The Paradigm Shift of Systems Theory


A Two-Part Essay On Systems Theory
Or Cybernetics As A Radical Paradigm Shift Away From Traditional Scientific Assumptions
And Its Impact On Family Therapy And Our Understandings Of Mental Illness

Copyright © 2007 by Robin Artisson



I. The Perspective of Systems Theory and its Relationship to the Traditional Mainstream Sciences, and its Approach to Mental Illness

“Systems theory” is the name given to both a broad perspective and a large body of knowledge which has formed through the original efforts of many men and women in the last century, all of whom were working under the impulses of an important epistemological paradigm shift. That shift- the implications of which are too numerous and transformative to state or explain adequately in one place- was from the causal/linear and reductionist perspective that had largely dominated scientific thinking in their time, to an interactional perspective that explored reality in important new ways. From the perspective of the traditional sciences, the paradigm shift of systems theory was and is both radical and subversive.

The seeds that gave rise to systems theory were planted primarily in the field of cybernetics, a revolutionary science or “way of seeing” to which we must now turn for a deeper understanding of the present topic. The Becvars write: “In what has since been recognized as a major departure in the way we study and come to know our world, the science of cybernetics early on concerned itself with organization, pattern, and process rather than with matter, material, and content” (Becvar and Becvar, 2006). The Becvars quote another cybernetic pioneer, W.R. Ashby, in saying that cybernetics “treats not things, but ways of behaving” (Becvar and Becvar, 2006). Cyberneticians were originally concerned with understanding and controlling complex systems. Their main focus was on feedback mechanisms, but also on communication between the parts of systems, and this led, perhaps providentially, to cyberneticians comparing inanimate machine-systems to organic or living systems early in the 1940’s.

This “quantum leap” of exploration, coupled with many events related to the second World War, led to a communion of thinkers and scientists from many disciplines coming together to share insights and create the basic bodies of information from which systems theory would be born. It was a logical step to examine organic systems in comparison with inanimate systems, in the search for understanding within the cybernetics field; but the fact that organic systems should be so similar to inorganic systems is itself a strange miracle of symmetry- it is as if the human creators of inanimate systems could not help but create an image or reflection of themselves in their creations. By creating technology and inanimate systems, humans perhaps unknowingly created a mirror in which they would later see themselves and find the ability to increase their understanding of themselves- even to the level of their own minds, families, and societies.


A Radical Shift

To understand how radical the paradigm shift of systems theory is, we should examine the fundamental assumptions of the scientific worldview that it can be contrasted against. The traditional Western, Lockean scientific worldview leads people to focus on one part or aspect of reality, excluding most or all others, when information or understanding is sought. The questions that naturally arise from this focus are many, but they begin with “why”. Why is “A” the way it is? What previous forces or events made “A” the way it is? What will A lead to? There is an implied linear chain of causality- A will lead to B which will lead to C, just as an implied or observed sequence of causes and effects led up to “A” in the first place. The nature of “A” is somehow tied to the linear causal chain that birthed it, but A is also A, its own thing, apart from other forces in the causal chain of reality. It is something that can be isolated and studied, which brings us to another assumption of the basic Western scientific view: someone must isolate and study the parts of the world. That someone- the observer- is enjoined to take the role of the “objective outsider” to whatever he or she studies. To be “objective” means to never bring one’s own preconceived notions, hopes, or desires to the phenomenon being studied, and to remain impartial to the results, dispassionately recording and reporting them.

This “ideal of objectivity” is itself tied up with a most fundamental fact of human perception- the fact that each of us experiences the world as though we were very much apart from it. There is a sense of a “perceiver” versus the “things perceived”, a division in our own perception- giving birth to subject-object dualism- which is enshrined by the basic Western scientific view not as a “way of seeing” but as an unalterable, objective fact of reality. Instead of admitting that this is a matter of perception, primarily, and making the more honest statement that it seems as though we are apart from the rest of the world, the mainstream understanding is that we absolutely are apart from the rest of the world. To this epistemology is given the credit for many other assumptions that have controlled the direction of Western thinking (and perhaps human thinking) for a very long time: the idea of “mind” being a substance apart from matter or “transcendent”, and often in opposition to matter; the older religious notions of “soul” or “spirit” being a transcendent entity, a substance apart from matter, and very often in opposition to it; the idea of human creatures, endowed with reason, having to face a hostile and irrational world which they are “born into” and have to survive within until they “die out” of it; and the basic idea of “us and them”- the basic dualism that places walls between societies and drives mankind to struggle with his fellow man.

