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The Physiology of Observation in Nietzsche and Luhmann
- Monatshefte
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Volume 105, Number 3, Fall 2013
- pp. 472-488
- 10.1353/mon.2013.0076
- Article
- Additional Information
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The article examines Nietzsche’s adoption of Johannes Müller’s principle of specific nerve energies, which Nietzsche expands to encompass the relationship between nerve stimulus, mental image, and language. As a consequence, Nietzsche dispenses with the unity of the subject as primary observer, replacing it with a media theory of sorts; and he encounters a problem of recursion, as the findings about the physiological limits of observation need to be applied to these findings, too. Reflecting the philosophical consequences of nineteenth-century neurophysiology, Nietzsche engages problems that are at the center of Niklas Luhmann’s epistemology. For Luhmann, the observer is no longer viewed as an entity (a subject, a mind, a transcendental I) located outside of what is being observed. Instead, drawing on twentieth-century neurophysiology, observation is formalized as a process of auto-observation where the operations of a particular system must be thought to constitute what is being observed.