Who Am I and If So How Many? (26 page)

Even today, many people who wish to see God and not nature as the cause of the complexity of life invoke the slogan ‘intelligent design.’ The hub of intelligent design theory is the Discovery Institute, a Christian conservative think tank in Seattle. The many varied theories of intelligent design have two basic positions in common, namely, that physics and biology cannot adequately explain the world, and that there is only one truly convincing solution to this problem: the existence of an intelligent God with long-term designs. They use the idea that the constants of the physical world are so wonderfully attuned to one another as an indirect proof of the existence of God. Even the slightest deviation would make all life on earth – including man – impossible.

This observation is certainly correct, but the question of whether it points to God as a creator depends on how this fine-tuning is evaluated. The chain of events that gave rise to man is so colossal as not to appear random. But does that prove necessity? Even the most improbable coincidences are still possible. Some scientists believe that purposefulness in nature should not be overstated. Biologists in particular have problems with the idea that
everything in nature is well organized, beautiful, and purposeful. After all, the history of our planet has featured five global disasters during the transition periods between major geological eras, with frightful mass extinctions of plant and animal species. And not every detail that evolution has allowed to exist is a blessing. All mammals have seven cervical vertebrae, but dolphins would be better off with one or two fewer. If you’ve ever watched a giraffe drinking, you might wish it had a couple of additional vertebrae. The male babirusa, a wild boar in Sulawesi, Indonesia, has two oddly curved tusks that do not offer any evident advantage. But the fact that it does have them is not a sign of purposefulness. It is more probable that they simply pose no problems.

A closer look reveals quite a bit that does not fit the category of intelligent design. Neither God’s intelligence nor the intelligent adaptation of nature explains why deep-sea shrimp are bright red. The color looks nice, but for whom? There is no light in the pitch-black deep sea, and the red offers no advantages. Even Darwin’s theory of evolution does nothing to explain the bright color. What higher purpose could be served by blackbirds imitating cellphone ring tones or warbling most tunefully when the mating season is over and their singing is no longer useful in evolutionary terms? How is it that humans fall in love with people of their own gender? Open questions of this kind show weaknesses in an evolutionary theory that interprets every phenomenon and every behavior pattern as optimal adaptation to the environment, yet they do not play into the hands of intelligent design either. Any objections to purposefulness in Darwin’s theory apply equally well to the notion of a clever master plan. Biologists now tend to steer clear of the concept of unconditional purposefulness, which makes the whole idea of intelligent design even less tenable.

Organisms do not simply link together from atoms and molecules, like pieces in a Lego set; they originate in contact with their environment. A potato comes out white and leafless if it vegetates in a cellar, but turns green and leafy in the fields. The
same occurs on a vast scale with all living creatures. Nature perpetually reinvents itself in this feedback process with the rest of the world. Life, it would seem, has such a complex structure that it represents its own very special form of organization and gives rise to a unique entity that is more than the sum of its parts. The terms and thought patterns of classical physics are as insufficient here as they would be in explaining cosmic origins.

Albert Einstein said in a 1929 interview:

Let us leave aside the fact that Einstein actually embraced the notion of an intelligent creator of universal constants – that is, of an
author
of the many books in the library – and focus instead on his insistence on the limitations of the human mind. Vertebrate brains and objective reality do not fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, for the simple reason that we ourselves create every idea from our own ‘objective reality.’ ‘Real reality,’ outside our perception, inevitably remains a construct, and each of us has to decide where God figures in it.

Biologists will continue to debate whether to explain the animate world on the basis of cause and effect or of
self-organization
. Remarkably, though, it was a scholar outside this discipline – a sociologist – who delved deeply into the biological concept of self-organization right from the start. In the following
chapter, we will turn our attention to this sociologist, arguably the preeminent scholar in his field in the second half of the twentieth century, in particular to his explanation of one of the most mystical phenomena outside of religion: love.

