von Foerster — Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics
Es ist klar, dass sich Ethik nicht aussprechen lässt.
It is clear that ethics cannot be articulated. — Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.421
The first speaker at an international congress on ethics opens by telling the room ethics can’t be spoken about. He spends the next hour showing why, and what to do anyway.
The forbidden land
Cybernetics arises when effectors and sensors close a loop — motor to sensor, sensor back to motor. That circular organization is what sets cybernetic systems apart. Wiener’s gloss: the behavior of such systems may be interpreted as directed toward the attainment of a goal. It looks as if they pursued a purpose.
For roughly half a century philosophers and theorists got drunk on this concept and noticed something odd was happening to them: they began to see themselves included in larger circularities — family, society, culture, eventually cosmos. This was forbidden territory. The basic principle of scientific discourse demands that the observer be kept out of the description of the observed. The properties of the observer shall not enter the description of his observations.
Foerster’s read: if you strip the observer of his observing, there’s nothing left — no observation, no description. The principle survived because the alternative looked terrifying. Let the observer into the universe of his observations and paradox walks in behind him. A implies B, B implies C, C implies A. Or the pure form: A implies A. Self-reference. The devil’s cloven hoof.
Cyberneticians stepped over the line because they had to. A brain is required to write a theory of a brain. Any theory of the brain that pretends to completeness has to account for the writing of that theory, which means accounting for the writer. Translated: the cybernetician, by entering his own domain, has to account for his own activity. Cybernetics becomes cybernetics of cybernetics — second-order.
What the move costs you
This is not a technical refinement. It’s an ethical pivot.
If I stand outside the universe and watch it go by, I’m in a position to tell others how to think and act. Thou shalt. Thou shalt not. This is the origin of moral codes.
If I’m a participant in the circularity of human relations — acting changes me and changes everyone else — I can only tell myself how to think and act. I shall. I shall not. This is the origin of ethics.
The whole essay turns on this distinction. Moral codes are external rules issued from outside the system. Ethics is internal — it follows from being a participant who can’t pretend not to be one.
Now the Wittgenstein problem becomes load-bearing. If ethics is implicit in the position of being inside the system, the moment you make it explicit — let me now tell you the rules — you’ve stepped back outside. Ethics that gets articulated stops being ethics and becomes moralization. This is what 6.421 means. Not that ethics doesn’t exist; that the act of stating it destroys what was being stated.
Foerster’s response: master the use of your language so that ethics is implicit in every discourse you have, in science, in philosophy, in therapy. Let language and action ride on an underground river of ethics. Make sure you’re not thrown off. Hide ethics from all eyes and still let her determine language and action.
Ethics has two sisters who make this possible. They give her a visible framework while she stays out of sight. One is Metaphysics. The other is Dialogics.
Metaphysics: the freedom of undecidables
Foerster invokes Metaphysics not the discipline but the act. You become a metaphysician any time you decide on a question that is in principle undecidable.
A decidable question: is 3,396,714 divisible by 2? It takes you two seconds. It would take you the same two seconds if the number had seven thousand digits or seven million. The decidable questions are already decided by the framework you’re asking them in — the rules that connect “question” to “answer” do all the work. You’re not free. You’re just slow.
The in-principle undecidables — Goldbach, the origin of the universe, am I apart from the universe or part of it? — have no compelling logical path that forces an answer. Nobody was there for the Big Bang. The framework doesn’t decide for you.
Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide.
That’s the metaphysical postulate. And it’s not just a logician’s joke. It’s the precise place where freedom lives. The compliment to necessity is not chance, it is choice. On a decidable question you’re not exercising freedom; the framework is grinding to its predetermined yes or no. On an undecidable question, no external necessity forces your hand. You can choose who you wish to become when you have decided on an in-principle undecidable question.
The good news: you’re free. The bad news: with freedom comes responsibility. And humans have built elaborate machinery to escape it. Hierarchies where I was told to do X is always available. Pontius Pilate’s I have no choice but X — language that replaces among the many choices I had, I decided on X. And the most respectable dodge: objectivity. Remove the observer’s properties from the description and you’ve removed the observing — and the observer becomes a copying machine, free of responsibility because free of agency.
All these devices are choices on one specific undecidable: Am I apart from the universe, or part of it? Whenever I look, am I looking through a peephole at a world unfolding out there, or am I changing both myself and the universe whenever I act? Foerster is impressed by the abyss between the two answers — and by how rarely anyone admits they’ve chosen.
