Prolepsis of Life-World and Social Formation
In the proleptic view of life-word, I am concerned with the Santiago school of thought; self-awareness is tied to language, and its approach to language is undertaken in a careful analysis of communication, which implies mutual coordination of behavior among living organisms through mutual structural coupling. Our linguistic distinctions exist in the network of structural couplings which is woven through language, and meaning arises in our linguistic distinction and communication through self-reflection. To be human is to live in language and communication by coordinating our behavior and bringing forth a world with others.[1]
Endowed with reflective consciousness, Santiago’s theory does not need to discard the dimension of intersubjective communication and hermeneutical dialogue with the literary world. In this dialogical interaction we bring forth a world with others in enhancing horizon of meaning, critical thinking, and emancipation from sedimentation of the past. A bringing forth of a world (externalization) is structurally coupled with life-world underlying our understanding, society and culture through language and social communication.
This epistemic stance facilitates public theology in constructing social epistemology concerned with an articulation between religious discourse, agency, and social systems in functional differentiation. It features significance of postsocial (non-human) relations in which object-centered environments have a defining role in shaping individual identity and mediating human relationships. Epistemic cultures are shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, since they make up how we know what we know in a given field.[2]
Autopoietic nature of epistemic cultures can be seen in its production, dissemination, and expansion in globalized knowledge society along with object-centered environments and their transformations in the network of power relations. Systems evolve according to symbolic material interests, while structures changing in hierarchical stratification according to power relations.
This systemic view of religious construction of reality advances a model of elective affinity between ideas, material interests, and power relations in the course of history and society. Ideas rely on continual feedback and travel on its actual trajectory oscillating around the preset direction in the river of the history.
Social scientists, like steerspersons, have the skill of steering a boat of ideas in finding its elective affinity among casually adequate, multiple elements in dealing with symbolic material interests and power relations in terms of deviation, control, or misuse to justify ideological legitimacy and social discourse. This epistemic procedure entails the immanent critique coming from the religious idea of the future of God, which shines upon the beginning and the present (Rev. 22:5).
The epistemic holism does not necessarily contrast evolution (functional differentiation in self-organization) with revolution (structural transformation in the dissipative structures) through complexity, catalytic mediation, and co-creation. This applicability fuses into the social scientific theory of elective affinity, which focuses on interaction, emergence, and new development.
A plot of elective affinity (seen in Goethe’s novel) is compared to the chemical theory of reaction in regard to attraction, conflict, replacement, degeneration, and even tragic end. Indeed, chemical affinity can be reconstructed in human social systems and through collective catalytic reactions in terms of cybernetic-phenomenological operation.
Given this, I am concerned with Max Weber’s study of Protestant ethos (ideal factors) and capitalist spirit (real factors) through elective affinity, in which religious idea (or knowledge) is led and constructed by social material interests. A sociological concept of casually adequate elements implies the articulation between history and social structure, which remain crucial as environment for system of self-organization and human agency.
History is connected with social process and dissipative structure of agency (class/status) in the network of symbolic material interests, epistemic legitimacy of social discourse (a general system of knowledge including ideology as false consciousness), and power relations. A proleptic view of world reality is concerned with world complexity with functional differentiations and takes into account a regime of systems communication.
In fact, Luhmann’s problem can be detected in his approach to the excessive structural coupling in terms of self-organization and process. So, he leads to reduction of world complexity, while his external observing position is bound to selection capability, which runs into a political theory of decisionism and a general theory of ideology in contrast to a critical theory of ideology.[3]
Proleptic Life-world and Cybernetic Phenomenology
I incorporate a cybernetic framework of dissipative structure in complex systems of living organisms into a proleptic theology of life-world and a systems method (in the revision of Max Weber’s sociology of religion). On the contrary, Luhmann develops a general theory of systems sociology, which is based on complex interacting elements in the autopoietic system dissolving the structure of life-world into a process of network.
In fact, Maturana and Varela remain restrained whether an autopoietic reality of all living systems would be able to be a defining role in the larger systems (the organisms, societies, and ecosystems). “What we can say is that [multicellular systems] have operational closure in their organization: their identity is specified by a network of dynamic processes whose effects do not leave the network. But regarding the explicit form of that organization, we shall not speak further.”[4] Unlike Maturana, however, Varela advocates for a broader concept of organizational closure as applicable to social system, though process of production is specified at the very core of autopoiesis within the biological network.[5]
Luhmann reconstructs the concept of autopoiesis in his description of social systems theory in terms of communication and observation with emphasis on operational closure. He makes a radical shift in social theory grounded in a network of communications, de-ontologizing the human subject. His approach can hardly be underestimated in a creative synthesis between a biological theory of living organism and social systems communication.[6]
For Luhmann, the world makes sense, as being observed by systemic operations. The systems determine the sense the world makes—and thereby its reality. In continual operations of observation a reality is constructed. The observer cannot exist other than as an observer in a crow’s nest in warning of problems and risk in society.
