A HISTORY OF SYSTEMS THAT TRIED TO EXPLAIN EVERYTHING

Version: 0.1 · Status: Draft (author to ratify) · Last updated: Session 1

This is the intellectual spine. It answers the project’s five historical questions: (1) what were the previous systems theories; (2) who built them; (3) when, and what became of them; (4) since when have we lacked them; (5) what is out there now, and who is trying.

A note on scope. By “systems theory” here we mean something broader than the twentieth-century academic field of that name. We mean any total explanatory framework — a way of accounting, in a single coherent order, for nature, society, mind, history, and meaning together. The academic discipline “systems theory” is one late chapter in a very long story.

Part I — The age of total systems (antiquity to ~1830)

For most of recorded history, human beings had complete explanatory systems. They were theological and cosmological, and they integrated the natural, moral, social, and divine into one meaningful whole. This is the crucial baseline: the sense of coherent, total understanding that today feels lost was, for millennia, the normal condition.

The first attempts — Greek philosophy of nature. The Pre-Socratics invented the move that founds all later systems: the search for the archē, a single underlying principle from which everything follows. Thales (water), Heraclitus (the logos, flux, “everything flows”), Parmenides (unchanging Being), the atomists Leucippus and Democritus (void plus atoms). These are the first systems theories — bold claims that beneath the visible manifold lies one intelligible order.

Plato and Aristotle — the two poles. Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) gives us the totality from above: the world of Forms, the Good as the sun of the intelligible realm, the soul and the city ordered by the same three-part structure (Republic). The Allegory of the Cave — prisoners mistaking shadows for reality — is arguably the oldest and still the sharpest diagnosis of what we now call a manufactured, mediated reality. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) gives us the totality from below: the first encyclopedic attempt to categorize all of knowledge — logic, physics, metaphysics, biology, ethics, politics, poetics — bound by the four causes, teleology, and the unmoved mover. He is the model of the system built bottom-up from observation, and the founder of the idea that the whole can be mapped.

Stoicism and Neoplatonism — the cosmos as one living system. The Stoics (Zeno, Chrysippus, later Marcus Aurelius) held a genuinely systemic view: a cosmos pervaded by logos, all parts bound by sympatheia (cosmic sympathy), providentially ordered — an ancient anticipation of the idea that everything is interconnected. Plotinus (204–270 CE) built the great emanationist system: all reality flows out from the One, through Intellect and Soul, down to matter — a total metaphysical hierarchy.

Non-Western totalities (running in parallel, often deeper). The story is not only Greek.

• Chinese correlative cosmology: yin–yang, the five phases (wuxing), and the Dao form a systems cosmology of resonance and correspondence between heaven, earth, body, and state. The Neo-Confucian synthesis of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) — li (principle) and qi (material force) — is a complete rational-moral system.
• Buddhist systems: pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination — nothing exists independently; everything arises in interrelation) is a proto-systems-theory of startling rigor. The Huayan school’s image of Indra’s Net — an infinite net of jewels, each reflecting all the others — is one of the most beautiful systems metaphysics ever conceived: total interpenetration.
• Indian Vedānta: Advaita (Śaṅkara, c. 8th c.) reduces all multiplicity to one reality, Brahman.
• Islamic and Jewish falsafa: Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980–1037) built a vast Aristotelian-Neoplatonic system; Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Maimonides carried the synthesis into law and theology.

The medieval apex — the Great Chain of Being. In the Latin West the total system reached its most complete form in Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and his Summa Theologica: a single architecture integrating God, cosmos, angels, human nature, ethics, law, and salvation, fusing Aristotle with Christian revelation. The background picture — the “Great Chain of Being” (a term Arthur Lovejoy later gave it) — was a hierarchical, meaningful, complete cosmos in which everything had its ordained place and purpose. This is the high-water mark of lived total understanding: for centuries, educated people inhabited a world that made total sense.

