Scientists generally don’t talk about love, at least not in a scientific manner. It’s seen as impossible to quantify, unpredictable, and is unlikely to survive time in a lab. Award-winning Chilean scientist Dr. Humberto Maturana is not shy of the topic, placing love at the very centre of his scientific explanation of human evolution and existence. These claims are not those of an ageing hippie or a new-age guru, but come from the recipient of the 1994 Chilean prize for Natural Sciences, and have a logic every bit as rigorous as a mathematical equation.
Dr Humberto Maturana has studied biology, medicine and anatomy, and has been Professor of Biology at the University of Chile in Santiago. He has been researching, writing, and lecturing for forty years, and though his ideas are radical and question the fundamental assumptions of Western thinking, he is being increasingly heard in scientific, educational, therapeutic and ecological circles. Some believe his thinking to be a new foundation for integrating and respecting diverse human practice. At the same time, he is insistent that he has no message, no truth, simply that, if asked, he will argue impeccably.
Dr. Maturana wants to explain humanness and how it arose simply from our being alive. But why would we want to explain humanness? Isn’t this obvious?
“Yes, it seems obvious that we understand ‘humanness’, because we live our daily life as, and in company with, human beings. Yet, for instance, to claim that human beings are fundamentally competitive animals has very different implications to claiming that human beings are fundamentally cooperative, loving animals. To claim that to be human is the same thing as being a homo sapiens, and that relationships are secondary, has very different implications to claiming that relationships of mutual respect and caring are fundamental to our becoming, and remaining, human. If we look at many of the broadly accepted ideas today, like economic rationalism, I think that it is not so obvious.”
“A scientist always explains from his experience, and is always clear about what he wants to explain. I want to explain humanness, so I am clear that I must explain the daily life of human beings, not some abstraction or principle. When I look at us in daily life, I see us flowing in language and emotions in our activity. I call this braiding of language and emotion, conversation.
“I also claim that language is not a communication tool, is not the processing of meaning, and does not take place in the brain, but takes place in our manner of interacting. I claim that language is our human manner of living together, and is a dance, or coordination, of behaviors that has become more complex. For instance, pointing is an operation in language, where we humans look in the direction of the pointing and not at the finger, while my cat, outside of language, only looks at my finger. I claim that language takes place as one behavior coordinates a second, a sort of ‘two-step’ of behaviors, and that love is central to the development of this increased complexity, and therefore to what makes us human.
“We see nowadays, wherever there is profound interference with love in the raising of children, disturbance in language development, and in the worst cases, absence of language. For example, in ‘wild’ children raised by animals.”
If love is central to our being human, then this has far-reaching implications, especially in the current rush to competition. For science, education, social practice, public policy, ethics, politics. If we are by nature loving or cooperative beings, and competition and hierarchy are cultural impositions, then they must be a negation of our humanness.
Maturana continues. “If we look at the fossil record, we see that we and chimpanzees have a common ancestor. Around six million years ago, there is a divergence which results on the one hand with modern chimpanzees and on the other hand with us. Now, chimpanzees occasionally language, and for example, some have been taught sign language. But there is a difference - they do not live in it, and we do. What else is different? Well, chimpanzees live in hierarchical relationships based in cunning, strife and competition, and such relationships do not allow for the continued intimacy that the development of language requires.
“Therefore, I argue, between six to three million years ago, beings must have arisen, our forebears, who began to live an expanded intimacy which involved active sharing of food, female-male sharing of child-rearing, frontal sex, bipedalism, and increased pleasure in caress and touch. Increased closeness could only have been maintained under an emotion of mutual respect, or a manner of interacting based in love. When this occurred, interactions became more complex, and, around three million years ago, language arose and began to be conserved as their manner of living.
“And here is the beautiful conclusion. In order for a lineage to develop which conserves language, then the fundamental way of relating must spring from the biology. In other words, we have evolved as biologically loving beings. In order for language to evolve as a manner of living, love is a precondition.
“This is not to deny what happens today, when we are in language, in terms of aggression, misery, hate. What happens for us now is that we arise and live as biologically human, but culturally more akin to apes, and that is a fundamental schism for us. But it does not negate my argument that we are biologically loving.”
We are often told to be ‘objective’, ‘un-emotional’ in our consideration of rational arguments. That if we can just be ‘Rational’, we will understand. Yet Maturana has emotions, especially the emotion of love, as underpinning rationality, and at the centre of his scientific, rational explanation of humanness. Don’t emotions deny rationality?
“No. I claim to show, based on experiments with the nervous system that we can only bring forth our realities depending on what we do, that we can make no statement about a reality that exists independently of our doing. There are therefore an infinite number of realities, or rationalities, and I say that each rationality is based in its own set of coherent experiences which we choose, emotionally, to attend to. The consequence of this is that, in living responsibly, we are aware that we live from our preferences, and that our actions flow from that. When I am in love, I can say and do different things from when I’m in distress, I live different realities. So an argument cannot be ‘the Truth’, only a coherent argument.
“I think the Western notion of a single Reality with a capital ‘R’ is our greatest difficulty. For in that understanding Reality commands us. We justify our actions according to the Truth and not according to human relationships, and emotions are nuisances to be dispensed with. And the one who tries to win an argument is always demanding the other to obey Reality, to be Rational. This leads to great misery, great justification of the actions which result in misery, and abnegation of responsibility.”
He says that in order to provide a complete explanation of humanness, he has to explain living systems, evolution, social systems, language, self-consciousness, mind, and culture. This he will do in the three-day seminar he will conduct in Melbourne in early September, and here we will simply examine some implications of his understanding, what this means for science, for education, for social practice, for politics.
He says that science is not reductionistic, that we will never explain living systems in physics or chemistry, that the propositions about Mind, Consciousness and God which come from some proponents of the new physics make no sense, are not coherent.
“Different scientists pay attention to different aspects of their experience, and this generates for them different objects. Physicists pay attention to mass, energy, velocity etc. in a coherent manner, but have no way to deal with questions about mind and consciousness. Some physicists today look for mechanisms of mind in quantum phenomena or in the ‘micro-tubule’ skeletons of cells, but this is like looking for ‘travel’ in the wheels of a car, or a picture of ‘mother’ stored somewhere in the brain. This is like trying to mix oil and water ... it is not coherent, the concepts do not mix or relate.
“Many of our difficulties come from looking in the wrong place for what we want to explain, and explanations then become inappropriate and often hugely complex. In a similar vein, I claim that language does not take place in the brain, but takes place in interactions. We will never find language in the nervous system, never find images of mother or father, never find ‘information’ stored. All we will ever find in the nervous system is nervous activity.”
“Humanness cannot be substituted. We cannot conserve competition and expect to maintain humanness. We cannot promote economic development at the cost of social cohesion and expect to maintain humanness. We cannot live our lives making human relationships secondary and expect to maintain humanness. There is no lone human, only humans in coexistence.”
Talking with Maturana is an extraordinary experience, a paradigm-shift in the broadest sense. It leaves one with a sense of unraveling of much that one takes for granted, and a sense of possibility of a different sort of world, of ‘a world in a grain of sand’, and simultaneously an understanding that is so fluid that it slips easily away. What remains is the possibility of a manner of living where certainty is replaced by trust, competition is replaced by cooperation, aggression is replaced by love, management is replaced by care and vision, control is replaced by responsibility and accountability. Where ethics is founded in human relationships, not in principles. Where humanness is our possibility, not our limitation.
“And that is the sort of world I like. That is the world I experience when I am with those I love, with friends and with family. Love is not blind, it is visionary. It makes the greatest possibilities.”
This man is a very interesting scientist, and passionately human!
