From Being to Doing by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

SYSTEMS THEORY AS WORLDVIEW

POERKSEN: The concept of autopoiesis has created a furore not only in science and amongst the followers of Erich Jantsch or Niklas Luhmann but also gained huge popularity in the New-Age scene. I think we are witnessing a sort of paradigm change with the theorists and opinion leaders of the New Age. Years ago they were attracted by modern physics and the dance of the atoms. It used to be reported that the physicist Werner Heisenberg, the creator of the Uncertainty Principle, and the Buddha practically shared an identical view of the essence of matter. The syncretism that emerged could be called quantum theology. For some time now, the key concepts of the New-Age scene have been provided by Gregory Bateson, Francisco Varela and – Humberto Maturana. The protagonists of the scene – Capra & Co. – have been brewing a rather explosive mixture of spiritualism and science, a sort of network theology, which is supposed to be the scientifically legitimated foundation of the worship of universal connectedness.

MATURANA: We have now hit upon the problem of reductionism, which is characteristic of our culture. Just look out the window for a moment. Over there, you see a loving couple, a young woman and a young man kissing each other. What is happening there? My answer would be: Whatever happens there happens in the domain of human relations. Naturally you can point out that in such exchanges of tenderness hormones and neurotransmitters are involved; no doubt we can speak of systemic processes in both organisms. All that would be correct, but what is occurring in the encounter of those two people, their feeling of love is not grasped or described by the reference to such processes: the loving tender relation that the two of them are living cannot be reduced to hormones, neurotransmitters and systemic processes. What they live occurs in them in the flow of their interactions as these give rise to the flow of what they do with each other through them. – When Fritjof Capra and others promote their quantum theology or some network theology and begin to worship systems or networks, they are thinking and arguing in a reductionist way. They flatten and blur everything. They no longer speak of molecules but only of systems that they elevate to their new gods. This is obviously reductionism, too. What I do is fundamentally different from a reductionist approach. Since I am always aware of the existence of different non-intersecting phenomenal domains, I take care not to confuse them in my thinking or in my writing. Indeed, if one does this, one can see that the phenomena of one domain cannot be expressed in terms of the phenomena of another domain. Thus, what happens in the domain of the operation of the organism as a totality in its relational space cannot be expressed in terms of the molecules that compose it, or vice versa. All that an observer can do is to see what happens in those two domains and attempt to establish a generative relation between them.

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