Biology of Cognition
The Bioethical Dimension of Maturana’s Thought Rossella Mascolo
Conclusion: Maturana’s epistemology implicates bioethics As pointed out, bioethics was introduced in the 1970s by Potter as “a mix between basic biology, social sciences, and the humanities” (Potter 1971: 2). The word was quickly coopted by other authors in a variety of different situations, especially in biomedical areas. Some thinkers, such as Engelhardt and Pagano, define a more open idea of bioethics, namely a pluralistic bioethics and environmental philosophy. However, they can all be regarded as implementing the traditional way of thinking of Western thought. Even when they try to solve the separation between the humanities and natural sciences, the risk of naturalistic fallacy arises. This is the case for Potter and Pagano whenever they use biology to justify human behavior. Many other authors, such as Engelhardt, continue to maintain the separation between facts and values, or “being” and “ought,” siding with “humanist philosophers.” Paradoxically, going back to Potter’s idea of bioethics would be a step forward. Indeed, he regarded bioethics as referring to the whole ecosystem to keep together biological knowledge and human values – even though he interpreted biology in the traditional way. Furthermore, he thought it was possible “to integrate the reductionist and mechanistic principles with the holistic principles” (Potter 1971: 5). His endeavor was to offer a new wisdom, based on ecology, as a “bridge to the future” to improve the quality of human life (ibid: 2) now and for future generations” (ibid: 6). This new wisdom was intended to connect all the areas of knowledge together, whose foundational laws he recognized. If we decide to embrace Maturana’s thought, we can reach Potter’s objective and escape the paralyzing framework of traditional epistemology so that a sense of wellbeing and freedom embraces us, even though we cannot disregard our earthly responsibility in our living. According to Maturana’s way of thinking, dualism is an unnecessary logical trap; we can just continuously distinguish numerous interacting domains that arise during our living. So here we do not need to bridge independent areas as Potter was constrained to do, given his implicit acceptance of the du-
alistic epistemological frame assumed by the founders of bioethics. In Maturana’s epistemology, biology is our condition of existence, not the hard science of the Western tradition, The process of living, like “a manifestation of adequate behaviour in the domain of existence,” is an expression of knowledge, as in Maturana’s aphorism: “In the living of living beings living entails knowing, and knowing entails living” (Maturana & Poerksen 2004: 67). Besides, there is “inseparability between a particular way of being and how the world appears to us” and this circularity “tells us that every act of knowing brings forth a world. […] All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing” (Maturana & Varela 1988: 25–26). In this indissoluble interlaced design among knowing, acting, and living, our human beingness arises. Thus in Maturana’s epistemology we cannot conceive the separation between facts and values. Indeed, Maturana’s new epistemology cannot be considered separated from ontology, but it becomes – as Pille Bunnell said – an “ontepistany,” i.e., an “awareness of the grounds for one’s understanding” (Bunnell 2005: 83). This perspective enlightens the intrinsic inseparability between “ought” and “being,” which once again surpasses the perspective of the traditional ethics (see for example Lecaldano 2002: 124). Hence, we can see that Van Potter’s original proposal of the term “bioethics” as an application of ethics to all life – bioethics as ethics of life – has no raison d’etre anymore because it turns into the concept of ethics and vice versa. Ethics and bioethics dissolve into each other in the circularity of the living-knowing-acting. There is no longer any need to set up bioethics, as Engelhardt wished to do, using respect as a metaphysical principle. In Maturana’s theory, respect arises while the observer speaks to another observer in the circularity of “languaging” and of knowledge, in the biology of love. This explains why Poerksen called his chapter on Maturana “The knowledge of knowledge entails responsibility” (Poerksen 2004: 47–83). This responsibility operates in any living-acting of human beings in the systemic texture of which they are part and that they contribute to create, in perpetual “languaging.” When I used concepts such as “the observer,” “trust,” “respect,” and “love,” I made an epistemological mistake. This is not
because I was not aware of it but because I needed to describe a new epistemology using the instruments of the traditional one. What I should have asked myself was not what that particular concept was, but only how that particular concept could operate in our human existence as autopoietic systems. We cannot question anything about the “essence” of the observer because, by doing that, we rest on the traditional epistemology that believes in the possibility of objects existing independent from the subject’s knowledge. If we decide to accept Maturana’s thought and his observer, in an ethical process, as we know, we can just jump inside the circularity of his process of knowing and accept the unavoidable role of circularity in maintaining our awareness. In Maturana’s epistemology, we can choose whether or not we live as loving beings. If we do not choose love we face disharmony, which in the end can destroy our living. By living in the biology of love, we live in a neotenic extension of the mammalian mother/child relationship, where respect is “spontaneously realized in the Homo sapiens-amans manner of living as a cultural living that involves our whole life” (Maturana & Verden-Zöller 2008: 120–123). At this point we can decide to accept the systemic explanation from Maturana, despite the unsolved problems deriving from the impossibility of putting into relationship through languaging ourselves and all other non-human beings and the possible situations of un-awareness and not-autonomy among them. So, maybe again in some kind of anthropocentric attitude, expanding our intelligence through the biology of love, we can assume responsibility for the other, planet Earth, the cosmos, and ourselves, living together in the biology of love, today for the future, just as Potter envisioned. When Maturana met Dávila she showed him “the interplay of the biology of cognition and the biology of love in a reflective conversation with the result that the persons who consulted her recovered self-love and self-respect, and felt liberated of their pain and suffering” (Maturana & Verden-Zöller 2008: 6). From this they together developed the notion of the “biological-cultural matrix of human existence” and founded the Matriztic Institute in 2000 “as a place to work and do research in the domain of the art and science of constitutive ontological thinking and doing” (ibid: 7).
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