Sociological Concepts in the Theory of Autopoiesis

erations in different systems, new questions

on systems research emerge. The social and
the biological concepts of autopoiesis appear
then as two facets of the same operational
phenomenon. Based on these suggestions,
promising perspectives for interdisciplinary
research are opened. Empirical research on
the field of the organizational studies, for example, has applied the concept of autopoiesis both in the biological and social sense

176

(see Magalhes & Sanchez 2009). David

Eldridge (2002) has explained the empirical
functioning of the judicial courtroom, also
following the social and biological concept
of autopoiesis.
52 An interdisciplinary framework
seems to be realistic; nevertheless, important challenges for this purpose can be identified, especially on methodological issues.
The communication between disciplines

demands new research tools and analytical

frameworks. The first step, however, is the
recognition of the interdisciplinary nature
of systemic research and the overcoming of
the obstacle pistmologique placed by Maturana and Varela to their own invention.
Received: 27 January 2014
Accepted: 28 October 2014

Open Peer Commentaries

on Hugo Cadenas & Marcelo Arnolds The Autopoiesis of Social
Systems and its Criticisms

What Is Sociology?

Living systems?

Humberto R. Maturana

Escuela Matrztica de Santiago, Chile

hmr/at/matriztica.org

>UpshotI discuss the foundations of

what I have said in my work as a biologist on autopoiesis, molecular autopoietic systems and social systems. I argue
that the theme of sociology should be to
understand how is it that we come out
of the social manner of living that is the
foundation of our origin as languaging
and reflecting human beings.
1 I am writing this commentary because the contents of Hugo Cadenas & Marcelo Arnolds target article and its title evoke
a criticism of what I have written about living systems and about social systems.I find
that the article is misleading because it does
not represent what I have said in my writings.For these reasons I want to reflect on
sociology in detail here. This links in particular to the Results and Implications in
Cadenas and Arnolds abstract.

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2 As a biologist, my purpose has

been and is to describe, explain and understand biological phenomena as I see them
happening in the realization of the living of
at least one living being as they appear to me
as aspects of my daily living from one morning to the next in whatever domain of doings I may find myself.
3 Accordingly, in what follows I
present my reflections standing on a reflective ground defined by three basic unavoidable biological facts:
The first basic biological fact is that we,
like all living beings, do not know and
cannot know that which we, calling valid at any particular moment in the experience of what we live, shall devalue later
as a mistake or illusion or shall confirm
as a perception when we compare it
with another experience, the validity of
which we choose not to doubt.
To accept this first basic biological fact
leads me to accept the second basic biological fact: We cannot claim to be able
to say anything about anything that we
distinguish as if that which we distin-

guish had any property or feature independent of what we were doing in the
moment that we distinguish it.
The third basic biological fact is that
living beings as molecular entities are
structure-determined systems. As such,
anything that is external to a living system and that impinges upon it cannot
specify what happens in it, and only
triggers in it some structural change determined in its structure according how
it is made at that moment. As a result of
this third biological fact, whenever two
or more living beings participate in a
dynamics of recursive interactions, they
enter in a process of coherent transformation, which I have called structural
coupling (Maturana 1978). It gives rise
to ontogenic and phylogenic evolutionary histories of congruent structural and
behavioral transformations between the
organisms and their ecological niches
that arise with them. These histories last
until the organisms separate.
4 All this happens spontaneously
in the biological domain, and all this constitutes the foundation of all that we do in

Theory of Autopoiesis

What Is Sociology? Humberto R. Maturana

our living as biological-cultural human beings from one morning to the next, whatever we may be doing, thinking, desiring or
reflecting. Therefore, I shall take our daily
living as the operational and epistemological grounding of all that we human beings
can say and that I shall say as I describe and
explain my understanding of living systems
and of the operation of what we call social
systems in our daily living in our cultural
present. I begun to think, speak and act in
this understanding in 1965, when as a result
of my work on color vision (Maturana, Uribe
& Frenk 1968) I came to realize that which
I described above as the first biological fact.
5 From this reflective starting point,
I, together with Francisco Varela, referred
to a living system as a molecular autopoietic
system (Maturana & Varela 1973). The word
autopoiesis was proposed to indicate and
evoke a closed network of recursive processes of production of the molecular components of a system that specifies its borders
in its operation as a discrete entity in the
relational space in which it exists as a totality. Thus, when we first referred to living
systems as autopoietic systems, we were
claiming that they existed as networks of
molecular productions that were closed in
the sense that they produced their own borders determining their extension as discrete
entities. However, at the same time they are
open to the flow of molecules through them.
It seems to me that this was well understood
by Niklas Luhmann but that he wished to
use the notion of autopoiesis in an operational domain different from the molecular
one, as is apparent in his proposition that
social systems were autopoietic systems of
communications. When we talked in 1991,
I pointed out to him that the notion of autopoiesis does not apply in the way that he
wanted because communications do not
interact and thereby produce communications like molecules. I asked him why he
leaves human beings out of his proposition,
knowing that human beings are the foundation of human social systems and that what
we call communications occur as a reflective operation of human beings in conversations about what they do. He replied that
he wanted to propose a predictive theory of
social phenomena, and that human beings
were unpredictable in their behavior. So I
told him that I did not want to propose a

