"The real voyage of discovery consists not
in seeking new
landscapes, but in having new eyes..." Marcel Proust
If you desire to see,
learn how to act. Act always so as to
increase the number of choices. Heinz von Foerster
Speaking of his friend Warren McCulloch, one of the founders of the
Science of Information, Heinz von Foerster said, "He was a creative
receptacle for every fascinating idea, whether it was logic,
mathematics, physiology, neurophysiology, philosophy or poetry." [1]
Heinz could have been speaking about himself. He was one of the
original founders of cybernetics. He could have added to the list
his own mastery of downhill skiing and mountain climbing. He had
a avid interest in family therapy and Feldenkrais work, both fields to
which he made contributions. But when we, who had come into his
sphere, spoke of Heinz, we thought of more than a list of his domains
of expertise or a set of attributes: charismatic, honorable,
inspirational. We would recall more than his distinctive and
cheerful Austrian accent or the kinetic ease and grace of virtually his
every gesture and movement. A meeting with Heinz was a special kind of
occasion. In speaking about Heinz one could use ‘Heinz’ as a noun
or a verb. As a prelude to a meeting with Heinz, one could
say “Let’s Heinz.” While his friend Bucky Fuller might say, “I seem to
be a verb,” with Heinz everything and everyone seemed to be in a
becoming. To break the hold of Descartes' "I think, therefore I am"
Heinz might say, "In becoming 'we' each of us realizes 'I'." Whether
listening to a thoroughly entrancing lecture or having tea and torte
with him and his wife Mai at the home he built on Rattlesnake Hill in
Pescadero, California, you just felt present at something unique.
It was a kind of homecoming that would inevitably become a departure, a
journey of discovery and invention.
Heinz became part of our Feldenkrais world, and the Feldenkrais method
part of the von Foerster universe in 1977. Either Thom Sturm (SF '77)
or Patrick Douce (SF '77) brought Heinz von Foerster, Patrick's
former mentor from the Biological Computer Lab at the Champagne Urbana
campus of the University of Chicago, to the San Francisco Feldenkrais
Training in 1977. Whether it was Thom or Patrick, it was rightly
divined to be a fruitful encounter. Heinz entered the training room
just about at the start of an ATM lesson. He got on the floor and
did the lesson. After, he talked with Moshe and our training
group and told stories and anecdotes, mostly familiar to Moshe, from
science and cybernetics. He was quite engaging and seemed to have
a good grasp of what we were there to learn. His stories, when
linked together, present a worldview inclusive of science but evocative
of a grander scope, what Heinz called Systemics (the content of his
keynote speech at a Feldenkrais conference in 1989). Some of
those stories were retold by Moshe in his later books lending another
level of accessibility and clarity to Moshe's own ideas of learning and
the role played by one's nervous system.
The "nervous system," reified in the Feldenkrais community as an almost
alien entity controlling our every behavior, is according to von
Foerster but one autonomous system linked inextricably with all the
other systems comprising the unity that is the individual,
organismically and socially. We should realize that, for us, when
we invoke the nervous system we are saying nothing significant about
the discipline of anatomy. We are really indicating a set of
practices congruent with the notion of "organic learning", that is,
Functional Integration and Awareness Through Movement. Our use of
the term nervous system, in other words, means something unique to us.
As we shall see, Heinz and his colleagues not only re-visioned notions
of the dynamics deterministic of the biological individuality of the
organism, but they also rethought how the organism’s component systems
serve that individuality.
