Distinguishing
the Observer: An Attempt at Interpreting Maturana
Ernst von Glasersfeld
If there is no other, there will be
no I. If there is no I, there will be none to make
distinctions.
Chuang-tsu, 4th
Cent., B.C. (*)
"Languaging", as Maturana
occasionally explains, serves, among other things, to orient.
By this he means directing the attention and, consequently, the
individual experience of others, which is a way to foster the
development of "consensual domains" which, in turn, are
the prerequisite for the development of language. - Although the
sentence (you might say, the languaging) with which I have here
begun is at best a pale imitation of Maturana's style, it does
perhaps represent one important aspect of Maturana's system: The
circularity which, in one way or another, crops up again and
again.
In my interpretation, it is absolutely
indispensable that one diligently repeats to oneself, every time
one notices circularity in Maturana's expositions, that this
circularity is not the kind of slip it would be in most
traditional systems of our Western philosophy. It is, on the
contrary, a deliberately chosen fundamental condition that arises
directly out of the autopoietic model. According to Maturana, the
cognizing organism is informationally closed. Given that
it can, nevertheless, produce descriptions; i.e.,
concepts, conceptual structures, theories, and eventually a
picture of its world, it is clear that it can do this only by
using building blocks which it has gleaned through some process
of abstraction from the domain of its own experience. This
insight, which Maturana expresses by saying that all cognitive
domains arise exclusively as the result of operations of
distinction which are made by the organism itself, was one of the
points that attracted me to his work the very first time I came
across it.
On the basis of considerations, far from those
that induced Maturana to formulate the biological idea of
autopoiesis, I had come to the same conclusion. My own path
(some-what abbreviated and idealized) led from the early doubts
of the Pre-Socratics via Montaigne, Berkeley, Vico, and Kant to
pragmatism and eventually to Ceccato's "Operational
School" and Piaget's "Genetic Epistemology". This
might seem irrelevant here, but since Maturana's expositions
hardly ever refer to traditional philosophy, it seems appropriate
to mention that quite a few of his fundamental assertions can be
substantiated by trains of thought which, from time to time, have
cropped up in the conventional history of epistemology. Although
these trains of thought have occasionally irritated the official
discipline of philosophy, they never had a lasting effect and
remained marginal curiosities. I would suggest, that the reason
for this neglect is that throughout the occidental history of
ideas and right down to our own days, two requisites have been
considered fundamental in any epistemological venture. The first
of these requisites demands that whatever we would like to call
"true knowledge" has to be independent of the knowing
subject. The second requisite is that knowledge is to be taken
seriously only if it claims to represent a world of
"things-in-themselves" in a more or less veridical
fashion'
Although the sceptics of all ages explained
with the help of logical arguments that both these requisites are
unattainable, they limited themselves to observing that absolute
knowledge was impossible. Only a few of them went a step further
and tried to liberate the concept of knowledge from the
impossible constraints so that it might be freely applied to what
is attainable within the acting subject's experiential world.
Those who took that step were branded outsiders and could
therefore be disregarded by professional philosophers.
A Closed
Experiential World
It is not my intention here to examine why the
philosophical climate has changed in the past twenty or thirty
years. The fact is that today one can defend positions that take
a relativistic view of knowledge without at once being branded a
nihilist or dangerous heretic of some other kind.
It is fortunate for Maturana, and for us, that
he survived the last two decades in spite of his opposition to
the reactionary Chilean dictator Pinochet. I say fortunate,
because Maturana is undoubtedly one of those thinkers who, in
past centuries, would have been led to the pyre without
recanting.
In philosophy the authoritarian dominance of
the realist dogma (be it materialistic or metaphysical) has
certainly been shaken by the manifested unreliability of
political and social "truths" as well as by the
revolution in the views of physics. But the aversion against
models of cognition that explain knowledge as organism-dependent
and even as the product of a closed circuit of internal
operations, has by no means disappeared.
The comprehensive conceptual flow-chart that
Maturana often shows during his lectures, has on the left (from
the audience's point of view) the break-down of explanation with
objectivity, and on the right side, explanation without
objectivity. Whether, in one's own describing, one chooses to be
on the left or the right side is, according to Maturana, a matter
of emotion. As far as knowledge and language are concerned, the
left side must cling to the belief that knowledge can capture
objective reality and that language can refer to and signify it.
The concept of objectivity that Maturana has in mind, is
dependent on this belief. Maturana himself, if I have understood
him correctly, does not share it, and places himself
unequivocally on the right side, where objectivity is discarded
("put in parentheses") and the only realities possible
are realities brought forth by an observer's operations of
distinction.