In Luhmann’s theory, a turn occurs from universal reason in philosophical enlightenment to functional reason in metabiology, which is in a cybernetic way described as basic phenomenon of the self-maintenance of self-relating systems.[7]
Nonetheless, Luhmann does not discard the place of self-critical reason. He defines self-critical reason as ironical reason, which can be seen in the reason of the “gypsies who constantly vagabond around Europe.”[8] It refers to the role of a “gypsy of reason” which locates Luhmann within a camp of postmodern condition.
Luhmann still maintains postmodern logic of functional differentiation in terms of the meta- or supertheory, which is to be universally applicable to globalized modern society. There can be no final unity that eventually does away with difference. The second-order observation is also the case with deconstruction in terms of Hegel’s logic of negation. At the level of second-order observing, everything becomes contingent, while including the second-order observing itself.
For cybernetic phenomenology Luhmann utilizes the connection between operation, double reference (self-reference/other-reference), temporality, oscillation or sense, horizon and life-world—all from systems theory communication. Indeed, sense has no reference to a subject, a sense-constituting agency (noesis), but it is a sufficiently formalized and differentiated concept of sense in connection with social systems of communication as cognitive function (observation, sense making, or irritating/irritated).[9]
A human subject is like an observer in a crow’s nest, but sense or meaning is based on the selective relationship between system and world. Our minds and communications operate within a sense-horizon like a ship operates within the horizon of sea. The ship continuously relocates itself within a horizon through its motion, as the horizon changes with it. The horizon—the ship’s environment—is a direct product of the ship’s own operations.[10]
This position can be elaborated in the cybernetic model of circular causality underlying the feedback loop in dealing with the behavior of living organism in terms of human experience in steering a boat or observer in the crow’s nest.
In effect, a cybernetic position does not necessarily contrast with Husserl’s phenomenology, a rigorous science. Experience is attention intentionally directed upon ideal objects (unities of sense or meaning) in the stream of internal time. This immanent process has suspense on naturally taken-for-granted attitudes toward the externally existing world (bracketed in an act of phenomenological reduction). Human consciousness correlates with systems of meaning, which is under the structure of life-world constraining psychical experience.[11]
This stance integrates operational closure into the process of understanding related to the structure of meaning through adumbration and expansion of the horizon intentionalities. All our theoretical, practical, and even scientific themes lie always within the coherence of the life-horizon world, universal life-world a priori, within which we (natural scientist included) are conscious of objects or things.
Sociological Clarification of Life-World
The systemic notion of the structure of life-world takes issue with the mathematization of the world for technological dominion in the project of Galileo, who reduces the whole of the relations between history, society, and nature (world complexity). Life-world is not reduced to technological mastery, but functions as the source of responsible critique of erosion and degeneration in the sedimentation tradition caught in prejudices and obscurities, while emancipating us toward the whole of the relational in terms of recognition, a goal of common good, and democratic, pluralistic value.
Life-world theory implies a structural feature of knowledge societies in which epistemic cultures are differently constructed in cultural and societal contexts. Life-world structure relativizes a one-dimensional portrayal of the human being, while relocating it with an emergent complex model of co-evolution as a steering person imbued with the structural complementarity and initiation. This implies probability of quantum theory, or the probabilistic nature of quantum predictions on measurement.
Life-world operation maintains that the agent’s choice in measurement and interaction is independent of the physical system itself. The life-world can be taken into account as the forgotten meaning-fundament of natural science and its epistemology. The prolepsis of life-world reinforces a systemic thinking with a metaphor of steering person, while bringing forth a new world order.
A structural change emerges as a consequence of environmental influence upon the system’s internal dynamics, elaborating structural coupling in terms of world complexity, which triggers structural change in a nonlinear and unpredictable way toward a new order. Operational closure (implying the system’s identity) is not fixed, but determined by the organism’s own dissipative structure in a nonlinear and unpredictable way (freedom). This structural theory resonates with a general reality of life-world.
In so doing, the system of autopoiesis is self-bounded (operational closure as determined by a boundary), self-generating (produced by processes within the network), and self-perpetuating (replaced by the system’s process of transformation), and structural coupling toward a new order (operational rupture); epistemological interactive, structurally coupled, and operational rupture. This perspective does not discard environmental reality of life-world in a phenomenological sense.[12]
[1] Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (Boston: Shambhala, 1987), 244.
[2] Karin K. Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1.
[3] Habermas, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, 460-1.
[4] Maturana and Varela, The Tree of knowledge, 89.
[5] Varela, “Describing the Logic of the Living, in Zeleny (ed.), Autopoiesis, 36-48.
[6] Luhmann, “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems,” in Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
[7] Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 372.
[8] Luhmann, Die neuzeitliche Wissenschaften und die Phänomenologie, 45-6.
[9] Luhmann, Social Systems. Trans. John Bednarz, Jr. and Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 69.
[10] Moeller, Luhmann Explained From Souls to Systems, 66.
[11] Husserl, 326.
[12] Capra, The Web of Life, 208, Capra does not connect operational closure to its rupture in interaction with the environment at social cultural realm in terms of life-world.