These basic Western epistemological conclusions seem so logical and self-evident that one might consider it unthinkable that systems theory could question them all, and indeed, fly in their faces by accepting the opposite positions. But this is precisely the situation. We’re all so used to asking why things happen, that if the average caring person were introduced to a woman suffering from depression, and instructed to help her, they would most likely begin by asking “why is she depressed?” Very few (if any) would begin by asking “what is depression? Furthermore, what is the multi-faceted situation or system of this woman’s life like? What is occurring here?” This may seem like a small difference, but it is, in reality, an enormous shift in thinking and in achieving understanding. This approach, of asking “what” as opposed to “why”, is the Systems approach.

Point for point, systems theory questions the conventional assumptions about the world posed and promulgated by the mainstream sciences- can “A” be truly isolated from the world and studied? The answer is a resounding no. To quote the great preservationist John Muir: “When you tug at a single strand of nature, you find the rest of the world attached.” “A” doesn’t cause B and then cease to be important or vanish; A, B, and C aren’t living alone and isolated from one another on any “line” and related only by a single point of contact in a chain of linear cause and effect; they all exist together, reciprocally. They are parts of a system that arises all at once and perpetually, not a “bit at a time” in some sequential way. You can’t affect B without affecting A and C in some manner; A, B, and C are constantly in communication, constantly recursively affecting one another, creating feedback and dynamically existing. This is the systemic “way of seeing”- a simple invitation to make the leap from linear causality to holistic, reciprocal causality.

If “A” cannot be truly isolated from the world and studied, then we have no choice but to also conclude that “A” cannot be studied by some isolated and objective observer. The act of observing “A” is itself interaction- the system of the observer and the system observed exist together, recursively. The observer brings so much to what is seemingly “observed”, and draws so many conclusions based on what they think they observed- objectivity is, simply put, its own sort of illusion. A value-free science is not possible. When you consider it, the very notion of a “separate” or “independent” observer must be impossible; if the observer were truly separate, they couldn’t perceive the thing being observed to begin with- it’s fair to say that by the time you’re seeing something, feeling it, hearing it, thinking about it, or otherwise dealing with it as though it were something apart from yourself, you are already intimately in the same system as this “thing”. You are interacting with it, and interaction means change and recursion.


Running for Cover

By this point, most people who are well invested in the basic Western scientific paradigm are running for cover, or trying desperately to re-assert the philosophical assumptions upon which they were nursed and into which they have invested so much of their self-identity. They may understandably ask “if we can’t even be truly ‘apart’ from the world, as individuals, how can anything make sense? Are you saying that the objective scientific reports we’ve heard about all our lives, which informed our textbooks throughout our entire schooling, and which told us about the way the world was “out there”, were not reports of a world “out there”, but the reports of some scientist’s subjective experiences? What about the very foundations of our society’s most important institutions, like the justice system? Are you saying that even judges, who are trusted to examine evidence and make rulings impartially and objectively, cannot do so? Are you saying that every judge that has ever passed judgment has done so subjectively, based on his own personal biases and limitations?”

To these pained souls, responses can be given. The world as seen through the glass of systems theory can make sense if we remember that we need not ultimately be apart from the world, to have a relative experience of ourselves as though we were apart from it. Bearing in mind the unalterable truth of our involvement, systems theory asks us to recall relationship and interaction in all things: an idea best summed up in the statement that we are with the world as the world is with us. It is a simple but profound change of perception.

As for the scientists and judges, and the troubling way in which system theory casts doubt on the foundations of Western science and institutions that deal with important matters like law and justice, the answer to the troubling questions is “yes- science has never been value-free, and neither has justice been found apart from the values and biases of judges and other human beings.” So where do we turn now? What is real “science” and what is real “justice”? The closest approximation we will ever find for these fine ideals would seem to be in how we are prepared to re-think our approach to reality. If we can approach reality in a more holistic way, while being fully aware of our participation in reality, and not ignoring the fact of our unavoidable and indivisible participation in system of interactions, then we can arrive at a kind of honesty in “how we know things” that may have been lacking for a long time in the history of human ideas and interactions.

