Circling the Archimedean Viewpoint: Observations of Physiology in Nietzsche and Luhmann

Abstract

The question of how our conception of the world could differ so widely from the disclosed nature of the world will with perfect equanimity be relinquished to the physiology and history of the evolution of organisms and concepts. (Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 16). In an interview conducted by the Italian literary journal Alfabeta in April of 1987, 1 Niklas Luhmann was asked if sociology, in particular its systems-theoretical variant, could replace the privileged position that art, religion, philosophy, and politics had lost, and provide an Archimedean point from which to describe society as a whole. Luhmann responded that today it is no longer possible to imagine such an outside position for the observation of the whole, sociology being no exception. In its description of society, contemporary sociology can merely offer to reflect its own descriptions as being part of what they describe, and “reflect its own refusal to adopt an ontological, subject-transcendental or epistemologically privileged position” (Archimedes 165-6). 2 In the interview, Luhmann suggests that the forfeiting of an Archimedean viewpoint is what distinguishes his sociological theory from the Old-European tradition. In the latter, we are “always dealing with descriptions from an outside, for example, through the mediation of a subject. Traditional logic or traditional ontology always presupposed an external observer who was in the position to distinguish between false and correct, that is, who could apply a bivalent logic in its observations” (164). Alternatively, Luhmann’s adaptation of systems theory is an attempt to construct an epistemology that would not assume such an “outside” position for its observations, but includes “the observer and observational instruments” in its observation. Simply put, systems theory acknowledges what the assumption of an Archimedean point hides—namely that what one observes is what it is only by virtue of how it is being observed. Not restricting observation to attentive sensual perception, but defining it more broadly as any operation that draws a distinction and indicates one of its sides, Luhmann reads the spatial distinction between