Self-Organization: New Foundations Towards a “General Theory of Reality”

Abstract

In this paper, an attempt will be made to show that the fundamental conceptual categories of the Theory of Self-Organization (TSO) furnish novel opportunities for depicting man’s position in the world. Preparatory work towards a theory of process-evolutive understanding of reality where the structure and dynamic of nature and culture can be represented in a unified way becomes possible. Then we can identify a convergence between the understanding of reality as mediated by the “Science of Nature” on the one hand, and the understanding of reality as propagated by the“Science of Man” (self-understanding) on the other. The philosophical reconstruction of the meaning of TSO leads to the realization that a new type of science can be developed; it will be a symbiosis of the “Science of Nature” and the “Science of Man”. Up to now, the “natural sciences” have not been able to provide a suitable approach to man or society as a whole. A similar situation, but linked to much more serious problems, can be found in the humanities and the social sciences; both of them have so far also failed to provide an adequate approach to nature as a whole. TSO fundamentally changes the situation: it is an increasingly integrated component of thinking in the categories of the natural sciences; and this makes possible a new type of modeling social processes. As a naturalistic system of science, TSO does away with the apparent difference between the categories of material and social structures. The implementation of TSO in the categories of social-scientific thinking shows that, for the first time, a socio-scientific approach to nature has become possible. Any efforts in the direction of identification and development of new presuppositions for establishing a “general theory of reality” will share an ultimate goal: to grasp the human thinking process itself as reality; and this means, finally, to show that the socio-cognitive structures can be imbedded in reality in a consistent manner.