Introduction

Humberto Maturana, our interlocutor here, is a fundamental protagonist (together with F. Varela) of what is known as the “Chilean school of the biology of cognition”. For years he has kept up a close contact with systemic family therapists, in his capacity as a central figure of systemic and cybernetic thought, of which our clinical models are embodiments within a specific field of practices.

The conversation we had had two fundamental purposes: to show how, in Humberto’s trajectory, his personal interests and the content of his theoretical proposals became intertwined, on the one hand, and to explore certain aspects of the consequences of his thinking for social issues, on the other. The dialogue was guided only by a few questions, which oriented Humberto’s account in line with those prior purposes; for the rest, it unfolded as a free discourse that displays, as is often the case with him, a metalogical character: its form is pertinent to its content. And it is so inasmuch as the notion of circularity, of recursiveness, is always present in his formulations, while at the same time his discourse is formally circular. Perhaps this property has something to do with the aesthetic impact that an encounter with him produces.

There would be a great deal to say about a body of work as vast and as profound as Humberto’s, but I would like to underline here two aspects that seem to me important for the psychotherapeutic field:

a) His work shows the continuity between the human world and the rest of the living world. And it does so because, starting from his characterisation of the organisation of the living as autopoietic, it has shown the central role of the self-organising and the self-referential in understanding the living, from the biological levels to the psychological and social ones, thereby extending the concept of cognition in a sense close to that of G. Bateson, both on the side of the subject of cognition and on the side of the act of knowing. The subject of cognition is every living organism, and to know is to operate effectively in the natural world.

b) At the same time, it shows, within that continuity, the difference that language introduces between the human world and the rest of the living: a recursive operation also takes part in its emergence, but one that introduces an unprecedented domain of structural interactions, within which “the mental” is given. Language is also the instrument for the construction of the consensual distinctions we call “reality”, as they are given in human experience.

With all this, Humberto Maturana has made an essential contribution to the epistemology of observing systems and to the constructivist vision, today shared by a whole set of practices in the field of the social sciences, psychotherapy included. Lastly, one must underline the emphasis he has placed, throughout his work, on the complementarity of ecology and autonomy within a systemic and cybernetic vision of the world, and on the ethical consequences of such a vision. The systemic vision must guard against being blind to autonomy, for it is on autonomy that the awareness rests that, in those “objects” of interaction that our fellow human beings are, there is a “subject” who, like each of us, already holds himself to be unique and irreplaceable.

Marcelo Pakman

Systems and cybernetics

Humberto, I wanted to ask you whether you consider your work and your thinking to be part of the systemic and cybernetic field and, in any case: what is your current vision of systemic and cybernetic thinking?

Personally, I place myself as a biologist, and this for several reasons. First because that is my professional space; and when I say my professional space, I mean my space of concern, my history of reflection, my lived history in the field of biology. The field of biology has the advantage of being very vast, because it involves all of us in our doing. Being vast, it allows me a very great mobility: whether I deal with the human, the vegetal or the social, I can always do so from biology. Because the social, inasmuch as it has to do with the human, and inasmuch as the human is biological, has to do with biology. But not in reductionist terms. I am not saying that the social is biological, I do not deny it its own domain; what I am saying is that for the social to be given, the biological has to be given. This, on the one hand, gives me that mobility and, on the other, gives me a particular mobility, since the biological happens to be a kind of bottleneck. Nothing can occur on the side of the selective¹ if biology does not allow it: that is the condition of possibility; and at the same time nothing occurs on the side of the selective specified by its biology without it being given in history, for if there is no history, biology does not specify what is going to happen. That is what I was referring to when I spoke of second-order cybernetics: what I was saying is that for second-order cybernetics to be given, the corresponding processes had to be given, so that it might arise after first-order cybernetics, even though it was not in first-order cybernetics. But in order for it to come from there, that earlier process had to have taken place. What happens is that it is from this biological being that I have happily met certain fundamental questions which brought me closer, for example, to the systemic field. The systemic field as such is a concern for a certain mode of looking, with a certain type of distinctions that can be made; it is a rather methodological field. I can therefore have a systemic gaze while being a biologist: there is no contradiction in that.

But at the same time as I am a biologist, I carry along with it a question about knowing: I can give an account of the way the cognitive phenomenon is produced. And something analogous happens with cybernetics, for I have never declared myself a cyberneticist; and yet the American Society for Cybernetics has taken me in, it treats me as such, as a life member — which has the great advantage that I have no dues to pay.