It seems to me that the left side of the schema
was added only to explain the misguided paths of conventional
philosophy and does not have the same didactic functions the
right. That it is to be understood in this way, seems
unquestionable to me, because the belief in the possibility of
acquiring knowledge about an objective reality, a
world-in-itself, as Kant would have said, can be demolished
without biology or autopoiesis by the arguments formulated by the
sceptics. What then remains, from my point of view, is the
necessity to substitute a new explanation for the relation
between our knowledge (i.e. every conceptual structure we
use successfully) and the "medium" in which we find
ourselves living. This new explanation must be one that does not
rely on the assumption of an isomorphy that can never be
demonstrated.
In this context it is crucial to remember that
Maturana set out to describe and explain all the phenomena that
are called "cognitive" from a biological foundation.
Insofar as his project is successful, he can afford to
disregard the traditional theory of knowledge and to refer to it
only for the purpose of emphasizing the difference of his way of
thinking. By departing from the history of philosophy without
entering into it, however, he runs the risk of being
misunderstood by all those whose notion of cognition is still
tied to the conventional idea of knowledge. Maturana therefore
often finds himself having to face misconceptions of the same
kind as Piaget had to face, who also reiterated that, in his
theory, cognition is not a means to acquire knowledge of an
objective reality but serves the active organism in its
adaptation to its experiential world.
What Murana calls "operational
effectiveness" corresponds, in my constructivist
perspective, to "viability" and coincides in the
history of philosophy with the slogan launched by the Pragmatists
at the turn of the century: "True is what works".
Maturana's "operational effectiveness", however, is
more successful in its application than the Pragmatists
"functioning". All operations and their effectiveness,
according to Maturana's definition, lie and must lie within a
domain of description that is determined by the distinctions the
particular observer has made. The generalized
"functioning" of the Pragmatists, in contrast, fostered
the temptation to look for an access to an "objective"
world, on the basis that certain ways of acting
"function", while others do not. Maturana's model
thwarts any such temptation in the bud, because it makes clear
that "effectiveness" is a judgement made within a
domain of experience which itself was brought forth by an
observer's activity of distinguishing.
That experiential worlds and their domains can
be brought forth only by an acting observer is, I believe, the
one insight Hans Vaihinger lacked when he wrote his brilliant Die
Philosophie des Als Ob (The Philosophy of As If) - and
because of this lack he was unable to close his system without
shifting the theory of evolution into an ontic reality.4
The Birth of the Observer
For me, one of the most difficult points in
Maturana's conceptual edifice was his oft repeated assertion that
the observer, too, could be derived, without further assumptions,
from his formulation of the basic biological conditions governing
the interactions and the linguistic activity of autopoietic
organisms. It took me more than a decade to construct for myself
an interpretation of this derivation. If I present it here, I do
so with the emphatic warning that it is, indeed, a personal
interpretation that makes no claim whatever to authenticity.
According to Maturana, all linguistic activity
or "languaging" takes place "in the praxis of
living: we human beings find ourselves as living systems immersed
in it". Languaging, for Maturana, does not mean conveying
news or any kind of "information", but refers to a
social activity that arises from a coordination of actions that
have been tuned by mutual adaptation. Without such coordination
of acting there would be no possibility of describing and,
consequently, no way for the distinctions made by an actor to
become conscious. To become aware of distinctions, is called
observing. To observe oneself as the maker of distinctions,
therefore, is no more and no less than to become conscious of
oneself. Maturana has recently described this very clearly:
...if we accept that what we
distinguish depends on what we do, as modern physics does, we
operate under the implicit assumption that, as observers, we
are endowed with rationality, and that this need not or
cannot be explained. Yet, if we reflect upon our experience
as observers, we discover that our experience is that we find
ourselves observing, talking, or acting, and that any
explanation or description of what we do is secondary to our
experience of finding ourselves in the doing of what we do.
The salient point in this closed circle is the
basic condition that Maturana repeats so frequently, namely that
what is observed are not things, properties, or relations of a
world that exists "as such", but rather the results of
distinctions made by the observer himself or herself.
Consequently, these results have no existence whatever without
someone's activity of distinguishing. Just as Vico, the first
constructivist thinker, said, the cognitive subject can know only
facts, and facts are items the subject itself has
made (Latin: facere). The observer, thus, arises from his or her
own ways and means of describing, which is to say, by
distinguishing him-or herself.
Here, then, I do see a connection to
Descartes, but it is not the connection to Cartesian dualism that
was mentioned by Volker Riegas in his "Conversation with
Maturana". Descartes, set out to defeat scepticism by using
doubt as the tool to separate all that was dubious from the
certain truths he hoped would be left. He found at the end of his
endeavor that there was only one thing he could be certain of,
namely that it was he himself who was engaged in the reflective
activity of doubting. Since his investigation had been motivated
by the hope that, in spite of the sceptics' arguments, a way
could be found to reach an ontic reality, he now formulated the
certainty of his own doubting as an ontological principle: cogito
ergo sum.
