You
would have to have lived in Dublin for a long time in order to
really understand what James Joyce is describing here. For an
Irish person it is clearly and obviously funny, but to an
outsider it remains obscure and mysterious. However, Ernst
had the opportunity to become Irish in the ten years or so
that he lived in Ireland from 1939 onwards, and even carried
an Irish passport from 1946 until he died a few weeks ago. The
Irish passport replaced his expiring Czech passport which he
held because at his birth his father was cultural attaché at
the Austrian embassy in Munich, but when Czechoslovakia was
created after the First World War his father became a Czech
citizen automatically. Constructions and reconstructions!
As
part of his becoming Irish (I used to introduce him to my
students in Dublin as Ernst O’ Glasersfeld) he had delved into
the texts of James Joyce, and of course came to know the
streets and roads of Dublin and its environs both by using the
map provided by Joyce and by driving around on the territory
itself on his way up and down, to and from, Dublin city and to
the Dublin hills where he had his farm. It was through Joyce’s
humorous use of these Irish roads that Ernst discovered who
this often-mentioned ‘Vico’ was. Right from the opening lines
of Finnegans Wake we have a description of a trip around
Dublin “by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth
Castle and Environs”.
Prompted by his participation in literary discussions of
Joyce’s masterpiece in Dublin Ernst found in the Dublin
library that there was an Italian philosopher called
Giambattista Vico who had proposed a circular theory of
history, and realised that Joyce had many references to Vico’s
work embedded in his book. From there Ernst went on to learn
about Vico’s theory of knowledge, and thence to discover also
Berkeley’s works at Trinity College Dublin. His studies on
Berkeley paved the way for his eventual espousing of the works
of Jean Piaget and Silvio Ceccato.
I had
the good constructivist fortune to know Ernst in three
different countries – First in Ireland, then in Italy and then
in America, often visiting him in Amherst where he had built
his house – twice – because after a fire about 10 years ago he
had his house rebuilt exactly as it had been before the fire.
One of his great regrets was losing much of his extensive
philosophy library in that fire and of not having the time to
reconstruct it.
Recalling one of our trips through the Dublin and the Wicklow
mountains – described as the Joycer would have it as “an
immaginable itinerary through the particular universal”, and
of course ‘to find that pint of porter place’, we once
wandered around in those hills in the company of a great
friend of ours called Bartley Sheehan, in whose immensely
comfortable Volvo we were voyaging; visiting pubs, peat bogs,
and various hang-outs of Ernst when he lived in Ireland from
1939 through the war years, and eventually locating where he
had had his farm with his first wife Isabel and his only
daughter Sandra, who was born, he was often pleased to note,
just two weeks after Hitler’s suicide.
Unfortunately, one of his most painful experiences in life was
the suicide of his daughter Sandra in Christmas of 1991. He
often expressed profound puzzlement about how she had become
first a rebel against any form of rules, later becoming a
heroin addict, and finally taking her own life. The gnawing
anguish of guilt would appear in our conversations every so
often as he would ask if his relationship with Isabel hadn’t
been so close as to make their young daughter feel excluded
from their magic circle. He worried that their closeness as a
couple had made Sandra feel ‘triangulated out’ so that she was
not able to use the common survival strategy where kids
occasionally make a coalition with one parent ‘against’ the
other one, to obtain some favour, privilege or desire that the
other parent has already refused. Ernst had the disturbing
conviction that as a consequence of not being able to do this
Sandra had felt lonely and even an ‘outsider’.
Returning to our trip on this particular day we managed to
visit the farmhouse where he had lived in Kilternan, and the
gentle farmer’s wife who now lives there invited us in for
freshly-baked scones and Bewleys’ Earl Grey tea, while Ernst
explained to her how the house used to be organised when he
lived there all those 60 years earlier. For Ernst that
serendipity visit was quite an emotional event, and as we
repaired to a local country pub he recalled all the friends
and acquaintances that had been sheltering in Ireland during
the war, including great minds such as Schrodinger, at whose
house in Dublin they were often to tea.
His
death comes after years of illness, which however had not
prevented him from continuing to write, communicate and speak
at conferences right up to a few weeks ago. One of his recent
talks (August 2, 2010) which was a dinner speech given to the
C:ADM2010 (Cybernetics. Art, Design, Maths) conference can be
found at this link:
http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/2010/?p=2700
Over
the past year notwithstanding the fact that he became ever
more deaf and blind he continued to stand up to give congress
presentations. Last year in Vienna when he was honoured by the
City he gave a complete full-length presentation. The only
difficulty was with the questions from the floor afterwards,
because he could neither hear what people were asking, nor
even in which language they were speaking. This in effect led
to a number of amusing interactions where some English
questioners received their replies in German. We could note
that with the increasing problems of hearing and seeing that
his presentations were ever-briefer, perhaps resulting in
something of a record of brevity a month or so ago when he
gave a 3-minute talk to another cybernetics gathering.