It was from biology that I encountered cybernetics. Curiously, history — and Heinz (von Foerster) referred to this precisely — shows that biologists, or people connected with biology, have an important participation at fundamental moments of cybernetics. Because biological systems are cybernetic systems; and, moreover, biological systems are systems: the systemic gaze can be employed with them. I also think that, in order to take advantage of this stance from biology, a certain ease within the space of biology is required. For, of course, biology has many branches. There is anatomy, genetics, physiology, endocrinology, and so on. These are particular branches, committed to certain particular avenues of distinctions, some of which are methodological; and what I do when I insist that I am a biologist is to avoid letting myself be trapped in one of those avenues.

Biology, perception and cognition

How did you come to your specific field of interests?

Although I am professionally a neurophysiologist, I also met with a happy historical accident. I wanted to be a biologist, but I could not study biology directly in Chile; I therefore had to study medicine, but I did not obtain the title of physician because the opportunity was given to me to study biology. I did, however, study medicine long enough for the connection with a concern for the human to remain with me. I suddenly found myself a biologist with, in the background, a concern for the human. And I meet this concern because, when I was studying medicine and my interest was biology, I was looking in many directions: some were traditional biologies, such as genetics, and others I regarded as extensions of my biological training, engaged as I was there in medicine, such as anthropology. I read a great deal of anthropology during my medical studies, and that opened up a very vast space for me, even though I did not imagine that I might become a biologist. But I believe that looking in many directions had something to do with my having become a biologist concerned with the human. And, as a biologist and as a neurophysiologist, I met the question of perception, which I could not handle in the traditional sense; and I had the good fortune, precisely because of the difficulty of the question, to change my mode of looking and to accept the question of cognition, at the moment when I realised that one could go on touching the theme of cognition, go on touching the theme of perception.

I began as a biologist. At the beginning, I studied medicine. I followed, so to speak, the path of neuroanatomical specialisation, but I did my post-doctoral work in neurophysiology, in the field of perception, with questions about vision and in particular about colour vision. I spent six and a half years as a student abroad, in England and then at Harvard, and afterwards two years working at M.I.T.

When I returned to Chile, I found myself at the following crossroads: first, I was coming to work in a biology department, because I was a neurophysiologist.

It was not so common to do neurophysiology. But at the same time, I asked my professor to let me give a few courses on the organisation of the living, and I found myself at a crossroads, between two paths that seem so disparate: speaking of the organisation of the living and studying visual perception. They crossed at the moment when I began to look at living beings as circular systems: in attempting to give an account of the phenomenon of perception, I realised that one had to begin taking seriously the circular organisation of the living. And once one began taking that seriously, one had to raise the question of knowing.

That is how I came to carry out the salamander experiment², which I repeated in 1956. But I only realised what it revealed in 1966, ten years later. And this in connection with colour vision in pigeons — apparently nothing to do with it, but the importance of the question lies precisely in what it reveals. Thus, what I present within the space of the phenomenon of cognition and its explanation has a history within the space of experimental biology. This is not what generally happens to scientists, for very often scientists change domain, in a certain way, in the rejection of what came before; in my case, there was no rejection, but an expansion. In this too I was fortunate, and it allowed me to do my work on the theme of cognition in a way that reconsiders the whole methodology of the scientific approach, but in no way in the negation of the scientific. And this is fundamental here. Because many scientists, at a given moment, want to revise science out of disillusionment with science: that is not my case.

Listening to you, it seems that you discovered yourself to be an epistemologist.

Yes, and here is how. I was studying colour vision, and what I did experimentally was to record the activity of the ganglion cells of the pigeon’s retina, because the pigeon sees colours and one can work with it. If you want to work with monkeys, it is impossible: they are too much like us.

I was studying the animal’s retina by presenting it with chromatic visual stimuli. I had previously done a piece of work in which I demonstrated, with my colleague in the United States, Lettvin, that there are cells in the frog’s retina that responded univocally to certain visual configurations: curvature, direction of movement. I believe I was the first person in the world to record cells with a preference for movement in a determined direction, at least in the frog. It may be that someone else did similar things in other species. So I had a certain experience, I had been able to demonstrate that one could establish this correlation whereby a class of cells responds to a particular configuration. I thought I could do the same thing with colours, and I set to work on it in Santiago. Now it turned out that I could not establish that univocal correlation. I spent two years trying, and one day I said to myself: but perhaps it is not like that. It is not that I went about it badly, it is not that I did not have the right experimental set-up: perhaps it is true that no univocal correlation can be established between a cell type and a colour defined in terms of spectral composition. So that was a hypothesis.

And perhaps a little more than that.

