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For Niklas Luhmann:* “How
Recursive is Communication?”
HEINZ VON FOERSTER
(Tranlated by Richard Howe)
A year and a half ago Niklas Luhmann sent me a fascinating essay for my
80th birthday (Luhmann 1991). This article culminates in two extraordinary
questions. I won't read you these questions now;
§
I'd rather just briefly
report on the impression these questions made on me. I saw in them a
resemblance to two of the great problems of antiquity, two problems of
geometry. The one problem is the
Trisectio anguli
. That is the problem of
dividing an angle into three parts using only a compass and a ruler. And
the other problem is the
Quadratura circuli
, the task of constructing a
square, again using only a compass and a ruler, the area of which is equal
to a given circle. As you probably recall, both of these problems are unsolv-
able in principle, as Karl-Friedrich Gauss showed about two hundred years
ago. But if one removes the restriction of working only with a compass and
a ruler, then these problems can easily be solved.
When I got the invitation to say a few words here at the birthday cele-
bration for Niklas Luhmann, I of course immediately thought, oh good, now
that's where I'll present my answers to the two problems that he put to me
for my birthday. I sat myself down and went to work on the answers, but in
the midst of my preparations it suddenly occurred to me: but Heinz, that's
* Lecture given at the Authors Colloquium in honor of Niklas Luhmann on
February 5, 1993 at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld. The
German version was published in
Teoria Soziobiologica 2/93
, Franco Angeli,
Milan, pp. 61-88 (1993).
§
Editor's note: The two questions run (Luhmann 1991, p. 71) “1. Does knowledge
rest on construction in the sense that it only functions
because
the knowing system
is operatively closed, therefore:
because
it can maintain no operative contact with
the outside world; and because it
therefore
remains dependent, for everything that
it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference? 2.
Can (or must) one impute the formation of “Eigen values” to the domain of latency;
therefore for first order observation to the intangible and therefore stable distinc-
tion that underlies every single designation of objects; and in the domain of second
order observation to those very forms that are conserved when a system interrupts
its constant observation of that which cannot be observed?”
305
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