Humberto Maturana

14 September 1928, Santiago, Chile – 6 May 2021, Santiago, Chile (aged 92)

Chilean biologist who, with Francisco Varela, developed the theory of autopoiesis and a biology of cognition in which knowing is something living systems do, not a picture of an outside world.

Life

Maturana studied medicine and biology in Santiago, then anatomy and neurophysiology at University College London under J. Z. Young, and took his PhD in biology at Harvard. As a postdoctoral researcher at MIT he worked with Jerome Lettvin, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. He returned to the University of Chile in 1960, where Francisco Varela became his student and then his collaborator. He remained in Chile through the dictatorship, and in 2000 co-founded the Instituto Matríztico with Ximena Dávila to apply his ideas to human relationships and organisations. He died in Santiago at 92.

Influences

The frog vision work at MIT showed him that the eye does not simply transmit an image of the world: it reports what matters to the frog. Jakob von Uexküll’s idea that each animal lives in its own perceptual world pointed the same way. Contact with the cybernetics community, especially Heinz von Foerster, gave him a home for his increasingly radical conclusions about observers.

Contributions

In Biology of Cognition (1970) Maturana argued that cognition is the process of living itself, and that “everything said is said by an observer”. With Varela he defined autopoiesis (1972): a living system is a network of processes that continuously produces the components that produce it, and so maintains its own organisation. Living systems are structurally determined: the environment can trigger changes but cannot specify them. Systems that interact repeatedly undergo structural coupling, changing together.

Later, Maturana turned to human relations, describing language as the coordination of coordinations of behaviour and emphasising love, defined as acceptance of the other as a legitimate other, as the emotion that makes social life possible.

Why it matters today

Autopoiesis is a key reference in debates on what separates living systems from machines, which matters for claims about AI agency. Maturana’s insistence that we cannot step outside our own observing underlies second-order cybernetics and much of constructivist education and therapy.

Further reading

  • Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980)
  • Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (1987)

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