That is it, and a little more than that, because I realised that we give the same name to many situations that we know to be different from the physical point of view, from the point of view of spectral composition; and history shows these situations, for example: the study of coloured shadows, perspectivism, and so on.

Painters know it: for chromatic experiences they combine things, they know that one can affect the neighbouring colour depending on the colour one uses. So I said to myself: perhaps I cannot correlate the activity of the retina with spectral composition, but perhaps I can correlate it with the name, since we do in fact give the same name to situations that I know to differ spectrally. And this shift was fundamental for me, because what I did there, without realising it, was to respect the illusion. It was to grant the illusion the same value as perception. It turned out that I was able to correlate the activity of the retina with the name — not in the experimental situation, since that would have required training pigeons, but I did it with human beings. There was a whole series of experiments taking advantage of this, in which I could show that, taking into account the physiology and anatomy of the human retina, it is possible to correlate the activity of the ganglion cells of the human retina with the name of the colour. That changed the world for me, because the name is not part of what is out there: it is here, in the observer. In doing so, I connected the activity of the retina to the activity of the rest of the nervous system, and that completely changes the situation, because the question of what I am saying when I say that I know something becomes manifest. Before, I operated by saying: of course, I am a neurophysiologist, or I study the perception of objects in the normal way; and it turned out that, in order to be able to explain chromatic space, I had to do something that I did not know was forbidden. I realised it afterwards, because my colleagues thought I had gone mad.

Circularity and autopoiesis

What also happened to me, fortunately, is that, not realising it, I was not terrified by what I was doing. I was as innocent as a child, and this fascinating thing happened to me: I was asking myself about knowing and, all of a sudden, everything changed. Because everything comes from that moment, 1965, 1966, and it had to do with that attempt to speak of living beings and with the discovery that, in order to speak of them, I had to speak of them as circular systems.

And this also happened to me, in a certain way, because what I wanted to do was to speak of living beings in relation to the living being, from the perspective in which living beings are systems in which whatever happens always has to do with them. If I study a dog and the dog bites, or runs, or whatever it may be, what happens always has to do with the dog: they are obviously non-trivial systems, in Heinz’s (von Foerster) language, that is to say systems referred to themselves. And in this attempt to speak of living beings as systems referred to themselves, at a time when there was no way of speaking of them, I was looking for a distinction that would allow me to say that living beings are systems referred to themselves because what happens to them is that they are made in this way: that is what I wanted to be able to say. And the truth is that I could not manage it. I spoke of these things in class, before the medical students, trying each year to say it one way or another. I varied from year to year, because at bottom the medical students were my laboratory. I tried my explanations out on them, they would say to me “mmm…”, and if they said “mmm…”, I would say to myself: something is not right, it does not work yet. And one day, I was conversing with a microbiologist colleague on the subject of genetic information, on the question of whether genetic information went only from the nucleus to the cytoplasm or whether it also went from the cytoplasm to the nucleus. Things have changed since then, but in 1964 the dogma of genetics was: information goes only from the nucleus to the cytoplasm. Now we were wondering whether that was true and we were discussing it. Whenever I was tired of my experiments, I would go and converse; we had a blackboard, and one day among days, I was saying to him, while writing on the blackboard: nucleic acids (DNA) take part in the synthesis of proteins — and I drew an arrow going from the nucleic acids to the proteins; and proteins, which are enzymes, take part in the synthesis of nucleic acids; and at the moment when I completed that arrow: “My goodness!” (and I say it in English), that is what I was looking for, this circularity of living beings, which are circular systems; and it is this circularity, and the constitution of this circularity, that constitutes them as living beings.

Beatriz Maturana: The Hindu religions, for example, have always worked with the Ouroboros³; did they do so simply out of instinct? Because they did not know that living systems functioned like the Ouroboros.

Out of instinct, because they were speaking of something else. They used, in a certain way, natural circular processes as a reference, as an alchemical symbol of transformation. And what was happening to them had a point of connection with Eastern thought and with the Eastern religions, which had to do with the fundamental question that, in Buddhism for example, Shakyamuni⁴ asks himself: is there a way of transcending illness, suffering and death? And his whole history of meditation turns around this question: that is what he wants to resolve. But he belonged to the Vedic tradition, and in the Vedic tradition there exists a discourse on illusion. And that surely comes — I do not know — from an awareness, from the ancient history of humanity onwards, of the fact that one cannot distinguish between illusion and perception. It is an everyday experience: you greet someone and it is not the person you thought you were greeting; you see an animal and it then turns out that no, it is a shadow. But things happen to us when we see that animal: we are terrified, and then we calm down because it is a shadow. And that belongs to the human. And the Hindus committed themselves to the side that consists in declaring that everything is illusion. Buddha belongs to that, and the way out that Buddha too finds, faced with the problem of illness, suffering and death, is to say that everything is illusion. Consequently illness, suffering and death belong to the space of illusion, and one escapes them if one leans on the only thing that is permanent. And what is the only permanent thing? Nothingness. Such is his answer.

