The Socrates of Cybernetics: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Heinz von Foerster

By Bernhard Poerksen

Who is - was - Heinz von Foerster, who has been called the "Socrates of cybernetics"? We must caution against a hasty answer and definition.1 For like a late-born skeptic von Foerster was wary of being pinned down as a matter of principle; he sought to steer clear of fixed formulas and supposedly definitive definitions of positions and people. When asked, he accepted only one designation: He was "Viennese"; that quite simply could not be denied. "That is the only label that I have to accept. I come from Vienna; I was born there, that's an established fact." But what else? A cybernetician? - "First tell me what a cybernetician is before pinning such a label on me." A follower of constructivism, the school of thought that got the academic world all excited for several years? - No way, he said during one of our last conversations: "The problem is that the moment any sort of -ism emerges and becomes fashionable, all involved - proponents and opponents alike - become prisoners of a semantic web: They cease to listen to each other, misunderstandings arise - and they start to rant and rave about the other side. If somebody asks me, 'Are you a constructivist?', I always, in order to gain access to that person's world, answer with a question: What is that? What do you mean by that? Then he or she will say something, I will say something - and suddenly we'll have a dialogue where the different views and perspectives are able to balance each other out and cause mutual astonishment and delight." If we need a label at all, the closest fit might be "curiologist." Or we could simply abandon the search for a fitting label to finally start the conversation and the dance of dialogue.

Heinz von Foerster, the dialogician, constantly and vehemently opposed intellectual rigidity. He always tried to avoid being pinned down to the one and only truth, rejecting an ontological perspective that searches for invariable ontic facts and presupposes an individual's unchanging identity. Instead he preferred what he called an ontogenetic perspective; he did not speak of human beings but of human becomings: beings of potentiality whose paradoxical characteristic is precisely the continual dynamics of transformations and development opportunities. So when we look at von Foerster's own life, this means that we should not only nor perhaps even primarily take stock of the results of his highly productive life but rather inquire into its history and genesis, the curious concatenation of coincidences, circumstances, and conditions that drove him forward and stimulated him. What we can learn from the many and diverse transformations of his life is this: What conditions must be met to throw off a discipline's epistemological straightjacket? How can a many-sided and multi-disciplinary dialogue succeed? How can freedom of research be used? Finally, how is it possible to retain openness and playfulness in the academic realm, also when dealing with hermetic definitions, and to avoid turning into a dogma-formulating anti-dogmatist?

The Gift of Origins

Heinz von Foerster grew up in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Vienna, in a world of artists and creative minds. His great-grandfather, an architect, gave the city of Vienna its urban identity by designing the city's famous Ringstrasse (ring road) and the so-called Gürtel (beltway) in the form of two concentric circles. His grandmother, Marie Lang, a theosophist and an early member of the bourgeois women's movement in Central Europe, advocated for maternity rights and the rights of illegitimate children; throughout her life she used the power of the word and the public debate to fight against the discrimination of women, which was still taken for granted at the time. When his father was taken prisoner of war by the Serbs right at the beginning of World War I, his mother again and again took little Heinz to his grandmother's house. Socialized, as it were, among the chair legs of a literary salon, he grew up among debating adults. As an adolescent, Heinz von Foerster came into contact with the city's bohemian circles; the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was a family friend. One day, he and a friend decided to train as magicians; together they invented a few acts and, after a number of performances, were admitted to an association of artists and magicians that was quite well-reputed in Vienna at the time. Later on, Heinz von Foerster saw magic as an original epistemological experience, as an attempt to invent - together with the audience - a world of wonders and surprises.

When he began to study physics in Vienna, he fell under the spell of the Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle). Here, the wealth of inspirations as well as the realization that different worlds of thought and perception can combine to form a stimulating wonder-room became manifest a second time: After his grandmother's salons, the young student of physics now came into contact with a circle of mathematicians, philosophers, and logicians eager for debate. In later years, his own ideas would have little in common with the insights of the Vienna Circle, which on the eve of a violent irrationalism championed clear thinking. In his later intellectual life, Heinz von Foerster had no use for the ideas of the brilliant logician Rudolf Carnap who believed that there was an irrefutable relationship between symbol and world, knowledge and reality. And yet, it was here that the young student encountered a way of thinking that would stay with him his whole life: it may be described by the words "inter- and transdisciplinarity." However, Heinz von Foerster was not just interested in the facticity of cross-disciplinary encounters but in that tolerant and open mindset that enables these encounters in the first place. You have to make a conscious decision to cross a disciplinary boundary; you have to make a conscious decision to see polyphony not as dissonance or chaos but to enjoy the diversity of standpoints. The programmatic decision in favor of pluralism and the ability to enjoy differences as enrichment not only takes a certain personal poise and a self-confidence that may be contingent on talent; it also requires a cooperative mindset that constantly aims to emphasize that which connects rather than separates people.

However, before he would achieve international fame and reflect on questions of epistemology, the Second World War broke out. After completing his studies, Heinz von Foerster first worked as a physicist in Cologne and eventually returned to Vienna. Since his family and his Jewish grandfather were well-known and - now dangerously - prominent in Vienna, he fled to Berlin where he survived undetected and unrecognized in the center of Nazi power and capital of the Reich. He found work again as a physicist doing research, and at the end of the war, via many a detour, ended up once again in Vienna where he consulted for a telephone company and, now also working as a journalist, headed the culture and science desk of the U.S.-controlled radio station Rot-Weiß-Rot. At night and in between two jobs, he wrote his first book, Das Gedächtnis: Eine quantenphysikalische Untersuchung [Memory: A quantum-physical investigation]. In this book, he developed a theory of memory that fascinated the first generation of American cyberneticians and brought him to their attention.

From the Vienna Circle to the Cybernetic Circle

Owing to a series of fortunate circumstances and his special talents, Heinz von Foerster was catapulted onto the stage of the American scientific elite in 1949. He traveled to the United States; his wife, Mai, a former actress in Vienna, and his three sons would follow eventually. Noticing his talent, people invited and helped him. Though barely proficient in English, he gave lectures and talks; he later told laughingly, bewildered and touched at the same time, that these invitations actually came about to help him improve his "disastrous English." In fact, from one moment to the next Heinz von Foerster was received into a circle of top-class scientists who gathered in the 1950s at the invitation of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation at the so-called Macy Conferences. He was appointed secretary and editor of the conference proceedings. The maths geniuses Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and Walter Pitts, the systemicist thinker Gregory Bateson, the star anthropologist Margaret Mead, the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, and many other researchers of similar stature formed a group of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary enthusiasts that could be called the Cybernetic Circle. Under the aegis of the Macy Foundation they talked about topics broadly related to the field of cybernetics. Discussions revolved around the construction of sensory prostheses; grief, laughter and humor; the huge carapaces of freshwater crabs; teleological mechanisms and circular causality. Always, the discussions aimed to uncover the fundamentals of living organisms and get them to disclose the secret of their functioning. Or, to put it in a less friendly way, the American science elite gathered here dreamt a far-reaching mechanistic dream that, it was believed, would finally result in the decoding of the human mind. Warren McCulloch und Walter Pitts' 1943 treatise, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in...