# The Radical Luhmann  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hans-Georg Moeller]] - Full Title: The Radical Luhmann - Category: #books ## Highlights - “world society has reached a higher level of complexity with higher structural contingencies, more unexpected and unpredictable changes (some people call this ‘chaos’) and, above all, more interlinked dependencies and interdependencies. This means that causal constructions, (calculations, plannings) are no longer possible from a central and therefore ‘objective’ point of view.” ([Location 97](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=97)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Luhmann’s “fourth insult” to human vanity consists in denying the notion of the “human being” a central place in social theory. He follows earlier nonanthropocentric shifts that occurred in cosmology (Copernicus), biology (Darwin), and psychology (Freud). ([Location 137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=137)) - Tags: [[pink]] - In chapter 5, “The Last Footnote to Plato,” I outline what I believe to be the most obvious, and yet most overlooked, achievement of the Luhmannian shift to theory: a solution to a central problem of traditional Western philosophy, mind-body dualism. ([Location 146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=146)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Luhmann convincingly shows that there is at least one more dimension in addition to the intellectual and the physical, namely communication. This third dimension allowed Luhmann to replace traditional substance dualism with a functional theory of structural couplings between different systemic realms. ([Location 151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=151)) - Tags: [[pink]] - For Luhmann, reality is not the a priori condition for experience. Instead, he argues that cognitive functions are capable of generating themselves “autopoietically” and thereby of constructing reality—and that they can do so in multiple ways. Reality, as an effect of cognitive self-generation and construction, is not based on identity, but on difference, and this makes it no less real. ([Location 166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=166)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The conclusion attempts to answer what is perhaps an inappropriate question: where does Luhmann’s radicalism ultimately lead us? Or, how can a Luhmannian attitude toward society, and, indeed, life, be described? I suggest that this attitude can be defined as a cultivation of modesty, irony, and equanimity. ([Location 176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=176)) - Tags: [[pink]] - This already constitutes a major break with the Western philosophical tradition, which had been thoroughly humanist. ([Location 234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=234)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Luhmann’s theory of operationally closed systems is, at the same time, also a second-order cybernetic theory of nontrivial or complex systems, which, being in a system-environment relation, are open for mutual resonance, perturbation, and irritation. ([Location 262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=262)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Luhmann’s ecological evolution theory means that society has no center, just as an ecosystem has no center. Therefore society has never been (and will never be) open for creationist interventions by divine or secular sources. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=278)) - Tags: [[orange]] - Note: disagree - “This technique, I believe, explains why I do not at all think in a linear way, and why I have trouble finding the right chapter sequence when writing books, since, properly, any chapter should reappear in any of the others.”4 ([Location 326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=326)) - intellectual heritage that he chose to continue. Luhmann explicitly aimed at constructing a “supertheory.”6 He was therefore willing to connect with the ambitions of the grand theoretical systems of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German idealism and, in particular, its two main representatives, Kant and Hegel. Not only are these two philosophers often referred to in his writings, but it is quite obvious that Luhmann followed them in trying to develop a novel scientific system, which, by being a new theoretical conceptual terminology, had to be sufficiently technical and abstract in order to be applied to an analysis of, basically, anything. ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=341)) - Luhmann candidly declares, in a highly programmatic and uncompromising way, that his theory is to be understood as an attempt at a “transition towards a radically anti-humanist, a radically anti-regionalist, and a radically constructivist concept of society.” He flatly denies the common assumption “that a society consists of concrete human beings and relations between human beings.” ([Location 409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=409)) - The world has never been human, and thus there has never been a shift from a human to a posthuman world. ([Location 449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=449)) - Note: spirit, not human biopsychosocial - This is not to deny the profound social influences of recent technological developments (which have been successfully traced, for instance, by N. Katherine Hayles and Donna J. Haraway), ([Location 454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=454)) - Note: look these up - There is no central steering agency in a society that is constituted by a multiplicity of (self-steering) systems that have no particular hierarchical order. ([Location 515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=515)) - Thus, Luhmann ridicules ideological hopes of establishing a new, peaceful, and equal society on the basis of rational politics. ([Location 530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=530)) - Luhmann, however, maintains: “No policy can renew the economy, parts of the economy or even single firms because for this one needs money and thus the