What he does, then, is to dissolve the subject of pain?

Exactly.

Beatriz Maturana: But Humberto, to come back to the Ouroboros: you use it as a symbol, whereas the Hindus make it a tool of health. They have quantities of everyday Ouroboroses drawn and, in a certain way, what is reinforced there is a natural organic way of functioning.

I believe it is a coincidence, but what is interesting is that it is a coincidence that has to do with the fact that natural phenomena are cyclical. They are rarely unidirectional; most are cyclical. What happens to living beings belongs to cyclical phenomena. For example: the wake-sleep cycle, the cycle of activity and rest, the cycles of feeding — one eats, then one eats again, some time passes and one eats once more: that is a cyclical situation. Living beings are therefore made of cycles, and cycles are central because we are immersed in these cycles in which the Sun rises and sets, in which the Earth turns on itself, in which there are seasons: summer comes, then winter comes, and so on and so forth, and summer returns; the Moon waxes, wanes, disappears, waxes, wanes, disappears, and so on.

Man and nature

What Beatriz was raising seems to me connected to an aspect of Bateson’s thought, when he argued that if we learned to think with an epistemology that, for him, was better, founded on the choice of the biosphere as the unit of survival, that epistemology would imply learning to think as Nature thinks. And this on the hypothesis that thinking as Nature thinks is better for us, who are part of Nature, and thereby better for Nature. The question would be: are there ways of thinking that come close to Nature’s thinking?

Yes, systemic thinking. Because what happens with Nature is that it is a system — that is what I was trying to say, without developing it fully, this afternoon, when I said that the salamander and the worm belong to the same history and belong to the same system, because organism and environment change together in evolutionary history.

But the problem that appears here is the following: if this coupling occurs in the course of evolution, why do we sometimes end up thinking in a way that departs so far from the way Nature thinks?

Because our thinking has nothing to do with Nature’s thinking. Because, from another point of view, Nature does not think: it operates, and it operates as a system; and when we speak of human thought, we always refer to a descriptive, or discursive, or explanatory space, and that has to do with certain aspects of human actions.

Now human actions generally have a very short perspective with regard to the cyclical character or the operating dimensions within the system of Nature. One sees only a small stretch of it, nothing more, and one always engages in the linear, whereas one would have to take the whole of life into account. The peasant, for example, who has spent thirty years immersed in cultivating, pruning, raising livestock, knows that when he does something here, something happens over there, and he functions, even without discourse, in a systemic manner. He tells you: “No sir, do not cut that, because such and such will happen to you”, or “do not cut down the trees, because your channel will get blocked”. And he does not produce an explanation such as the physicist would give on the carrying of sediment, but he has seen this and he has lived it. Now, for that, one has to live thirty years as a peasant. And most of us do not live thirty years as peasants. We live a little here, a little there, a little more somewhere else. Moreover, we are immersed in human arrangements in which discourse is linear — for we belong besides to the linear Aristotelian discourse —, so that we do not see the systemic character of human vital conglomerates. And we do not understand what is happening, we do not know how to speak of systems, we do not know how to see systems. But at the same time, Nature does not care what happens: even if we human beings destroy everything, Nature is not in the least concerned.

To make you see in what way it is not concerned: in the South of Chile lies the island of Chiloé, a marvellous wooded island. Someone took the trouble to study the pollen deposits, to study the sedimentation — which covers about 40,000 years — by looking at the pollens in the accumulated earth, in the various strata. By studying the pollens, you can know what plants there were, what trees there were, and you can know the local landscape. Now it turns out that in the course of those 40,000 years there were forests three times and plains several times: there were two sorts of things. Today there are forests; the Japanese come and propose to fell all the forests and turn all that into wood chips. And it may be that all this will be turned into wood chips, if we are foolish enough to let them do it, because someone is going to get rich on it; but well, in another ten thousand years, there will be forests again. It pains me because I shall not be there, but Nature is not in the least concerned: there will be forests again. It is the same story: there were forests, there were no forests, there were forests… but forty thousand years came into play, ten thousand years for each of those transformations. And I do not want that: there is the point. For us, the timescales are so different that we do not understand, and that we seem to live in an artificial world; but it is artificial from our point of view, whereas it is as natural as any other, because things happen in the course of a becoming.