Callin-podcast №1 | The necessary precondition of a possibility

Hello, my Name is Christian Fischer, I am a Landscape- resp. Environmental Planner, -ecologist and Nature-Protectionist. But I also studied the sociological Systems-Theory developed by Niklas Luhmann. Although this Theory is a sociological one, it is full of deeply philosophical concepts, concepts worth exploring in many fields. And this is exactly what I am trying to do here, exploring Systems-Theory-Ideas and see to what extend they are applicable within the framework of Environmental Planning and Nature Protection. So you are invited to join the podcast, as listeners or as active participants if you would like to join the debate. I am certainly open for new perspectives and ideas.

So let’s begin with the first concept, one I stumbled upon in the context of systems-theory but is actually a very fundamental philosophical concept: The necessary preconditions of a possibility. Before we explore this concept, I´d like to introduce a few other concepts, so we got a few to play with.

Most people understand, for example, how bees, provide so called ecosystem-services, not just do they produce honey but in the process of doing so, they also pollinate the plants they visit, thus providing an essential service, necessary for our entire agricultural food production.

So here we take an utilitarian perspective. The main question of the utilitarian perspective is “What is it useful for?”. We might say we value the bees because they provide theses ecosystem-services, I just motioned, so from this perspective, the bees have an instrumental value. They are means to an end or purpose, and that is exactly how value is attributed. No purpose, no value, right?

Or is it? Of course, there is a contrarian perspective, and that’s the holistic perspective, here we don’t need any services provided to attribute a value to the bees, from a holistic perspective the bees have an inherent or even intrinsic value. Just because they´re the bees, right? Their sheer existence alone seems to be reason enough to attribute them value. They might also be means to an end, but independent of this, they are always primarily observed as an end in themselves.

So we got two perspectives here, the utilitarian perspective, in this case observing ecosystem-services and bees as instrumentally valuable, because they provide pollination and honey and so on, means to an end, fulfilling a purpose, and therefore being attributed an instrumental value. And then there is the holistic perspective, basically saying the bees are the bees and we love the bees and even if we didn’t, they have an inherent or even intrinsic value, whether they are useful for us or not.

Usually, these two perspectives on how value is attributed, namely the utilitarian and the holistic perspective, are emanating within the context of two very different worldviews and I often got the impression, sometimes these two perspectives might have a slight tendency to either ridicule or demonize one another. Maybe that’s due to a different code or convention of communicating, but that’s another episode. Just think of cats and dogs, one is showing affection by waging its tail and the other one is interpreting that as a sign of discomfort or even aggression, so unfortunately miscommunication seems to be the norm here.

But, the concept of the necessary precondition could, in my opinion, be a bridge between these two perspectives. Instead of attributing a value because of provided services or of “being” as the only criteria, we could also understand the bees as one link in an entire chain of necessary preconditions for certain possibilities.

Sounds a little complex, when you here it the first time, but that’s ok, I’ll explain:

In this case the possibility would be agricultural food production, I think we can all agree on the value of that. We need food to survive, utilitarians and holistic thinkers alike, and it is a possibility, because just because we have bees, does not mean, we can be sure our crops are growing. Bees can be observed as a necessary but not sufficient condition for crop-production. So, there are of course other necessary preconditions, that need to be fulfilled to produce food in the context of agriculture. Soil for example, or water and of course a hard-working farmer and maybe many more, that might not be that obvious.

So if we value our crops, and I think it’s safe to say we all do, we also, and this is my point here, we also have to value the preconditions that necessarily need to be fulfilled in order to produce our crops, to actualize this possibility.

And I would argue, this a very different perspective from the purely utilitarian ecosystem-services-approach and also from the holistic perspective, that, at least to critics, might seem almost a little naïve, because there seems to be no good ethical explanation or derivation for the conclusion that “everything has value”. Some seem to vaguely point to the transcendent respectively religious or spiritual concepts, but there seems to be no immanent reasoning behind that perspective, to back it up.

And here comes in the concept of the necessary precondition of a possibility. So we might start at the very intuitively and familiar utilitarian ecosystems-services perspective, and then we run with it, and where do we run to? Towards holism, but not necessarily arriving there, but very logically and immanently step by step, recursively going back along the chain of the necessary precondition of whatever possibility we can agree on observing as valuable.

We don’t just say “everything is valuable”, period, just because it exists. What I am saying is, sure, ecosystems-services are real, and of course we can take the utilitarian perspective and attribute an instrumental value, that makes all the sense in the world, there is nothing wrong with that, BUT we cant stop there, if we realize that certain possibilities always have certain necessary preconditions that need to be fulfilled in order to make this possibility an actuality.

Agricultural food production, that was the example, we don’t just need the bees, we don’t just need the soil, and fertilizer, we don’t just need the farmers, we need a whole chain of necessary preconditions to actualize our possibilities. Maybe we need mycorrhiza and an entire ecosystem of soil-bacteria and all of their necessary preconditions, you know, and on and on…

And there is a difference between this perspective and holism, here we do not transcend, we stay within the realm of the immanent. But that’s is another podcast.

For right now I hope I came through to some of you. If you here about these concepts the first time, it might seem a little dense and complex, and that’s because it absolutely is, but, if you’re interested, just listen to it again, take your time and maybe even join the conversation, ask questions, bring in new ideas and perspectives. The more we can establish an actual conversation about these topics, the more accessible the whole topic will become.

This is a transcript of my first callin.com-podcost, you can listen to it here.