ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 pointed to how systems theory, as developed by Kant in his Critique of Judgement (1790), is a method of understanding nature as organism rather than simply mechanism. According to Kant, we cannot know reality itself, only the appearance of reality. It follows that he was not claiming that nature was a system, only that the scientist could think about it as if it were one. In other words, for him, systems thinking consisted of regulative ideas, or hypotheses, about the development of a system, which is the appearance of nature, not its reality. This method of looking at nature “as if ” it were following the laws of a given hypothesis was taken up by mathematicians and became a theory of modelling at an abstract level. The success of such modelling led to the reification of the systems models, that is, to the taken-for-granted understanding that they were things. They came to be thought of as reality itself and eventually these models were applied to human interaction. Chapter 3 went on to show how more recent thinking has moved a step further to a theory of living systems in biology, particularly in the theory of autopoiesis (self-producing systems). These theories of living systems in the natural sciences have also been taken over into the social sciences so that human social systems are now often treated as self-reproducing autonomous unities. Francisco Varela, who along with Umberto Maturana developed the theory of autopoiesis, himself warned against such a move from the physical domain of biology to the social domain because of the ethical implications (Bednarz, 1988: 60). This was precisely the objection of Kant.