Briefer, but always interesting and with admirable lucidity.
Perhaps we should have conferences where people are allowed to
give only 3 minute presentations!
We
spoke very little together about his experiences with cancer
largely because he regarded such conversations as ‘giving too
much importance’ to the phenomena. The past decade of his
illness experiences coincided with the even more painful
experience of seeing his wife Charlotte developing Alzheimer’s
disease – which had a devastating effect on their ‘close
togetherness’ of the previous twenty five years. So apart from
a cursory “how are you’s” we agreed to not give emphasis to
illness experiences in our conversations. This is of course in
line with his radical constructivist approach of ‘keeping in
perspective’ and ‘limiting one’s attention’ to certain themes.
Ernst always emphasised our human talent for deciding where to
put our attention, and he gave numerous examples of the
importance of this - one of which related to skiers surviving
a snow avalanche and which I wrote up in an article called
‘Anyone for Tennis’ which can be seen here
http://www.oikos.org/Anyonefortennis.pdf
Ernst
was one of the last great gentlemen which could be seen in his
deep embodiment of all the better human values, and of his
embodiment of a cultural background of the great
middle-European cultures of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The
words to describe him are words which are actually falling out
of usage in modern times, partly because of the
commercialisation and brutalisation of human relationships,
and partly because there are so few people left who can carry
the import of these words – which include terms such as
courteous, polite, gracious, genteel, humble, self-aware,
decent, moral and honest. In other words, a person my mother
used to call ‘well-bred’. His loss is made all the more
painful in a world that promotes the opposite attitudes, a
world of increasing rudeness, manipulation, crude
self-seeking, ill-will, arrogance, self-inflated pomposity,
wilful ignorance, and plain dishonesty. Unfortunately no-one
has to look very far to find bodies which easily carry these
epithets.
Even
in the face of such ignorance Ernst continually re-presented
his phenomenally lucid intelligence and enormous patience –
especially with those who repeatedly failed to listen to what
he was saying in his theory of radical constructivism – and
with those who continued to repeat misconstruals and the
miss-taken criticisms based on these misconstruals. In his
final paper published a few days after his death he was still
patiently attempting to correct such misconstruals. His
exposition of radical constructivism was always simple to the
point of stating the obvious – and yet people continued to
misunderstand what he was affirming – including many so-called
experts.
Ernst
always treated other people in the same way – that is, he did
not change his mode of relationship depending on which type of
person he was with. He was always courteous, clear, kind
patient, and honest. I never saw him behaving any differently,
not even when he was under extreme pressure for whatever
reason. I did see him once in Rome - speaking in Italian –
getting a little impatient with himself because he could not
find certain words quickly enough in his memory.
Last
November (2009) we spent a week together in Vienna when he was
awarded the Gold Medal of the city of Vienna in a formal
ceremony at the town hall, with string quartet, speeches, and
a wonderful reception in sumptuous settings. This happened
during the week of the congress in memory of his great friend
Heinz von Forester with Ernst also giving the opening address
at that conference. So we combined the cybernetics of the
congress with the personal honours bestowed on him by the city
of Vienna, and of course many an hour sitting in Freud’s
personal favourite hang out (and Marlene Dietrich’s) the Café
Landtmann on the Dr. Karl Lueger-Ring in front of the
University building. There Ernst showed his spirit of bon
viveur and held international court where we met several of
the current luminaries of the cybernetic world, entering and
exiting continuously into complex but variously fascinating
conversations while sampling all the best that Landtmann’s has
to offer – especially the Gebackene Topfen-Torte, and the
freakily good Landtmann’s sausages with sauerkraut! Adding in
the right tot of spirits there was always a lot to be involved
in.
More
than Wicklow, Dublin, Amherst or Rome, Ernst was truly at home
in Vienna, and not only in Landtmann’s – and not only because
the old world charm of Vienna coincided precisely with the old
world charm of Ernst - but more so because Vienna was the
amazing focal node of explosive creativity of the last century
– recalling just a few such as Freud, Adler, Buber, von
Frisch, Frankl, Lorenz, Hayek, Popper, Schrödinger,
Wittgenstein, Heinz von Foerster, Feyerabend, et alii – and
this also produced the phenomenal creativity that
characterised Ernst’s mind. He was truly an important part of
one of the most amazing manifestations of human creativity of
the last century. I am very glad that the last time we spent
together was in Vienna.