In 1968, it was anything but business as usual at most German universities. The student movement was in full swing, and its two major centers were Berlin and Frankfurt. Particularly in the field of sociology, there were heated confrontations between the students and their professors. Professors Jürgen Habermas and Theodor W. Adorno, teaching in Frankfurt, shared many of their students’ political views but not their desire for revolution. Although Habermas and Adorno felt the students were justified in labeling the Federal Republic a ‘reactionary’ and ‘late capitalist’ state, they did not believe that the state could be changed by force.

In the fall semester of 1968, matters finally came to a head. Adorno’s lectures were interrupted, the famous philosopher and sociologist was ridiculed, and the Institute for Social Research was occupied. In light of these events, Adorno canceled his lectures overnight, and the university scrambled to come up with a replacement for the rest of the semester, someone who was intrepid enough to leap into the pandemonium of the sociology department. To everyone’s great surprise, a candidate was found, a virtually unknown forty-one-year-old
public administration expert from Münster. His name was Niklas Luhmann. The topic of his lecture series was ‘Love as Passion.’

A lecture series about love, at a time when the humanities and social sciences disciplines were focusing squarely on ‘late
capitalism
’ and the future of society? Who was this valiant substitute teacher, laying out the finer points of a ‘theory of intimacy’ for those twenty or so inquisitive students who had not joined the strikes and had made their way to the large third-floor auditorium of the main building?

He was born in 1927 in Lüneburg, a city in north-central Germany. His father owned a brewery, and his mother was from a family of Swiss hoteliers. Shortly before it came time to take his college entrance examinations, Luhmann was conscripted into the Wehrmacht as a
Luftwaffenhelfer
(a term for German students deployed as antiaircraft gunners), and in 1945 he was taken prisoner by American troops. In 1946, he completed his
examinations
and entered law school in Freiburg, but in 1953, after passing his state examinations, he switched over to public administration, first in Lüneburg and then in Hanover. In his spare time, he read his way through a mountain of scholarly literature from a variety of eras and in wide-ranging subjects, and noted every interesting idea on index cards.

In 1960 he applied for and was accepted to a year-long program in public administration at Harvard University. Here he met the famous American social-systems theorist Talcott Parsons, who divided society into separate functional systems – an idea Luhmann found immensely appealing. When he returned to Germany, he became an instructor at the University for Administrative Sciences in Speyer. No one there seemed to notice that he was extremely overqualified for this position until his first book,
Functions and
Consequences of Formal Organization
, was published in 1964 and a sociology professor in Münster took an interest in this
unconventional
and innovative public administrator. Helmut Schelsky, one of the leading German sociologists at the time, recognized Luhmann’s undiscovered genius, just as Bertrand Russell had
discovered the brilliant Wittgenstein in Cambridge, but Schelsky had quite a time persuading Luhmann to embark on an academic career and move to Münster so that Luhmann would not ‘go down in history as a senior civil servant without a doctorate.’ In 1966, the thirty-nine-year-old was granted a doctorate on the basis of the book he had published while in Speyer – another parallel to Wittgenstein and highly unusual in the German academic world. In the same year, something even less usual came to pass: he was granted his postdoctoral
Habilitation
degree. And Schelsky had arranged a professorship for Luhmann at the newly established University of Bielefeld, an appointment that became official in 1968. Since his duties there would not begin until the following spring, he spent the fall semester of 1968 in Frankfurt standing in for Adorno, then taught in Bielefeld until his retirement in 1993. He lived in Bielefeld for his first ten years on the faculty, and moved to the nearby town of Oerlinghausen in the Teutoburg Forest after the death of his wife. His daily routine was unvarying. From the early morning to the late evening he worked on his books, taking a little stroll with his dog only at lunchtime. In 1998, Luhmann died of leukemia at the age of seventy-one.

Schelsky’s instincts were right on the mark. Luhmann, who had been trained in public administration, became a titan of sociology. To introduce him in this book as a philosopher of love is thus a bit odd – but Luhmann would have relished the thought. As his performance in Frankfurt in the fall of 1968 proved, Luhmann was a man with a fine sense of humor, and he surely would have chuckled at the label. Restricting our attention to Luhmann’s ideas on love is like looking at Immanuel Kant as a philosopher of religion or René Descartes as a doctor. Still, Luhmann had truly important things to say about love, and his pronouncements on this subject shed light on his complex work as a whole. But a few introductory words on Luhmann’s sociological approach are in order before we launch into his views on love.