sociological theory, especially if the theory

would leave out human beings as he proposed. Rather, I wanted to understand the
spontaneity of the operation of those communities of living beings of any kind that in
our daily life in our culture we would call
societies or social systems.
6 The word social and the expression social system were used in daily life to
refer to some manner of living together of
organisms already long before Varela and I
proposed the notion of autopoiesis to speak
of the molecular constitution of living systems as discrete entities. In the domains of
biology and of our daily life, many different
words were used and are still used to refer to
the distinctions that we make between the
different manners of living together that the
different kinds of organisms may adopt. For
example, we speak of symbiosis, parasitism,
social systems, commensalism and communities. What kinds of things are we distinguishing with such different names?
7 We human beings propose theories as systems of explanation of what we
distinguish as happening in what we observe
or do in the realization of our living. Theories are systems of logical deductions that we
propose in order to follow the consequences
that would arise in a particular situation if
we transformed everything in it around the
conservation of some set of basic premises
that we choose to adopt either because
we accept their validity according to some
logical argument or, a priori, because we like
them. Yet, we cannot properly make a theory
before having some notion of what characterizes the kind of systems or situations that
we may be considering while everything else
is changing around the basic premises that
we think define the theory and that we have
chosen to conserve.
8 Accordingly, I want to ask the
question: What do we wish to mean with
the word social? More precisely, I want
to address the common features that those
systems that we call social in our daily living have in common systems that we wish
to conserve while everything else is allowed
to change around them as we operate with
the theory that we are proposing in order to
understand the manner of operating that is
evoked when we speak about those manners
of living in human or in insect communities
that we call social systems.

Social systems?

9 If we attend to the different kinds

of manners of coexistence that we may observe in living systems, we will see that they
differ in the nature of the biological processes that keep them near each other in the
different degrees of closeness or of distance
as they happen to come together. Expressions such as multi-cellular, symbiosis,
commensalism, parasitism, colonies
and social systems are used to distinguish
those different classes or forms of nearness.
And we know also that those different forms
of living in nearness or distance entail different inner feelings and different relational
doings and emotions. Furthermore, in our
daily living we act as if we are aware that not
all human relations are of the same kind,
and that their nature as different manners of
relating and of closeness depends precisely
on the inner feelings and emotions that
define them. Thus we speak of relations of
work, authority, domination, subordination,
alliances, etc. and we know that they differ
from collaboration, friendship, etc. in the inner feelings that, as I just said, define them.
Accordingly, this is why I have claimed that
not all human relations are social relations.
Rather, the inner feelings, emotions and doings that constitute social relations are those
of mutual care, collaboration, honesty, equity
and ethics, not as declared values, but as
spontaneous manners of relating that result
from our biological constitution as basically
loving beings. Furthermore, we human beings can also consciously choose to adopt
explicitly those manners of relating in our
living together that we call democracy.1 Yes,
as reflective languaging beings we human
beings can negate and reject, support and
approve our feelings, emotions and doings,
being consciously or unconsciously guided
by some theory of our choice that we may
have adopted according to what we may
want or not want to do.

1| Ximena Dvila Yez and I claim that

there are five manners of relating, which we intentionally adopt for living together, that constitute
what we want to be the case when we declare that
we want to live in democracy. These are: mutual
respect, honesty, collaboration, equity and ethics
(Maturana & Dvila, in press).

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178

10 As I just said above, that which

we call social in our daily living in our
cultural present is our spontaneous biological coexistence in relations of mutual care
and collaboration that are sustained by inner feelings of love. If we accept our understanding that the biological nature of social
phenomena is collaboration in mutual care,
what do we need a sociological theory for?
What are our concerns that we feel that we
need a special sociological theory to speak
of our spontaneous biological living in mutual care and collaboration under the inner
feelings of love? Let us reflect.

Individuals?

