Niklas Luhmann Quotes on Knowledge
Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) constructed in Social Systems (1984) and the late two-volume Society of Society (1997) the most ambitious twentieth-century systems theory of society, treating it as a network of self-reproducing (autopoietic) communication systems — economy, law, science, religion, art — each of which constitutes its own elements through its own operations. Knowledge for Luhmann is not the relation of a knowing mind to a known world but a recursive operation of the science system, observable only through the second-order observation of how observers observe.
Quotes
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Attributed to Niklas Luhmann:
“Society consists of communications, not of human beings.”
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Attributed to Niklas Luhmann:
“Systems reduce complexity by selecting from their environment.”
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Attributed to Niklas Luhmann:
“Trust is a strategy for the reduction of complexity.”
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“Humans cannot communicate ; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.”
Luhmann (1988) "How can the mind participate in communication" In: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht et all. (Ed.) Materialities of Communication . p. 371 ( link ). -
“Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference?”
Luhmann (1991) “Wie lassen sich latente Strukturen beobachten?,” in Paul Watzlawick , Peter Krieg (eds.), Das Auge des Betrachters: Beiträge zum Konstruktivismus. Festschrift für Heinz von Foerster , Piper, München-Zürich, p. 71; cited in: Heinz von Foerster (1993) " For Niklas Luhmann: “How Recursive is Communication?” ". Translated by Richard Howe. -
“Luhmann (1991) “Wie lassen sich latente Strukturen beobachten?,” in Paul Watzlawick , Peter Krieg (eds.), Das Auge des Betrachters: Beiträge zum Konstruktivismus. Festschrift für Heinz von Foerster , Piper, München-Zürich, p. 71; cited in: Heinz von Foerster (1993) " For Niklas Luhmann: “How Recursive is Communication?” ". Translated by Richard Howe.”
Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference? -
“It had always been clear to me that a thoroughly constructed conceptual theory of society would be much more radical and much more discomforting in its effects than narrowly focused criticisms—criticisms of capitalism for instance— could ever imagine.”
Protest . Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,1996. p. 200 -
“Protest . Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,1996. p. 200”
It had always been clear to me that a thoroughly constructed conceptual theory of society would be much more radical and much more discomforting in its effects than narrowly focused criticisms—criticisms of capitalism for instance— could ever imagine. -
“The following investigations attempt this transition to a radically anti-humanist, a radically anti-regionalist and a radically constructivist concept of society.”
Die folgenden Untersuchungen wagen diesen Übergang zu einem radikal antihumanistischen, einem radikal antiregionalistischen und einem radikal konstruktivistischen Gesellschaftsbegriff. -
“Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature.”
The reality of the Mass Media(2000) | p. 1. -
“The effect if not the function of the mass media seems to lie, therefore, in the reproduction of non- transparency through transparency, in the reproduction of non-transparency of effects through transparency of knowledge .”
The reality of the Mass Media(2000) | p. 103.