Humberto Maturana - Collected Quotes

"A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner: what happened once will occur again. Its organization, (genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which works. For this same reason living systems are historical systems; the relevance of a given conduct or mode of behavior is always determined in the past." (Humberto Maturana, "Biology of Cognition", 1970)

"Living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact: the niche; nor can the niche be defined independently of the living system that specifies it." (Humberto Maturana, "Biology of Cognition", 1970)

"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (Humberto Maturana, "Autopoiesis and Cognition: The realization of the living", 1980)

"The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine." (Humberto Maturana, "Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living", 1980)

"As observers we designate as communicative those behaviors which occur in social coupling, and as communication that behavioral coordination which we observe as a result of it." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"By behavior we mean the changes of a living being's position or attitude, which an ob-server describes as movements or actions in relation to a certain environment." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"By cultural behavior we mean the transgenerational stability of behavioral patterns ontogenically acquired in the communicative dynamics of a social environment." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"Coherence and harmony in relations and interactions between the members of a human social system are due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, in an ongoing social learning which their own social ( linguistic) operation defines and which is possible thanks to the genetic and ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity of the members." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"Each time an observer describes the inter-actions that occur between two or more organisms as if the meaning he attributes to them determined the course of those interactions, the observer is making a description in semantic terms." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"Each time in a system that a state arises as a modification of a previous state, we have a historical phenomenon."  (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"Knowing is effective action, that is, operating effectively in the domain of existence of living beings." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"Organization denotes those relations that must exist among the components of a system for it to be a member of a specific class. Structure denotes the components and relations that actually constitute a particular unity and make its organization real." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"The dynamics of any system can be explained by showing the relations between its parts and the regularities of their interactions so as to reveal its organization. For us to fully understand it, however, we need not only to see it as a unity operating in its internal dynamics, but also to see it in its circumstances, i.e., in the context to which its operation connects it. This understanding requires that we adopt a certain distance for observation, a perspective that in the case of historical systems implies a reference to their origin. This can be easy, for instance, in the case of man-made machines, for we have access to every detail of their manufacture. The situation is not that easy, however, as regards living beings: their genesis and their history are never directly visible and can be reconstructed only by fragments."  (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"We admit knowledge whenever we observe an effective (or adequate) behavior in a given context, i.e., in a realm or domain which we define by a question (explicit or implicit)." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"We call social phenomena those phenomena associated with the participation of organisms in constituting third-order unities." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"We speak of structural coupling whenever there is a history of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems." (Humberto Maturana & Francisco J Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge", 1987)

"Even revolutionaries conserve; all cultures are conservative. This is so because it is a systemic phenomenon: all systems exist only as long as there is conservation of that which defines them." (Humberto M Romesin & Pille Bunnell, "Biosphere, Homosphere, and robosphere: What has that to do with Business?", Society for Organizational Learning, 1998)