Vernetztes Denken, networked thinking. The scientist Frederic Vester (1925–2003) made the phrase common in Germany. When he died, Der Tagesspiegel called him the “Erfinder des vernetzten Denkens”, the inventor of networked thinking.
Vester was a member of the Club of Rome. He developed a sensitivity model for analyzing complex systems. One of his best-known books is Die Kunst vernetzt zu denken, the art of thinking in networks.
In 1866 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel defined a new science in his work Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. He called it Oecologie: “die gesammte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Aussenwelt”. It was the whole science of the relations of an organism to the world around it.
Haeckel counted all the conditions of existence among these relations, in the wider sense. The Federal Environment Agency lists his definition in its chronicle of environmental history under the year 1866.
Alles ist Wechselwirkung. Everything is interaction. Alexander von Humboldt wrote this sentence in 1803. The researcher Tobias Kraft says of it: “Wenn es eine Humboldt-Formel gibt, dann ist es dieser Satz.” If there is a Humboldt formula, it is this sentence.
Humboldt wanted to explore the larger connections behind each single observation. The Humboldt scholar Ottmar Ette calls his science a Vernetzungswissenschaft, a science of connections.
Das Ganze ist mehr als die Summe seiner Teile. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. This is the guiding principle of Gestalt psychology. Its more precise form is Das Ganze ist etwas anderes als die Summe seiner Teile, the whole is something other than the sum of its parts.
Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler worked together on the theory from 1910, first in Frankfurt and later in Berlin.
The sentence is often credited to Aristotle. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote that the whole is something besides the parts.
In the preface to his Phänomenologie des Geistes, published in 1807, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote: Das Wahre ist das Ganze. The true is the whole. The whole, he went on, is only the being that completes itself through its development.
Of the absolute he said that it is essentially a result, and that only at the end is it what it truly is. A result without the path that led to it is worth nothing to him. Das nackte Resultat ist der Leichnam. The bare result is the corpse.
Theodor W. Adorno later turned the sentence around in Minima Moralia. Das Ganze ist das Unwahre. The whole is the untrue.
In 1989 the psychologist Dietrich Dörner published Die Logik des Mißlingens, the logic of failure. He studied how people act in complex situations, using computer simulations. In one of them, participants managed Tanaland, an imaginary region in Africa. In another they ran Lohhausen, a simulated small town.
A chapter on dealing with goals discusses global goals and what Dörner calls Reparaturdienstverhalten, repair-service behavior. Dörner’s first step for acting in complex situations is to become clear about the goal. Many people, he found, already fail at this first step.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant has a chapter on the architectonic of pure reason. There he writes: Ich verstehe unter einer Architektonik die Kunst der Systeme. (By an architectonic I understand the art of systems.)
Kant describes a whole built from an idea: Das Ganze ist also gegliedert (articulatio) und nicht gehäuft (coacervatio). (The whole is therefore articulated and not heaped up.) And he adds: Die Idee bedarf zur Ausführung ein Schema, the idea needs a schema for its execution.
In 1968 the sociologist Niklas Luhmann was appointed to a chair of sociology at the new University of Bielefeld. At the end of the 1960s he was asked there to name his research project. He wrote: “Theorie der Gesellschaft; Laufzeit: 30 Jahre; Kosten: keine.”
Theory of society. Duration: 30 years. Cost: none. His main tool was a Zettelkasten, a card index he had kept since the 1950s. It grew to about 90,000 notes. His Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, The Society of Society, appeared in 1997, shortly before his death.
On 15 April 2020, after a meeting with the state premiers, Chancellor Angela Merkel explained why most pandemic restrictions would stay in place and easing would be slow. At the end of the press conference, she did it with arithmetic.
The reproduction number then stood at about one. If it rose by only a tenth to 1.1, she said, the health system would reach its limit in October. At 1.2 it would reach it in July. At 1.3 it would reach it in June.
On 19 December 1998, Ralf Rangnick, then coach of SSV Ulm in the second division, was a guest on ZDF’s das aktuelle sportstudio. At a tactics board, he explained to the presenter Michael Steinbrecher how the Viererkette, the back four in a flat line, and pressing work. He explained in great detail. The appearance gave him a nickname he has kept to this day: der Fußballprofessor, the football professor.