The mainstream “Western scientific approach” to things has never been limited to the realm of the sciences; it exists (as has been demonstrated) on every level in every person and institution in our society, from the level of perception onward. This approach, this “way of seeing” the world, has many side-effects, but one of the primary effects is the creation, in the minds of people, of the construct called “normalcy”. If, as the mainstream sciences once confidently believed, all things were composed of matter of some kind, and all things could be reduced to their constituent parts, and so on in an endless chase of reductionism that would extend to the “laws” of reality which governed matter, then eventually, we could reach the basic “truth about things”. Of course, systems theory has come onto the scene to side with the view that disagrees with the idea of reductionism- from the perspective of systems thinking, there is no objective and absolute truth hanging around “out there”, waiting to be uncovered by sufficiently objective and clear-thinking humans. Since “truth”, as a value judgment, is part of the system of human interactions and perceptions, then it is situational and relativistic. This means that what we might call “normal” is equally as situational and relativistic.

The insights of systems theory may have come too late; already humans exist alongside one another socially, mostly living under the assumption that there is some absolute standard or standards for human behavior, and that these standards are based on the “truth” about mankind, an objective truth which can be found in various ways. Normally- and predictably- people think these truths can be found by good, “objective” truth-seekers, or people who can “get underneath” all the layers of garbage and get back to the “basics” or “fundamentals” of man. Perhaps, (some believe) the fundamental truths were handed down to this or that teacher or prophet in ancient times; or maybe the anthropological sciences have isolated and located the fundamental working truths about Homo Sapiens. At any rate, “normalcy” is taken for granted: most will tell you that there’s a way to live, a way to act and a way to be, and this isn’t viewed as a highly relative matter, but a reflection of some standards “out there” which humans in the past discovered and handed down or set in place for us. The interactional/relational and contextual framework of systems theory has no place for the mysterious “truths out there”, but focuses on the reality of interactions here and now. What is “normal”? What are the features of social systems, and how are they interacting? How are they perpetuating behaviors and limits they call “normal”? What makes them define a particular behavior as normal, and another behavior as deviant?


The Myth of Mental Illness

Systems theory, used in the context of relationship therapy and in the context of caring for people who are suffering from what the mainstream call “mental illnesses”, brings its holistic and relativistic focus to these tasks. A systems theoretician must study the concept of “normalcy” and the systems in which concepts like “normalcy” arise, if they wish to fairly appraise the idea of “mental health”. This is so because minds- as Gregory Bateson was relieved to conclude- are immanent in systems, not transcendent (Becvar and Becvar, 2006). What further uncomfortable conclusions are we forced to arrive at, when we realize that the socially-accepted diagnoses of mental illnesses that we all know so well have heretofore been made following the standards of the linear, materialistic and reductionist models of science? We are forced to conclude that a sweeping reconsideration about the nature of “mental illness” is both needful and unavoidable. We may be forced to suggest, as Dr.Don Jackson and Thomas Szasz have, that “mental illness” as we normally think of it may be a myth.

This isn’t to say that mental illnesses do not exist, only that they may not be based on what we believe them to be based on; they may not exist as we typically understand them to exist. There is no doubt that some people suffer greatly in the system of human interactions; even though their bodies are not necessarily diseased, they still feel great emotional pain and encounter confusion that they have trouble coping with. They seem driven to destructive behaviors, to distress and the causes of distress. They are unhappy beyond the “acceptable” range of unhappiness, whatever that may be. They express ideas that we may be very uncomfortable with and communicate in ways that are disturbing to us. They may even harm others- but at this point, systems theory again steps in and forces us to question the basis on which we rest our ideas of “normalcy”. We are forced to reconsider the basis upon which we rest our notions of “proper” interactions. And we are forced to consider how large the system of human interactions really is, and in how many ways it can come into conflict, or cause the sorts of results we see in people we call “mentally ill”.

