Excerpt: What must immediately surprise any reader new to the discourses of systems theory or what is sometimes called “second-order cybernetics” is the rather systematic reliance of this new theoretical paradigm on the figure of vision and, more specifically, observation. That surprise might turn into discomfort if not alarm for readers in the humanities who cut their teeth on the critical genealogy of vision and the look which runs, in its modernist incarnation, from Freud’s discourse on vision in Civilization and Its Discontents through Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to Lacan’s seminars and finally to recent influential work in psychoanalysis and feminist film theory. With the possible exception of Michel Foucault, no recent intellectual has done more to call into question the trope of vision than America’s foremost pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty. From his ground-breaking early work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature onward, Rorty has argued that the figure of vision in the philosophical and critical tradition is indissolubly linked with representationalism and realism, where representationalism assumes that “making true’ and ‘representing’ are reciprocal relations: the nonlinguistic item which makes S true is the one represented by S, ” and realism maintains the “idea that inquiry is a matter of finding out the nature of something which lies outside the web of beliefs and desires, ” in which “the object of inquiry – what lies outside the organism – has a context of its own, a context which is privileged by virtue of being the object’s rather than the inquirer’s.” Instead, Rorty argues, we should reduce this desire for objectivity to a search for “solidarity” and embrace a philo-sophical holism of the sort found in Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, which holds that “words take their meanings from other words rather than by virtue of their representative character” and “transparency to the real.” Hence, Rorty rejects the representationalist position and its privileged figure, and argues instead that “Our only usable notion of ‘objectivity’ is ‘agreement’ rather than mirroring."

Key words: Luhmann, Rorty, Habermas, Žižek, Maturana, Varela, closure

Excerpt: One of the perpetual problems in Husserl-scholarship concerns the clarification of Husserl’s notion of constitution, especially its bearing on the realism- idealism controversy. The dominant tendency among Husserl’s many critics has been to interpret constitution as a creative activity, thus accusing Husserl of an untenable idealism. Among philosophers more favourably disposed towards Husserlian phenomenology one often finds this critique rebutted in one (or both) of the following ways: Either it is maintained that constitution is in reality merely a matter of epistemic restoration (thus being fully compatible with a realism), or it is argued that the dimension disclosed by the transcendental reduction and constituted by transcendental subjectivity is a dimension of meaning; not of being. The following paper will attempt to refute the above mentioned interpretations, presenting an alternative clarification of some of the formal elements in Husserl’s transcendental concept of constitution, by way of an explication of the late Husserl’s view on the relationship between world and subjectivity. An explication eventually making it apparent, that Husserl’s concept of constitution entails reflections much more in line with the views espoused by later phenomenologists, such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, than is normally assumed by his critics. In order to situate these reflections my exposé will start by recapitulating some of the main ideas in Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological project – focusing on the notion of reduction. This is essential for a precise estimation of Husserl’s overall aim, and I believe that a correct comprehension of his transcendental concept of constitution will only be possible on this background.