economy.” ([Location 548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=548)) - According to Gray, this has not prevented (and has even perhaps externally contributed to) major economic catastrophes in Russia and Argentina. ([Location 567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=567)) - Freud had set up a famous list of three insults to human narcissism, namely Copernicus’s proof that the earth was not at the center of the universe (the cosmological insult), Darwin’s discovery that man was not the crown of creation (the biological insult), and his own findings regarding the insignificant powers of the ego compared with drives and unconscious forces such as the libido (the psychological insult).17 Luhmann now adds another insult to this list—one that could be called the sociological insult. If Luhmann’s analysis is correct, then human society cannot steer itself. Just as we cannot control the universe, our bodies, or our minds, we are also unable to shape the social world we inhabit according to our ideals, wishes, or intentions. ([Location 577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=577)) - Knowledge becomes scientific once it is systematized, once it is integrated into a coherent whole. ([Location 685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=685)) - For Hegel, science, in its ultimate meaning was the process of the self-understanding of consciousness. ([Location 695](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=695)) - The highest type of cognition is the self-cognition of cognition. This is what scientific and systematic philosophy consists in. It is the ultimate self-description. For Hegel, any attempt at self-description had to culminate in (t)his philosophical system. ([Location 703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=703)) - The entities that Luhmann called systems, that is, social systems, biological systems, psychic systems, and so on, are not systems in the Hegelian sense of the term. For Hegel, there was, strictly speaking, only one real system, namely his own philosophy. ([Location 728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=728)) - Theory is understood as a conceptual edifice, or, as he explains on the same page, as concepts within a coherent context of usage. Kant used exactly the same metaphor in his transcendental methodology and spoke about the “architecture of pure reason” and the “art of systems.”10 ([Location 740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=740)) - Note: computational ala towers of symbolic approach to ai wolfram - is probably safe to say that Luhmann’s theory is a successor of Kant’s and Hegel’s system. Luhmann did not intend to be a “normal science” sociologist, helping to increase the sociological “aggregate of information” by conducting surveys and collecting data. Instead, he wanted to react to the theory crisis in sociology and establish a new general theory of society.11 ([Location 742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=742)) - In this way, the final sentence of the preface of The Science of Society demonstrates, in the form of a parody, that science is not the authentic realization of truth, but a social system with its own standardized forms of communication, just like all other social systems. Its “truth” is merely a communicative construct among many others. ([Location 864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=864)) - “Contingent” for Luhmann means both “being connected with” and “extremely unlikely.” ([Location 915](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=915)) - While Hegel believed that the complete self-inclusion, or feedback loop, of science or philosophy would lead to the self-unification of spirit and an insight into its own necessity, for Luhmann (and many postmodernist thinkers) this “project of modernity” has to be abolished. Luhmann believed that insight into the scientific feedback loop demonstrates contingency and not ultimate necessity. ([Location 924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=924)) - This paradoxical situation leads to a carnivalization of philosophy and science. That which was once esteemed (or, more precisely, esteemed itself) as the lofty mountain top of human cognition, appears as only one contingent reality construction among many. ([Location 1005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1005)) - One can witness the “dialectics of enlightenment” brought about by the scientific age. With indubitable Cartesian scientific “certainty,” and with utmost seriousness, the great projects of social science were put into practice: the French rule of reason, the Russian elimination of class distinctions, the racism of the Nazis, the disciplinary mechanisms described by Foucault—these were all supported and defended by what may be called “extremist” science, philosophy, or both. Today, we see the applications of their supposedly more rational successors: free markets expanding worldwide along with neo-Kantian universal recipes for peace, social understanding, and liberty. If faced with a choice between these types of serious science and carnivalistic theory, I’d find it rather easy to decide in favor of the latter. ([Location 1015](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1015)) - The triple dualism is still both academically and in ordinary life a most essential commonsense ontological, epistemological, and ethical concept. While the dominance of the soul over the body is no longer an accepted theory, there is still something like a common consensus that the world is made up of the physical and the intellectual, that we can know things either through reflection or experience, and that we can act according to material or ideal values. In this sense, Plato’s triple dualism is as alive as it ever was. ([Location 1079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1079)) - A system is a functional entity that is operationally distinct from and so distinguishable from other systems. It is, so to speak, a sequence of events that connect with one another, that is, that go along with one another diachronically, synchronically, or both. Luhmann focuses on autopoietic and operationally closed systems. That a system