A SOLUTION TO THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
One of the most useful of Luhmann’s radicalisms is what I would dare to call nothing less than a convincing solution to the mind-body problem that has haunted the history of ideas in the West for two and a half millennia.1 Given the contingent character of the theory, it should be noted right away that this is not to say it is the solution to the mind-body problem. Luhmann’s solution to this problem necessarily arises from the contingency of the problem: it is part of the semantic heritage or history that Luhmann’s theory relates to. The problem is, to begin with, not so much a substantial problem as a conceptual one. As always, “solution” can only mean: an observational construct. Such a solution “solves” a problem in a Wittgensteinian sense, namely by increasing the clarity of the terminology and thereby reducing the “abuse” of language.
The history of the mind-body dualism dates back to Plato, to the Phaedo, the Republic, and other of his major works. This dualism has at least three dimensions. First, an ontological distinction between different ways of being: physical and intellectual being. Whatever is, is either physical or intellectual, or contains elements of both. Second, an epistemological distinction between different kinds of knowledge: whatever we know, we either know through our senses or our mind, or through a combination of both. And, third, an ethical distinction with respect to what we value and, accordingly, how we live: we strive toward either material or ideal goods, or a mixture of the two. These distinctions, as most famously illustrated in the allegories of the cave, the line, and the sun in the Republic, are explicitly hierarchical. The soul exists in a substantially more profound way than the body (it is immortal while the body is not); thought leads us to truth while sensual knowledge leaves us only with appearances; and to live by cherishing what is morally good rather than what is materially valuable is the only way to real happiness.
Notwithstanding possible modifications of this stark three-dimensional dualism in other works by Plato (which some scholars may point at in order to defend Plato against charges from “postdualistic” thinkers) it is beyond doubt that, historically speaking, it had a profound influence on the further development of mainstream Western religion and philosophy ranging from Christianity (Saint Augustine and others) to Descartes and Spinoza, and then on to Kant and Hegel. One could write a whole series of books describing in detail how each of these thinkers integrated, criticized, sharpened, or softened the ontological, the epistemological, and the ethical aspects of the Platonic mind-body dualism. In many ways, Whitehead was entirely correct when he famously stated that European philosophy essentially kept itself busy with producing footnotes to Plato, or, more precisely, footnotes to Plato’s triple distinction.
The attitude of the footnote writers changed considerably in the nineteenth century. With authors like Marx and Nietzsche, reactions to the triple dualism became much more hostile. With Hegel and Feuerbach, idealism had reached its highest forms of expression and was bound to decline. The old hierarchy (that had previously been challenged by some, for instance, Spinoza) is now attacked openly. The values are to be reevaluated. Hegel has to be turned from his head to his feet (by Marx), and Plato and Socrates have to be exposed as responsible for the decay of philosophy (by Nietzsche). It is, for Marx, material being that determines consciousness, and not the other way around. One of the great errors that plagued Western thought, as Nietzsche proclaims, was to confuse the relation between the physical and the spiritual. When we eat frugally, we may deceive ourselves that by our “free will” we impose a “diet” on our body. In fact, Nietzsche says, we only hide from ourselves the real causes and effects which are exactly vice versa: when we intellectually decide to go on a diet, we do so only because our body is already too sick to eat freely.2
Marx and Nietzsche, each in their own specific way, inverted Plato’s threefold hierarchy. For Marx, what we are economically is more substantial than what we may be intellectually; to understand our material conditions is more fundamental than to understand the world spiritually. The real moral responsibility of the philosopher is to change the material world rather than to merely add another moralistic interpretation. For Nietzsche, our physiology characterizes us more than our mind; thus to know ourselves physiologically is more interesting than reflecting on our soul, and, perhaps most important for him, in order to overcome our traditional “slave morality” we have to honestly affirm our physiology rather than construct a system of values that nihilistically restricts the forces of life.
In the twentieth century, the reevaluation of Plato’s triple dualism continues. Freud transforms Nietzsche’s philosophy into a psychological theory and “scientifically” outlines how human existence, both individually and collectively, is founded on unconscious “drives,” wishes, and anxieties that spring from our physiological being, that is, our sexuality and digestion. In philosophy, a phenomenology of life energies and the body becomes popular (Bergson, Merleau-Ponty). And later on, feminist and deconstructionist ideas are infused into the humanities and the social sciences, and, by focusing on gender issues, contribute to the demise of older “phallocentric” and “logocentric” hierarchies.
