Unity and System

by Maria Odete

The unity (unitas, atis) is a syntax that can be operationalized to capture, in the systems, that which, in them, is about their internal cohesion, consistency and coherence.

These internal systemic properties (cohesion, consistency and coherence), enactively produced by the system (Varela), signal, refer and identify the system as a being or entity, and, therefore, also an identity.

The system, considered in terms of its individuation, bearer of an identity, is, thus, signaled as a concrete spatio-temporally localized existent in permanent rotative coincidence with itself.

In this way, from an ontological approach, the unity can be thought of as a concrete relational existence, coexistent with that which, in the system, is multiplicity, division and dispersion.

If it is the case that, to form itself, the system needs the existence of a principle of unity enactively present in the system itself, it is also the case that the existence of that same principle of unity depends, constitutively, upon the capability of the relational dynamics of the system to produce and operationalize that principle of unity as a permanent organizing principle, dispositionally available in the system, and that can be thought of as an ontological, logical and epistemological attribute that makes any judicative syntheses about the nature of the unity of the system dependent upon the relations that are coexistent and actively present in the system, since the unity itself of the system is grounded (urgrund) upon those relations.

In this way, the unity can be consistently considered, in the statements, as an organizing principle, systemically synthesized, monadologically complex, relational and in network.

Without relations there can be no systemic unity.