Truth is the invention of a liar E-Book

Heinz von Foerster

• Herausgeber: Carl-Auer Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Systemische Horizonte
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 285

Beschreibung

"This book is so rich with insights, sparkling dialogue, and wisdom that one would love to distribute it like a leaflet around town." Südwestrundfunk (German radio station) "The intellectual dance that the two dare to dance is intelligent, light, humorous, and enchanting." Süddeutsche Zeitung (German daily) "I recommend this book not only to the cybernetics and systems community, but to anyone." Ranulph Glanville, Cybernetics and Human Knowing "Easy and enjoyable to read, without loss of scientific and philosophical depth and rigor. … The reader will find the book difficult to put down." Bernd R. Hornung, Journal of Sociocybernetics Conversations for skeptics How real is reality? Are our images of the world mere inventions or do they correspond to an external reality? Is it possible to know the truth? These are some of the questions that are discussed in this book by physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster and media studies scholar Bernhard Poerksen. Together they explore the limits of our cognitive capacities; they debate the apparent objectivity of our sensual perception and the consequences of "truth terrorism"; and they talk about the relationship between knowledge and ethics, sight and insight. The authors: Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002) completed his studies of physics in Vienna and worked at different research labs before emigrating to the United States in 1949. In 1957, at the University of Illinois, he established the Biological Computer Lab (BCL) – the cradle of the epistemology that would later cause a stir under the label of "constructivism." The focus was on analyzing the logical and methodological problems that in evitably arise when one seeks to know knowledge. He is the author of numerous books, including Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition. Bernhard Poerksen is professor of media studies at the University of Tübingen with a particular research interest in the new media age. His books about systemic thinking have been translated into many languages. In 2008 he was voted "Professor of the Year" in honor of his teaching. His most recent book publications in English include From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition (with Humberto Maturana), The Unleashed Scandal: The End of Control in the Digital Age (with Hanne Detel), and Digital Fever: Taming the Big Business of Disinformation.

Leseprobe

Systemic Horizons – Theory of Practice

Editor: Bernhard Poerksen

»Irritation is precious.«

Niklas Luhmann

The wild years of constructivism and systems theory are over. Today, constructivist and systemic thinking are fast becoming well-established paradigms and normal science. Yesterday’s provocations are today’s certainties. For some time now, we have seen them being harnessed for practical purposes, strategically applied in organizational consulting and management, in counseling and politics, in education and teaching. In short, they run the risk of turning into epistemological Biedermeier. An outsider philosophy becomes fashionable – complete with all cognitive follow-up costs that popularization and practical adaptation inevitably entail.

Against this background of ambivalent success, the series Systemic Horizons – Theory of Practice fulfills a dual role: It seeks to advance the theoretical work while at the same time challenging the world of practical application through both rigorous and rogue thinking. Changing one’s perspectives and points of view is put forward as a way of thinking that fosters creativity. The point is to practice one’s intelligence at the interfaces and in the in-between worlds: between science and application, between the humanities and the natural sciences, between philosophy and neurobiology.

The experimental explorations and essayistic excursions, the canonical texts and lightly penned dialogues are based on the insight that theory is needed most when it seems to have become superfluous – as an inspiration to think again and differently, to broaden your horizons, and to irritate you into reexamining personal certainties and final truths, ideologies, big and small, until they blur at the edges – and you see more than before.