The discoverers (astronomers, physicists, engineers) think they live in a universe whose rules they’re uncovering. The inventors (family therapists, poets, biologists) think they live in one whose customs they’re making up. Neither realizes they made the choice. When pushed to defend their position, each constructs a conceptual framework which itself rests on a choice on an in-principle undecidable question.
Foerster’s friend grew up in Marrakesh, on the street that divides the Jewish and Arab quarters. Played with kids from both sides as a boy, heard their fundamentally different accounts. Asked once who was right: they are both right. But that can’t be — only one of them can have the truth! The problem is not truth, his friend said. The problem is trust.
The problem is understanding. The problem is understanding understanding.
And so Metaphysics asks her younger sister Ethics what she should bring back to the metaphysicians. Ethics: Tell them they should always try to act so as to increase the number of choices. Yes — increase the number of choices.
That’s the first imperative. It’s a procedural rule, not a moral one. It doesn’t tell you what to choose. It tells you to keep choosing possible.
Dialogics: language as the dance
The second sister works through language — not language as grammar or syntax or vocal-cord noise, but language as the dance. It takes two to language.
Foerster sat in once at a one-way-mirror therapy session, his colleagues out of the room, and turned off the sound. What he saw was the silent pantomime — parting and closing of lips, body movements, a boy who only once stopped biting his nails. The dance steps of language, without the music. He heard later the session was very successful. The medicine was the dance and the music. Language! What magic indeed.
Magic can’t be explained, only practiced. Reflecting on the magic of language is like reflecting on a theory of the brain — you need a brain to do it, you need language to do it. They are of second-order. Concepts that need themselves to come into being. And language protects itself from explanation by always speaking about itself. There’s a word for language: language. There’s a word for word: word. Look up “word” in a dictionary — it’s an utterance. Look up “utterance” — it’s expression through words. A implies A.
Language runs on two tracks and switches whenever you chase it.
Appearance. The land stretched before you, viewed through a peephole. Language here is monologue: noises, grammar, syntax, well-formed sentences. The mode is denotative pointing — point to a table, make the noise “table”; point to a chair, make the noise “chair.” Margaret Mead learned the words of many tribes by pointing. She tried it once and kept getting the same noise: chumulu. A one-word language, she thought. Later she learned chumulu means pointing with finger.
Function. The land that is part of us as we are part of it. Language here is dialogic and connotative. The noises “table” and “chair” need not refer to any table or chair because nobody is pointing. They’re invitations to the other to take a dance step together — bringing to resonance strings in the other’s mind that, when vibrated, would produce noises like “table” and “chair.”
In appearance language is descriptive. You tell your story: the ship, the ocean, the sky, the flirt that made the trip a delight. For whom do you tell it? Wrong question. With whom do you dance your story — so the partner floats with you over the decks, smells the salt, lets the soul expand over the sky, and feels a flash of jealousy at the flirt?
In function language is constructive. Nobody knows the source. As it was is gone forever.
Descartes sat in his study doubting his own existence and answered with the solipsistic monologue: cogito ergo sum. He knew this was language in appearance, otherwise he would not have rushed to publish it for the benefit of others. Had he understood the function too, in all fairness he would have written: Cogito ergo sumus. I think, therefore we are.
In its appearance, my language is mine — the root of consciousness. In its function, my language reaches for the other — the root of conscience.
And conscience is where ethics manifests itself invisibly through dialogue. Foerster closes the address with Buber:
Contemplate the human with the human, and you will see the dynamic duality, the essence together. Here is the giving and the receiving, here is the aggressive and the defensive power, here the quality of searching and of responding, always both in one, mutually complementing in alternating action, demonstrating together what it is: human. We may come closer to answering the question, what is human? when we come to understand him as the being in whose dialogic, in his mutually present two-getherness, the encounter of the one with the other is realized and recognized at all times.
The shape of the argument
Both sisters get you to the same place by different roads.
Metaphysics: real freedom lives only on the undecidables, freedom forces responsibility, responsibility means you can’t dodge by hiding behind framework or hierarchy or objectivity. The maxim falls out: act so as to increase the number of choices.
