The Human as the Subject of Silence in Luhmann’s Theory
The Human as the Subject of Silence in Luhmann’s Theory
A usually emerging critique against Niklas Luhmann’s social scientific approach is that within this theoretical framework there is no place for human. This treaty attempts to reconstruct Luhmann’s concept of human and find explanation why Luhmann did not built his theory on that. According to Luhmann, the concept of human means three distinct modes of organization: we can conceive of human as a biological system (body), as a psychic system (mind), and as a personality (that is what emerges from human in a social context). The problem of anthropologically-grounded social theories is that they do not clarify how they understand “human” according to these three aspects. Luhmann, in order to avoid this problem, chooses a different base for his social theory and this is communication. Of course, this does not mean that humans are missing, only that this is a different starting-point for Luhmann.