Bernhard Poerksen, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen

Truth is the Invention of a Liar

Heinz von Foerster/Bernhard Poerksen

Conversations on Epistemology and Ethics Translation by Karen Leube

The preface to this new edition was translated by Manuela Thurner

Second edition, 2024

Members of the Scientific Advisory Board of Carl-Auer Verlag:

Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Rolf Arnold (Kaiserslautern)

Prof. Dr. Dirk Baecker (Dresden)

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Clement (Heidelberg)

Prof. Dr. Jörg Fengler (Köln)

Dr. Barbara Heitger (Wien)

Prof. Dr. Johannes Herwig-Lempp (Merseburg)

Prof. Dr. Bruno Hildenbrand (Jena)

Prof. Dr. Karl L. Holtz (Heidelberg)

Prof. Dr. Heiko Kleve (Witten/Herdecke)

Dr. Roswita Königswieser (Wien)

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kriz (Osnabrück)

Prof. Dr. Friedebert Kröger (Heidelberg)

Tom Levold (Köln)

Dr. Kurt Ludewig (Münster)

Dr. Burkhard Peter (München)

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Poerksen (Tübingen)

Prof. Dr. Kersten Reich (Köln)

Dr. Rüdiger Retzlaff (Heidelberg)

Prof. Dr. Wolf Ritscher (Esslingen)

Dr. Wilhelm Rotthaus (Bergheim bei Köln)

Prof. Dr. Arist von Schlippe (Witten/Herdecke)

Dr. Gunther Schmidt (Heidelberg)

Prof. Dr. Siegfried J. Schmidt (Münster)

Jakob R. Schneider (München)

Prof. Dr. Jochen Schweitzer † (Heidelberg)

Prof. Dr. Fritz B. Simon (Berlin)

Dr. Therese Steiner (Embrach)

Prof. Dr. Dr. Helm Stierlin † (Heidelberg)

Karsten Trebesch (Dallgow-Döberitz)

Bernhard Trenkle (Rottweil)

Prof. Dr. Sigrid Tschöpe-Scheffler (Köln)

Prof. Dr. Reinhard Voß (Koblenz)

Dr. Gunthard Weber (Wiesloch)

Prof. Dr. Rudolf Wimmer (Wien)

Prof. Dr. Michael Wirsching (Freiburg)

Prof. Dr. Jan V. Wirth (Meerbusch)

Series »Systemic Horizons«

Editor: Bernhard Poerksen

Series design: Uwe Göbel

Cover design: B. Charlotte Ulrich

Translation: Karin Leube

Typesetting: Drißner-Design u. DTP, Meßstetten

Printed in Germany

Print and binding: Stückle-Druck, Germany

Second edition, 2024

ISBN 978-3-8497-0566-4 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-8497-8511-6 (ePUB)

© 2002, 2024 Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag

und Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Heidelberg

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission of the copyright owner.

The first edition was published in 2002 under »Understanding Systems«.

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek

Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at.

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To Mai and Julia

Contents

The Socrates of Cybernetics: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Heinz von Foerster

By Bernhard Poerksen

The Gift of Origins

From the Vienna Circle to the Cybernetic Circle

A Scientific Community of Transdisciplinarians

From Outsider Philosophy to Fad

Further References

A Foreword in Three Acts

By Heinz von Foerster

I.  Invention

II.  Magic

III. Conversation

I. Images of Reality

1. Biology of Perception

The representation of the world

We never see the same thing

A short skit

Decision against solipsism

2. Facets of Truth

Truth means war

The hidden workings of nature

The ethical imperative

Loss of the archimedic point

The metaphor of the dance

3. The Danger of the Label

Skeptical remarks on Constructivism

An attempt to get around the big words

4. Explaining the Explanation

Cause and effect

Laws of people and laws of nature

Why Socrates had to die

Trivial and nontrivial machines

The interaction of nontrivial machines

II. Perspectives in Practice

1. Teaching

The pupil as a nontrivial machine

“Tests test tests”