is autopoietic means that it is not externally produced or constructed but instead produces, constructs, and perpetuates or reproduces itself. Its operational closure means that its operations can only connect with its own operations, but not with those of any other system. ([Location 1127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1127)) - The very concept of a nexus is what the system/environment distinction is no longer in need of. ([Location 1247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1247)) - Luhmann successfully dissolved the traditional mind-body triple dualism. First, instead of an ontological division between ideal and material existence, there is a distinction between at least three, and potentially many more, kinds of systemic functions. There are psychic systems, living systems, and social systems. They do not split the world into a hierarchical structure of being, but into a complex arrangement of system/environment relations without any particular order. ([Location 1321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1321)) - of the hierarchical epistemological division between two kinds of knowledge, there is a differentiation between types of observation. Systems are observing systems and have their own internal capabilities for producing knowledge or cognition of their environment and of themselves. There is no privileged observatory platform and knowledge does not grant the ability to come to unequivocal conclusions or predictions. ([Location 1324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1324)) - One profound difference between creationism and a theory of evolution is the idea of a plan. Creation is not random or involuntary; it involves intentionality. It involves action and agency. ([Location 1375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1375)) ## New highlights added May 30, 2023 at 12:24 PM - If, as Habermas has done, one labels Luhmann’s social theory as “metabiological,” then it should also be added, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that this means “metaevolutionary” and not “metacreationist.” While social theorists like Habermas worked on the unfinished “project of Enlightenment” and its secularized creationist ideals, Luhmann subscribed to a radically different paradigm, namely the paradigm of ecological evolution. ([Location 1506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1506)) - Kant, like Habermas and others who followed in his footsteps, failed to understand this “social ontology.” Reality, by being observed, described, and analyzed, becomes further complicated than it had been before it was observed. ([Location 1661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1661)) - Only a decent turnout at the election guarantees the survival and strength of the democratic myth. The legitimacy of the government, as well as that of the democratic state as a whole, depends on this myth. A similar ideal was of prime importance for the political self-description of the totalitarian “democracies” in communist and fascist states. The “people’s parties” that ruled these states conceived of themselves as both the institutionalized form of public political activity and the source of a thorough politicization of society. The insistence on active political participation followed the very same democratic revolutionary demands stemming from the Enlightenment that still inform liberal democracies—the demand for active citizenship. The despotic democracies of the left and the right saw themselves as more democratic than liberal ones, not less so. ([Location 1944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1944)) - His defense of democracy is thus not an expression of a substantial prodemocratic ideology. It is based, instead, on the paradoxical insight that politically less charged political systems seem to function in a way that is socially less harmful than those of a highly ideological nature. The benefit of actually existing democracy is not that it somehow realizes any supposed historical goal, but that it allows for social stability. Luhmann believed that “symbolic democracy” had empirically proven to be more successful than any attempt to bring about “true democracy.” ([Location 2002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2002)) - In other words, theorists have to be more modest than the philosophers of old. They can no longer proudly consider themselves all-important lovers of wisdom. Instead, they must consider themselves traders at the knowledge exchange marketplace. Theorists will have to let go of a lot of the pretension that used to be attached to the profession of philosophy. ([Location 2079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2079)) - Luhmann’s theory is neither idealist nor materialist; it is constructivist. Like idealists who claim that different ideas change society and materialists who claim that material changes change society, constructivists claim that different social constructions constitute social change. This is not the issue. The issue is that ideas and material conditions are supposed to be something more essential than a social construct—in other words, whereas ideas or material conditions are supposed to be foundational first causes of social change, social constructs are radically immanent within society and no more a cause of social change than its effect. ([Location 2105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2105)) - Luhmann states: “Self-critical reason is ironical reason. It is the reason of ‘the gypsies who constantly vagabond around Europe.’”12 In direct opposition to his earlier master Husserl, toward the end of his life Luhmann identified himself with the gypsies of reason—those who violate the unified pattern of sense-making and live outside of what is generally considered the norm. ([Location 2148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2148)) - Luhmann’s theory is about the contingent social constructions of sense that have no ultimate meaning, no transcendental or transcendent anchorage, and do not manifest or conform to a unified reason. In this way, theoretical reason is ironical reason: what it says is rooted in contingency and not necessity, and