If, at least academically, the Platonic reign of the soul over the physical has been largely discredited, this does not mean that, philosophically speaking, the age-old mind-body problem has been solved. The traditional order has been thoroughly shattered and one can now choose between various ways of attributing ontological, epistemological, or ethical (non)priority to mind and body respectively. However, the old vocabulary along with its philosophical “grammar” (in the Wittgensteinian sense) still prevails. And this is not only academically true, but also in ordinary language. We can still use the word “brain” in such sentences as, “she is the brains behind Pa” or “use your brain!” It is still believed that brain science can actually find out how whatever happens physiologically in the brain determines what happens in our mind, that is, how we think and feel. Alternatively, we believe that many illnesses are psychosomatic. “Stress” leads to anxiety, and anxiety leads to bodily malfunctions. On the positive side, our mental attitude may allow us to win a sports competition. If we are appropriately motivated, we will perhaps outperform our physically advantaged opponent. The triple dualism is still both academically and in ordinary life a most essential commonsense ontological, epistemological, and ethical concept. While the dominance of the soul over the body is no longer an accepted theory, there is still something like a common consensus that the world is made up of the physical and the intellectual, that we can know things either through reflection or experience, and that we can act according to material or ideal values. In this sense, Plato’s triple dualism is as alive as it ever was.
Modern Western philosophy succeeded in loosening the hierarchical and dynamic structure of the mind-body dualism, but it did not succeed in—or, probably more correctly, never had the intention of—replacing the model as such. Demands for integrating the mental and the physical into a psychosomatic continuum and for acknowledging the material as the basis for the ideal still operate well within the traditional mind-body semantics. They offer alternative and, in part, novel ways of arranging the concepts in relation to one another, but they stick to the traditional pattern of conceiving of ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues in mind-body terms.
This semantic continuity cannot but perpetuate what may be called the chronic discursive illness that has been labeled the mind-body problem. When Descartes, for instance, tried to answer how to practically follow his demand for overcoming the “passions of the soul” (i.e., a state in which the soul is passively subjected to an active body) and for exerting intellectual domination of the material, he was forced to somehow explain how one agency, namely res cogitans, can concretely exert its control over another and substantially different agency, namely res extensa. In other words, how can the mind actually “get in touch” with the body, or how can the body physically direct mental activity? Descartes came up with a daring hypothesis that nowadays seems rather curious; he maintained that the soul had “its principal seat in the little gland which exists in the middle of the brain” (the so-called pineal gland) and the power to move this gland in such a way that “animal spirits” could be emitted and sent to the various body parts (through the blood and nerves) in order to steer the “machine of the body.”3 However, as Descartes pointed out, a weak soul was not powerful enough to exert such control and thus the steering mechanism could also work in reverse. In the case of a weak soul, the body would be able to force the soul into passivity (the state of “passion”) and control it by directing the motions of the pineal gland. In a state of “passionate” love or anger, for instance, our physical impulses are thus able to subdue our intellect.
Descartes’s model is a simple form of a cybernetic mechanism, that is, a mechanism consisting of an active steering part and another part that is passively steered, just like a car. As long as we are fully conscious, we are able to impose on the car we are driving the direction that it has to take. If, however, we are drunk or fall asleep at the wheel, the steering relation is reversed and the car will take us with it and manipulate our movements. The mind-body (or consciousness/ matter) relations suggested by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud may well be more complicated than Descartes’s, but they are still at the level of mechanistic cybernetics. They are about various degrees of agency and passion, of being in control or being controlled. Similarly, most contemporary scientific and popular models of mind-body interaction will try to outline or predict the effects that certain physiological processes have on mental ones, or vice versa. Brain scientists produce research on what sort of brain activity produces what sort of emotional and cognitive effects; and some psychotherapists will instruct their clients on how to heal themselves through positive thinking or other cognitive therapies. The Cartesian hypothesis about the concrete interaction between the soul and the body is now obsolete, but interactionism as such remains a popular option for mind-body mechanics. Thus, the mind-body problem remains unresolved. There are a number of vague ideas about how the brain can practically steer the mind, or how the mind can steer the brain, or how both can steer one another psychosomatically, but there is not one commonly accepted theoretical replacement for the pineal gland. That such steering happens is commonly assumed, but still no one knows how it works.