I first met Heinz at a seminar in Big Sur in 1976. I forget what
the seminar was about. Heinz’s co-leaders were Chilean
neurophenomenolgist Francisco Varela and exponent of consciousness
expansion, John Lily. Varela, fellow Chilean Humberto Maturana and
Heinz von Foerster were the main proponents of what came to be called
the Santiago School of Neuroepistemology. The Santiago School
asked and answered the question, what is a living entity? They
coined the word autopoiesis
(auto – self, poiesis – making, hence
self-making) to denote a truly novel way to distinguish the
organization of a living entity from the non-living. Out of their
radical yet pragmatic position towards the question of ‘what is a
living entity’ -- what is living?
what is an entity in its
unity? --
there necessarily followed the need to re-cast notions of self,
language, and learning. That is, to see things anew
required a dis-stance from the orthodox stance. For Heinz
et al this new stance emerges from a collapsing of the space between
the observer and the observed. That is, the observer is in
relation to, is “coupled” with, the observed and observing yielding
Heinz’s Systemics. In Heinz's words:
As you may remember, (in
Science) objectivity requires that the
properties of the observer shall not enter the description of his
observations. With the essence of observing, namely the processes of
cognition, being removed, the observer is reduced to a copying machine,
and the notion of responsibility has been successfully juggled away.
....hierarchies, objectivity, and other devices, are all derivations of
a decision that has been made on a pair of, in principle, undecidable
questions. Here is the decisive pair:
Am I apart from the universe?
That is, whenever I look I
am looking as through a peephole upon an
unfolding universe.
or
Am I part of the universe?
That is, whenever I act, I
am changing myself and the universe as well.
Whenever I reflect upon
these two alternatives, I am surprised again
and again by the depth of the abyss that separates the two
fundamentally different worlds that can be created by such choices. [2]
It necessarily follows that the orthodox stance carries with it an
ethics, an ethics at odds with that of the Santiago School. How is it
that an observer arises to observe? What happens when we shift
from observers and things observed to include ourselves in the
question? That is, what are the implications of the shift from observed
systems to the observing system entangling itself with the observed,
the observer and observing. For Heinz it is, "Either to see myself as a
citizen of an independent universe, whose regularities, rules and
customs I may eventually discover, or to see myself as the participant
of a conspiracy, whose customs, rules, and regulations we are now
inventing."[3]
As with any really novel approach the Santiago School at first met with
opposition, misunderstanding, jealousy, some enthusiasm and mostly
neglect. Currently their worldview is gaining some acceptance even if
it’s through a lot of unacknowledged appropriation of their
ideas.
From the beginning I felt an immediate kinship with the ideas of the
Santiago School. I gave Moshe my copy of Varela's book The Principles
of Biological Autonomy while I was in Israel in 1979. In Boulder
in the
summer of 1980 Moshe told Varela at their first meeting that Varela’s
book was one of the two or three most important books Moshe had ever
read. The ideas in that book, while uniquely crafted by Varela,
are part of a larger set of concerns also held by Maturana, von
Foerster, et al. Varela says of von Foerster:
As the dust settles with
time, the role of Heinz von Foerster in
contemporary science becomes sharper and more vivid…
I cannot write about Heinz
without saying that I owe him a lot not only
intellectually but also personally. …In 1962 he met Humberto Maturana,
a Chilean neurophysiologist who was to be my undergraduate mentor in
1965-68. Thanks to that (for me) lucky encounter, I found laying on
table counters articles by Heinz with such titles as "A Circuitry of
Clues for Platonic Ideation" when I arrived at Humberto's lab in
Santiago. …It sent my imagination flying into a hyperspace of ideas and
style of work from which I have never recovered. Besides, Heinz's style
is one of posing questions and main principles in a concise form, which
made his writings intellectual zettels I had in my pockets by the time
I arrived as a graduate student at Harvard in 1968. By then, the wind
had begun to blow in the opposite direction: I found virtually nobody
to talk to about these issues. McCulloch had already retired from MIT,
and the AI Lab was under the dominance of Marvin Minsky, who excelled
at exorcising what he saw as "unproductive stuff" (from today's
perspective, that is quite ironic). Heinz kindly invited me to come to
Illinois a few times during the time I was in Cambridge, and each time
I was touched by the humor and openness of this Viennese.
