I
For a long time the thinking in systems has experienced a need for legitimation in relation to common sense and ordinary, everyday comprehensibility. "The most ingenious way of becomming foolish, is by a system". Shaftesbury thought, and concerning the mathematical student he said: "All he desires is to keep his head sound, as it was before".1 Currently, this kind of scepticism is not found so much in relation to systematic, theoretically based thinking, but rather in relation to any preference for certain "Grand Theories". Within the social structure of modern society there is no position from which one can with authority announce statements about the world. Similarly, the world has withdrawn to the non-observable. That line which is drawn by the observer between himself and that which he observes, must be drawn contingently.2 In this way an original borderline arises which hsd only validity in relation to the observer and which by other observers may be drawn in many other ways. Exactly this can be reflected by declaring the "unmarked state" (Spencer Brown) for non-observable; and by arranging a second order observation: an observation of observations, a description of descriptions in order to find out whether such recursive procedures might produce valid forms, "Eigenvalues" which could stand firm in relation to such a procedure.3 It is my hypothesis that "systems theory" belongs to that kind of Eigenvalues within modern intellectuality; not least because this theory is able to reflect and to understand the condition of self-creation in the unmarked state of the non-observable world.
It is only another version of the same perspective when one takes the notion of the contingency of all forms, all distinctions, all laws as one's starting point.4 The totally indefinite cannot be anything but what it is. As soon as something definitely happens or is being made, new posibilities arise. It may be an accidental beginning, or a beginning which shows no consideration for what is already present (for instance the first step of the creation of a work of art); but when something happens or is being made, a limitation arises as to how to go on. A story of adaptation starts which reduces the free space of what is still possible without through this being able to resolve the contingency of all definitenesses. One will always be able to see new possibilities without necessarily being able to realise them. The world of meaning is based on dissatisfaction and not, as Aristotle thought, on perfection.
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