In other words, most contemporary views on the relation between mind and body are simply “mop-up operations” working within the general Cartesian “paradigm”—to use Thomas Kuhn’s terminology. Luhmann is one of those theoreticians who try to radically depart from, to again use Kuhn’s terminology, this kind of “normal science.” He is, I believe, able to provide a convincing solution to the mind-body problem, which mechanistic models derived from the traditional Platonic triple dualism have failed to do.
Luhmann’s break with the “normal science” of the mind-body relation and his subsequent solution to the mind-body problem is twofold. First, he adds a third concept to the dualism, namely communication (or, society as the system of communication), and thus transforms the dualism into a “triadism,” which could also be understood as a pluralism. Second, he explains how the relations between these three systemic realms can be conceived differently from the traditional mechanical steering conceptions. He replaces a mechanistic cybernetics of steering with the second-order cybernetics of system/environment configurations. I first discuss Luhmann’s triadism/pluralism and then his second-order cybernetics.4
Triadism/Pluralism
Unlike Descartes, Luhmann considers the mind and body not substances but systems. The use of the term “system” already denotes a shift from an ontological to a functional perspective. Systems are processes, not static things. Luhmann’s systemic triadism is concerned with operations, and not with what essentially is. A system is a functional entity that is operationally distinct from and so distinguishable from other systems. It is, so to speak, a sequence of events that connect with one another, that is, that go along with one another diachronically, synchronically, or both. Luhmann focuses on autopoietic and operationally closed systems. That a system is autopoietic means that it is not externally produced or constructed but instead produces, constructs, and perpetuates or reproduces itself. Its operational closure means that its operations can only connect with its own operations, but not with those of any other system.
An example of a biological or physical system, that is, a living system, is the human body. The human body includes subsystems, such as the visual system and the immune system, but subsystems are not to be confused with parts that constitute a whole.5 All operations within living systems are life operations, such as biochemical processes, hormonal processes, neurological processes, and so on. Each system functions by continuing its own operations with further operations of the same kind. The immune system, for instance, continues to function by further immune reactions. It cannot continue to function by visual operations. The system’s function cannot be taken over by the visual system, or vice versa. A system is not a body part or an organ that can be potentially replaced by a spare part. One cannot transplant an immune system. Nor can it be amputated like an arm or taken out like the appendix. The view of the body as a biological life-system including a number of subsystems is therefore substantially different from a mechanistic view of the body as a whole consisting of parts.
The operations of biological systems are not dictated, or steered, or produced from the outside by a “divine watchmaker.” Any biological system is an effect of the evolution of life and not some ready-made machine. Systems change by evolving. Different forms of life, nonhuman life for instance, have evolved differently. Some living systems do not have visual systems, but this does not mean that they lack anything. They are no less alive, and no less able to function, reproduce, and come up with (nonvisual) cognition.
An example of a psychic system is the human mind. Mental operations are thoughts, feelings, emotions, and so on. A mental system is operationally closed in the sense that no mind can directly interfere with the operations of another mind. One cannot continue someone else’s mental activities by thinking or feeling for him or her. It is also impossible to immediately think what someone else is thinking, or to feel what someone else is feeling. We can hear what others say, or see an expression of pain or joy on their face, but we cannot literally think or feel what they do. Psychic systems are autopoietic. Just like living systems, they are integrated into evolutionary processes and exposed to environmental “perturbations.” However, they are not created or steered like a machine by any external agency.
Communication systems are social systems. In other words, society consists of communicative operations. Such operations can be performed as speech or writing, that is, through language, but also by a large number of other means, for instance through signs, gestures, and facial expressions, as well as through monetary payments, the assigning of grades, the issuing of documents, the production of images, the composition of music, or a kiss on the cheek. Social systems are operationally closed and autopoietic as well. Communication in the education system can only be continued with further communication of the same kind. If I no longer lecture during my lectures, but instead insist on only singing beautiful songs, I will be fired (after a while). Nor are social systems, contrary to some modern humanist narratives, man-made. The economy cannot be planned, and the legal system was not established as the result of an invention by some clever individuals on a specific day in history. Just like living systems and psychic systems, social systems, such as the law, the economy, and the mass media, emerge through evolutionary processes, and they are continually changing.