The transfer to reason and mathematics (17th–18th c.). The Scientific Revolution did not abandon the total-system ambition; it transferred it from theology to mathematics and mechanism.

• Descartes (1596–1650): a unified system of knowledge deduced from first principles; the mechanical philosophy.
• Spinoza (1632–1677): the Ethics, a total system built more geometrico (in the manner of geometry), with a single substance — Deus sive Natura, God-or-Nature — of which everything is a mode. One of the most complete monist systems ever written.
• Leibniz (1646–1716): the Monadology; and — prophetically — the dream of a characteristica universalis (a universal formal language) and a calculus ratiocinator (a calculus of reasoning) that would let all truths be computed. This is the ancestor of the idea, central to our project, that a total system might be held computationally rather than in a single mind.
• Newton (1687): the Principia — the mathematical system of the world, unifying the heavens and the earth under universal gravitation. The clockwork universe. A total theory of the physical.
• The Enlightenment: the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert — the ambition to systematize all human knowledge — and the first stirrings of a “science of man.”

Part II — The apex and the inversion (~1780–1900)

German Idealism — the last great flowering of systematic philosophy.

• Kant (1724–1804): the critical system. The three Critiques map the conditions of possibility of knowledge, morality, and judgment. Kant’s decisive, double-edged move: the order we find in the world is partly imposed by the structure of the knowing subject. He also drew the boundary — reason cannot know things-in-themselves — planting the seed of every later doubt about totality. His term for the systematic form of knowledge was the architectonic.
• Fichte and Schelling: Schelling’s Naturphilosophie treats nature and spirit as one developing system.
• Hegel (1770–1831): the apex. The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the system of the dialectic aim to comprehend the entire of reality — logic, nature, history, art, religion, philosophy — as the self-unfolding of the Absolute Idea through contradiction and resolution. History itself becomes the rational self-realization of Spirit. Hegel is, by wide agreement, the last thinker to claim a complete rational system of the whole in the grand classical sense. After him, the system fractures. Everything that follows is, in one way or another, a response to Hegel — completing him, inverting him, or refusing him.

The secular grand narratives — the ambition survives the death of theology. The nineteenth century produced three great post-theological total systems, each claiming to explain history and society by a single principle:

• Marx (1818–1883): historical materialism. History is driven by modes of production and class struggle; a base of material/economic relations conditions a superstructure of law, politics, and ideology; the whole moves by an internal logic toward a foreseeable end. A total system of society and history — and a secular eschatology.
• Darwin (1859) and Spencer: natural selection was not itself a philosophy, but Herbert Spencer built a “System of Synthetic Philosophy” that tried to unify all knowledge under evolution — and “Social Darwinism” extended the principle (disastrously) to society.
• Comte (1798–1857): positivism. The “law of three stages” (theological → metaphysical → positive/scientific), sociology as the crowning science, and an explicit Religion of Humanity to replace the God whose funeral the nineteenth century was quietly holding. Comte wanted, in so many words, a total secular system to do the integrating work theology used to do.

So by 1900 there were three or four rival totalities in play — Hegel’s Spirit, Marx’s matter, Darwin/Spencer’s evolution, Comte’s positivism — and the sense that one of them might turn out to be the true key to everything.

Part III — The crisis: why the total system broke (~1880–1970)

Then, within a few decades, the whole ambition came apart. Five hammers fell.

1. Nietzsche’s demolition (1880s). “God is dead,” and with him the guarantee of any total meaning. Nietzsche attacked the systematic impulse itself: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” Perspectivism — there are no facts, only interpretations — cut the ground from under any claim to comprehend the whole from nowhere. And his figure of the Last Man — the comfortable, incurious creature who has “invented happiness” and blinks — is an uncannily exact prophecy of a certain modern condition. Nietzsche also named the disease we still have no cure for: nihilism, the situation in which “the highest values devalue themselves” and there is no shared answer to why.