After returning to Chile in
1970, we developed with Maturana the notion
of autopoiesis, and the first paper published on it owes a tremendous
amount to Heinz's comments and corrections during a long stay in Chile
during June-August 1973, when the rumblings of civil war were only too
evident. Heinz was perhaps the first who recognized immediately the
interest of this idea at a time when almost everyone else wanted us to
drop such idle speculations. A similar experience was to be repeated in
1974 when Heinz was again instrumental in making my calculus of
self-reference quickly accepted and disseminated, when I was stranded
in Costa Rica after escaping Pinochet's Chile
Since then and until today
Heinz has been an untiring ear and friendly
advisor. His ethical and human qualities are impeccable, and they have
been a source of much needed inspiration. Thus, this is the right place
for me to restate all my enormous debt towards him. Without his
influence and his presence for the last 30 years, my life would have
lacked a deep, joyous, and nourishing dimension. I call him Heinz the
Great. [4]
(Sadly, the mentor was to
outlive the apprentice as Varela passed away
from liver cancer in 2001. The liver cancer was a consequence of his
having contracted hepatitis while in exile in Costa Rica from the
repressive Pinochet regime in Chile.)
Feldenkrais lessons evidence genius on virtually every level upon which
they are examined. While very practical in application the lessons are
rife with theoretical implications that need pairing with a
complementary theoretical biology. Feldenkrais's approach challenges
most theories of how we learn and how we define optimal living.
Awareness Through Movement and Functional Integration lessons prove
their practicality and effectiveness over and over again every day on
virtually every continent. Moshe explicitly situated his method
as a phase in the space between the current scientific zeitgeist and
some future orthodoxy. And, von Foerster, Varela and Maturana
have gone a long way in developing a theoretical approach consonant
with Functional Integration and Awareness Through Movement. In the
history of science sometimes theory precedes practical demonstration
and sometimes an experiment or phenomenon needs a new theory to explain
it. By way of example: For the layman, Einstein was the exemplar of a
genius. In the popular mind, the proof of the power of Einstein's
ideas came not in understanding the beauty and elegance of his Special
and General Theories of Relativity but rather in their seeing the power
and destructiveness of the Atomic bombs dropped on Japan during
WWII. Einstein himself developed his theories in response to
experiments which were inexplicable in the classical mechanics of
Newton. And so it goes, sometimes theory precedes practice and
sometimes practice precedes theory. Feldenkrais's method is his
own unique creation and while he could cobble together ideas to support
his insights and practical implementations he knew that there was not,
and to this day still is not, a General or Special theory of Human
development.
At the Big Sur seminar Heinz read a sonnet by Shakespeare and asked us,
"What does it mean?" Can we say what the meaning of a particular
set of words in a particular order is by using another set of words, in
another order? It’s such a subtle yet subversive question. The
poet Louis Zukofsky [5] wrote that the test of a critical system is how
well it matches the word with its subject/object. Can the
integrity of a poem, he asked, remain intact when translated into or
read through the lens of a critical meta-theory? Zukofsky shows
that the trueness of words in
poems to the poem is not captured in
words about poems.
Therefore, critical systems fail the test of
poetry. Through a playful discussion Heinz demonstrated that not only
is it not possible to say the meaning of a poem (definition not being
the name of the game) but that some unexpected things happen to such
attempts. The philosophy of Heinz's famous uncle Ludwig Wittgenstein
influenced Heinz's ability to parse statements and frame questions in a
unique way. Wittgenstein made his mark on 20th century philosophy
by, among other things, developing the notion of language games.
For Wittgenstein, language games are a kind of technique for examining
uses of words and sentences in ordinary language. They were employed
to, “…battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of
our language." [6] We're not talking ‘word games’ here. Rather,
Wittgenstein sought to determine the meaning of a word by considering
its use in language as an activity, a
form of life. It is a
rule-governed practice, like a game. Language-games show the use of
words in a context of human behaviors. Wittgenstein calls the
context and activities ‘forms of life.’ All human activities, simple or
complex, are forms of life, part of human culture. Speaking a language
or, as in signing for the deaf enacting a gestural language, is part of
a form of life. Philosophy should be understood as an activity,
not as a theorizing, but rather something more like "learning."