"As a metaphor - and I stress that
it is intended as a metaphor - the concept of an invariant that arises out of mutually or
cyclically balancing changes may help us to approach the concept of self. In cybernetics
this metaphor is implemented in the ‘closed loop’, the circular arrangement of
feedback mechanisms that maintain a given value within certain limits. They work toward an
invariant, but the invariant is achieved not by a steady resistance, the way a rock stands
unmoved in the wind, but by compensation over time. Whenever we happen to look in a
feedback loop, we find the present act pitted against the immediate past, but already on
the way to being compensated itself by the immediate future. The invariant the system
achieves can, therefore, never be found or frozen in a single element because, by its very
nature, it consists in one or more relationships - and relationships are not in things but
between them.
If the self, as I suggest, is a relational entity, it cannot
have a locus in the world of experiential objects. It does not reside in the heart, as
Aristotle thought, nor in the brain, as we tend to think today. It resides in no place at
all, but merely manifests itself in the continuity of our acts of differentiating and
relating and in the intuitive certainty we have that our experience is truly ours."
Ernst von Glasersfeld - p.p.186-7:
‘Cybernetics, Experience and the Concept of Self.’ [1970]
BIOGRAPHY
Ernst von
Glasersfeld is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia,
Research Associate at the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute, and Adjunct Professor
in the Dept. Of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a member of
the Board of Trustees, American Society of Cybernetics, from whom he received the
McCulloch Memorial Award in 1991; and a Member of the Scientific Board, Instituto Piaget,
Lisbon.
Philosopher & Cybernetician he spent large parts of his life
in Ireland [1940s], in Italy [1950s] and the USA [current]. Elaborating upon Vico,
Piaget’s genetic epistemology, Bishop Berkeley’s theory of perception, James
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and other important texts, Ernst developed his model of Radical Constructivism - which is an ethos shared by all of
these writers to one degree or another, sometimes it is difficult to see where their
epistemological agreements begin and end - but that is part of the fun.
IDIOSYNCRASIES
No matter how long the talk or lecture, has never been seen to use any notes; Likes drinking
Guinness in Co. Wicklow.
In Memoriam H.v.F.
Obituary
for Heinz von Foerster by Ernst von Glasersfeld [11.04.02]
ARTICLES
The
Constructist View of Comunication by Ernst von Glasersfeld
[31.03.08]
An
Exposition of Constructivism: Why Some Like it
Radical
by Ernst von
Glasersfeld [08.04.03]
The Incommensurability of Scientific and
Poetic Knowledge by Ernst von
Glasersfeld [01.15.98]
In Memory of a Pioneer
(Silvio Ceccato,
1914-1997) by Ernst von Glasersfeld [01.15.98]
Distinguishing the Observer: An Attempt
at Interpreting Maturana by Ernst von
Glasersfeld [12.19.97]
Homage to Jean Piaget by Ernst von Glasersfeld
[12.12.97]
The Conceptual Construction of Time
by Ernst von Glasersfeld [10.06.97]
Cybernetics and the Art of Living
by
Ernst von Glasersfeld [10.06.97]
VON GLASERSFELD'S ANSWERS:
2010
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If you have had your question to Ernst von Glasersfeld published on this web site,
and if your name appears in the following list can you contact me about
a future publication
which may contain your particular question.
List of Questioners we are seeking to contact:
JOHN ROSE -- DAVID KIRSHNER -- JENNY MCDERMOT -- SUZIE A. R -- VIC CIFARELLI -- WILLEMIEN VISSER --
DAVID WHITAKER -- S.T.P -- MARTIN F. WECKENMANN -- PETER STECHER -- MR. D'APOLLONIA --
HANADA TAHA-THOMURE -- STEVE BENSON -- ROBERT CROSBY -- JOANNA SALE -- FERNANDO WILLIAMS --
AGOSTINO DI SCIPIO -- HORST LEHRHEUER -- WILLIAM R.WARRICK -- LIAM COOPER -- ROB KOOIJMAN --
CLARE BENTALL -- MICHELLE K. REED -- WENDY MAHAN
JEANNIE SCOWN -- AUG 05 -- CHRISTIAN FUCHS -- FEB 04 -- SIMON SCHEIDER -- SAM HAIRSTON -- JAN 03 --
MATTHEW SHAPIRO -- APRIL 98 -- MAUREEN QUINQUIS -- SEPT 05 -- LI WANG -- JAN 03 -- WENDY MAHON --
JUL 04 -- CHRISTINE BRAITHWAITE -- NOV 05 - KATHY KATH -- OCT 02 -- DEESH -- OCT 02 -- ANNETTE TOMORY
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