11 The basic statement that love is

the emotion that constitutes social relations
was made in Maturana (1985). The following reflections have been developed by Ximena Dvila Yez and me during our work
together over the last fifteen years in Escuela
Matrztica de Santiago. This is why in what
follows what I write is the product of us
both, and we refers to her and me.
12 We may say that an organism
acts as an autonomous individual when we
think that it does what it is doing without
emotional contradiction in the pleasure of
doing what it is doing, whatever it may be.
In the case of those insects that we call social
insects, the manner of living together occurs
in the doings of each member of the community as a spontaneous result of its individual
growth in the nurturing circumstances of
the care given to it by the older members of
the community that it integrates with them
as they act themselves as autonomous individuals. This manner of living is the evolutionary result of a history of conservation
of the mother-offspring relation of care
prolonged in the ontogeny of each insect
and conserved from one generation to the
next in their historical coexistence in communities that became extended networks of
collaborative mutual upbringing in mutual
care. This collaborative mutual upbringing
and care was established and is sustained by
a flow of hormones, neuropeptides, nutrients and many other kinds of molecules that
act in the process of growth and cellular differentiation of each insect through an interchange of food. At every instant and circumstance, it determines in each of the insects
the course followed by the physiological and

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the anatomical changes that the insect may

be undergoing at that instant-circumstance
according to its participation in the realization of the dynamic architecture of the social
community that it integrates at that instant.
Nothing that an observer could call a plan,
blue print, purpose or aim is involved in
this process. In other words, every organism member of the community does what it
does at every moment according to its structure or dynamic architecture as it is arising
according to its present participation in it.
This particular manner of generating and
conserving instant after instant the sensory,
operational and relational coherences in a
community of social insects through a food
interchange that continuously results in the
realization of the adequate dynamic architecture of each insect and of the social community at every instant is called tropholaxis.
13 An insect becomes a member of
the social community to which it belongs,
as it grows in it as an individual that participates in a recursive fashion in its realization and its conservation, through caring for
the growth of other individuals in the same
manner that it was cared for. Is what occurs
with social insects very different from what
occurs in the human communities that we
call societies or social systems to which
we belong? No, and at the same time, yes. No,
what happens with social human beings is
not very different from what happens with
social insects in the sense that in both cases
a social system or social community is
generated and conserved through relations
of collaboration and mutual care that arise
in the evolutionary expansion of the mother-offspring love relation. But, yes, it is very
different because what happens with social
insects is a living in spontaneous collaboration in mutual care sustained as a dynamic
loving relation through a network of interchange of hormones, neuropeptides and
nutrients; while the mutual care that realizes and conserves us as social human being
members of the social community or social
system into which we may integrate arises in
the expansion of the motherchild relation
of loving care for the whole life. This care
relation arises as the continuous result of
living in the recursive flow of coordination
of feelings, doings and emotions in the creation together of the worlds of daily living
that they generate as they live as languaging

and reflective beings in networks of conversations, through a languaging process that

we, Dvila and I, call logolaxis.2
14 Logolaxis is the flow of the networks of conversations that in us human
beings play the same role as tropholaxis in
insects for the generation and conservation of the harmony of the acting dynamic
architecture of the individual organisms
and the social and non-social systems and
communities into which they integrate at
any moment of their living. That is, we reflective human beings live the networks of
our conscious and unconscious coordinations of inner feelings, doings and emotions
in a logolaxis of mutual care and collaboration that constitutes our body and soul
as loving social beings. So, the networks of
conversations through which we generate
and realize the worlds that we live as human
beings coordinate and guide unconsciously
the course of the continuously occurring
anatomo-physiological transformation of
the dynamic architecture of the ecological organismniche unity of our social and
non-social living, depending on the inner
feelings, doings and emotions that guide us
in all that we do while our living lasts.
15 We are usually not aware of the
extent to which our inner feelings and emotions that guide the nature of our doings in
the networks of conversations that constitute the realization of our living guide the
course of the continuous transformation of
our anatomy and physiology according to
the living that we are living. In social insects,
tropholaxis guides the forms of living that
are basically conservative in that they appear to repeat from community to community within each species that we recognize
precisely due to such repetition. In humans,
logolaxis can in principle exhibit unlimited
variation. Humans can generate an open2| In social insects the coherence of their behavior is obtained through the flow of hormones,
peptides, nutrients and other molecules transmitted from one insect to the other while they
share food a process that is called tropholaxys;
the same occurs between human beings through
language in a process that we have chosen to call
logolaxys.Dvila and I have written about this in
a book that is in the process of being published,
called The Tree of Living (Maturana & Dvila, in
press).

Theory of Autopoiesis

What Is Sociology? Humberto R. Maturana

ended diversity of networks of conversations, which may be changing continuously.