Language-games are a way of getting at and situating the meanings of
words in any given language. Wittgenstein states, "to imagine a
language means to imagine a form of life." [7] The total environment in
which the language is used is part of the language game. "If, in any
given language, one cannot ask questions, give orders, describe things,
or make requests, then these activities do not exist there. That is
what seems to be meant by saying that language-games are expressions of
a form of life." [8] In a phrase that echoes Feldenkrais's insight that
we are being held hostage by our incomplete, unquestioned and even
fraudulent self-image, Wittgenstein says,
115. A 'picture' held us
captive. And we could not get outside it, for
it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us
inexorably.
Uncle Ludwig's purpose, not unlike Moshe Feldenkrais's, is simply to
help us see past these muddles. Wittgenstein says:
464. My aim is: to teach
you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense
to something that is patent nonsense. [9]
While Moshe was developing his method he read Wittgenstein with an
eager thoroughness, the effect of which was reflected in his own
careful use of language. The language game called the Feldenkrais
Method is an assemblage of practices -- descriptive, mechanical,
aesthetical, ethical -- that stands or falls on its own logicality or
self coherence. The 'form of life' that is the Feldenkrais method today
is best understood from the inside out. In the course of his
presentation Heinz was able to show, echoing his famous uncle, that any
particular ideological stance, be it Freudian, Jungian, Marxist,
deconstructionist, etc., used to interpret a poem may occasionally
elicit some new understanding of the poem. More often, however, what is
revealed is something more about the interpreter and his or her
ideological stance and less about the interpreted. Ultimately the poem
absorbs the interpretation, metabolizes it and develops 'antibodies' to
that interpretive mode. Again, the test of a critical reading is
in its ability to match words with the work it critiques and pretends
to explain. Heinz maintained that while an interpretation may
carry the day or win the battle, in the end, the poem outflanks said
interpretation to win the war. A more fruitful approach would be
to look at "how" a poem means. At another time we'll fully
explore the analogy between understanding a sonnet and understanding an
Awareness Through Movement or Functional Integration lesson. Just
as a poem generates new meaning with every reading so we can see the
same inexplicable robustness in Feldenkrais lessons. Is that due to the
power of the process or to the weakness of our descriptive
apparatus? Both? Neither? Lessons and poems seem to
perpetually yield new interpretations.
For Heinz, the question was not only ‘what defines life?’ but also how
it is defined and by whom. Is life so generic that a list of attributes
can be made that exhaustively contain it? Wouldn't one need a
kind of definition that includes the person(s) doing the
defining? To displace the model of physics and its necessarily
materialistic basis as the theoretical underpinnings for a theory
the living, Heinz first revisited Aristotle's four fold notion of
causality: 1) material cause - the matter from which a thing is formed;
2) efficient cause - that which actually causes the event; 3) formal
cause - the form to be realized, and; 4) final cause - the purpose to
be realized. Aristotle used the example of a statue to illustrate his
point: the block of marble from which it is to be hewn is the material
cause; the sculptor himself, through the intermediary of his tools, in
his chipping away at the stone is the efficient cause; the form which
is present in the sculptor's mind during the work is the formal cause;
the destination or purpose of the completed statue is the final cause.
The first three causes refer to the thing itself. The fourth cause,
final cause, evidences the very existence of a thing as the realization
of a purpose. For Aristotle every living and every inanimate thing has
purpose. Explanations which traffic in a thing’s purpose are called
teleological (telos – ends; logos – saying, speaking; hence a speaking
or saying of ends). Efficient cause is solely the one modern
science employs. Science as we know it purposely excludes final cause,
or purpose, in its definitions. For Heinz's Uncle Ludwig
Wittgenstein causality (in its guise as efficient causality) is a
superstition, the superstition of modernity. But here are
Wittgenstein's own words:
5.135 There is no possible
way of making an inference from the
existence of one situation to the existence of another entirely
different situation.