Autopoietic systems are not necessarily limited to the body, mind, and society. It can be imagined that there are or will be other types of operationally closed and autopoietic systems. In his later works, Luhmann repeatedly speculated, albeit without elaboration, about the possibility of, for instance, the emergence of novel autopoietic systems that may operate on the basis of computer technology.6 So far, computers, like all other machines, operate allopoietically, and not autopoietically, meaning they are not operationally closed. They are not (yet) self-generating and self-reproducing, and it is possible to immediately interfere in their operations. For instance, I am pressing a key on a keyboard right now, which is how the text that you are reading is currently being produced. No brain, social system, or mind can be steered in the way I steer my computer while writing this text. Therefore a better candidate for a fourth category of systems would perhaps be a nonliving natural system, such as, the global climate.7
In theory, Luhmann acknowledges the possibility of replacing the mind-body dualism with an unlimited pluralism. Concretely and in the present, the knowledge of the existence of autopoietic systems is nevertheless limited to three: living systems, psychic systems, and communication systems.
The operational closure of the three types of systems excludes the possibility of mutual steering processes like those envisioned by Descartes with respect to body and soul. There is no pineal gland by which the operations of one system are mechanically connected with those of another. This guarantees, so to speak, the operational autonomy of each system, and thereby its functional difference. This functional differentiation replaces the substantial or ontological differentiation as conceived by Plato and Descartes. While the mind-body dualism was an ontological and/or substance dualism, the mind-body-communication triad is a functional triad. Instead of substantial distinctions, there are functional differences.
Even Marx, arguably the most profound social theorist of the nineteenth century, was incapable of expanding the traditional dualism and replacing it with a triadism/pluralism. He did not acknowledge that society is neither ideal nor material, but social, that is, a system not constituted by physical or mental operations but by communication.
Marx overturned Hegel’s idealist dualism and replaced it with a materialist dogma. Material “being,” for Marx, determined consciousness, and not the other way around. He distinguished the material aspects within society (such as land, goods, the means of production, money, capital, and property) from ideal aspects (such as values, ideologies, religious belief, class consciousness, and knowledge). This division, notwithstanding the inverted hierarchy, neatly followed the dualist models of the past by distinguishing between material (i.e., economic) and ideal (e.g., the law, religion, morality) forces that strive for control over one another.
Marx was unable to acknowledge an essential difference with respect to the functioning of the economy, between what may be called material and virtual aspects, or, in terms of systems theory, between society and its environment. Land, goods, and the means of production are in fact not social. They exist in the material environment of society. Money, capital, and property, on the contrary, are social; they are virtual social constructs, that is, they are communicative constructs, or, more precisely, economic constructs. Land, goods, and machines can well exist in a society that has no economy—in the sense that it does not communicate economically. Land, for instance, before the evolution of money, capital, and property, did not yet have economic meaning in the modern sense of the term “economy.” It may well have been used to feed people and animals, but it was not yet “observed” in economic terms. Native Americans, for instance, often could not understand the social construct of “selling” land when confronted with European settlers who wanted them to do exactly this. In order to observe land economically, and to sell and buy it, there has to be an economic communication system within which the transaction of selling land becomes meaningful. The economic meaning of land is, once again, not an effect of the material qualities of the land, but of how its value is observed and thus socially constructed in the economy. In this sense, the economy is not material; it is social. Marx was unable to see the decisive difference between the economy as a virtual communication system and its material environment. The economy is a communication system that exists within the social environment, which is constituted by the law, politics, education, and so on, and the extrasocial environment of living and psychic systems, that is, bodies, trees, land, human thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and do on.