True to the systems approach, we cannot isolate a person who is labeled as “mentally ill” from the rest of the system in which they live and interact- and if this is the case, then we are forced to look to every salient feature of their lives, all of the connected and recursive forces and actors that surround them, and even to a much broader context, for a “systems eye view” explanation for what is happening to them, or what is truly causing them to feel the pain they feel. Most importantly, we can’t isolate the “mentally ill” person from ourselves and our own perceptions and inputs, for there are no objective observers. We too are participating in the lives of other people, especially those we attempt to treat or counsel.

Thomas Szasz said that mental illness was a myth- a myth whose function was to disguise, and thus render more palatable, the bitter pill of the moral conflicts in human relations. He said that what we had were problems living together, and not poor mental health. These problems were, he claimed, biological, ecological, political, and sociopsychological (Jackson, 1967). What could cause so many problems with people living together? It may be the simple fact of the vast mental and behavioral variety (and therefore the vast cultural variety) we encounter in our world- Jackson himself says “I submit that there is no such animal as the normal person. Instead, there is a wide variance in adaptive patterns and behavioral repertoires” (Jackson, 1967). Cultures may once have existed with more isolation, but as the world has modernized, and science has revolutionized communication and transportation, the world has progressively grown “smaller”. Cultures, and all their great behavioral varieties and differences of value, have been forced together on an unprecedented scale.

Even within one culture, each human member has the potential to demonstrate a wide variety of adaptive patters and behavioral repertoires. When these miniature worlds collide, troubles are almost inevitable. There’s so many things that we don’t know about other cultures, and so much we don’t know about other people- a fact that most people are not comfortable with. Jackson makes another valuable observation in his article “The Myth of Normality” , regarding how humankind approaches the unknown- man seems to live in a sort of dread of the unknown or of anything that occurs outside of what is expected. He states that “anything occurring outside common experience stimulates fear and is labeled “freak”, “accidental”, “miraculous”, “crazy”, lest we need admit we simply don’t understand” (Jackson, 1967). We live in an “era of classification”, in which the dominant paradigms of thinking are dependant on the limitations and expectations of the classifiers.

Over-classifying things gives us a sense of security, but at what cost? It would seem to be the cost of our duty to be compassionate, open, and understanding to our fellow man, and the cost of sciences that do not operate or produce understanding at their highest potential. Over-classifying things, while seemingly quite edifying, helps us to create and maintain the “myth of normality” that we all have been indoctrinated with, since we were very young. After a while, as you classify, you’ll notice that many of these “things” that you tear away from the rest of the world and put in neat categories tend to fit pretty well into the criteria you’ve come up with. That should come as no surprise, considering you are creating both the “things” you are categorizing and the criteria by which they are categorized, but few people ever stop to think about this long enough. Inevitably, however, as you continue along with the classification game, something isn’t going to fit well with the way things have been going for you, and then you’ll meet the monster of abnormality that your thinking has helped to create.

But where is the problem? From what source does this attribution of “abnormal” come? Thinking as systems theoreticians, we can’t isolate the source of the label to the thing being labeled, and yet, we can’t fully separate it, either. This is a recursive system, after all. The uncomfortable and unavoidable suggestion here is that the existence of “mental illness” depends as much on the perceptions and beliefs of the doctors who diagnose people as mentally ill, as it does the person diagnosed. And what could make doctors think a certain way? What could make a person being diagnosed act a certain way? The answer is forces and interactions beyond number, interactions from which the doctor and patient cannot themselves be meaningfully separated. The system of human interactions is simply too massive for any such idea as “normal” to survive for very long- and it’s certainly too massive for easy categories of behavior to be formed, and then applied with cookie-cutter strokes to entire groups of people. Where is normal now? “Normal” would seem to be only within a given context, and nowhere else. There is a “poverty of limitation” in mainstream human perceptions and in mainstream approaches to reality, a poverty which cannot be separated from the things we call “mental illnesses”.



II. Epistemology, The Two Orders of Cybernetics, and a New Approach to Ethics

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which is concerned with the nature and origin of knowledge. Epistemology asks a subtle question that seems redundant at first, but is in reality the secret heart of the human experience: “how do we know what we know?” Any living person consciously and/or unconsciously processes and relates to their world and their life-experiences from the perspective of their worldview, which is a broad collection of epistemological presuppositions and assumptions about things, which they have internalized over the course of their lives. The body of epistemological statements and assumptions thus internalized is largely due to the cultural tradition each individual is born into, though the process of learning and supporting a worldview is not static, but dynamic.