2. Gödel’s incompleteness (1931). Just as Frege, and then Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, tried to ground all of mathematics in logic — a total formal system — Kurt Gödel proved that any formal system rich enough to contain arithmetic must be either incomplete or inconsistent. There are true statements it cannot prove. This is not a metaphor but a theorem, and its shadow falls across every dream of a complete, self-contained system: no sufficiently rich system can fully capture itself.

3. The explosion and specialization of knowledge. The “last person who knew everything” (the phrase is used of Thomas Young, around 1800) became impossible. Knowledge fissioned into hundreds of specialties, each with its own language. No single mind could any longer command physics and biology and economics and history and the new sciences of mind. The cognitive precondition of the old systems — that one person could survey the whole — simply evaporated.

4. Heidegger’s diagnosis (1927 onward). Being and Time reopened the question of Being that the whole tradition, Heidegger argued, had forgotten. His later work turned to technology: modern technology is not a set of tools but a way of revealing — Gestell, “enframing” — under which everything, including human beings, shows up as Bestand, “standing reserve,” resource to be optimized and ordered. This is not a system of the world so much as a total diagnosis of the modern epoch, and it is directly relevant to our project: it names the deep logic — everything rendered as optimizable resource — that our own candidate theories will try to make precise.

5. The refusal of grand narratives (postmodernism, 1960s–1980s). The final hammer was explicit and programmatic. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979): “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” The grand stories — Progress, Reason, Emancipation, the dialectic — were declared not merely false but finished, and worse, complicit: totalizing explanations, the argument ran, underwrite total domination (a lesson drawn from the totalitarian catastrophes; see Arendt). Foucault replaced total theory with local genealogies of power/knowledge. Derrida showed every text deferring and undermining its own closure. Baudrillard described a world of simulation and hyperreality in which signs detach from any referent — “the map precedes the territory” — a diagnosis we will lean on heavily for the post-truth question. Deleuze and Guattari opposed the rhizome (a decentered, non-hierarchical network) to the tree (the hierarchical system) — though, tellingly, A Thousand Plateaus is itself a kind of anti-systematic systems theory.

This is the answer to question (4) — “since when have we lacked total systems?” In the grand classical philosophical sense: since roughly Hegel (d. 1831), with Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) usually named as the last serious attempt at a systematic speculative metaphysics in the old mode. In the sense of a shared, lived, culturally-dominant total understanding: it eroded across the long twentieth century and was declared officially over by the postmodern turn of the 1970s–80s. Nietzsche diagnosed the vacancy; Gödel formalized a limit; specialization removed the possibility of one mind holding the whole; Heidegger named the epoch’s logic; Lyotard and company made refusal of totality into a doctrine.

Part IV — But the ambition did not die. It migrated.

Here is the crucial correction to the project’s founding premise. It is true that the classical grand system died. It is false that “no one has tried since Heidegger.” The ambition to explain everything did not vanish — it changed form and migrated out of philosophy, into science, into social theory, and into new hybrids. Three migrations matter.

Migration 1 — Into a new science of systems as such (1910s–present). This is where “systems theory” becomes a named field — and it is a genuinely new method: not a metaphysical worldview but a transdisciplinary formal science of what systems are and how they behave, regardless of what they’re made of.

