12.1 Early studies and interests.
Let me share with you some details about my educational background, and about the role that music has played in it. I began to play the cello at the age of seven, under the guidance of my father, who was an accomplished amateur musician. Since then I've been engaged in ensembles for chamber music. It is a cooperative effort: with your fellow-musicians you enter a time-structure designed by the composer. Everyone participates in shaping complicated structures in a time-sequence: rhythmic and melodic successions differ slightly from each other, are remembered, varied and restructured. It is a training of practical intelligence and motor skills; it is also sharing with others the powerful reverberations induced in one's emotional life by the music. You may download a recital by the author (cello) and Lucie Roodvoets (piano) given at a musical party on the 70th birthday of Els Versteegh at Geldermalsen (Netherlands): Variations by Beethoven. (bad link)
The fine receptive and imaginative skills involved in music have a practical application in science when a "participating and listening" attitude is needed (12.6). Musical sound patterns succeed each other in a way that can be compared to a natural evolution, from elementary forms to a complex creation, which, in turn, can be compared to developing ideas, institutions and cultures. In earlier civilisations the role of music in education has been more predominant than it is now (E.G.McLain 1978). Religious music was considered to be an abstract image of the world, it served to establish harmony between man and his universe. Many composers have attempted to depict the cosmos and nature in monumental compositions: among them S.ten Holt, K-H. Stockhausen, P.Schat. The present book lays out a comparable trail: it is an exercise in time-structures (governing material structures) that are the essence of living nature and also that of humankind and the society it lives in.
After my elementary school years I have never participated in formal religious practice. I appreciated religion as one does an idealistic myth, leading to prejudice and holding some risk of stagnation as to moral and intellectual unfolding. A key experience gave further shape to my view of spiritual life. In a conference organised shortly after the second world war by the reformed Christian student body about the topic of nuclear energy, the opinion was formulated that it could not be God's intention that man should touch the secrets of His atom. This was in contradiction my grandpa's achievements: in his inaugural lecture (1906) he had mentioned the bountiful energy, contained within the atom, that might in time become available to mankind; the time had now come for this energy to be exploited. The conservative opinion of the Christian students was contrary to my own view and that of several other participants. We decided to promote a more progressive and liberal platform and founded a Humanistic student movement. It resulted in lively discussion sessions with such contemporaries as Ab Goudsmit, Trude Schok, Rut Matthijsen, Tom Verheyen and Peter de Koning. It is only recently, since I started writing this book, that I have realised that a religious view of life is bound to have strained relations with pivotal issues in science, education, health care and social dynamics. Self-organisation, evolution, self-unfolding, interactive growth, autonomy of the patient in the doctor-patient relationship, they all loose their meaning if mixed with even a trace of "divine guidance". There is a solution: one can be religious if divine guidance is the same as the laws of nature.
At school I turned out to be quite good at foreign languages but my main interests were biology and chemistry. When the moment came to register as a student, I entered the Department of Medicine because it seemed to combine my diverse interests. In the first three years of study the basic sciences and the biological foundations of medicine were revealed. For one year I held a junior assistantship in medical physiology. The professor in charge, Janus Jongbloed, had been an eminent military aircraft pilot before he entered a medical career, and had later become a pioneer in aviation medicine. He asked me if I wanted to consider specialisation in this area and offered me a position in his laboratory. If I accepted, it would mean choosing a career in science and giving up a future in clinical work. After seriously considering his offer, I resolved to finish the two years that separated me from the doctor's license, before deciding about specialisation.
After graduating as an M.D., I was drafted for training in military medicine and, encouraged by Janus Jongbloed, I served in the Air Force from 1953 to '55. The challenge that faced human beings when adapting to high altitudes and to space travel (quite a novelty in post-war Holland!) attracted me and I enjoyed taking a close look at space physiology and aviation medicine. My daily work consisted of periodic medical checkups of military and civilian aircraft pilots. The rest of the time I spent in the well-stocked (thanks to gifts from the U.S.) library of the National Centre for Aviation Medicine at Soesterberg. The concepts of Cybernetics, introduced in 1943 by Norbert Wiener, and General Systems Theory seemed promising as a universal language for scientific transactions. The habit of ‘systems thinking’ has never left me. My first publication (in Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Militaire Geneeskunde, 1956) discussed the interaction between fighter pilots and their aircraft. Unimpaired communication of man with his environment seemed to me a vital aspect of personal health, and a necessity for survival in combat.
I became interested in General Semantics (GS)as a cleanser of polluted thinking. After the distorted Nazi ideology in Europe we were bounced back in an equally distorted movement of denial and repression of intellect. GS was needed to defend truth and honesty.