From teacher to researcher

Outline of an experiment

2. Psychotherapy

The distinction between sickness and health

Generating a new eigenbehavior

Learning to see white mice

3. Management

Thus spake the hierarchy …

Thinking heterarchically

The Battle of Midway

Principles of self-organization

4. Communication

The world contains no information

Hermeneutics of the listener

Realities of the media

III. Cybernetics

The Fundamental Principle: Circularity

People and Machines

The Computer Metaphor of the Mind

Cybernetics of Cybernetics

We Do not See that We Do not See

All Cretans Lie

IV. Biographical Excursions

1. Childhood and Youth

The world of Vienna

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Experiences of a magician

2. The Second World War and the Post-war Period

Survival in Berlin, the capital of the Reich

As “Dr. Heinrich” on the radio

Collective guilt or individual responsibility

3. A Jump to another World: America

Theory of memory

Beginnings of Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences

The Biological Computer Laboratory

V. Knowledge and Ethics

Ethics is not a Theory

Decidable and Undecidable Questions

Responsibility for the World

About the Authors

The Socrates of Cybernetics: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Heinz von Foerster

By Bernhard Poerksen

Who is – was – Heinz von Foerster, who has been called the “Socrates of cybernetics”? We must caution against a hasty answer and definition.1 For like a late-born skeptic von Foerster was wary of being pinned down as a matter of principle; he sought to steer clear of fixed formulas and supposedly definitive definitions of positions and people. When asked, he accepted only one designation: He was “Viennese”; that quite simply could not be denied. “That is the only label that I have to accept. I come from Vienna; I was born there, that’s an established fact.” But what else? A cybernetician? – “First tell me what a cybernetician is before pinning such a label on me.” A follower of constructivism, the school of thought that got the academic world all excited for several years? – No way, he said during one of our last conversations: “The problem is that the moment any sort of -ism emerges and becomes fashionable, all involved – proponents and opponents alike – become prisoners of a semantic web: They cease to listen to each other, misunderstandings arise – and they start to rant and rave about the other side. If somebody asks me, ‘Are you a constructivist?’, I always, in order to gain access to that person’s world, answer with a question: What is that? What do you mean by that? Then he or she will say something, I will say something – and suddenly we’ll have a dialogue where the different views and perspectives are able to balance each other out and cause mutual astonishment and delight.” If we need a label at all, the closest fit might be “curiologist.” Or we could simply abandon the search for a fitting label to finally start the conversation and the dance of dialogue.

Heinz von Foerster, the dialogician, constantly and vehemently opposed intellectual rigidity. He always tried to avoid being pinned down to the one and only truth, rejecting an ontological perspective that searches for invariable ontic facts and presupposes an individual’s unchanging identity. Instead he preferred what he called an ontogenetic perspective; he did not speak of human beings but of human becomings: beings of potentiality whose paradoxical characteristic is precisely the continual dynamics of transformations and development opportunities. So when we look at von Foerster’s own life, this means that we should not only nor perhaps even primarily take stock of the results of his highly productive life but rather inquire into its history and genesis, the curious concatenation of coincidences, circumstances, and conditions that drove him forward and stimulated him. What we can learn from the many and diverse transformations of his life is this: What conditions must be met to throw off a discipline’s epistemological straightjacket? How can a many-sided and multi-disciplinary dialogue succeed? How can freedom of research be used? Finally, how is it possible to retain openness and playfulness in the academic realm, also when dealing with hermetic definitions, and to avoid turning into a dogma-formulating anti-dogmatist?

The Gift of Origins

Heinz von Foerster grew up in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Vienna, in a world of artists and creative minds. His great-grandfather, an architect, gave the city of Vienna its urban identity by designing the city’s famous Ringstrasse (ring road) and the so-called Gürtel (beltway) in the form of two concentric circles. His grandmother, Marie Lang, a theosophist and an early member of the bourgeois women’s movement in Central Europe, advocated for maternity rights and the rights of illegitimate children; throughout her life she used the power of the word and the public debate to fight against the discrimination of women, which was still taken for granted at the time. When his father was taken prisoner of war by the Serbs right at the beginning of World War I, his mother again and again took little Heinz to his grandmother’s house. Socialized, as it were, among the chair legs of a literary salon, he grew up among debating adults. As an adolescent, Heinz von Foerster came into contact with the city’s bohemian circles; the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was a family friend. One day, he and a friend decided to train as magicians; together they invented a few acts and, after a number of performances, were admitted to an association of artists and magicians that was quite well-reputed in Vienna at the time. Later on, Heinz von Foerster saw magic as an original epistemological experience, as an attempt to invent – together with the audience – a world of wonders and surprises.

