By Elizabeth O’Neil

“During the 1930s and 1940s, thousands of scientists and intellectuals fled Austria. Some, especially those with Jewish heritage, left in the early 1930s when the threat of Nazi antisemitism became apparent. Others remained in Austria through the war years and left afterwards in search of financial security. This “intellectual migration,” as scholars often call it, had profound impacts both on Austria and the United States.“

Introduction: What is Life?

In 1943, against the background of global warfare, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger stood in front of a rapt audience in Dublin and asked a simple question: what is life? The question sounds trivial, but it has troubled scientists and philosophers for generations. In a universe that seems destined to entropic decay, how do organisms maintain their highly organized forms? How is genetic material preserved and transmitted across generations? Why does evolutionary development tend toward complexity, rather than simplicity? Although Schrödinger had made his name exploring the indeterminacy and randomness of quantum mechanics, he was now captivated by how living organisms were able to create order out of the chaos of the world. Could life be explained purely through principles from physics and chemistry? Over the course of his lectures in Dublin, Schrödinger gave a theoretical account of life deeply influenced by his own work in quantum physics, recasting problems of reproduction in terms of code and aperiodic crystals. His lectures were published the next year under the title What is Life?: Physical Aspects of the Living Cell, and the book skyrocketed to popularity.(1)

Schrödinger was not the only scientist interested in the problem of life. After the end of the Second World War, there was an explosion of interest in the relationship between organisms and machines, one made possible both by the American cybernetic machines and the philosophical theories of Austrian émigré thinkers. My research explores how a network of émigré scientists and intellectuals engaged with cybernetic machines when they asked Schrödinger’s question: what is life? One Austrian thinker who puzzled over this question was Ludwig von Bertalanffy. In his worn personal copy of What is Life?, Bertalanffy mulled over Schrödinger’s strange, quantum-theoretical approach to biology. As he emigrated from Vienna to the United States, Bertalanffy would help shape the emerging conversation about men, machines, and the meaning of life.

Intellectual Migration

During the 1930s and 1940s, thousands of scientists and intellectuals fled Austria. Some, especially those with Jewish heritage, left in the early 1930s when the threat of Nazi antisemitism became apparent. Others remained in Austria through the war years and left afterwards in search of financial security. This “intellectual migration,” as scholars often call it, had profound impacts both on Austria and the United States.(2) New ideas and art forms were imported into American culture, often reinvented in the process of translation. Historians have detailed the impact of Austrian emigres on a diverse set of fields including economics, architecture, art, and engineering. Especially the history of science in the 20th century cannot be told without accounting for this intellectual migration. Philosophers from the Vienna Circle reshaped American philosophy. Austrian economics, personified by the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek, laid the groundwork for neoliberalism.(3) Even the shopping mall can at least in part be attributed to the work of émigré Austrians.(4)

Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory, or Allgemeine Systemlehre, was one such cultural import. Bertalanffy was born on the outskirts of Vienna in 1901, and after a few years at the University of Innsbruck, came to the University of Vienna to study the philosophy of science. Under the guidance of Moritz Schlick and Robert Reininger, in 1926 he wrote a dissertation on the philosophy of Gustav Fechner. In the years that followed, he published widely in the field of theoretical biology while remaining engaged in ongoing debates about the philosophy of science around the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Circle.(5)

Man (Not) a Machine

Bertalanffy’s prewar systems biology had been shaped by a long-standing scientific debate between “mechanism” and “vitalism.” This debate was almost always framed in terms of machines and technology. Scientific mechanists argued that biologists should treat organisms like very complicated machines: they should search for physical and chemical mechanisms that explained metabolism, reproduction, and development. Living matter was no different from anything else in the universe; there was no transcendent soul working behind the scenes. Vitalists, on the other hand, argued that the organism could not be broken down into its parts like a steam engine. Instead, living systems were integrated wholes, maintained by some extra-physical organizing principle. They pointed out that a machine-theory of life seemed to require a transcendent engineer: if life was a collection of well-tuned mechanisms, then who had designed the mechanisms in the first place? Determining the relationship between life and machines involved fundamental questions about how the universe works and how we should study it.

Vienna was a central site for such debates about wholeness, unity, Gestalt, and metaphysics in the interwar period. As previous historians have shown, both “life” and “machine” were politically fraught concepts in interwar Central Europe. Associating organisms with machines brought in arguments about industrialization, capitalism, and social organization. Both mechanist and holist positions were steeped in politics in ways that did not map simply onto a left-right division. Focusing on the German context, the historian Anne Harrington wrote: “both the romantic and the mechanistic efforts were, in different ways, haunted by an image of a fractured Germany and were motivated by a desire to discover conditions under which some sort of synthesis and integration could be imagined and lived.”(6) Post-Habsburg Austria was similarly fraught with concerns about cohesion.