Dialogics: language splits between monologic appearance (the world out there) and dialogic function (the world we make between us); the dialogic side is where conscience lives because that’s where the other is. The maxim falls out: language is for dancing with the other, not for pointing at the world.
In both cases the ethical content is implicit — never spoken, always carried. Articulate it directly and you’re back in thou shalt, back in the moral code, back in the discourse Wittgenstein said was impossible. The two-sister architecture is how you let ethics determine action while she stays unseen.
What the interview adds
Three things from the Yveline Rey interview at the end of the published version are worth keeping.
Zero-order cybernetics. Foerster invents it on the spot to answer Rey’s pushback (when I turn on a light switch I’m not exploring senso-motoric connections). Zero-order is when activity is structured and behavior emerges but no one reflects on the how or the why — one just acts. First-order is when you reflect: feedback, circularity, control, homeostasis, attractors. Second-order is when you reflect on your reflections — and there you stop, because you’ve stepped into the circle that closes upon itself, the domain of concepts that apply to themselves. Yes, you could go to third-order. But it would not create anything new.
Causa finalis vs causa efficientis. A throwaway distinction that lands hard. Physicists do causa efficientis: past determines present. Because she turned the switch, the lights go on now. Cyberneticians do causa finalis: future determines present. In order to have the lights on, she turns the switch now. The physicist’s laws can’t compute the trajectory of your shoelace-tying or her pump-slipping from initial conditions — there are thousands of unpredictable variations producing the same predictable outcome. Goal-directed action is computationally cheap; trajectory simulation is impossible. The cybernetic frame is a different kind of explanation, not a worse version of the physical one.
The therapeutic imperative. Rey lists three coordinates of family therapy: ethics, aesthetics, change. Foerster has imperatives for the first two — act so as to increase the number of choices, and if you desire to see, learn how to act. He invents the third on the spot: If you want to be yourself, change. Paradoxical, yes. What else would you expect from change? He cites the I Ching’s 58th symbol, Fu, the Turning Point: the ultimate frame for change is the unchanging.
What surprised me in the source
Three things I didn’t expect.
The Wittgenstein move is more aggressive than its reputation. It’s usually quoted to suggest ethics is mystical or ineffable. Foerster reads it as a structural constraint on the discourse: ethics articulated becomes moralization, by mechanism. The whole address is an attempt to honor the constraint while still doing something useful — which is why the structure is two sisters showing without saying, not one speaker saying what ethics is.
“The problem is not truth, the problem is trust.” This is a child’s reply, in the source, from a kid in Marrakesh asked which neighbors were right. It’s load-bearing. It does the work the rest of the address tries to do — by inversion. If truth is the criterion, then one side has to lose (Aristotle’s platform). If trust is the criterion, both can hold because trust is a function of language not its appearance. The child says in one sentence what Foerster spends the Dialogics section unpacking.
Foerster’s role in naming cybernetics. The interview reveals that the term “cybernetics” was applied to the Macy meetings by Foerster, in 1949, three days after he arrived from Vienna with a 25-word English vocabulary. The original conference title was “Circular-causal-and-feedback-mechanisms in biological and social systems,” which he couldn’t pronounce. He proposed “cybernetics” to honor Wiener’s book; Wiener wept and left the room. The naming wasn’t deliberate field-building — it was a non-native speaker reaching for something shorter.
What I cut: the long string of cybernetic definitions from Mead/Bateson/Beer/Pask at the front of the address (kept the Wiener line, which is load-bearing); the Goldbach exposition (kept the postulate); most of the Chuang Tse / Ortega y Gasset / Buber quoted passages (kept the Buber close because it’s the structural end of the contrast); the Macy-meetings biographical detour from the interview except the naming moment; the third-order-cybernetics dialogue except the punchline.
What I added: a one-line frame at the top (the speaker opens by saying ethics can’t be discussed and then spends an hour anyway), and the closing “shape of the argument” section that names the contrast structure explicitly. Bolded the load-bearing one-liners.
Structure choice + why: Contrast. The address is built around two parallel routes (Metaphysics, Dialogics) that arrive at the same end-state by different means. Both routes loop back through the same second-order pivot: the observer who can’t pretend not to be inside the system. Chiasm would have forced an artificial mirroring that the source resists — the two sisters don’t invert each other, they complement. Linear would have flattened the parallelism. Spiral would have implied the same idea revisited at deeper register; the address visits two different ideas that converge.