When he began to study physics in Vienna, he fell under the spell of the Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle). Here, the wealth of inspirations as well as the realization that different worlds of thought and perception can combine to form a stimulating wonder-room became manifest a second time: After his grandmother’s salons, the young student of physics now came into contact with a circle of mathematicians, philosophers, and logicians eager for debate. In later years, his own ideas would have little in common with the insights of the Vienna Circle, which on the eve of a violent irrationalism championed clear thinking. In his later intellectual life, Heinz von Foerster had no use for the ideas of the brilliant logician Rudolf Carnap who believed that there was an irrefutable relationship between symbol and world, knowledge and reality. And yet, it was here that the young student encountered a way of thinking that would stay with him his whole life: it may be described by the words “inter- and transdisciplinarity.” However, Heinz von Foerster was not just interested in the facticity of cross-disciplinary encounters but in that tolerant and open mindset that enables these encounters in the first place. You have to make a conscious decision to cross a disciplinary boundary; you have to make a conscious decision to see polyphony not as dissonance or chaos but to enjoy the diversity of standpoints. The programmatic decision in favor of pluralism and the ability to enjoy differences as enrichment not only takes a certain personal poise and a self-confidence that may be contingent on talent; it also requires a cooperative mindset that constantly aims to emphasize that which connects rather than separates people.

However, before he would achieve international fame and reflect on questions of epistemology, the Second World War broke out. After completing his studies, Heinz von Foerster first worked as a physicist in Cologne and eventually returned to Vienna. Since his family and his Jewish grandfather were well-known and – now dangerously – prominent in Vienna, he fled to Berlin where he survived undetected and unrecognized in the center of Nazi power and capital of the Reich. He found work again as a physicist doing research, and at the end of the war, via many a detour, ended up once again in Vienna where he consulted for a telephone company and, now also working as a journalist, headed the culture and science desk of the U.S.-controlled radio station Rot-Weiß-Rot. At night and in between two jobs, he wrote his first book, Das Gedächtnis: Eine quantenphysikalische Untersuchung [Memory: A quantum-physical investigation]. In this book, he developed a theory of memory that fascinated the first generation of American cyberneticians and brought him to their attention.

From the Vienna Circle to the Cybernetic Circle

Owing to a series of fortunate circumstances and his special talents, Heinz von Foerster was catapulted onto the stage of the American scientific elite in 1949. He traveled to the United States; his wife, Mai, a former actress in Vienna, and his three sons would follow eventually. Noticing his talent, people invited and helped him. Though barely proficient in English, he gave lectures and talks; he later told laughingly, bewildered and touched at the same time, that these invitations actually came about to help him improve his “disastrous English.” In fact, from one moment to the next Heinz von Foerster was received into a circle of top-class scientists who gathered in the 1950s at the invitation of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation at the so-called Macy Conferences. He was appointed secretary and editor of the conference proceedings. The maths geniuses Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and Walter Pitts, the systemicist thinker Gregory Bateson, the star anthropologist Margaret Mead, the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, and many other researchers of similar stature formed a group of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary enthusiasts that could be called the Cybernetic Circle. Under the aegis of the Macy Foundation they talked about topics broadly related to the field of cybernetics. Discussions revolved around the construction of sensory prostheses; grief, laughter and humor; the huge carapaces of freshwater crabs; teleological mechanisms and circular causality. Always, the discussions aimed to uncover the fundamentals of living organisms and get them to disclose the secret of their functioning. Or, to put it in a less friendly way, the American science elite gathered here dreamt a far-reaching mechanistic dream that, it was believed, would finally result in the decoding of the human mind. Warren McCulloch und Walter Pitts’ 1943 treatise, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” which dealt with the neuronal reception and transmission of impulses, made possible a logical formalization of neuronal activity. And since the brain consists of neurons that are connected by synapses and axons, it was believed that the logicaltechnical reconstruction of the brain was within reach. It is here that the computer metaphors describing people as information-processing systems, thinking as data processing, and the brain as a storage unit have their origins. Already then, there was curiously carefree talk of building an “artificial brain.”