5.136 There is no causal
nexus to justify such an inference.
5.1361 We cannot infer the
events of the future from those of the
present. Belief in the causal nexus is superstition. [10] (emphasis
Wittgenstein's)
And in the words of Heinz's friend Warren McCulloch: "...let us be
perfectly frank to admit that causality is a superstition." We
are all, of course, familiar with Feldenkrais's railing against
'cause-effect' thinking.
For Heinz, purpose and non-purpose are linked in very complex ways and
are both required in any description of a living system. To the
traditional disallowance of purpose in scientific explanations, Heinz
would ask. "Ah, but what is the purpose
of no purpose?" For the
Santiago School, any observer of any phenomenon must have some sort of
training, must, in other words be trained by someone and therefore be a
member of some tradition. And a tradition such as science has a
rationale, a purpose, for its being thought of as unique. In the
scientific tradition the observer remains outside the observed event or
process. In the Santiago School the observer, whoever she or he
may be, cannot stand outside of time and place. And so, any
description that includes its describer cannot be reduced totally to a
list of non-temporal attributes. There is a history of actions,
rules and principles and that history is peopled and those people
constitute a tradition. On that Maturana, Varela and von Foerster
all agree. However, von Foerster and Varela braid together purpose and
non-purpose so as to give a place for the givenness of meaning toward
or intention in everyday life. How we link science and it's products
with science as a human activity is crucial for Heinz. He is an
emphatic proponent of not trivializing human beings via scientific
reductionism.
The import of Heinz’s impact rests upon recognizing the difference
between trivial thought and non-trivial understanding. For Heinz the
abstract notion of a "machine" denotes any conceptual device used to
contemplate something. Machines are mechanisms that link a
system's external variables to the system's internal states (if there
are any) and its operations. Machines describe the form of such
linkages and can be realized in flesh and blood or on a silicon
chip. They are not to be thought of as what people or beings are
but rather machines are the generalized patterns of thought which
connect. Heinz describes two types of machines: trivial and
non-trivial. Heinz depicts the implications of trivial machines to be
like the schemas of a light switch or a soda machine, in that they
characterize modes of thinking in different domains that employ
cause-effect thinking and the desire for predictability. Given
the same input you get the same output. You have, for example, a
cause (the input), the law of nature (the transfer function) and then
you get the effect (output). With a trivial machine, say a soda
machine, you put in your money, push the soda choice (coke, orange,
7-Up) and get your soda. The trivial machine is designed to give
a specific output to every specific input. Imagine that the soda
machine had "internal states" that biased or even determined what soda
would come out despite your selection. That is, pretend that the
machine had developed internal dynamics that made its output
unpredictable. What if you are in the mood for a coke and you
punch the coke button but the machine is in a "7-up mood" and so gives
you 7-Up? That kind of unpredictability would render the machine
non-trivial.
Heinz von Foerster: "the trivial machine is the mainstay, the paradigm,
underlying our 'logical' working conditions in almost all fields of
study." Some examples from Heinz's biography The Dream of Reality
by Lynn Segal:
Input
Transfer
Function
Output
____________________________________________________________________
1. Cause
Law of nature
Effect
2. Stimulus
Central nervous
system
Response
3. Motivation
Character
Deeds
4. Goal
System
Action
5. Minor premise
Major
premise
Conclusion
6. Dependent argument Independent
Argument Function
"These machines have the following properties:
1) They are
predictable.
2) They are history
independent. Whatever took place in the
past will not
influence the present.
3) They are
synthetically deterministic. You can plug them
together. You can
synthesize them.
4) They are
analytically deterministic. If you want to find
out how they work, you can give them inputs, observe
the outputs, and figure out the transfer function.”
"By contrast, the nontrivial machine is:
1) Synthetically
deterministic, i.e., you can glue a nontrivial
machine together, just as you can do with a trivial machine. For
example, you can write down a transfer table.