• Alexander Bogdanov, Tektology (1912–1917, Russian) — arguably the first general systems theory, a universal science of organization. Largely forgotten for decades; increasingly recognized as a founder.
• Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (papers from the 1940s; book 1968) — the search for isomorphies, principles that recur across physics, biology, and society; the concept of the open system and emergent properties of wholes.
• Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1948) — feedback, control, and communication “in the animal and the machine”; developed at the Macy Conferences alongside Bateson, McCulloch, von Neumann, Mead.
• Claude Shannon (1948) — a mathematical theory of communication (information, entropy, channel, noise) that quietly underlies everything digital.
• Second-order cybernetics — Heinz von Foerster, and Maturana & Varela’s autopoiesis (a living system as one that continuously produces itself): the observer is inside the system.
• Systems dynamics — Jay Forrester, and then Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (1972): the world modeled as a system of stocks, flows, feedback loops, and delays, with the discovery that exponential growth in a finite system overshoots and collapses unless deliberately steered. Meadows’s Thinking in Systems and her essay on leverage points remain the most usable systems toolkit we have.
• Prigogine — dissipative structures and order emerging far from equilibrium (Nobel 1977): the discovery that open systems can spontaneously generate order out of chaos, and that time and irreversibility are fundamental. The optimistic counter-pole to Meadows’s limits.
• Complexity science (Santa Fe Institute, 1980s onward) — emergence, self-organization, complex adaptive systems, networks, chaos and nonlinear dynamics, scaling laws (Geoffrey West). The current scientific frontier of systems thinking.
• Edgar Morin, La Méthode (six volumes, 1977–2004) and pensée complexe (“complex thought”) — an explicitly transdisciplinary method for thinking phenomena in their interconnection rather than by disciplinary dissection. Morin also coined “polycrisis” (with Anne Brigitte Kern, Terre-Patrie / Homeland Earth, 1993) — the term now used for our entangled present.
• Gaia — Lovelock and Margulis: the Earth as a single self-regulating system, later taken up philosophically by Latour.

Migration 2 — Into social systems theory. The most direct rebuttal to “no one tried since Heidegger” is a sociologist.

• Talcott Parsons built a grand “structural functionalism” of society (mid-century), later heavily criticized.
• Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) is the decisive figure: he took autopoiesis and built an explicitly universal theory of society. In his account, society is not made of people but of communication, which reproduces itself; modern society is functionally differentiated into self-referential subsystems (law, economy, science, art, politics, mass media), each operating by its own binary code (legal/illegal, payment/non-payment, true/false), each closed and unable to directly steer the others. This theory speaks with eerie directness to our questions about coordination failure, the fragmentation of shared reality, and the sense that systems now run without subjects. Luhmann is, in a real sense, “the systems philosopher who tried to explain everything (social) after Heidegger” — the counter-example the project’s premise needs to reckon with.

Migration 3 — Into new syntheses and popular grand narratives (1990s–present). The hunger for a total story never left the public; it re-emerged as ambitious syntheses, most carrying postmodern “warning labels.”

• Big History — David Christian: a single narrative from the Big Bang to the present, organized by rising complexity across energy-flow thresholds. A literal attempt at a total account, taught in universities.
• Integral Theory — Ken Wilber: an explicit meta-theory (“a theory of everything”) mapping all knowledge domains onto quadrants and developmental stages. Influential, contested.
• Metamodernism — Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker (“Notes on Metamodernism,” 2010) named a post-postmodern structure of feeling: an oscillation between modern sincerity and postmodern irony, engaging grand narratives “as if” they were possible while knowing they aren’t (an “informed naïvety”). Hanzi Freinacht (pen name of Daniel Görtz & Emil Friis), The Listening Society / Nordic Ideology, turns this into “developmental metamodernism” — an explicit attempt to reconstruct a grand narrative (“reconstruction must follow deconstruction”) while accepting that any synthesis is only ever a “proto-synthesis,” never final. Jason Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), gives it an academic form (“Process Social Ontology”). This whole current is the clearest contemporary answer to “who is trying to build a grand narrative again, and how” — and their signature move (totality held provisionally, as a never-finished process) is close to our own stance.
• Cliodynamics — Peter Turchin: history treated as a natural science. His structural-demographic theory (building on Jack Goldstone, and ultimately on Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyya) models political instability as a function of three variables — elite overproduction, popular immiseration, and declining state fiscal health — coupled through what he calls the “wealth pump.” In a 2010 Nature forecast he predicted rising instability in the US and Western Europe peaking in the 2020s. This is the living proof-of-concept of the project’s own wager: a systems theory of society built by new methods (mathematical models, a historical crisis database, explicit falsifiable prediction). Turchin himself notes the resemblance to Asimov’s fictional “psychohistory” — and the difference: unlike Hari Seldon’s, his forecasts are meant to help us change the outcome.
• The polycrisis discourse — Morin’s term, revived by Adam Tooze and the WEF (2022–23), to name the way today’s crises (climate, pandemic, war, inflation, migration, political breakdown) interact and amplify each other. Crucially, even its champions concede it names the phenomenon without explaining it — critics call it “too tidy, too abstract,” a buzzword “not yet associated with a rigorous field of inquiry.” That gap — a name for the entanglement but no rigorous systems theory of it — is precisely the niche this project targets.
• Critical diagnoses of the present as system — Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019: the economic logic that harvests human experience as raw material), Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society, Psychopolitics: the achievement-subject who exploits itself), Anna Lembke (Dopamine Nation: the neuroscience of the engineered-reward economy), Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern; Facing Gaia: dissolving the nature/society divide the crisis depends on), Timothy Morton (hyperobjects: entities like climate too vast in time and space to perceive). None of these is a total system, but each is a rigorous account of one deep mechanism of the present — and together they are the raw material a new synthesis would integrate.

