Hey! So Glad You're Here.
Rekh Magazine is an intellectual challenge aimed at making a closer dialogue among thinkers of different disciplines, from theoretical philosophy to physics and fashion, just to quote some of the domains taken in consideration by this magazine. My idea is to build a free space, initially only a digital realm, to be extended to multiple projects. Being a professional journalist in a daily newspaper I have really a few time to dedicate to Rekh Magazine: I wake up very early in the morning, or I work in night time. I'll do my best. I've reduced the academic research in philosophy just to focus on Rekh Magazine. I'll see how it works. Everybody who whishes to write a paper is welcome. Proposals will be scrutinized and, if they are valuable, they will be accepted.
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A Systemic Approach to Life
Rekh Magazine is an open, free, international space for the philosophical debate about anthropological topics, metaphysics, Ancient Egyptian thought, and fashion studies. The red thread that connects these theoretical environments all together is Systemic Thinking, an interdisciplinary approach to complexity. Founded and curated by Primavera Fisogni, Ph.D. in Metaphysics, philosopher, and journalist, Rekh Magazine (literally: a magazine for understanding, where “rekh” means “understanding, knowing, knowledge” in Ancient Egyptian) is aimed at making the dialogue between academic and not academic philosophy effective and fruitful for the contemporary community. Although the English language is the basic language of the magazine, being the best linguistic medium for global understanding, all languages are welcome. Where it will be possible, all the texts will be translated into English or at least introduced by a short abstract in English.
A Short Account of General System Thinking
Complex phenomena, that’s to say the largest part of the phenomena of life, can be better grasped through a systemic approach (Bartelannfy, 1967; Urbani Ulivi, 2019; Minati, 2019), which allows a general rational vision of the world on a more comprehensive basis’ (Urbani Ulivi, 2019: vi). Through the lenses of systemic thinking, the main question is not about ‘what is’ something, but ‘how it works’ in its inner layers and in relation to other entities and with the environment in which each phenomenon is included.
Although systemic thinking has become more and more popular in the past few years, being interdisciplinary at heart, some accounts are useful for a better understanding of its macro features. The first idea to keep in mind in this theoretical perspective is that all the objects around us are not simply ‘things’ composed of ‘parts’, but systems and each of them results from several interrelations. The second step to get acquainted with General System Thinking (GST) stresses the concept of relation/interrelation, in which areand grounded both the well-ordered dynamics of each phenomenon of life and the capacity to give rise to new, unexpected characteristics.
Interdisciplinarity
As Agazzi clarifies: ‘The primitive constituents in system theory are systems, each having its specific characteristics and internal structure, and they do not simply “belong” to the global system but are mutually interrelated with the other systems and are not “elements” but “subsystems” of the global system, according to a net of relations that allow the global system to have certain properties and perform certain functions.’ (Agazzi, 2019).
There is a wide consensus among international scholars that systemic thinking is the more valuable interdisciplinary perspective in the treatment of complex issues by virtue of its capacity to grasp the interrelations that link them. Complexity is a term that belongs to a wide domain of topics in which cyberterrorism takes a relevant part. It is also a fact that organizational problems are systemic in nature (Deming, 1986). According to GST (Urbani Ulivi, 2019) objects and events are considered in terms of open systems; it means that they are not mere aggregations or sums of parts, but primarily dynamic units, to which pertain qualities that depend upon many interactions and processes, internal or external to the system, within the frame of a continuous exchange with the environment that gives rise to systemic properties or II type systemic properties.
Through the lenses of systemic thinking the main question is not about ‘what is’ something, but ‘how it works’ in its inner layers and in relation with other entities and with the environment in which each phenomenon is included.
Scholars can properly speak, according to Agazzi of «an ordered of interrelated parts whose characteristics depend both on the characteristics of the parts and on the web of their interconnections» (Agazzi, 2019, p. x). Each system, then, can be seen as a simple and complex unit that interacts with the whole.
Theoretical tools that GST gained from biology and physics (dissipation and balance of systems, coherence, co-variants etc.) that could be highly useful in understanding terrorism, especially the cyber threat, are rarely applied to scholarly investigations.
Historically, the idea of a system is deeply interwoven with modern scientific thinking, since Galileo’s Dialogo sui due massimi sistemi (1632), however in the contemporary age it has been relaunched by Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy who developed a paradigm (General System Theory, 1967), assuming also models elaborated in cybernetics, which can be applied to a multidisciplinary domain. In brief, GST fits a variety of themes about which analytical philosophy, linear thinking, and reductionist approaches have generally revealed unable to provide responses. Traditional conceptual frames could be updated or rewritten (e.g., finalism or radicalization, as the author is going to argue in the present paper) while new terms, derived from biology or computational sciences (auto-organization, emergence, equivalence, dissipation, balance) have been forged and successfully applied.
A Rock in the Pond of Thought
Like a veritable rock in the pond, in virtue of its non-linear approach, GST offers a valuable key to understanding phenomena that pertain to multiple levels of the human experience, from natural science, medicine, and biology to politics, and philosophy. Over the past few years, scholars have demonstrated that the systemic approach improves responses to contemporary social phenomena more than linear thinking. However, the new pathway has not yet reached the core of the problem, providing a general, punctual overview of the interactions among subsystems, without addressing the explication of how these dynamics work. Theoretical tools that GST gained from biology and physics (dissipation and balance of systems, coherence, co-variants, etc.) that could be highly useful in understanding terrorism, especially the cyber threat, are rarely applied to scholarly investigations. Differently from the ‘first systemics’, especially aimed at exploring the organization of complex systems, the ‘second systemics’ throws light on the coherence and dynamics of aggregations (Pessa, 2013; Minati, Pessa & Abram, 2016), as Urbani Ulivi notes, warning «the risk of systemic reductionism» (Ulivi, 2019, p. vi). The concept of emergence is at the core of the GST. It primarily concerns the origin of systemic properties (or second-level systemic properties), which result from the interactions within systems and between systems and the environment. The human mind is a paradigmatic case of it: it cannot be reduced to the chemical processes of the brain, nor its functions and activities, and can be explained according to the environmental interactions with the neuronal cells (Urbani Ulivi, 2013; 2019).
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