Luhmann hoped to figure out how society functions. One promising point of departure was Parsons’s systems theory, and
another was biology. That was not unusual; after all, one of the founders of sociology, Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer, had derived sociology from psychology, and psychology from biology. But Luhmann did not think much of a model of this kind, which applies findings from simple organisms to society as a whole. The development of social systems, he argued, could be explained, as Parsons had, with concepts from the theory of evolution, but social systems are not just a highly complex form of biological system, even though people are certainly living beings, because social systems depend not on the exchange of nutrients and energy among living creatures but on the exchange of communication and meaning. Communication and meaning differ so fundamentally from proteins that it is barely worthwhile for a sociologist to ponder biological foundations in this manner. It did not matter to Luhmann that humans were living creatures and thus ‘social animals’ of a sort. Learning from biology meant something completely different to him.

The scientists who inspired him were the Chilean neuroscientist Humberto Maturana and his student Francisco Varela. Maturana was one of the founders of ‘theoretical biology’ and a specialist in color perception in the brain. In the 1960s, Maturana and Varela explored the question of what constitutes life, and they determined that living beings ‘produce themselves and specify their own limits.’ Just as the brain itself constructs what it uses to function, organisms create themselves in the process of self-perpetuation. Maturana called this process
autopoiesis
(self-creation). In 1969, when he presented this idea at a conference in Chicago, Niklas Luhmann, who was the same age as Maturana, was just beginning his lecture series in Bielefeld. When he later heard about Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis, he realized that Maturana had not only described the self-creation of life and the brain, but also redefined the term ‘communication.’ According to Maturana, communication is more than simply a means of conveying information; it constructs a system with whatever language is employed. Bacterial interaction forms an ecological system; brain
regions communicate and create a system of neurons, namely, consciousness. Doesn’t this mean, Luhmann mused, that social systems are also an autopoietic system that arises by means of linguistic (that is, symbolic) communication?

Luhmann had been planning for some time to provide a precise description of the social systems of a society based on the concept of communication. The idea of autopoiesis supplied a key missing component. Although Maturana later had serious doubts about stretching this approach so far, Luhmann’s accomplishments went well beyond those of Maturana and all others in this field. Luhmann became one of the sharpest observers of social processes in the second half of the twentieth century. He was an ‘intellectual continent,’ an architectural theorist of superlatives. The very fact that he approached the subject on the basis of communication was revolutionary.

Before Luhmann, sociologists had framed their discourse around people, norms, social roles, institutions, and actions. But for Luhmann, the
incidence
of communication was the focus, and it was of little consequence
who
was doing the communicating. The important question was only: ‘With what result?’ In human society, no nutrition and energies are exchanged as they are in bacteria, no neurons as in the brain, but rather
expectations
. But how are expectations exchanged? Which expectations are
expected
, and what are the results? In other words: how is communication able to exchange expectations in such a manner that modern social systems that are basically stable and functioning arise independently of other influences – systems like politics, economics, law, science, religion, education, art, or love?

Love is accordingly a social system, made up of expectations, that is, of predictable and set codes. Luhmann’s book
Love as
Passion
– which he did not publish until fifteen years after his lecture series on the subject – is about the history and current state of love codes. Luhmann argues that what we take to be love today is less a feeling than a code – and a very bourgeois code at that – that arose in the late eighteenth century. The declaration ‘I love you!’ is far more
than an expression of feelings, such as a statement like ‘I have a toothache.’ A declaration of love implies an entire system of promises and expectations. Assuring one’s love promises that a person considers this feeling reliable and takes responsibility for the object of his or her affections, that he or she is prepared to act like a lover and all that implies in the eyes of the other in our society.