From a systemic perspective, Marx’s analysis of capitalist economy had two basic flaws: (1) the failure to properly distinguish between what belongs to the functioning of the economy as a social system and what belongs to its nonsocial environment, and (2) the failure to go beyond the traditional cybernetic concept of a hierarchical steering relation between different systemic realms. Marx still assumed that one system, namely the economy, could determine and therefore mechanically steer all other aspects of society. The traditional Marxist vocabulary that distinguishes between a base structure (the economy) and a superstructure (all other systems) in society demonstrates the mechanistic architecture of this theory. Society is described as a simple machine consisting of two basic components, one being in control and the other being controlled. It may thus be said that, somewhat ironically, the dualist heritage prevented even a revolutionary theory like Marxism from developing truly radical alternatives to traditional Platonic conceptions of society.8
System-Environment Multiplicity: No Nexus!
In comparison with nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theory, recent developments in the theory of consciousness, both popular and scientific, depart more radically from a dualist Platonic ontology, but not necessarily from Cartesian mechanics. It is quite common for people to assume that our mental processes are subject to both biological and communicative influences. Our thoughts and feelings, it is believed, are somehow related not only to what happens in our brain but also to what we experience in our social life. It is also acknowledged that a malfunction of certain neurological transmitters in our brain may have strong effects on our psychic well-being as well as on our capabilities of going to work or living within a family. Perhaps, by allowing for a triad of physical, mental, and social phenomena, psychological common sense has developed in a more complex way and distanced itself from Platonic dualism more than our current sociological and political self-descriptions.
Psychological common sense seems to accept the concept of a functional differentiation between what happens, respectively, in our brains, in our minds, and in our social life. But another major obstacle that prevents a radical departure from the Cartesian model unfortunately remains.
Descartes explicitly calls the pineal gland the principal seat of the mind. This concept of a location of the mind within the body was and remains an obstacle for a systemic understanding of the relation between mind, body, and other systems. In ancient Greece and ancient China, the heart was believed to be the principal seat of human consciousness. In the contemporary world, the brain is ascribed this role—so that the image of a physical place of the mind still remains. Not only metaphorically, but literally the mind and the brain are often linguistically identified with one another.
The image of two distinct systems coupled by the physical mechanism of a seat is misleading. It implies a causal link between two otherwise separate realms, along with the idea of at least potential control. When I am physically sitting in the driver’s seat I can, by being linked to it through all kinds of mechanisms such as the steering wheel and the accelerator, control the motions of my car. I am not simply the environment of the car, like the street or the air; I am located within it and at its center. Similarly, one can imagine not only a dualist, but also triadic and pluralist mechanistic cybernetics. It can be imagined, as perhaps some brain scientists and psychiatrists do, that by manipulating certain mechanisms in the brain, it will be possible to steer mental processes. Or, as perhaps some behaviorists or psychotherapists may believe, we may be able to control mental process by making people act or speak in a certain way. To proceed from dualism to a systemic triadism or pluralism is therefore not yet sufficient for radically solving the mind-body problem. In order to do this, we must discard not only Platonic ontology, but also Cartesian mechanics.
Systems theory should more appropriately be called system-environment theory. For Luhmann, the system/environment distinction replaces the subject/object distinction and revolutionizes the classical epistemology that comes with it.9 This has at least two important consequences: (1) the notion of “unilateral control” by an active subject over a passive object has to be replaced by the notion of mutual feedback effects between systems that form a “cybernetic circle,”10 and (2) the notion of an objective external view on internally accessible subjects has to be replaced by the distinction between operations that belong to any given system and those that occur in its environment, which is constituted by other systems. The terms “system” and “environment” are mutually dependent. An environment does not exist objectively, but only in relation to a specific system, that is, “the” environment is never the environment as such, but a concrete environment for a concrete system. Similarly, a system cannot exist subjectively on its own as “the” system, but only within an environment. While a system operates autonomously, it is existentially inconceivable without, and therefore entirely dependent on, its environment.
I stress again that despite the fact that systems theory usually speaks of systems, for lack of a more precise vocabulary, as being “in” or “within” an environment, this should not be confused with the Cartesian idea of a principal seat. A system has no seat in its environment in the sense of a specific location, or, to give a probably all too simplistic example: a fish has no principal seat in the water. That a system is within an environment means that it functions while other systems function simultaneously. A more appropriate example than the fish in the water is the immune system. We can well say that the immune system is within the body, but this does not mean that it has any principal seat in the body. The immune system can only exist within the complex environment of the body—it cannot work without blood circulation, digestive processes, and respiratory activity all functioning simultaneously. There is, however, no pineal or other gland that serves as the nexus between the immune system and its bodily environment. The very concept of a nexus is what the system/environment distinction is no longer in need of. And it was precisely this problem of the nexus that Cartesian mind-body dualism was unable to convincingly solve.