Bradford Keeney writes in Aesthetics of Change that it is impossible for one to not have an epistemology. He quotes Gregory Bateson when he says “You cannot claim to have no epistemology. Those who so claim have nothing but a bad epistemology” (Keeney, 2002). He adds, however, that “the claim to have no epistemology is “bad” only if the individual uses such a claim to avoid responsibility for his ideas, perceptions, and decisions. Having no conscious awareness of one’s epistemology is not necessarily bad, although such awareness may be risky. I would prefer to say that the claim to have no epistemology reveals an epistemology that does not include a conscious awareness of itself.”

This notion of the unavoidable nature of epistemology is tied into the fundamental fact of human experience: the fact of perception, and how we perceive. Even though there is no way that we can meaningfully separate ourselves or detach ourselves from the vast system of life that we are both products of and recursive participants in, we naturally seem to feel as though (and perceive as though) “we” were very different from “it”, from our surroundings, and from one another. This basic perspective leads to the formation of a subject-object duality which is the basis of much of the rest of our approach to knowledge. Our languages, for instance, only work if there is a clear understanding of subjects and objects; language is inherently dualistic. Following along in our natural feeling of isolation or separation from the world, we further divide and create “subjective” regions of experience (that “space” that seems to be “inside” us, the space of thoughts, dreams, emotions, and memories, and which we alone can access) and “objective” regions (the presumably shared “space” in which all other events occur, and which other perceiving creatures who are not us also participate).

When a person is allowed to build epistemological assumptions on these common pylons of experience, they unavoidably arrive at a range of common epistemological conclusions. One common example is this: if a person sees a vase containing flowers, then they will likely believe that they came to knowledge of that vase- that “thing” that is apart from them- through the input of the eyes, eyes which “receive” inputs coming from the “outside” world and relay those inputs to the brain, which translates them into subjective impressions which are immediately related to linguistic categories and labels dwelling in the memory. From that point, emotions can arise, depending on the associations the individual may have with various memories, categories, or labels. At any rate, the common epistemological assumption- and the one accepted by many mainstream sciences- is that the “objective” world and the “subjective” world have an ongoing intercourse of great complexity and the senses act as their “bridge” of interaction, with the brain as the interpreter, bringing the element of knowledge, understanding, and even meaning to the perception-event.

In the above example, the observer of the vase of flowers lives under the assumption that what they see or experience at the end of this “chain of perception” is really what is there. Though the process of perception, even given in the above model, is clearly very subjective, relying on the subjective processes of the brain, association through memory, and linguistic categorization and labeling, somehow this fact- the fact that nearly the entire process of perception is filtered and manipulated by a complex subjective assembly line- never seems to alert most individuals that what they are perceiving is dependant on them as much as it is on what they call “out there”. In a strange (and some might say tragic) near-sightedness, most people who consider themselves to be “objective” observers, isolated and separate “stations of consciousness” standing apart from the world all around them, never seem to be aware of what they bring to the act of perceiving. They live under the very large assumption that their entire subjective matrix of perception and knowledge is somehow simply reporting precisely what is around them at all times. To these people, description is world-referential.


Cybernetic Observation

Cybernetics, the “way of seeing” the world which posits our participation in a massive system of recursive and interactional events of information and feedback, takes another view. To cyberneticians, like Keeney, “all description is self-referential” (Keeney, 2002). Cybernetics, or systems theory as it is called by some, does away with the notions of truly separate and objective observers looking out into massive “worlds out there” full of material objects and “things”. It looks at the world in terms of interaction, organization, systems and patterns. The world for cyberneticians is not a world of materials, as much as a world of inter-related systems and processes. Matter is not “chopped apart” lumps of “stuff”, as much as forms in our perception. The ages-old conflict between “mind” and “matter”, which has bedeviled the western world for so long, is elegantly resolved in systems thinking by seeing the world instead in terms of mind and form, or mind and forms of mental experience.