Heinz von Foerster, who always maintained friendly personal and professional contact with the members of the Cybernetic Circle, kept his distance – and developed an epistemology that is called second-order cybernetics and that departs from the control and regulation euphoria of what has since been called first-order cybernetics. The core idea is to approach the fundamental principle of cybernetics – the idea of circularity or circular causality – philosophically, as it were: to reflect on it in depth and follow it through to its logical conclusion. He started from the apparently innocent question: What does it take to understand a brain? The answer: a brain. The theory that thus seems necessary becomes circular. It must satisfy the criterion of describing itself. The strict separation of subject and object underlying first-order cybernetics disappears. In second-order cybernetics, the observer and the observed seem to be inextricably intertwined. This epistemological position fundamentally discredits a notion that is central to scientific knowledge and research: the notion of truth whose understanding commonly assumes a world independent of the observer, with the aim being to achieve correspondence between the cognizing mind and the external reality (adaequatio intellectus et rei). Second-order cybernetics brings into play the obligation to always reflect on one’s own idiosyncrasies and blind spots, to see one’s utterances in relation to oneself, to see them, in a serious sense, as one’s own product. This well-founded departure from ultimacy is probably the secret of a real dialogue; for if we abandon a fiercely imagined absolute, we pull the rug out from under a dogmatic battle of beliefs. The results of one’s own thinking necessarily retain an unfinished, provisional element that needs to be complemented by another’s thinking. Perhaps it was this epistemological mindset, which is not to be understood as withdrawal or denial but as a chance for cooperation, that made it possible for Heinz von Foerster to enjoy the many and diverse perspectives within the Cybernetic Circle.

A Scientific Community of Transdisciplinarians

After an interlude as director of the Electron Tube Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Heinz von Foerster once again set out for new horizons. He familiarized himself with neurobiological issues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied physiology with Arturo Rosenblueth in Mexico City, and in 1957, again at the University of Illinois, established the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL), a little scientific community of transdisciplinarians that would become a center of innovation in cognitive science. To lead such a niche institution to success, it not only takes a passion for working and experimenting in all directions but also a special perception organ to identify talented researchers. You need to be able to pass on your own enthusiasm to others. Such work requires, moreover, a certain immunity against the normative power of purely conventional research paths. Finally, it takes a fundamentally critical attitude to knowledge, a departure from a dogmatic belief in objectivity, to be able to open to other and new worlds of ideas. The game of being right and being proved right, which could easily destroy an atmosphere of shared intellectual enthusiasms, loses its meaning.

Obviously, the BCL succeeded in making interdisciplinary cooperation a matter of course. Philosophers and electrical engineers, biologists, anthropologists and mathematicians, artists and logicians met in the inspiring environment of the BCL to discuss epistemological questions from the perspectives of both the natural sciences and the humanities. They engaged with computational processes in humans and machines and analyzed the logical and methodological problems that inevitably arise when one seeks to know knowledge and observe the observer. The mathematician Lars Löfgren worked on a concept of logic that permits rather than negates self-referential statements, which classical Aristotelian logic rejects as nonsensical. The seminal essay by the neurobiologist Humberto Maturana, a founding document of constructivism entitled Biology of Cognition, originated as a research report at the BCL. The young researcher Francisco Varela, who later would advance the dialogue between Buddhist philosophy and cognitive science, found here a forum for his interest in theoretical biology. Gordon Pask developed the fundamentals of his conversation theory at the BCL. Ross Ashby gave lectures on cybernetics. And an Israeli dancer was teaching forms of movement that were to be used for the construction of moving automata. One of the first parallel computers was built at the BCL.

