The Stability and Growth Act of 8 June 1967 requires German economic policy to pursue four goals at the same time: stable prices, a high level of employment, external economic balance, and steady and adequate growth.
German students of economics learn the four goals as the magisches Viereck, the magic square. It is called magic because the goals are hard to reach together. School materials also teach a magic hexagon with two further goals.
In 1992 the German Medical Assembly created an independent medical specialty for psychotherapeutic medicine, with five years of specialist training. Since 2003 it has been called psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy.
Basic psychosomatic care asks doctors to include biological, psychological and social factors in diagnosis, treatment and the understanding of illness. The physician Thure von Uexküll (1908–2004) helped establish psychosomatics as a university discipline in Germany. He worked with the bio-psycho-social model.
A German town that wants federal and state money for urban renewal must first write an Integriertes Stadtentwicklungskonzept, an integrated urban development concept. It is a condition for almost all funded projects. Its purpose is to make sure that as many local interests as possible are considered systematically.
The Bavarian municipality of Wörthsee completed its concept in June 2019. The chapters cover population and households, green space and landscape, the economy, social infrastructure and mobility. The concept works out the main connections and dependencies between them.
After the Fukushima accident, the federal government set up an Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply. It began its work on 4 April 2011. Its seventeen members included Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Bishop Ulrich Fischer and the sociologist Ulrich Beck.
The report was handed over on 30 May 2011. It said that reducing the risks to purely technical aspects would not meet the demand for ganzheitliches Denken, holistic thinking. “Ökologische, wirtschaftliche, gesellschaftliche und technische Risiken sind zudem eng miteinander verzahnt.” Ecological, economic, social and technical risks are closely interlocked.
The commission concluded that, with the measures it proposed, Germany could complete its exit from nuclear power within a decade.
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.
On 7 November 1917 Max Weber gave his lecture Wissenschaft als Beruf, science as a vocation, to students in a Munich bookshop. In it he said: „Persönlichkeit“ auf wissenschaftlichem Gebiet hat nur der, der rein der Sache dient. In the field of science, only the person who serves the matter purely has personality.
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.