His 1939 work on "The Structure of Wholes"[1] was seen as a precedent to systems theory in books in the 1960s–1980s edited by Fred Emery.
The word refers to both the individual and the environment, "not as interacting parts, not as constituents which have independent existence, but as aspects of a single reality which can be separated only by abstraction".
Autonomy is the relatively egoistic pole of the biosphere: it represents the tendency to advance one's interests by mastering the environment, by asserting oneself, so to speak, as a separate being.
In place of the words autonomy and homonomy, Angyal has also used the terms self-determination and self-surrender to describe these opposing yet co-operating directional trends of the biosphere, and he has felicitously summed up the individual's relationship to them with the remark that, "the human being comports himself as if he were a whole of an intermediate order".
The term 'biosphere' appears in his work, which for Angyal denoted a holistic entity/single reality, including both the individual and the environment.