Heinz von Foerster raised the necessary funds from the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; he published central works on the notion of self-organization which are still discussed today and organized conferences under the title Principles of Self-Organization (1960) which were attended by, among others, the economist Friedrich von Hayek and the theoretical systemicists Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Anatol Rapoport. He defended a student’s dissertation that was only five pages long against the objections of the academic establishment. However, in later years, a number of outstanding scientists left the institute, and raising external funding was becoming increasingly difficult. When a law (the Mansfield Amendment) was passed in 1968 prohibiting military sponsors from supporting any projects that had no clear military use, the BCL, whose existence was intimately tied to Heinz von Foerster’s commitment, was closed down upon his retirement in the early 1970s.

From Outsider Philosophy to Fad

A few years after his retirement, Heinz von Foerster – inspired by his contact with the Palo Alto-based psychologist Paul Watzlawick – became known to a wider scientifically interested public. He traveled extensively, lectured increasingly to therapists, spoke at big conferences from Berlin to Bogotá, sometimes in front of thousands of people, and started to spell out more clearly the social and practical relevance of his epistemological insights. In much-discussed lectures, he described the cybernetic key concept of circular causality as inspiration for an observer-relative ethics – a “cybernethics,” as he called it. At the same time, in the 1980s and 1990s, second-order cybernetics joined with works on autopoiesis, theories of self-organization, and thoughts on cultural and linguistic philosophy to evolve into a polyphonic discourse labeled constructivism that caused a stir primarily among European scientists and scholars and became an academic fad. Heinz von Foerster’s ideas were adopted and discussed above all in literary and communication studies, sociology, education, social work, and management studies. These attempts to fit his ideas into scientific and philosophical schools of thought are all about reflecting on the discovery of the observer – that key figure of the cognizing subject that plays the main role in all cognitive processes – with all its consequences: Literary hermeneutics once and for all becomes subject-/observer-specific, and the reader – according to a popular formula – becomes the real hero of the text. Media studies sees the media system as an autonomous producer of reality and asks, for example, in what ways journalists construct reality. Education, social work, psychotherapy, and management studies struggle with the question of how it is possible to influence and teach these observers – who are envisioned to be cognitively autonomous students, patients or colleagues –, how to change their constructions of reality and enhance their motivation. These are all disciplines and fields of application that in one way or another deal with changing people through communication; they study how attempts at external control can be translated into internally applied offers of self-regulation – that is, how it is possible to rededicate potentially stubborn and inevitably self-willed systems to one’s own goals, after all.

Within these diverse people-changing disciplines, Heinz von Foerster’s thinking generally becomes effective on two levels: At the level of criticism, his insights provide the basis for criticizing trivial concepts of regulation and rejecting them as insufficient; the belief in linear-directive influencing possibilities is unmasked as erroneous and wishful thinking. At the level of general principles, views of human nature, and didactic objectives, the respect of the other person’s autonomy seems justifiable after reading Foerster’s writings – true to his ethical imperative: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.” If we follow down this path, the important thing is to help a system regulate itself as best as possible and to promote the creative development of all involved; it is about a form of outside regulation that takes systemic autonomy seriously and that presupposes, respects, and cares for the other person’s autonomy, always aware of the necessity to protect differences and diversity and to fight against the standardization of perspectives and positions. It is a way of thinking that had its finger on the pulse of the time and that fit the zeitgeist. The Cold War and the era of great ideologies seemed to have come to an end. As a symbol of the times, people in Berlin were dancing on a wall that had until recently divided the city into two ideological camps. In this era of new beginnings and reorientation, Heinz von Foerster was very much a celebrity on the conference circuit.