This diversity of conversations in our human
existence our social conversations as conversations of mutual care and collaboration
under the inner feelings of love makes our
existence possible as the evolutionary result
of conserving the conversations through
our childrens learning from one generation to the next. This has been the case since
the origin of our living in languaging in a
family of bipedal primates, i.e., for at least
some three million years in the mutual care
of sharing food in the loving tenderness of
sexual intimacy.

Sociology?

16 The different kinds of social insects occur as different manners of living together in mutual care that occur in the same
manner in the different communities of
each species because the kinds of individuals that compose them repeat through their
manner of upbringing and their participation through tropholaxis in the generation
of their behavior as individual organisms.
All this makes the behavior of the individual members of any particular insect social
community essentially predictable, easily replacing each other in their operation in the
social community because they are basically
similar. Contrariwise, our manner of living
as languaging and reflective human beings
that learn the particular form of living together in the loving mutual care of the social
community in which they grow in logolaxis
may be different in the different kinds of
social living that we may generate in our
cultural-biological existence. We human beings as reflective languaging beings live in
a continuous openness to live in different
manners our individual lives through reflections in which we can always ask ourselves if
we want to do or think what we are doing or
thinking. Also, if we dare to do that, we can
also always look at our inner feelings, doings
and emotioning, and change them through
our reflections in the knowledge that our
bodyhood will also change accordingly.

What about our molecular

autopoiesis?

17 Our human anatomy and physiology occur in the realization of our molecular
autopoiesis in the ecological organism-niche

unity that we integrate; yet our humanness

as persons that exist as totalities operating
as social beings interacting with each other
happens in the relational space. And we, as
we speak about ourselves, exist in the relational doings of a reflective conversation
as persons that explain the nature of their
existence as observers to other persons that
listen as observers too. Whenever we reflect,
whenever some elements form a totality
through their interactions, an intrinsically
new sensory, operational and relational
domain arises that could not have been deduced from what was before. It is because
new sensory, operational and relational domains appear in our living from our doings,
from the independent happenings that occur in our ecological niche unity, and from
the new domains that arise in our reflections
in a manner that cannot be deduced from
what was happening to us before, that it is
intrinsically impossible to create a predictive theory in relation to what will happen
in the course of our social living as we operate in it according to our desires. If we want
predictive behavior in a human domain, we
must agree on a common project, or submit,
either unwillingly or willingly, to some tyranny.

What is sociology?

18 I feel that I do not fully understand what is the actual concern of sociologists as they do their sociological reflections;
I also feel as a biologist that if I were to declare myself a sociologist my concern would
be to understand how can we contribute as
human social beings to overcoming our fundamental addiction to the pleasure of being
served and to recovering the pleasure of mutual respect, collaboration honesty, equity
and ethical social living.3 Furthermore, as a
result of our reflections on tropholaxis and
logolaxis, Dvila and I think that if we were
to declare ourselves sociologists, our con3| In Maturana & Dvila (in press) Dvila
and I claim that democracy, as a manner of living, not as a political declaration, is the human
manner of social living. As such it entails the daily
presence of mutual respect, honesty, collaboration, equity and ethical living, not as principles
but as a matter-of-course coexistence in mutual
care. And we claim that if any of these manners of
relating fails, all fail.

cern as such would be to understand the origin of the rational-emotional contradiction

that has interfered with the conservation of
the basic harmony of our social existence in
the loving relation of collaboration and mutual care that was the ecological organismniche unity in which we arose as languaging
and reflecting human beings.
19 In other words, if social beingness
appears spontaneously in our biological history as a manner of living together in recursive mutual care as a result the expansion of
mother-offspring care, then the theme of sociology cannot be to understand the nature
of the social phenomenon. This is because
we know that when we speak about social
systems, we are speaking about sensory,
operational and relational biological communities of organisms that live in collaboration and recursive mutual care. The theme
of sociology should be to understand how is
it that we come out of the social manner of
living that is the foundation of our origin as
languaging and reflecting human beings.
20 How was it possible and is it still
possible in our human social history that
we have repeatedly fallen and we are still repeatedly falling out of our social beingness,
even though we are aware and know that our
social beingness is the basic foundation of
our humanness?
Humberto Maturana Romesn received a Ph.D. in
Biology from Harvard University. He showed that living
beings are molecular autopoietic systems, and that if
one follows the consequences of the fact that living
beings do not distinguish in their experience between
perception and illusion, one can show that: language
as a biological phenomenon occurs as a flow of living
together in coordinations of coordinations of consensual
behaviors; and cognition as a biological phenomenon
occurs when an organism operates adequately to the
circumstances of its living, conserving its autopoiesis
as a consequence of the operational-relational
coherences with its niche that are proper to it in the
present of its living as a feature of the history of the
evolutionary structural drift to which it belongs
Received: 4 January 2015
Accepted: 12 January 2015

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