General System Theory

Key to Bertalanffy’s theoretical biology was the concept of the organism as a “system.” Where some biologists treated the organism as a machine that could be broken down into its component parts, Bertalanffy and his allies argued that the organism had to be studied as a holistic, highly organized system with its own system-level laws. His laboratory work sought to uncover the Systemgesetzlichkeit (systemic lawfulness or systematicity) of organisms and populations. Eventually, he would frame his research program as an Allgemeine Systemlehre, a theory that scientists could derive stable laws that applied to systems in general. Bertalanffy’s empirical research on growth laws garnered attention from the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States.

After Hitler invaded Austria in 1938, Bertalanffy returned to Vienna and joined the Nazi Party; during the war, he continued to teach at the University of Vienna while pursuing his empirical research on biological growth. In published articles, he framed his systems approach as a contribution to German nationalist ideology.(7) Like many other Austrian scientists, after the war he underwent a denazification procedure and at least partially concealed his party membership from new collaborators in North America. He emigrated out of Austria in 1948, working at universities in England and Canada before taking at position at the Ford Foundation’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (now part of Stanford University) in 1954. With him he brought his updated General System Theory.

Cybernetic Machines

What happened to these debates about life and machines after the Second World War? How did Austrian emigres reframe their work in the radically different political context of the postwar US? To understand this, we might consider how the very nature of machines changed during WWII. During the war, American and British engineers had made huge strides in communications engineering and early computing. Alan Turing’s Enigma machine helped the Allies break German codes. Manhattan Project scientists – like the Hungarian John von Neumann – developed new tools for mathematical modeling. Engineers at Bell Labs made breakthroughs in signal processing. Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener developed what they called “information theory,” which would be foundational in the development of modern computing.

After the war, this interdisciplinary network of scientists and engineers coalesced into a movement they called “cybernetics,” after Norbert Wiener’s book of the same title.(8) The book Cybernetics proclaimed a new age of science built around new wartime machines: he recast organisms and computers as “automata” that could be described using the language of communication, code, message, and noise. A central concept for early conferences on cybernetics was “feedback,” a term adopted from communications engineering but often used to explain physiological processes like homeostasis. Flooded with money from philanthropic organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, cyberneticists held conferences, wrote books, and established research laboratories.

Cybernetics was certainly a machine theory of life, but it was a machine theory based on machines that could do surprising new things. The very idea of machine had been transformed to include communications circuits, self-regulating systems, guided missiles, and early computing devices. Cybernetic theories of life were built on concepts like code, adaptation, feedback, homeostasis, and learning. An organism modeled on a clock was quite distinct from an organism modeled on a computer.

Emigres in Cyberspace

Like many other fields of science, cybernetics was heavily influenced by Austrian immigrants. The young Austrian engineer Heinz von Foerster was especially influential. Foerster was born in 1911 to a well-connected Viennese family; his extended family included architects Emil and Ludwig von Förster, feminist writer Marie Lang, novelist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and the prominent Wittgenstein family. During the Second World War, Foerster worked in German radar laboratories while obscuring his Jewish ancestry from the government.(10) His top-secret work for the Society for Electroacoustic and Mechanical Apparatus (GEMA) in Berlin focused on the use of Klystron tubes, a special kind of vacuum tube used in Axis radar systems during the war. After the war, Foerster combined his technical work on communication with his theoretical interest in quantum theory to develop a “quantum theory” of memory.(11) This book caught the attention of cyberneticist Warren McCulloch and the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, who helped Foerster obtain a job in the United States.(12) Eventually, Foerster opened the Biological Computing Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois, where he mentored a second generation of cybernetic thinkers.

Newer émigré scientists sometimes saw cybernetics as a threat to their own approaches to questions of life and the mind. Psychologists Karl and Charlotte Bühler were among those who engaged critically with cybernetic ideas. Karl and Charlotte met in Münich in 1915, where Karl was a professor of psychology and Charlotte was a young PhD student. The two spent several decades developing a distinctive approach to psychology at the University of Vienna. After being forced to flee Vienna due to their Jewish heritage, the two ended up in California, where they observed the rise of cybernetics with critical eyes. Karl often framed his disagreement with American psychology writ large via engagements with cybernetics. At the Hixon Conference on Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior in 1948, Karl Bühler attended talks by the prominent cyberneticist Warren McCulloch, a man who often argued that neural circuitry and computer circuitry were mathematically identical. “Signs don’t behave like that,” Bühler jotted down in frustrated handwriting.(13)

Although Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory grew out of his distinctly Viennese scientific training, thinking in systems in the United States brought him into contact with engineers and behavioral scientists who were changing the very definition of “system.” A theory of systems in the postwar US had to explain men, machines, organisms, and social organizations all at once. Bertalanffy began popularizing General System Theory for these new, English-speaking audiences in 1950, publishing articles that compared GST to cybernetics explicitly.(14) “Cybernetics is part of a General System Theory of the future,” he wrote in 1951.(15) But although cyberneticists claimed that they could explain automata and organisms alike with feedback and code, Bertalanffy argued that cyberneticists saw mechanisms were none existed. Unlike machines, organisms were dynamic, capable of growth and change. Organisms were active, but cybernetic machines were only reactive. Thinking with cybernetic machines encouraged Bertalanffy to stress the spontaneity of life in the years that followed.

