Niklas Luhmann: My starting point is always: a Deficit in the current intellectual landscape, which always leads to the fact that individual points of view [⇒ Viewpoint] are pulled up, and are then sold for the Whole [⇒ God’s Eye View ⇒ Varieties].
People talk about the risk society or the information society, when they think they can better understand everything via the computer, or the distributional injustice of economic prosperity as the central problem of modern society. But how does this judgment come about?
The question is: How does someone know that this is what matters and nothing else? And I think that this is simply insufficient compared to the possible intellectual approaches, and one could do better.
It doesn't mean that you cover up or don't discover grievances. When you see how people live in favelas, there is already reason to think. And a social theory that is not able to understand the relationship between globalization on the level of functional large-scale systems on the one hand and the grievances of a regional nature on the other hand … If this cannot occur as a topic, something is wrong.
⇒ Requisite Variety (an example of such a starting point)
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„Es gibt keine Biographie“, p. 38–39.
p. 17 Every assertion of criteria, every assertion of starting points, premises, etc., or of theory structures always creates people who disagree.
What do we do with the excluded who don't agree, and in science they should write a better theory, but from the point of view of ethos, from the point of view of normative or moral basic doctrine, you can't actually deal with them at all; they are just, somehow heretics or whatever, and I just find it …, to play the whole thing over onto a, a merely scientific terrain, I also find it politically sensible again. Every assertion of criteria, every assertion of starting points, premises, etc., or of theory structures always creates people who don't agree.
p.18 My theory is something like an Experiment. So I feel more related to the experimental sciences than, for example, to the ethical sciences. But also for experiments there must be, so to speak, common starting conditions, and in natural science this is simple, there is a measurable nature, and a mathematics, of which we don't know exactly why it is the way it is, but it is the way it is. And with the help of measurements and mathematics one creates a basis, about whose ethics and about whose sensefulness it is difficult to discuss. But how is it in society?