The need for love springs from a specific type of
self-categorization
. The less a person is part of a clearly defined milieu, the stronger the need to assert individuality. But modern societies don’t make it easy for the individual. They are split into many individual social systems, autopoietic worlds concerned only with ensuring the perpetuation of the system. In Luhmann’s
descriptions
, systems thus act like organisms under the conditions of Darwinism, introducing from the outside only what they need to preserve themselves. There is little place for individualism. Ten years of work in administration seem to have confirmed
Luhmann
’s conviction that individuality is not what counts in social systems. The individual person is splintered into many different roles: mother or father, professional, competitive bowler or badminton player, member of an Internet community and neighbor, taxpayer and spouse. It is difficult to construct a unified identity in this manner. What is missing is a confirmation of how we experience ourselves as a whole – as an individual.

According to Luhmann, this ‘self-portrayal’ is accomplished by love, and it constitutes the very function of love, which is a rare and therefore ‘improbable’ form of communication, yet an altogether normal one. Love, Luhmann tells us, is the ‘quite normal improbability’ of finding one’s ‘own happiness in the other’s happiness.’ The image of the beloved is so thoroughly transformed that he or she departs from a ‘normal’ perspective. That is its unique and distinctive quality: the lover sees only the beloved’s smile, not the crooked teeth; or, in Luhmann’s sober formulation: ‘External supports are dismantled, and the internal tensions become more acute. The capacity for stability now depends on purely personal resources.’

The ensuing process of lovers attuning their expectations is fraught with potential disappointments. Love is, paradoxically, the code that ought to ensure the greatest degree of stability, yet it is the most fragile of all codes. The more the lover finds expectations for stability fulfilled, the less nervous tension there is in love relationships – for better and for worse. Perfectly attuned ‘expected expectations’ are dependable, but not terribly thrilling; the very improbability that constituted the attraction quickly fades. The romantic idea of love as a unity of feeling, sexual desire, and virtue, Luhmann explains, is quite a tall order. Finding meaning in the world of another – if only temporarily – is a colossal achievement.

At this point it is worth taking up the question of ‘why,’ for which Luhmann does not provide an answer. Why can’t the strong desire that frequently marks the start of a romantic relationship be maintained? Why does it wear off? Is that really just a question of predictable ‘expected expectations’? Doesn’t it also perhaps wear off in love relationships in which communication – that is, attuning of expectations – works poorly? In other words, in bad
relationships
? Maybe there is an altogether different reason for the erosion that lies totally outside Luhmann’s focus: a biochemical reason, for example?

Luhmann was roundly criticized for disregarding biology and its influence on our emotional lives. For Gerhard Roth, a
neuroscientist
in Bremen, it is incomprehensible that a sociologist like Luhmann failed to consider man’s role as a biological individual. To make matters worse, most neuroscientists were inclined to dismiss the views of Maturana and Varela, who were so influential for Luhmann, because their views could not be verified or refuted experimentally.

Luhmann replied quite simply that as long as brain research focused on neuron communication rather than on expectations, sociology could leave aside neurons and focus on how expectations are communicated. This is precisely the point of the functional independence of the systems of biology and sociology. Only what is relevant within a system is relevant. At the same time, it is
interesting to note that from a biological point of view, Luhmann’s concept of love integrates a series of very different states of consciousness. To be fair to Luhmann, discussions of love in a given societal context generally have clearly defined parameters, and everybody knows what is meant, but that does not change the fact that Luhmann’s umbrella concept of ‘love’ as the need for ‘self-portrayal’ in the eyes of the other is – in both a biological and a social sense – only one segment of a far more comprehensive picture. This concept is not an adequate descriptor of a first blush of love; falling head over heels in love with someone does not necessarily mean that confirmation is being sought in the eyes of the other. If it did, a teenager’s love for a pop idol might seem even more ridiculous than it already is. And the need for sex, which is often coupled with feelings of love, does not necessarily imply a quest for profound self-confirmation. The point of a sexual encounter for one person might be exactly what another person is trying to steer clear of. Actually, people may not be seeking self-confirmation at all; quite the contrary, the idea of adopting an uncharacteristic role or playing a charade might be exactly what constitutes the sexual attraction.