Francisco Varela

7 September 1946, Talcahuano, Chile – 28 May 2001, Paris, France (aged 54)

Chilean biologist and philosopher who co-created the theory of autopoiesis with Humberto Maturana, and later helped found enactive cognitive science and neurophenomenology.

Life

Varela studied biology at the University of Chile, where he met Humberto Maturana, and completed his PhD at Harvard in 1970 under Torsten Wiesel. Back in Chile he worked with Maturana on autopoiesis until the military coup of September 1973 forced him into exile. He spent years in the United States and Costa Rica, and in 1986 settled in Paris, where he directed research at the CNRS. He died in Paris at 54, after a liver transplant failed to stop the hepatitis C he had lived with for years.

Influences

Maturana was his teacher and partner in the early work. From the 1970s Varela practised Tibetan Buddhism with Chögyam Trungpa and other teachers, and found in it a disciplined way of examining experience. Phenomenology, especially Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, gave him a philosophical bridge between that practice and neuroscience. Heinz von Foerster’s work on self-reference shaped his early formal writing.

Contributions

With Maturana he defined autopoiesis (1972), the self-production that makes a system living. In Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) he generalised it to organisational closure, and extended George Spencer-Brown’s calculus of indications to include self-reference.

In The Embodied Mind (1991), with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, he proposed enaction: cognition is the bringing forth of a world through the history of an organism’s embodied action, not the representation of a pre-given world. He later developed neurophenomenology, which pairs first-person reports of experience with brain measurements, and co-founded the Mind and Life Institute to bring scientists into dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

Why it matters today

Enactive and embodied cognition are now mainstream in cognitive science and robotics, and are central to debates about whether large language models, which have no body or world of their own, can be said to understand anything.

Further reading

  • Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (1991)
  • Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (1987)

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