this is also the case “autologically.” Self-critical reason takes into account that it is ironical, and one of the ways to take this into account is to use ironical communication. ([Location 2168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2168)) - Luhmann’s redefinition of ethics is another example of his irony.14 He first defines morality as the communicative distinction between, and distribution of, esteem and disesteem. ([Location 2178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2178)) - Luhmann’s reflective theory takes a different approach: It shows that traditional attempts to identify moral reason have failed, and that the function of theoretical ethics, as opposed to philosophical ethics, can only be to warn of morality. ([Location 2182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2182)) - First, moral outrage was created—about the Nazi background of the parent generation; about the Vietnam war and American imperialism; about the capitalist Schweinesystem (pig system); about the nuclear arms race; about unfair trade mechanisms; about human rights violations; about nuclear power plants, the dying of the forests, and other environmental disasters, and so on. Then, beautiful countervisions were suggested: political and sexual liberation, an economy based on fairness and nonprofit orientation, political justice and equal rights for all, pacifism and disarmament, wind and solar power, a green conscience, and so on. The most prominent of Luhmann’s opponents on the German left, Jürgen Habermas, the proponent of a “discourse without domination” (herrschatsfreier Diskurs), and Ulrich Beck with his reflections on “risk society” (Risikogesellschaft), are good examples of these techniques. Moral communication, as Luhmann pointed out in his writings on ethics, functions by highlighting the scandalous and by contrasting it, at least implicitly, with a cathartically relieving remedy. In this way, nonironical ethics and nonironical reason produce a lot of social and psychological heat: they are exciting. People will be shocked, be enraged, and feel threatened by being alerted to all the bad and catastrophic things around them that they hadn’t really been aware of, as well as awed, enamored, and passionate about the wonderful solutions that are just around the corner if society would only complete its own enlightenment. ([Location 2205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2205)) - theory takes on an alternative stance: nec spe nec metu (neither hope nor fear), an ancient Latin phrase that Luhmann somewhat playfully uses to advocate “a kind of stoic attitude” in social theory,17 and thus, if such an extension may be allowed, toward the world in general. ([Location 2221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2221)) - Luhmann’s theory aims at replacing any kind of mental or humanist definition of communication with a purely functional one. ([Location 2486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2486)) - Transferring money from your account to mine is a financial transaction between accounts that are “addressed” to the two of us, but nothing is “exchanged” or “transmitted” from your mind or body to mine in this case. The same is true, according to Luhmann for all communication. Even the most intimate lovers cannot literally exchange their ideas or feelings. Eva Knodt describes the “hermeneutic despair” arising from this impossibility quite impressively in her foreword to Social Systems: ([Location 2489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2489)) - suggests the following definition for communication: it is the functional synthesis of three moments or “selections,” namely, announcement (Mitteilung),29 information (Information), and understanding (Verstehen). ([Location 2504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2504)) - They produce sense and then operate on the basis of having produced it. In the literal meaning of the expression, communication makes sense, that is, it constructs it. ([Location 2525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2525)) - As a “radical constructivist,”30 Luhmann does not believe that society functions on the basis of any presocial universals. That something has an economic value, that something is perceived as a work of art, that some acts are considered legal and others not, that there is such a thing as political power, that there are religious institutions and beliefs—all of these are, according to Luhmann, various results of communicative construction. Unlike Socrates in the Republic, for instance, Luhmann does not believe that the “idea of justice” is a subject worthy of investigation. For him, to give just one example of his social constructivism, justice is a “contingency formula” (Kontingenzformel) that is produced within the legal system.31 On the basis of this formula, the legal system can operate endlessly. It can declare things that were once neither legal nor illegal, smoking in houses, for instance, to become legal in some cases and illegal in others. These laws can be changed again ([Location 2528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=2528)) ## New highlights added June 20, 2023 at 7:40 AM - Unlike Descartes, Luhmann considers the mind and body not substances but systems. The use of the term “system” already denotes a shift from an ontological to a functional perspective. Systems are processes, not static things. Luhmann’s systemic triadism is concerned with operations, and not with what essentially is. A system is a functional entity that is operationally distinct from and so distinguishable from other systems. It is, so to speak, a sequence of events that connect with one another, that is, that go along with one another diachronically, synchronically, or both. Luhmann focuses on autopoietic and operationally closed systems. That a system is autopoietic means that it is not externally produced or constructed but instead produces, constructs, and perpetuates or reproduces itself. Its operational closure means that its operations can only connect with its own operations, but not with those of any other system. ([Location 1125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1125)) - Land, for