2) Unlike the trivial
machine, however, it is historically
dependent. What it does, its output, is determined by its
experience, its history.
3) It is analytically
indeterminable; you
can't figure out what the machine is ` doing by
operating it because it is too complex.
4) It is therefore analytically
unpredictable.” [11]
Heinz, "If one wants to use the word 'reality,' the nontrivial machine
models the reality with which we are working. The trivial machine
is just a hope, a predicted wish for the way we would like things to
be, we trivialize them. We trivialize complex systems so we can
predict and explain them." [12] The trivial machine epitomizes
our quest for certainty.
A story. So, in one of his annual talks at the
Somathematics Feldenkrais Training in 1988 Heinz was distinguishing
between trivial and non-trivial machines and fleshing out the
consequences in various domains of science and thought. At a
certain point, a student asked the question, "Heinz are you saying
blah-blah blah or blah-blah. Heinz graciously responded and did
not point out to the student that the very form of the question
revealed the entrenchment of a default trivialization in our thinking,
the logicality of either/or. To say what Feldenkrais is one must
be vigilant to distinguish the trivial from the non-trivial.
There is a tendency amongst students and practitioners alike to want to
trivialize the Feldenkrais method by forcing it through the very kinds
of default thinking that Moshe worked so hard to free himself
from. More than his colleagues Maturana or Varela, Heinz was
sensitive to the need to build a bridge from a cause-effect thinking to
a thinking oriented towards understanding understanding. He
wanted to keep what was radical and useful in the old and by revealing
its inherent limitations use that revelation as a ground to embrace the
non-trivial.
The poet Michael Palmer: "Once I couldn't see for awhile, so I
listened." From the sequence of poems dedicated to Robert Duncan come
these lines:
You can bring down a house
with sound.
Not to understand this.
But we builded it.
Not with periods (the
sentence) or any sense of design--
sight or sound.
Builded it while blind.
Rain came in.
Noises not ours. [13]
We build, construct, make, not by design, but by listening for
something that is not us, not yet, maybe never. Heinz promoted
poiesis, the making of a world through its givens and through a mutual
grasping and ordering of objects where they can be ordered and a
letting go of all that can't be ordered. The stance is neither to
follow orders, nor to give orders but to
act in order to... understand.
The richness, complexity and clarity reached in an understanding goes
beyond mere problem solving, solution generation or conflict
resolution. When one understands, one lives. For Heinz
there were human becomings in lieu of human beings. One of
Heinz's students Bob Zielinski says this in a short piece entitled A
Personal Story of My Encounter With Heinz von Foerster:
Heinz showed us how, when
we looked at the whole system, often the
problems we studied were really solutions, and that the apparent
solutions were often the problem. But most of all, what I learned, is
how the important solutions that could benefit the world rested on
simple and obvious observations, and these were often the most elusive.
We saw in class how people can work together in cooperation and that
when each individual is respected and cared for, that the whole system
will work with maximum efficiency - demonstrated "synergy". What a
contrast to the "entropy" of the world. [14]
Heinz "showed us how..." and when one gives of one's self the way he
did what can be said? In the words of Charles Sanders Peirce by
consensus of European philosophers, possibly America's greatest
philosopher:
But just the revelation of
the possibility of this complete
self-sacrifice in man, and the belief in its saving power, will serve
to redeem the logicality of all men. For he who recognizes the
logical necessity of complete self-identification of one's own
interests with those of the community, and its potential existence in
man, even if he has it not himself, will perceive that only the
inferences of that man who has it are logical, and so views his own
inferences as being valid only so far as they would be accepted by that
man. And that ideal perfection of knowledge by which we have seen
that reality is constituted must thus belong to a community in which
this identification is complete. [15]
Finally, Heinz spins yarns that make the fabric of his argument.
In his telling stories, stories life itself might tell if it used
Heinz to tell them, Heinz places human beings, all living beings, in a
developing context that gives place for order out of noise, human
community out of so many atrocities.
