“The characteristic of the organism is first that it is more than the sum of its parts and second that the single processes are ordered for the maintenance of the whole.”

— Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Source: 1920s, Kritische Theorie der Formbildung (1928, 1933), p. 305; as cited in: Cliff Hooker ed. (2011) Philosophy of Complex Systems. p. 189

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Ludwig von Bertalanffy 65

austrian biologist and philosopher 1901–1972

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 176
Context: Even these humble objects reveal that our reality is not a mere collocation of elemental facts, but consists of units in which no part exists by itself, where each part points beyond itself and implies a larger whole. Facts and significance cease to be two concepts belonging to different realms, since a fact is always a fact in an intrinsically coherent whole. We could solve no problem of organization by solving it for each point separately, one after the other; the solution had to come for the whole. Thus we see how the problem of significance is closely bound up with the problem of the relation between the whole and its parts. It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.

“A system is more than the sum of its parts; it is an indivisible whole.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

It loses its essential properties when it is taken apart. The elements of a system may themselves be systems, and every system may be part of a larger system.
Ackoff (1973) "Science in the Systems Age: beyond IE, OR and MS." in: Operations Research Vol 21, pp. 664.
1970s

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

“Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that.”

Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish scientist and philosopher

Source: Science and Sanity (1933), p. 64.
Context: Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language...

“I told about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. “It's that way with people, too,” he said, “only with people it's sometimes that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.””

Wendelin Van Draanen Flipped

Flipped (2001)

“A painting is more than the sum of its parts.”

Wendelin Van Draanen Flipped

Source: Flipped

“A system is more than the sum of its parts.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 42.

“The characteristic of life does not lie in a distinctiveness of single life processes. [Lebensvorgänge], but rather in a certain order among all the processes.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1930s, L. von Bertalanffy (1934). "Wandlungen des biologischen Denkens", Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung, 10:339-366; as cited in Manfred Drack (2008). " Ludwig von Bertalanffy's Early System Approach http://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings52nd/article/viewFile/1032/322"

“A system is more than the sum of its parts; it is an indivisible whole. It loses its essential properties when it is taken apart. The elements of a system may themselves be systems, and every system may be part of a larger system.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1973) "Science in the Systems Age: beyond IE, OR and MS." in: Operations Research Vol 21, pp. 664.
1970s

“Just as no thing or organism exists on its own, it does not act on its own. Furthermore, every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 73

“The characteristic of the organism is first that it is more than the sum of its parts and second that the single processes are ordered for the maintenance of the whole.”

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Ludwig von Bertalanffy 65

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