instance, before the evolution of money, capital, and property, did not yet have economic meaning in the modern sense of the term “economy.” It may well have been used to feed people and animals, but it was not yet “observed” in economic terms. Native Americans, for instance, often could not understand the social construct of “selling” land when confronted with European settlers who wanted them to do exactly this. In order to observe land economically, and to sell and buy it, there has to be an economic communication system within which the transaction of selling land becomes meaningful. The economic meaning of land is, once again, not an effect of the material qualities of the land, but of how its value is observed and thus socially constructed in the economy. In this sense, the economy is not material; it is social. Marx was unable to see the decisive difference between the economy as a virtual communication system and its material environment. The economy is a communication system that exists within the social environment, which is constituted by the law, politics, education, and so on, and the extrasocial environment of living and psychic systems, that is, bodies, trees, land, human thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and do on. ([Location 1188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1188)) - The very concept of a nexus is what the system/environment distinction is no longer in need of. And it was precisely this problem of the nexus that Cartesian mind-body dualism was unable to convincingly solve. ([Location 1247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1247)) - Taking a psychopharmacological drug will have an effect on one’s body. It will have an effect on how you think and feel, which will ultimately have an effect on how you talk and what you do in society. Similarly, communicating with a psychotherapist will have an effect on how you think and feel, and this will also have effects on your body and brain. Physical, social, and mental systems function simultaneously and constitute environments for one another. ([Location 1265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1265)) - Luhmann successfully dissolved the traditional mind-body triple dualism. First, instead of an ontological division between ideal and material existence, there is a distinction between at least three, and potentially many more, kinds of systemic functions. There are psychic systems, living systems, and social systems. They do not split the world into a hierarchical structure of being, but into a complex arrangement of system/environment relations without any particular order. Second, instead of the hierarchical epistemological division between two kinds of knowledge, there is a differentiation between types of observation. Systems are observing systems and have their own internal capabilities for producing knowledge or cognition of their environment and of themselves. There is no privileged observatory platform and knowledge does not grant the ability to come to unequivocal conclusions or predictions. ([Location 1321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1321)) ## New highlights added September 10, 2023 at 10:58 PM - Autopoietic systems are not necessarily limited to the body, mind, and society. It can be imagined that there are or will be other types of operationally closed and autopoietic systems. In his later works, Luhmann repeatedly speculated, albeit without elaboration, about the possibility of, for instance, the emergence of novel autopoietic systems that may operate on the basis of computer technology.6 So far, computers, like all other machines, operate allopoietically, and not autopoietically, meaning they are not operationally closed. They are not (yet) self-generating and self-reproducing, and it is possible to immediately interfere in their operations. For instance, I am pressing a key on a keyboard right now, which is how the text that you are reading is currently being produced. No brain, social system, or mind can be steered in the way I steer my computer while writing this text. Therefore a better candidate for a fourth category of systems would perhaps be a nonliving natural system, such as, the global climate.7 ([Location 1159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1159)) - Even Marx, arguably the most profound social theorist of the nineteenth century, was incapable of expanding the traditional dualism and replacing it with a triadism/pluralism. He did not acknowledge that society is neither ideal nor material, but social, that is, a system not constituted by physical or mental operations but by communication. ([Location 1176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1176)) - Luhmann successfully dissolved the traditional mind-body triple dualism. First, instead of an ontological division between ideal and material existence, there is a distinction between at least three, and potentially many more, kinds of systemic functions. There are psychic systems, living systems, and social systems. They do not split the world into a hierarchical structure of being, but into a complex arrangement of system/environment relations without any particular order. Second, instead of the hierarchical epistemological division between two kinds of knowledge, there is a differentiation between types of observation. Systems are observing systems and have their own internal capabilities for producing knowledge or cognition of their environment and of themselves. There is no privileged observatory platform and knowledge does not grant the ability to come to unequivocal conclusions or predictions. Observations are equally dependent on their operational modes. Third, the ethical distinction between ideal and material values and the subsequent formulation of normative prescriptions is simply absent from systems theory. It is, at least in its Luhmannian form, non-ethical and amoral and does not ascribe moral superiority or inferiority to any specific kind of system. It does not, for instance, repeat the traditional moral imperative that the intellect ought to subdue the body. ([Location 1321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0064CZ1RA&location=1321))