He and his wife were living incognito in Berlin during WW II as
Austrians of Jewish ancestry. Somehow, Heinz said, he could
recognize those like him and they him. Whether they acknowledged
it or let it pass, survival depended on them not getting it
wrong. And amazingly it never was. Once though Heinz said
he recognized a woman who was Jewish but who didn't recognize
him. He said, "She didn't know that she didn't know (that she
knew)." Knowing and ‘knowing not’ are not on the same
level. How can one know not?
How can one know that one
knows not? Such stories and questions were part of Heinz’s Socratic
path to understanding understanding. He also tells the story of a
case handled by his famous friend and Concentration Camp survivor,
psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. A man and his wife who had also survived
the Camps were living happily in Vienna shortly after the war.
After 6 months being back in Vienna the woman contracted a disease and
died. The husband became a broken, despondent man unable and
unwilling to talk to anyone. After repeatedly rejecting
advice he consented to see Frankl. At the end of their session
together Frankl made the following suggestion. "Say," Frankl
said, "I have the power from God to create a woman who is the exact
replica of your wife with her way of speaking, who knows all the little
jokes that couples have. She would have all the little experiences you
had together so she would be identical to your wife. If I had
that power granted me would you want me to make that replica?" The man
sat there awhile and then said, "No." He shook hands with Frankl and
left. The man, of course was functioning again. Hearing the story
Heinz went to Frankl and asked, "What was going on?" Frankl said.
"Everyone sees themselves through the eyes of the other. But when
she was dead he was blind. But, when he could see that he was blind, he
could see." I could conclude with my understanding, my interpretation
of those two incidents. But, if Frankl asked you if he could
construct a replica of Heinz, Moshe or someone lost to you, what
would you say?
A life passes. Loss. Life passes one by. Loss.
The wasting of a life, an odd glimpse, the entirety of its unadorned
futileness, in an instant: a neighbor, friend, relative or stranger,
one's self seen in a moment emblematic of a life of naked desolation.
Know that loss. A recognition, the seeing of that futility, a seeing
that is not futile, a seeing that is a renunciation of all that is
futile. Maybe by accident, maybe by design a moment does not pass
us by. We are engaged. We participate and it leaves a mark. Alienation
derailed, (the train wreck of a life) each moment newly re-marks,
traces that heightened, deepened engagement. A remarkable
life. So said. A person remarking, remaking a life for
themselves with and for others. Such was Heinz von
Foerster. Not what passes for life, no, rather a passion for
living it. Heinz recognized his passion through his seeing yours,
in you, even if you didn’t see it yet in yourself.
Notes
1. The Dream of Reality: Heinz von
Foerster's Constructivism Lynn Segal
, Published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1986
2. Metaphysics of an Experimental
Epistemologist, Heinz von Foerster at
the web address
<http://www.vordenker.de/metaphysics/metaphysics.htm>
3. Ethics and Second-order
Cybernetics, Opening address for the
International Conference, Systems and Family Therapy: Ethics,
Epistemology, New Methods, Paris, France, 1990
4. Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, volume 4, issue 2: Constructions of the Mind
5. A Test of Poetry, Louis
Zukofsky, Wesleyan University Press, 2000
6. Philosophical Investigations,
page 109, Wittgenstein, Ludwig,
Blackwell, 1998
7. Philosophical Investigations,
pp. 11-12, Wittgenstein
8. Wittgenstein,
Anthony Kenny, p. 14, London: Allen Lane, The
Penguin Press, 1973,
9. Philosophical Investigations,
p. 48 & p. 133
10. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
Wittgenstein, L.: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London, 1961
11. Dream of Reality
12. Ibid.
13. Michael Palmer Introduction
by Brighde Mullins at
< http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/96_97/intrpalmer.html>
14. Human Becoming - Becoming Human
Website at
<http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/HvF/festschrift/toc.html>
15. Charles Sanders Peirce 5.356; C. S. Peirce, Collected Works
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