Conclusion

Bertalanffy’s legacy, at least in the United States, has become inextricable from technological systems. Although he developed his systems approach to resist machine theories of life, in the end the exigencies of emigration pushed him to associate General System Theory with cybernetic man-machine systems. The General System Yearbook journal that he co-founded consistently treated technological systems, social systems, economic systems, and organic systems as interchangeable. System became synonymous with the machine in the postwar United States.

Today, questions about the relationship between humans and our machines have never been more urgent. Much modern AI research can be traced back to the early work around cybernetics that was inspired by Austrian emigres like Schrödinger and John von Neumann. Generative AI like ChatGPT has reignited the questions that Schrödinger asked his audience in 1943 and that Bertalanffy asked in his articles about systems and cybernetics. What is “learning” or “intelligence,” and what does it mean if an algorithm can demonstrate it? What happens when certain kinds of labor are automated? Who should reap the financial benefits of new technologies, and perhaps more importantly, who should control it? Philosophical debates about life, entropy, and intelligence were made material in new computing technologies. As we grapple with the challenge of AI amid political instability, it would serve us well to look back on how a previous set of thinkers navigated the relationship between man and machine.

Author Biography

Libby O’Neil is a PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. Her dissertation, “The Sciences of Unity: Organicist Systems Thinking between Vienna and the United States, 1900-1980,” traces the emergence of systems theory in the 20th century, focusing on scientists who emigrated from Central Europe to the United States. By offering alternative genealogies of systems theory, her work moves away from narratives that focus on the rise of the computer and toward a longer story about competing views of complexity and wholeness in the history of science. Her work highlights how political, cultural, and religious forces shaped the evolution of modern technoscience. Libby is currently a McDougal Teaching Fellow at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, where she leads workshops on pedagogy for Yale graduates students and postdocs. Before coming to Yale, she received a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Kansas in 2014, and an MA in Liberal Studies from Reed College in 2019. In addition to her previous academic experience, Libby has worked in avionics engineering and patent law.

__________

References

(1) Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

(2) Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration (Harvard University Press, 1969); Edward Timms and Jon Hughes, eds., Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation : Refugees from National Socialism in the English-Speaking World (Vienna, New York: Springer, 2003).

(3) Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018).

(4) Joseph Malherek, Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918-1968 (Budapest ; Vienna ; New York: Central European University Press, 2022).

(5) My account is informed by my engagement with the Bertalanffy Nachlass, held by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, on permanent loan to the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the Unviersity of Vienna. For additional biographical information on Bertalanffy, see: David Pouvreau, “Une histoire de la ‘systémologie générale’ de Ludwig von Bertalanffy – Généalogie, genèse, actualisation et postérité d’un projet herméneutique” (PhD thesis, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), 2013), https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00804157; Veronika Hofer, “Organismus und Ordnung: zu Genesis und Kritik der Systemtheorie Ludwig von Bertalanffys” (PhD thesis, Austria, University of Vienna, 1996); Mark Davidson, Uncommon Sense: The Life and Thought of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Father of General Systems Theory (Los Angeles : Boston: J.P. Tarcher ; Distributed by Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983).

(6) Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 10.

(7) Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “Die Organismische Auffassung Und Ihre Auswirkungen,” Der Biologe: Monatsschrift Des Reichsbundes Fur Biologie Und Des Sachgebietes Biologie Des NSLB 10 (1941).

(8) Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, 2. ed (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2013). The term cybernetics comes from the Greek word Kubernetes, or “steersman,” gesturing towards Wiener’s interest in how circular processes like feedback could “steer” systems toward pre-determined goals. Etymologically, Kubernetes is also linked to English terms like “governor” and “gubernatorial.”

(9) John Markoff, “Heinz von Foerster, 90, Dies; Was Information Theorist,” The New York Times, November 9, 2002, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/us/heinz-von-foerster-90-dies-was-information-theorist.html.

(10) Warren McCulloch Papers, MSS B M139, Series 1, Box 27, folder “Heinz von Foerster.”

(11) Heinz von Foerster, Das Gedächtnis: Eine Quantenphysikalischen Untersuchung (Wien: Franz Deuticke, 1948). Correspondence related to this publication, including a somewhat negative assessment by Schrödinger, can be found in the Heinz von Foerster Archiv, DO 967, folder “Ged: Corr.”

(12) Warren McCulloch Papers, folders “Heinz von Foerster” and “John von Neumann.”

(13) “The Hixon Symposium,” Bühler Nachlass at the University of Vienna Archive, Item 131.147.3.1.35.

(14) Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “An Outline of General System Theory,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1, no. 2 (August 1950): 134–65, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/I.2.134.

(15) Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “Towards a Physical Theory of Organic Teleology: Feedback and Dynamics,” Human Biology 23, no. 4 (1951): 360–61.