Just as the immune system has no specific seat in the body, systems theory argues, the mind has none—neither in the heart, the brain, or anywhere else in the body. Neither does it have a seat in the family, in one’s job, in one’s religion, or anywhere else in society. The mind, if conceived of as a human being’s mental system, has no seat whatsoever. It is, however, only able to function within the environment, or, if this should be a more acceptable term, the context of the simultaneous functioning of a great number of other biological and social systems. That the immune system does not have a seat in the body does not mean that it can exist outside of a bodily environment. The same is true for the mind as a nonbiological system. The search for a seat of the mind has been a phantom created by the mechanistic cybernetics inherent to the mind/body dualist tradition as exemplified by Descartes. Once one radically breaks with this tradition, the seat becomes a mere chimera.
Instead of a simplistic mind-body dualism, systems theory suggests a highly complex pluralism of simultaneously operating systems. Even the brain is not “one” system. There are, to my knowledge, a great number of functions that constitute brain activity, including electrical, hormonal, neural, chemical, blood circulatory, cellular functions, and so on. The brain is a very complex biological systemic arrangement of various systemic functions. Not only is there no nexus between the brain as a whole and the mind, but there are also no discernable “nexi” between the specific biological systems functioning in the brain or between those specific systems and the mind.
Our minds operate within both a bodily and a social environment. Language acquisition, cognitive development, emotional activity, and so on, all have a lot to do not only with what goes on in our bodies (including the brain), but also with our social experiences. Again, there is no principal seat of the mind in society or of society in the mind. There is no gland by which how we communicate in our family, at our jobs, or with our money enters into our mind, or vice versa.
Taking a psychopharmacological drug will have an effect on one’s body. It will have an effect on how you think and feel, which will ultimately have an effect on how you talk and what you do in society. Similarly, communicating with a psychotherapist will have an effect on how you think and feel, and this will also have effects on your body and brain. Physical, social, and mental systems function simultaneously and constitute environments for one another.
Given the complexity and plurality of simultaneous system/environment relations and the absence of any mechanical nexus between them, the effects of what happens in one system on what happens in another are at the same time limited and unlimited. They are limited in the sense that, given the absence of a causal nexus, they are not precisely predictable. They are unlimited in the sense that the effects are likely to produce further effects on a number of other systems that they were not intended to have an effect on. The problems attached to the so-called side effects of, for instance, psychopharmacological medication may illustrate this. The notion of “side effects” is misleading because it suggests that taking a certain drug will have a particular mechanical effect via one’s body (i.e., one’s brain) on one’s mind, as well as some other less central effects that somehow do not fully count as effects since they are merely “on the side.” The distinction between central and side effects, however, is entirely arbitrary and merely a semantic gesture. The side effect is no less of an effect than the central effect. With respect to a computer keyboard, for instance, the repeated pressing of the y key has the effect that many y’s appear on the screen and that, over time, the y printed on the keyboard becomes less visible. One may distinguish between intended and unintended effects in this case, but not between side effect and central effect.
The inference (which may well be drawn by a naive reader of a medication package) that the anticipation of effects, both “central” and “side,” can ever be complete is much more problematic. Even if the desired effect of a psychopharmacological medication should come about in the body (let’s say a modification of certain chemical processes in the brain), it is very difficult to predict if this desired effect in the body will also produce the desired effect in the mind (let’s say the disappearance of anxiety). And it is even more difficult to predict what an effect in one system of the body (brain chemistry) will have on other bodily functions (e.g., sexual performance capacity), particularly in the long run. Usually, previously unknown side effects of taking a drug only emerge after a certain period of regular consumption. Furthermore, it is impossible to predict how a drug’s mental and physical effects will, in turn, affect one’s social life. What will the effect be of both decreased anxiety and decreased sexual performance capacity on one’s family life, on one’s professional life, on one’s attitude toward spending money? To add another dimension of system/environment relations, what happens simultaneously to the taking of the drug in other aspects of one’s life is entirely uncontrollable. Maybe the patient has some yet undiagnosed cancer; maybe he catches the flu; maybe there will be a rise in taxes or a loss in the value of his property; maybe he will be promoted to a position that he feels unable to cope with; maybe he falls in love; or maybe no rain will fall for two weeks. Any of these events will resonate with the event of taking the drug, and vice versa. This is obviously not to say that taking such a drug has no effect or that it has bad effects, or that one should not take drugs. It is only to say that it is no more than a fiction to assume that taking a drug works in any way similar to the Cartesian model of the pineal gland mechanism. The human body does not work like a car. It is embedded in highly complex system/environment connections stretching over many different systemic realms.
