Books like Janus: A Summing Up

Janus: A Summing Up is a 1978 book by Arthur Koestler, in which the author develops his philosophical idea of the holarchy. First introduced in Koestler's 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine, the holarchy provides a coherent way of organizing knowledge and nature all together. The idea of the holarchy is that everything we can think of is composed of holons, so that each holon is always a constituent of a larger one and yet also contains other holons that are constituents of a lower level system within. Every holon is like a two-faced Janus, the Roman god: one side looks down ; the other side looks up. Each whole is a part of something greater, and each part is in turn an organizing whole to the elements that constitute it. Koestler believed that everything in a healthy system is organized this way, from the human body, to chemistry to the history of philosophy.