ABSTRACT
Having fi nally arrived at a point in the history of science where we feel strong enough to face complexity, we recognize that integration is an inherent feature of it-be it the complexity of the external world or of the inner world of human beings. Cosmology has to tackle this problem as well as neurology, economics as well as linguistics. There is no simple starting point; on the contrary, already the presumed simple-be it neurons or quarks-turns out to be a complex integrated phenomenon (Weigand 2002a). Whereas for more than two thousand years not only modern linguistics but Western thinking in general shied away from addressing the complex and restricted itself to compositional models (Harris 2002), in recent times we can observe something like the opposite, namely, a ‘fl ight from science and reason’ (Gross et al. 1996) towards a search for a new extended way of addressing the integrational complex.