Mental, physical, and social systems (and, perhaps, others) are integrated into complex system-environment relations that, in Luhmann’s words, cut through causal connections.11 Therefore, strictly speaking, taking a drug does not “cause” anything. In Luhmannian terminology, it “irritates” or “perturbs” a large number of bodily, mental, and social systemic processes. All these systemic processes incessantly produce mutual resonance. The world does not remain the same afterward, or at least this would be a very unlikely effect of the irritation or perturbation. The traditional notion of causality becomes highly problematic with respect to system-environment relations. Not entirely unlike Hume’s famous reflections on causality with respect to the playing of billiards,12 social systems theory looks at the cause-and-effect relation primarily as an ascription. Cause and effect are not objective categories but systemic constructs, which is obvious with respect to the dubious notion of a “side effect.” Causes and effects that are observed are, like all other observations, dependent on the observing system and its means of observation. The effects of taking a medical drug will be observed differently by the doctor, the patient, the pharmacological company, the medical insurance company, and so on. There is no such thing as the effect as such. The effects on the doctor’s professional reputation; the pharmaceutical company’s balance sheet; the patient’s digestive system, his mental well-being, his wife’s sex life; and so on, are all effects. What they are depends on the observational capabilities with which the various systems perceiving the effects are equipped. None of the effects can be labeled the central or proper effect as opposed to side effects. Such an ascription depends entirely on what is classified as central and peripheral by an observer. Side effects, like root causes, are semantic or ideological constructs.
Medical professionals—just like meteorologists and business consultants—are therefore, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, far more post-Platonic and post-Cartesian than most academic social theorists or philosophers. Instead of believing in mind-body dualisms and root causes, specialists in medicine have largely, due to the progress of statistics, abandoned simplistic dualist and cause-effect models. By extension, they have also abandoned the belief that they can take control of what they are professionally dealing with. Instead, they operate with probabilities. In North America, a doctor will often let you know the probability of success of a specific treatment; a meteorologist will tell you the probability of rain tomorrow; and a business consultant will inform you about the probable profit of a certain investment. This means that, implicitly, these people have quietly accepted the multiplicity of systems and the absence of a causal nexus between them—there is a chance that what they do will bring about some desired effects, that their projections will be more or less correct, but there is also a chance that they won’t. These people are aware that the probabilities with which they are working are only probable probabilities. In this way, Luhmann’s theory may be the last footnote to Plato, which many professionals in contemporary society, unlike we academic scholars, don’t even need to read anymore.
Luhmann successfully dissolved the traditional mind-body triple dualism. First, instead of an ontological division between ideal and material existence, there is a distinction between at least three, and potentially many more, kinds of systemic functions. There are psychic systems, living systems, and social systems. They do not split the world into a hierarchical structure of being, but into a complex arrangement of system/environment relations without any particular order. Second, instead of the hierarchical epistemological division between two kinds of knowledge, there is a differentiation between types of observation. Systems are observing systems and have their own internal capabilities for producing knowledge or cognition of their environment and of themselves. There is no privileged observatory platform and knowledge does not grant the ability to come to unequivocal conclusions or predictions. Observations are equally dependent on their operational modes. Third, the ethical distinction between ideal and material values and the subsequent formulation of normative prescriptions is simply absent from systems theory. It is, at least in its Luhmannian form, non-ethical and amoral and does not ascribe moral superiority or inferiority to any specific kind of system. It does not, for instance, repeat the traditional moral imperative that the intellect ought to subdue the body.