whole."

"Also the principle of stress, so often invoked in psychology, psychiatry, and psychosomatics, needs some reevaluation. As everything in the world, stress too is an ambivalent thing. Stress is not only a danger to life to be controlled and neutralized by adaptive mechanisms; it also creates higher life."

"We find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter."

"Biologically, life is not maintenance or restoration of equilibrium but is essentially maintenance of disequilibria, as the doctrine of the organism as open system reveals. Reaching equilibrium means death and consequent decay. Psychologically, behaviour not only tends to release tensions but also builds up tensions; if this stops, the patient is a decaying mental corpse in the same way a living organism becomes a body in decay when tensions and forces keeping it from equilibrium have stopped."

"From the methodological standpoint, however, we see that 'mechanism' and 'vitalism' by no means form the mutually exclusive disjunction they have been supposed to do. If a 'non-mechanist' wishes to deny the assumption of methodological mechanism that biological explanations must also be physico-chemical ones, it is obviously by no means intended that the required explanation must be 'vitalistic', i.e. involving the assumption that in living organisms factors analogous to psychical ones are 'at work'. A 'non-mechanistic' theory which is not all 'vitalistic' thus appears to be logically possible, and if we make a critical study of mechanism and vitalism this possibility will be seen to be of special importance."

"Every organism represents a system, by which term we mean a complex of elements in mutual interaction. From this obvious statement the limitations of the analytical and summative conceptions must follow. First, it is impossible to resolve the phenomena of life completely into elementary units; for each individual part and each individual event depends not only on conditions within itself, but also to a greater or lesser extent on the conditions within the whole, or within superordinate units of which it is a part. Hence the behavior of an isolated part is, in general, different from its behavior within the context of the whole... Secondly, the actual whole shows properties that are absent from its isolated parts."