The meaning of truth and the truth of meaning: Niklas Luhmann and Markus Gabriel on the problem of intelligibility

Abstract

This paper examines whether Niklas Luhmann’s epistemology and Markus Gabriel’s new realist ontology-despite their fundamental differences-can be related through a shared critical stance against naïve accounts of truth, totality, and foundation. Using a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, it reconstructs Luhmann’s shift from representational to operational epistemology: knowing becomes observing, and observing entails drawing distinctions that reduce complexity within autopoietic, functionally differentiated systems of communication. It then analyzes Gabriel’s pluralist ontology, which rejects “the world” as an all-encompassing totality and argues that existence consists in appearing within irreducible fields of sense, without any reductive hierarchy to naturalism. The paper argues that although “system” and “field of sense” are not equivalent concepts, both operate as conditions of intelligibility for reality under conditions of complexity: reality is not given as a transparent whole but becomes accessible through structured mediations-communicative and systemic in Luhmann, ontological and pluralist in Gabriel. The conclusion suggests that a productive dialogue does not require forced reconciliation, but rather the recognition of a minimal affinity: the refusal of any immediate access to the whole and the affirmation of multiple domains through which reality operates, appears, and becomes intelligible.