However, the stardom of his views and ideas (and related to this, their social power) is something that the Socratic thinker and friendly skeptic Heinz von Foerster – who always firmly refused to discredit and dominate other points of view – could only enjoy to a certain extent. For there is always the danger that ideas that originally fought against dogmatic rigidity themselves turn into new, seemingly definite dogmas. Heinz von Foerster tried to retain the subversive element of his thinking, to avoid the seduction of power and of intellectual hegemony complete with its inherent contradictions. He had an unconventional and humorous lecturing style, and he was quick to make fun of the fuss that was made around constructivism in Europe, as can also be seen in this book. In his essays, he combined epistemology and ethics, poetic aphorisms and mathematical precision; one moment he talks about Martin Buber’s philosophy, the world’s fundamental opacity, the wonder and the awe, and the next moment he talks about recursion processes, non-trivial machines, intrinsic values, and the principle of self-organization. Until the end of his life and as his popularity increased, he tried to transform the growing numbers of admirers into friends and dialogue partners with whom to conduct a conversation free of cumbersome etiquette, tiresome conventions, and inflated celebrity cult and to embark on a shared search full of curiosity and a passion for knowledge.

On October 2, 2002, Heinz von Foerster, the dialogician, humanitarian, and pioneer of a transdiciplinary understanding of science, died in his house in Pescadero, California, at the age of 90. His impact is documented in various festschrifts, films, and a special posthumous issue of the journal Cybernetics & Human Knowing. The American Society for Cybernetics keeps alive the memory of his ideas. To this day, the Heinz von Foerster Society in Vienna supports research on his ideas and for many years held regular international conferences on this work. Most of his extensive estate is owned by the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Journals such as Constructivist Foundations still rely on Heinz von Foerster to give the occasional prompt. As early as 2003, many of his key essays were published in a collection entitled Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition. This is, if you will, the obvious, publicly manifest impact of an intellectual life defined by an unrivaled passion for research and inquiry.

But there is, I believe, another sphere of Heinz von Foerster’s activity that is harder to describe. It touches on personal encounters and relationships, experiences of friendship and encouragement that continue to reverberate in subtle ways, sometimes to this day. Allow me to illustrate this by using my own example. In 1996 – I was 27 years old and had just finished my studies – I sat in the office of the Deutsche Allgemeine Sonntagsblatt in a villa on Hamburg’s Mittelweg and, as a rather unhappy trainee in charge of the newspaper’s media page, launched a few articles every week, which, if memory serves me, mostly dealt with TV series of some sort. Year after year, the newspaper had to be subsidized by millions of marks. It felt a little bit like writing and publishing on the Magic Mountain, seclusive, sickly, slightly sad, steering a course based on our own ideas of which we could not know whether they would be of any interest to the outside world. One day, the Sonntagsblatt published an interview that I had conducted with Heinz von Foerster and that I couldn’t get out of my head because, during our meeting, I had sensed a serene way of thinking and an elasticity and elegance in discussion and dispute that I had not come across previously. Shortly after the interview was published, I wrote him a letter and, in a fit of hubris, proposed that we write a book together – he, the 86-year-old agenda setter of the international science scene at the height of his popularity, and I, the unhappy trainee searching for his vocation, who had neither any academic merits nor a book to his name. To my amazement, he thought it was a good idea, and when we talked on the phone soon after he had received my letter, all he wanted to know was when I would have time to come for a weeks-long visit. I asked for a few months’ time to prepare and find a publisher, quit my job at the newspaper, tried to read all his essays, and finally, armed with my recording devices, made the trip to California where I spent several weeks interviewing him in his house in Pescadero, an hour’s drive from San Francisco. The house was located on a hill called “Rattlesnake Hill.” Heinz von Foerster claimed that the rattling of the rattlesnakes intonated a melody that resembled the Radetzky March – if only one listened closely enough. I can’t confirm that, because in my wanderings across the hill not far from the ocean, among old trees and thick grass, I did not encounter a single rattlesnake but a magician of cybernetics. Our conversations often took place at night, for von Foerster gave me to understand soon after my arrival that there would be days when he would be unavailable until 10 o’clock in the evening. Too busy, he said, meaning that he hosted guests, prepared lectures, worked on publications, and maintained the huge grounds with his mowing machines to prevent them from becoming overgrown within weeks. And so, at night, I drove from the only hotel in town to his house. He made coffee. And then we talked, hour after hour, night after night. For me, it was pure bliss. And instructive. For it became clear to me that at the beginning of all understanding and learning, there is the event of the dialogue – a dance of minds that is predicated on the encounter with and the inspiration through another. It is my hope that you, as readers of this small book, which is now available in a new edition, will be able to feel something of the magic of dialogue that is intimately connected to Heinz von Foerster’s life and work.