Where the old “mind” of the past once gazed out on cold and distant matter, and often bashed itself on these aggregates of particles, systems theory allows for a perfect interaction between mind and the forms that it perceives, for there cannot be one without the other. There is another powerful conclusion which strikes at the heart of the way people tend to think, embedded in these systemic ideas: mind, a thing thought for so long to be transcendent or “apart” from the material world, can be understood in new terms of origin and existence. In a world of systems, in a world of ceaseless recursive information-exchange, interaction and communication, mind need not and cannot be “apart” from it all- the unavoidable conclusion is that what we experience and call “mind” is a result of the total interactions, informational processes, and communications that are occurring to us at this very moment. It is not enough to say that the “mind” exists as some separate entity, or as a “free floating” phenomenon; the mind does not simply “exist”; it is coming to be at every moment, dependant on the systemic interactions of the moment. This is the key issue to the idea that we are constructing- at this moment and in every moment- of our reality, an idea that has been expanded upon greatly by many writers in this field.


The Dreamer Must Awaken: First and Second Order Cybernetics

Now let us turn to two specific models of this cybernetic epistemology which has been lightly described above. Using the language of cybernetics, two “types” of cybernetic perspective are discussed often: first-order cybernetics and second-order cybernetics, which is also called “cybernetics of cybernetics”.

First-order cybernetics is found in the application of systems thinking to the observed processes of one’s own mind or self, or to the processes of something apart from you. It is immediately apparent to people who have been reading this discourse thus far that this first-order cybernetic perspective fails to take into account the impossibility of there existing a truly “outside” observer. This is not lost on your writer. It just so happens that we can deal with the world as though it were a thing apart from us; we can look at things as though we were outside observers- we can create, however crudely, a conceptual model which treats the “things observed” as though they were very much apart from the observer. The key here is in the term “as though” - by admitting to ourselves up front, by accepting that we cannot ultimately be “apart” from those things we observe, we can proceed with the “construct of duality” in a safer manner, and in a more honest way. Very few people experience their world and think to themselves “it is as though I am apart from all this”.

In the perceptions of most, there is an automatic and unspoken assumption, a ground rule as it were, that they are just wherever they happen to be, and all the other things they are perceiving are “over there”, wherever they happen to be. They don’t think “it is as though I am apart from all this”- they feel and the believe “I am apart from all this”. The shift in how a person thinks and approaches their world once they have accepted the epistemological conclusion that they are not apart from the world ultimately, and only experiencing a relative sense of separation, is a radical one. When a person’s view of relationship and interaction is changed so radically, there are more than just changes in perception; there are broad ethical and even moral changes in the works.

A good example of how radical the change might be to a person who overcomes the duality of mind and matter and submerges themselves in the interactional and systemic way of thinking is the example of the dreamer who has no idea that they are dreaming. The dreamer’s experience is all mental; the dream is not a thing “happening to their mind”, but a form of their mind. While this fact is forgotten, as it commonly is in dreams, the dreamer is victimized by the painful emotional situations they perceive themselves as encountering in the dream. Trapped on the other side of the wall of absolute dualism, encased in an ego that cannot view itself in terms of intimate union with its world, only in terms of alienation, the dreamer suffers the tragedies of nightmares as though they were a subject apart from those tormentors. But the very moment they realize that they are dreaming, the nightmare has lost its power to terrify or disturb. Even if it continues, showing its awful forms, those forms no longer have the power to disturb as they once did; the dreamer accepts that these things are his own mental constructions. There is a sense of relief and freedom, even if the nightmare continues. The dream is no longer driven on by unconscious mechanisms and limited or flawed perceptions; it is now lucid.

So when we apply first-order cybernetics to a situation, we are choosing to partially “forget”, for a time, the fact of our unavoidable participation in our world, and taking on the role of the classic “observer”. We are applying cybernetic understandings- things like recursion, feedback, and others, to the processes we experience, and labeling our experiences in terms of systems, in an attempt to understand them in a certain way. We can do this to ourselves, as well, apply systemic insights to our own subjective worlds. As stated above, we are not falling victim to an unconscious set of assumptions about these “outside things” we are observing in cybernetic terms; we are consciously choosing to construct a way of seeing, without forgetting the rules and qualifiers of a deeper reality, that of second-order cybernetics, to which we must now turn.


