Luhmann Niklas: Ljubav kao strast

Niklas Luhmann: Love as passion

The research presented here on the semantics of "love" combines two different theoretical contexts. On the one hand, they are part of works from the sociology of science that deal with the transition from traditional to modern forms of society. Other works on this topic have been published under the title "Social Structure and Semantics" (2 volumes, Frankfurt 1980, 1981) and it is my intention to continue this research. They start from the thesis that the transition of a social system from a stratified to a functionally differentiated system produces deep changes in the conceptual heritage of semantics, which enable society to continue its own reproduction and connect one action with another. In the course of evolutionary transformations of this kind, words, platitudes, knowledge and experiential theorems can be successfully multiplied; but they change their meaning, their selectivity, their ability to connect experiences and to open new perspectives. The center of gravity from which meaningfully complex operations are managed is shifted; in this way, the wealth of ideas can, only if it is large enough, prepare, implement and quickly enough make deep changes in social structures comprehensible. Thanks to this help, structural transformations can be achieved relatively quickly, often in a revolutionary way, without having to realize all their assumptions immediately. Accordingly, here love will not be treated as a feeling, or only incidentally, but as a symbolic code that informs us of how man can successfully communicate even in cases where it seems improbable. The code encourages the creation of appropriate feelings. La Rochfoucauld believes that without him, most would not even reach such feelings. And English women who sought to conform to pre-Victorian novels had to wait for visible signs of conjugal love before they could consciously discover what love was. So, it is not about a pure invention of sociological theory, but about a state of affairs that has been thought about for a long time in the semantics of love. Theory only provides him with the benefits of abstraction, it enables comparison with completely different states of affairs such as, for example, power, money and truth; in this way, it gains additional knowledge and shows that love is not an anomaly but a completely normal improbability.