Further References

Heims, S. J. (1991). The Cybernetics Group. MIT Press.

Maturana, H. R. (1970). Biology of Cognition: Biological Computer Laboratory Research Report BCL 9.0. University of Illinois.

Maturana, H. R., & Poerksen, B. (2004). From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition. Carl-Auer.

McCulloch, W., & Pitts, W. (1943). A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5, pp. 115–133.

Müller, A. (2007). A Brief History of the BCL: Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory. In A. Müller & K. H. Müller (Eds.), An Unfinished Revolution? Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) (pp. 277–302). Edition Echoraum.

Müller, A. (2007). The End of the Biological Computer Laboratory. In A. Müller & K. H. Müller (Eds.), An Unfinished Revolution? Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) (pp. 303–321). Edition Echoraum.

Poerksen, B. (2004). The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism. Imprint Academic.

Poerksen, B. (2011). The Creation of Reality: A Constructivist Epistemology of Journalism and Journalism Education. Imprint Academic.

von Foerster, H. (1948). Das Gedächtnis: Eine quantenphysikalische Untersuchung. Franz Deuticke.

von Foerster, H. (2003). Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition. Springer.

1 In keeping with good academic practice, a note on the genesis and sources of this essay: This essay is based on previously published texts which have been slightly expanded and revised; see Bernhard Poerksen, “Die Entdeckung des Möglichen: Über den Kybernetiker und Erfinder Heinz von Foerster,” Gegenworte: Zeitschrift für den Disput über Wissen [Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities] 1 (1998): 62–67; Bernhard Poerksen, “Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002): The Socrates of Cybernetics,” International Journal of General Systems 32, no. 6 (2003): 519–23. See also Bernhard Poerksen, “Ethik der Erkenntnistheorie: Bernhard Poerksen über Heinz von Foersters Wissen und Gewissen,” in Schlüsselwerke des Konstruktivismus, ed. Bernhard Poerksen (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011), 319–40.

A Foreword in Three Acts

By Heinz von Foerster

I. Invention

If there were no such thing as a lie, everything that we say would be true. But with Ockham’s semantic razor, we do not have to mention anything that is universally valid. That means truth does not come about until the liar has started doing his or her job. “Truth is the invention of a liar.”

I was quite proud of myself for coming up with this insight and rushed over to a philosopher friend of mine so he could share in my discovery. “My dear Heinz,” he said, “you’re half a millennium too late!” and told me to read Nicholas of Cusa.

“Why him?” I wanted to know.

And so I learned that in God’s infinite kingdom there are no lies. Everything is true. But everything is true because there are no lies. In order to make this easier to understand, Nicholas of Cusa provides us with a metaphor. Imagine a circle with a finite diameter and allow the circle to grow and grow and grow until the diameter becomes infinitely large. Then the circumference becomes a straight line. An infinite circle is identical to a straight line! The opposites coincide with each other. It’s the coincidentia oppositorum.

II. Magic

In the spring of 1994, I was invited to hold the opening lecture at the fourteenth international conference on social psychiatry in Hamburg. I asked myself, “What can I tell the experts on social psychiatry that they don’t already know? How can I get a foot in the door of this world?”

Luckily, the topic of the conference had already supplied me with the key to my lecture. It was entitled “Farewell to Babylon” and dealt with deterioration and confusion in language.

But what is language? How does language become a medication – the only medication – in the framework of a social psychiatry?