The Wholeness of the Second Order and a New Approach to Ethics

When we let the fictional divisions of perception fall by the wayside- chiefly the fiction of “me the observer, the watcher of the world who is ultimately apart from it”, we are left with second-order cybernetics. All of the subsystems we can identify and index, describe and study, are all suddenly seen in their natural greater context, and the role we play in them is brought to the forefront. No longer imagining ourselves to be outside observers, the system or systems that were “around” us a few moments ago are now suddenly a part of our system, and we are a part of them, such that ultimate divisions between the two are meaningless. Even the labels of “we” and “I” reveal their permeable and insubstantial nature- a moment ago, we may have considered ourselves to be affecting this or that system, acting upon them, “happening to them”, whether we considered them “our” personal systems, or other systems; now we know that “we” are in reality the undivided operation of the suprasystem of life itself.

From one perspective, it may seem like second-order cybernetics is a devouring maw, swallowing all traces of boundaries and self-referential resting places; it seems as though to truly accept the second-order suggestion, that we must face a mind-blowing sense of being “lost” in the indivisibility of the great system of which we are all a part, and which ultimately does not honor the “divisions” we set for ourselves. Luckily, this does not happen because the perspective of second-order cybernetics has to be practical, as well as truthful. Its practical use, such as when we apply this sort of thinking to systemic family therapy, is the degree to which it reminds us of our indivisible connection to those other humans that we meet, speak with, and try to help. It reminds us that we are interactionally related to these people, and to this relationship, we bring everything. Moment to moment, we construct an entire fund of related ideas, a veritable world of labeled interactions which are applied to those we attempt to help, and to their situations. These labels are pregnant with our values, assumptions and other ideas- and herein lies both the warning and the wisdom of second-order cybernetic thinking.

The real use of submerging ourselves into a “way of thinking” that forces us to consider our intimate and recursive relationships with every single thing we experience is this: it awakens a sense of responsibility in us. Second order cybernetic epistemology awakens a special sense of responsibility for others by undermining our reliance on categories like “subjective” and “objective”- things that we might never have realized held us back from being as ethical and responsible as we could be. Keeney says “It is apparent that we need to look beyond the gestalt of objectivity and subjectivity. Cybernetics of cybernetics proposes that the alternative is ethics. From an ethical perspective we do not ask whether we are “objective” or “subjective”. Instead, we recognize the necessary connection of the observer with the observed, which leads to examining how the observer participates in the observed” (Keeney, 2002). Keeney further quotes Howe and von Foerster, who discussed Kant’s role in helping to formulate the paradigmatic shift that “replaces our concern with objectivity to one of responsibility”.

We all bring our assumptions and ideas to the world; we punctuate the world, as the old saying goes, “as we are”- “We do not see the world as it is; we see it as we are.” If this is the case, then the real focus of our studies becomes one of “self knowledge” to use a term that moves us back to the original (though useful) fiction of the self as apart from the world. We must study why we bring the things we bring to a situation; we must study and understand why we punctuate the world the way we do. Chiefly, it would seem (and as Keeney states) we have to examine our intentions. It seems (to the mainstream thinker) almost absurd or misdirected, but when a therapist enters into a therapeutic relationship with another person, their work is not (and cannot be) merely on the “other” person; it is not too far off the mark to state that their real work is on themselves- for in the relationship, the therapist and the patient will recursively affect one another, and their destinies are, in a real way, tied together. The better the therapist understands him or herself and their true role in the interaction system, down to the basic level of intentionality, the better things will go for all parts of the system.

When the therapist interacts with the patient, they are interacting with a self-constructed image of reality which includes their ideas about the patient- is it so much of a stretch to say that treating another person is always, in a way, a personal exercise? If the therapist can lay aside selfish intentions and remember compassionate ethics, they will be in a position to be truly present to the patient or client, and aware of the true nature of their interactions together. If an open and benevolent concern for the good of the other is present alongside this true awareness of relationship, positive systemic changes can hardly fail to occur.





References

Becvar, D., & Becvar, R. (2006). Family therapy: A systemic integration. Boston: Pearson.

Jackson, D. (1967).The myth of normality. Medical Opinion and Review. 3, 28-33.

Keeney, B. (2002). Aesthetics of change. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.