Systems and Individuals

‘System’ is a key philosophical concept, which in the 18th century became indissolubly linked with the philosophical problem of individuation. Individuation is the problem of determining how individuals are individualized, taking on discrete identities. Why did the concept of system become linked with the problem of individuation? Individuation presumes that there are individuals. That is, contrary to some monism of substance, if we accept that there are individuals, then we challenge the notion of the whole. Of course, questions of parts and wholes, the one and the many, are as ancient as philosophical thinking itself. Yet the problem of individuation flourished in the philosophical literature only with the demise of religion, or, the idea that one substance maintained a relationship of primacy, generally causal, with respect to all others. As soon as credence was given to the notion that individuals have viable being, in themselves, the conventional notion of system, as a whole or unity of nature, was undermined. Thus, system philosophy is not about the unity or wholeness of the world. Rather, it endorses the view that the world is composed of gaps, fissures, and relations among parts without any ultimate coherence. Systems philosophy is an attempt to grasp a world of multiplicity, and even the etymology of the term system suggests that a system is a unity *of* differences. That said, system philosophy does endorse the idea that multiplicity and difference, a world of individuals, may nonetheless be thought, or conceptualized, in some consistent way. When the idea that the concept of system no longer describes the whole, or the set of all sets, rises to prominence, what comes into being is a set of conceptual tools developed matching in complexity with a world without some holistic finality.
The problem of individuation itself used to describe a world where individuals were basic, indivisible substances, or atoms. In such a world, relations among individuals matter less than cataloging the basic atoms of being, and little attention is paid to the processes undergone by individuals. Such processes can only be accidents of substance, not the essence of individuals. However, research in systems in the 19th and 20th century, as well as the undermining of the world of classical thermodynamics towards a vision of dynamic systems at far-from-equilibrium conditions without final ends or stases, showed the limits of understanding individuals as basic substances. One might think of the importance of the theory of ‘elective affinities’ among chemical substances, an invention of 19th century chemistry, which placed primacy not in individual substances, but in the relations between substances. Iron (Fe) is defined less by the number of protons it carries than by the fact that it undergoes very different changes in its properties in the presence of atmospheric oxygen (rust) versus in the cells of living organisms (nutrient). Thus, studying chemical substances became a question of stoichiometrical relationships in dynamic interactions and processes. The reductionistic study of individual atoms gave way to the study of relations and processes in dynamic interactions. If an individual (an atom, a tree, a society) were to reveal the secrets of its identity and its behavior, it must be related systemically to other individuals. A systemic conception of individuality meant understanding individuals as results and processes generated in dynamic interactions. In this way, the traditional concept of individuality was shown to reflect an already-individuated effect of systemic being, and that examining the systemic relations and processes that generate individuality granted a richer conception of individuality.
Thinking systemically called traditional scientific concepts of linear causality, determinism, and reductionism into question, replacing them with notions of circular causality, self-organization, indeterminacy, and the unpredictable emergence of order from disorder. Thinking systemically meant working toward developing a unified theory and methodological approach to investigate not just the classical simplicities of the mechanistically structured material world, but also the complexities of biological, cognitive, and even social systems. Thus was set into motion a new, post-Newtonian scientific paradigm for research.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, studying systems, whether in science or philosophy, goes hand in hand with addressing problems specific to:
1. The self-organization of complex systems and
2. Their self-regulation through operations such as feedback
3. The passage between the differing levels of integration of a system;
4. The modalities of openness and closure of a system (system boundaries);
5. The question of teleology and finality;
6. The concept of code or information.
Systems, on the parameters listed above, presuppose the following assumptions
1) individuals are results of systems;
2) systems articulate relations and processes;
3) an individual is the generated result of systemic relations and processes;
4) following 1-3, if we want to explain how individuals are individualized (take on particular identities), we must first think of individuals as systems.