Humberto Maturana was a biologist. With Francisco Varela he developed the theory of autopoiesis: the idea that living things constantly create and renew themselves. Yet in Chile he is remembered just as much for a word biologists rarely use: love.
When Maturana died in May 2021, Santiago's daily La Tercera looked back on his path from biology to language and emotion. In his last interview with the paper, a few weeks before his death, he spoke about bringing harmony back into how people live together and how we treat the planet.
For Maturana, love was the feeling that makes social life possible. It brought people close enough to live together, and from that closeness, he believed, language grew. He described love as the way we act when we accept another person as a true equal. Where people work together with mutual respect, he argued, arrogance and blind obedience fade away.
In his later years he worked with Ximena Dávila. Together they founded Matríztica, an institute that studies how culture shapes human life.
Maturana carried the idea into his writing on education. Learning, in his view, means living together with mutual respect, in a place where mistakes are part of the process. Or, as he put it: a child can learn as far as 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.