The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love

by Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zöller
Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK, 2008
225 pp.   Paper, £14.36
ISBN: 978-184540088-0.

Martha Blassnigg
University of Plymouth

martha.blassnigg@gmail.com

The Origin of Humanness , written in the early 1990s, brings together two strands of research: Maturana Romesin's research into the origin of humanness and Verden- Zöller's research into the rise of self-consciousness in the child during the early mother-child play relations. The authors' core claim is that the human species has evolved by conserving love as fundamental domain of cooperation expressed through the basic emotions or moods of mutual respect, care, acceptance, and trust ( Homo sapiens-amans ), rather than competition and aggression (Homo sapiens aggressans or arrogance) . In this they do not declare an ethical imperative, but rather situate ethics in biology, since, in their view, a responsible concern for the well-being of the other (human, species, biosphere, etc.) arises naturally from a manner of living in the biology of love. This is what they propose as a way for conserving the existence of social human beings (and what they call "social consciousness") and for countering the dominant culture of domination, submission, or indifference in Western society. Ethics, in this sense, is a choice of emotioning on an individual basis that in relation to a social community defines how a particular manner of living is to be conserved over the coming generations. In this way the book opens up burning questions around the dimension of humanness in relation to contemporary developments in the sciences and the applications of technologies (genetic engineering, organ transplants, cloning, robotics, virtual reality, etc.), which the authors touch upon briefly as referential contexts, and Maturana Romesin has developed more fully elsewhere (1). The Origin of Humanness is a testimony of hope, which calls for the integration of: "... systemic and linear rational thinking through a change in attitude if we release our desire for control, and in doing so we could conserve loving humanness in awareness that the biology of love and intimacy is our fundament. That, indeed, would be a cultural change of no little magnitude" (p. 129).

The editor Pille Bunnell's decision to separate a scientific appendix from the main argument (which divides the book into two halves) is crucial to understanding the authors' argument in its self-conscious presentation as an explanatory system. This reveals that if, for example, the argument would be read from an intellectual position that separates the explanatory system and the position of the observer from life as an independent reality, it could be misunderstood as carrying a certain essentialist bias. Such a misdirection completely dissolves once it is understood (and the scientific appendix makes this method very clear) that from a systemic approach, scientific explanations are operational and conceptual instruments that permit us to: "... explain and understand what we do as human beings through our operation in the different domains of operational coherences in which we live" (p. 156). In the authors' view, any explanation can ultimately only explain experience, which reveals the constructedness of the notion of "reality" or "existence" as explanatory. This perspective is not only useful for understanding the authors' position when reading their reflections on the origin of humanness, but it also opens a framework to situate various other scientific explanatory models. As foundational principle of any explanatory system the authors define 'structural determinism' as the: "... abstraction of the regularities of our living and of our operation as living systems as the regularities of our living appear in our reflections as coherences of our experiences" (p. 159). What systems theory, used in this way, reveals is not a new explanatory theory of all and everything, but a modus operandi of how to situate and understand scientific explanatory systems that necessarily always include the position of the observer whilst their reflections abstract from life experiences. The insightful reflections in the appendix appear almost as a philosophy of science, and the in the book presented format needs to be congratulated in the way that a very complex system of thought has been presented and made accessible despite the fact that it asks from the reader some forbearance, or alternatively, a disciplined interactive reading between the separated sections.

Maturana-Romesin's and Verden-Zöller's intervention provides us with an innovative way to think forward by reflecting on the past, situated in very familiar contexts of the present. Given the book's relevant topic that occupies us all in some way or other, this leads to further questions to ask. It not only opens a way to address the topic of 'love' in the sciences and related disciplines, but it also will have to be seen if it might offer a new starting point from which to resolve the prevailing dualism which is used to describe the human condition. In a similar manner as the philosopher Henri Bergson addressed the cooperation between the intellect and intuition in Creative Evolution (2), the authors propose that reason: "... may help to shift our psychic identify if it guides our emotioning, but does not do so by itself" (p. 106). Most significantly, The Origin of Humanness introduces an ethics to the way we engage in our current cultural environment, which is based in the fundaments of human emotioning and in combination with self-reflection calls for responsibility for our desires as a choice for future directions in the human creative evolution.

Notes:

(1) Humberto Maturana-Romesin has developed a discussion with regard to technology more fully in an article from 1997 entitled "Metadesign", where the artist and artistic, creative dimension in human beingness arises as a most significant interventionist potential for change through aesthetics linked to the emotional domain. The article can be found online at: http://www.inteco.cl/articulos/metadesign

(2) Bergson, Henri. [1911] 1998. Creative Evolution. (tr. A. Mitchell). Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. [French original: 1907. L'Évolution Créatrice. Paris: Alcan].