Humberto
Maturana is a biologist dedicated to the study of relations between life systems.
He was born on September 14, 1928 (like my mother, except for the year) and he
made all his theoretical and experimental work in Universidad de Chile. The
most relevant work of Humberto Maturana is contained in his works The tree of knowledge and Autopoiesis and cognition. Nowadays, Maturana
and his collaborators represent the idiosyncratic area known as biology of knowing.
With the collaboration of his student Francisco
Varela, Maturana created and described the concept of “autopoiesis”, the one
that basically consists in the feature of a system to maintain and reproduce
itself. Maturana y Varela (1973, p. 69) defined autopoiesis:
“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”.
In psychology, he has contributed to the systemic
and constructivist scientific research program, specifically to the conceptions
of a) the human like a live system, in relation/connection to the other live systems
and b) the human like builder of multiple realities (trough the language we
could build multiverses).
Finally, I would like to say a cliché phase
of Maturana, that represent his legacy: Everything
said is said by someone.
Reference: Maturana, H. & Varela, F. 1973. De máquinas y seres vivos. Editorial Universitaria, Santiago, Chile
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