Part V — So where does that leave the founding premise?

Partly right, and more interesting once corrected.

• Right: the classical mode — one mind, one book, one complete rational system of the whole — is genuinely dead, and has been since the nineteenth century (Hegel), with a last gasp around 1929 (Whitehead). Nietzsche, Gödel, hyper-specialization, Heidegger, and the postmodern refusal each explain a distinct reason why.

• Wrong (or too strong): the ambition did not die. It migrated into systems science, into Luhmann’s social systems theory, and into contemporary syntheses (Big History, integral theory, metamodernism, cliodynamics). People have kept trying — just not in the old form, and rarely with the old confidence.

• Why it is genuinely hard now (the project’s hypothesis, sharpened into six reasons):

  1. Gödelian / epistemic limits — no rich system fully captures itself; every framing excludes.
  2. Knowledge overload — no single mind can command the relevant fields; the cognitive precondition of the old systems is gone. (This is the author’s core intuition, and it is correct.)
  3. Pace and reflexivity — reality now changes faster than theory can consolidate, and social theories change the systems they describe (the theory becomes part of the phenomenon), so the target moves.
  4. The moral suspicion of totality — after the totalitarian century, total explanations are, rightly, held under suspicion of underwriting total control.
  5. Genuine complexity / irreducibility — nonlinear, emergent, path-dependent systems may be computationally irreducible: there may be no theory shorter than running the system itself.
  6. The meaning vacuum — systems thinking is good at describing how and notoriously bad at why-it-matters; Luhmann’s cool functionalism drains normativity. Even a correct systems theory might fail to feed the human hunger the old theological totalities fed.

• Why a new method might nonetheless work (the project’s wager, which the panel will stress-test):

  1. Computation and modeling — a theory too large for one mind can be distributed into models: climate models, agent-based models, world-models, and now AI systems that integrate across domains. (Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator, three centuries late.)
  2. Network and complexity science with data at scale — we can now measure and model global systems empirically.
  3. Collective / commons-based authorship — a systems theory as an Ostrom-style commons (many contributors, shared governance, continuous revision) rather than a monograph.
  4. Designed disagreement + synthesis — the very method of this project: many perspectives, in structured conflict, integrated by a synthesizing intelligence and never declared finished. A procedural rather than doctrinal totality — which is exactly what metamodernism’s “proto-synthesis,” Freinacht’s “never final,” and Morin’s “complex thought” are all reaching for.

The rest of the project is the attempt to act on that wager — and to keep an honest record of whether it works.

Compact timeline