“Tikkun” Viewed from the Perspective of Systems Philosophy

Understanding the idea of tikkun, as it appears in tikkun olam and tikkun ha’yetser, can be enriched by ideas from systems philosophy. From a systems perspective, “moral evil“ – the flaws of individual human beings, which create the need for tikkun ha’yetser – is a special case of “natural evil” – the dangers to life and especially to humanity from the natural world and from societal moral evil, which create the need for tikkun olam. Natural evil is in turn a special case of “metaphysical evil” – flaws in olam (which include those of yetser) that are ubiquitous, which may be viewed from the religious perspective of Creation or from the secular perspective of scientific abstraction. Systems theory and philosophy offer an account of metaphysical evil: The fundamental flaw of everything in olam is finitude, the consequence of which is incompleteness and/or inconsistency. From a religious perspective this account is a “secular theodicy” which implies the need for tikkun in the Kabbalistic sense. kEYWORDS: tikkun, tikkun olam, tikkun ha’yetser, systems theory, systems philosophy, systems analysis, theodicy, Lurianic Kabbalah, ontology of problems, incompleteness