I was intrigued to discover from Hans Joas and W. Knöbl’s Twenty Lectures in Social Theory that Arnold Gehlen’s concept of Entlastung, which I’ve been fascinated by since I was introduced to it by Pierpaolo Donati, influenced Niklas Luhmann’s development of systems theory. This notion of unburdening conceives of institutions as freeing individuals from the emotional weight ensuing from the range of possible actions available to them. As Gehlen describes it, in a passage quoted on pg 257 of the Joas and Knöbl book:
are those entities which enable a being, a being at risk, unstable and affectively overburdened by nature, to put up with his fellows and with himself, something on the basis of which one can count on and rely on oneself and others. On the one hand, human objectives are jointly tackled and pursued within these institutions; on the other, people gear themselves towards definitive certainties of doing and not doing within them, with the extraordinary benefit that their inner life is stabilized, so that they do not have to deal with profound emotional issues or make fundamental decisions at every turn.
They explain how Luhmann adapted this notion from philosophical anthropology to describe the imperative for systems to attenuate variety. What was originally a humanistic concept of coping with freedom becomes a systemic concept about reducing complexity within systems. This is how they describe it on pg 258:
Institutions, stable structures or systems, prescribe certain forms of interaction, limit the options for action open to the parties to interaction, reducing their number, which is in principle unlimited, and thus not only ensure individual behavioural security, but also ordered interaction among human beings. Just as Gehlen argued that the human capacity for action is dependent on easing routines, habits and ultimately institutions , Luhmann argues that ‘in light of the unalterably meagre extent of the human attention span, increased efficiency is possible only through the formation of systems, which ensure that information is processed within a meaningful framework’ (Luhmann, ‘Soziologische Aufk lärung’ [‘Sociological Enlightenment’], p. 77). Social and other systems thus reduce the, in principle, infinitely complicated environment by laying down relatively limited options for action, thus making ‘increased efficiency’ possible. But at the same time, this sets them apart from the environment, from other systems for example, which in turn privilege highly specific options for action
Mark Carrigan 