When Ludwig von Bertalanffy was studying at the University he started to attend the evening discussions of the Vienna Circle where the participants pondered scientific methodology and terminology in the spirit of logical positivism. Bertalanffy admired Professor Moritz Schlick, the founder of this Circle, but since those years he became a lifelong and vocal opponent of logical positivism, because its members believed and suggested that "philosophy marry science and divorce metaphysics, thereby abandoning religion, ethics, and all questions of human values". Then he opposed the logical positivist edict that scientists must restrict themselves to what is and eschew all questions about what ought to be.

Instead of being seduced by positivism he kept arguing tireless that the great accomplishment of science has been the product of observation inspired by theory. This appreciation pushed him to reject continuously the logical positivistic view of science in which experimentation is everything and theory is nothing. He even indicted the logical positivist attitude for scientism, the dogmatic view that physical science is the only key to reality. In contrast, he liked to quote the Kantian maxim that, though theory without experience is mere intellectual play, experience without theory is blind.

Since 1928, reflecting on the technologically efficient carnage of World War One, LvB warned that the Machine was dragging humanity "down to its own level". Since then he advocated a scientific effort to rescue life's uniqueness from the mechanists, who denied it, and from the vitalists, who obscured it with mystification. He certainly opposed to reductionistic approaches and mechanicist interpretations, and denounced that scientists who really have no interest in human values, because they believe in absolute scientific objectivity, are de facto robots, who cannot realize that such a kind of assumed objectivity is a myth.

To struggle against these interests was and still is a very difficult task because, as the same Bertalanffy argued, every scientific endeavor is biased by the original decision to engage in that particular endeavor, and a denial of the existence of such fundamental bias amounts to hypocrisy or moral idiocy. The reductionism and the mechanicism have been guided by the methodo resolutivo (analytical method) employed by the Italian astronomer-physicist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) who found possible to learn how things work by literally or figuratively taking them apart to observe one element at a time. Today
 
"the acceptance of living beings as machines, the domination of the modern world by technology and the mechanization of mankind are but the extension and practical application of the mechanistic conception"
 
makes necessary to recognize that this situation started to be developed formally by the French philosopher-mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650) who said all of nature was just matter in motion according to mathematical laws, and every organism was a bête machine (mechanical beast), though arguing that all these machines were created by God and that God had made the human machine unique by giving it a soul; that it was a divine intervention---a deus ex machina.

LvB noticed how "mechanistic attitudes had seeped into virtually every area of social behavior, encouraging doctors to view patients as cases, employers to regard workers as units, advertisers to regard consumers as stimulus-response robots, and television programmers to reduce the public to a set of demographic numbers". In the 1960s he forecasted that "the production of more efficient robots will continue, if the theory of behavioral sciences continues to be mechanistic; (that) humanity's leaders habitually stumble from one crisis to another; (that) systems science could be used for totalitarianism;..." In the late 1960s he told that he envisioned with horror the possibility that mechanistic biologists would use genetic engineering to pursue the Hitlerian dream of creating a super-race.

Though, LvB recognized the contribution of the analytical method, which replaced the holistic viewpoint based on the prevailing metaphysical assumptions about the mysterious organizing force of the universe, but he claimed that analysis is necessary but not sufficient. Such argument became indeed indispensable for him who believed in creative evolution, which assumes the existence of one universal force of organization in the direction of increasing complexity, causing each level of such a complexity to display emergent qualities, not present on the level below.