Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
Wilber's View
Koestler occupies a small but foundational place in SES: he coined the word "holon" itself, the single term the entire book's ontology is built on. Wilber introduces the concept in the opening pages by crediting Koestler directly, using Koestler's own example (the word "bark" is a whole relative to its letters but a part relative to the phrase it sits in) before developing the idea across the rest of the book far beyond where Koestler took it. Koestler also gets credit for spotting that ordinary "hierarchy" is the wrong word for holon-structures — since a series of increasing wholes isn't the rigid, one-directional kind of ranking "hierarchy" usually implies — and coining holarchy as the correct term instead, a coinage Wilber adopts as one of the book's other core structural terms. Koestler's further distinctions (fixed "codes" versus flexible "strategies," the "particularistic" and "holistic" polarity in every holon) also survive into Wilber's own vocabulary of deep structure versus surface structure and agency versus communion, though Wilber gently distances himself from Koestler's tendency to lump self-adaptation and self-transcendence together as a single kind of "going beyond," treating them instead as different in kind, not just degree.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
"Arthur Koestler coined the term holon"
Arthur Koestler coined the term holon to refer to that which, being a whole in one context, is simultaneously a part in another. With reference to the phrase "the bark of a dog," for example, the word bark is a whole with reference to its individual letters, but a part with reference to the phrase itself.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1
"Koestler … pointed out that the correct word for 'hierarchy' is actually holarchy"
It is for all these reasons that Koestler, after noting that all such hierarchies are composed of holons, or increasing orders of wholeness, pointed out that the correct word for "hierarchy" is actually holarchy.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1
"'On different levels of the inorganic and organic hierarchies…'" (Koestler, quoted)
Koestler: "On different levels of the inorganic and organic hierarchies, the polarisation of 'particularistic' [agency] and 'holistic' [communion] forces takes different forms, but it is observable on every level."
— Koestler, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 2
"Koestler refers to this difference as 'fixed codes and flexible strategies'"
Koestler refers to this difference as "fixed codes and flexible strategies"—that is, relatively stable deep structures and changing surface structures within the basic guidelines (or basic limiting principles) of the deep structure.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 3
