HEINZ VON FOERSTER:
THE LIVED AND LIVING IMPLICIT*

It has been my totally undeserved privilege to work with three of the most educated hearts of our time: Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, and Humberto Maturana. Of these, Heinz is by far the most elusive. When I reflect on my time with him, the word that immediately arises is nurturing. In 1975, when Gregory Bateson and I were mulling over the question of who the other primary professor for my doctoral work should be, Gregory, with characteristic empathy, suggested Heinz—because "Heinz is retiring from teaching in Illinois and will miss having students when he comes out here to California." This was the beginning of countless hours of delight. Heinz and Mai took me under their prodigious wing and nurtured me on every conceivable level. The three of us laughed our way through God knows how many lunches and dinners; Heinz and I worked together clearing poison oak from his hillside and otherwise enhancing his beloved Rattlesnake Hill; and through all the meals, laughter, labor, and love, I received an incomparable education—all the more incomparable because it was virtually all implicit. I can't remember a single instance of Heinz trying to fill me with a particular notion that he thought I should hold: he taught me through action, through his every behavior, through his living. And I thrived on it. Heinz's capacity for living cybernetics, for living systemic understanding, is to me his greatest gift to us, above all his ability to trigger vs. tell. It is this in my mentors that inspires the very name of my institute: Crazy Tiger Institute for the Cultivation of Living Systemic Understanding & Design. I humbly hope my poor efforts contribute to keeping Heinz's deeply nurturing understanding of what I might call "the lived and living implicit" Alive. Cheers, Heinz!

*Published in German as "Heinz von Foerster: Das gelebte und lebende Implizite" in Lernende Organisation, No. 11 (January-February 2003), pp. 54-55.

[Heinz von Foerster (1911-2002) was a Viennese physicist who edited the famous Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and headed the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American Society for Cybernetics, President of the Society for General Systems Research, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is widely known as the father of "Second Order Cybernetics." Heinz's spirit permeates everything I do at Crazy Tiger, but perhaps especially the one-on-one mentoring and the courses on Art as a Manner of Living and on Living Systemic Design.]