Humberto Maturana was a biologist. Together with Francisco Varela he developed the theory of autopoiesis — the idea that living systems continually produce themselves. Yet in Chile he is remembered as much for a word biologists rarely use: love.
When Maturana died in May 2021, Santiago's daily La Tercera traced his intellectual path from biology to language and emotion. In his last interview with the paper, given weeks before his death, he spoke of the need to restore harmony in how people live together and in our relationship with the planet.
For Maturana, love was the emotion that founds social life. It made possible the closeness in living together that gave rise to language. He defined it as the domain of actions through which the other arises as a legitimate other in living together. Where cooperation rests on mutual respect, he argued, arrogance and obedience disappear — and all values are expressions of social harmony grounded in love.
In his later years he worked with Ximena Dávila, with whom he founded Matríztica, an institute for reflection on the cultural nature of human life.
His writing on education carried the idea into the classroom. Learning, in this view, means living together in a space of mutual respect, where mistakes are part of the process. As Maturana put it, a child can learn to the extent that it feels accepted.
Read the original at La Tercera (Spanish)
Sources
La Tercera. (2021, May 7). Biología, lenguaje y emociones: El camino intelectual de Humberto Maturana. https://www.latercera.com/earlyaccess/noticia/biologia-lenguaje-y-emociones-el-camino-intelectual-de-humberto-maturana/U3UZYT6FUFGRBCROJ3IVMJ4NJA/
Maturana, H. (1990). Emociones y lenguaje en educación y política. Ediciones Pedagógicas Chilenas.