For Maturana this formulation is not
acceptable, precisely because the "sum" asserts
existence in the ontological sense. Had Descartes seen - as
Maturana explicitly does - that the doubting he was so certain
of, rested necessarily on distinctions which he himself was
making in his own experimental world, and not in any ontic
reality, then he might have said: " by distinguishing, I
create myself as observer." - If I have understood Maturana,
he could easily accept this new formulation of the Cartesian
principle.
From my perspective, Maturana supplies, as it
were, the ladder which a consciousness must ascend in order to
become observer. About the origin of that consciousness he says
nothing. That I, as a living organism, "find myself immersed
in language", means to me that I have the capability to find
myself, and this capability, which involves a kind of reflection,
belongs to what I call consciousness.
Representation and Memory
In "The bringing forth of pathology",
an article Maturana recently wrote together with Carmen Luz
Mendez and Fernando Coddou, there is a section about language and
the various forms of conversation. Two of these forms are
described in some detail:
The first we shall call conversations
of characterisation if they entail expectations that have
not been agreed upon about the characteristics of the
participants. The second we shall call conversations of
unjustified accusations and recriminations if they entail
complaints about unfulfilled expectations about the
behaviors of the participants that were not previously
agreed upon7. (p. l55)
Given that Maturana, at various places in his
writings, makes it very clear that he considers unacceptable the
concept that is usually linked with the word
"representation", it may surprise one at first that, in
the passage quoted here, he bases a discrimination of
conversations on "expectations". In my analysis, to
have an expectation is to use one's imagination in order mentally
to compose something out of distinctions made earlier in the flow
of experience, but not available in the actual, present
perceptual field. To imagine such compositions, however, requires
the ability to represent to oneself at least parts of past
experiences. The apparent contradiction disappears, however, if
one considers that the English word "representation" is
used to designate several different concepts, two among which are
designated in German by the two words Darstellung and Vorstellung8.
The first comes to the mind of English-speakers whenever
there is no explicit indication that another is intended. This
concept is close to the notion of "picture" and as such
involves the replication, in a physical or formal way, of
something else that is categorized as "original". The
second concept is close to the notion of "conceptual
construct", and the German word for it, Vorstellung, is
central in the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer.
Maturana's avversion against the word
"representation" springs from the fact that, like Kant
and Schopenhauer, he excludes conceptual pictures or replications
of an objective, ontic reality in the cognitive domain of
organisms. In contrast, re-presentations in Piaget's sense
are repetitions or reconstructions of items that were
distinguished in previous experience. As Maturana explained in
the course of the discussions at the ASC Conference in October
1988, such representations are possible also in the autopoietic
model. Maturana spoke there of re-living an experience, and
from my perspective this coincides with the concept of
representation as Vorstellung, without which there could
be no reflection. From that angle, then, it becomes clear that,
in the autopoietic organism also, "expectations" are
nothing but re-presentations of experiences that are now
projected into the direction of the not-yet-experienced.
This consideration leads to another question
that often remains unanswered in the context of Maturana's
theory: the question of memory and the mechanism that makes it
possible to remember. As Maturana reiterates, also in this
context everything one can say lies on the level of descriptions,
a level that is determined by the fact that one makes certain
distinctions and not others. Maturana discards - as does Heinz
von Foerster - the notion of a "storage" in which
impressions, experiences, actions, relations, etc., could be
deposited and preserved. I fully agree with this. From my point
of view, however, it is nevertheless clear that the observer who
describes something as re-living, must have some indication that
the experience referred to is one that has been lived at least
once before; and this realization of the repetition requires a
mechanism that plays the role of what one calls "to
remember" in ordinary English.
In an autopoietic organism, every perturbation,
every experience, every internal event changes the structure of
the network that constitutes the organism. These changes, of
course, are not all of the same kind. Some could be the forming
of new connections and thus of new pathways in the network;
others could be what one might call "lubricating" or
facilitating an already existing path. The observer, who speaks
of re-living, must be able to distinguish a path that is being
generated for the first time, from one that uses connections made
at some prior occasion. This would seem necessary, regardless of
whether the description concerns the operations of another
organism or the observer him -or her - self. But the repetition
of an experience can be ascertained only if the observer is able,
at least temporarily, to step out of the stream of experience, in
order to distinguish the use of an already trodden path from the
opening of a new one. In my terminology that means the observer
must be capable of reflection.
Maturana makes it clear that in his model all
acting and behavior of an organism is fully determined by the
organism's structure and organisation; hence it requires no
reflection. On the level of descriptions, however, where what can
be described is brought forth by nothing but the observer's
operations of distinction, one cannot, as far as I can see,
manage without reflection. To my knowledge, Maturana says nothing
about this point. I assume, however, that the observer generates
his or her own ability to reflect simply by distinguishing him -
or herself as the acting, observing, and eventually reflecting
subject in the particular domain of experience.
The Excluded Reality
The question concerning the origin of the
observer in Maturana's theory is answered for me by continually
keeping in mind that not only the entire experiential world must
be considered the product of distinctions one makes oneself, but
also that the flow of experience is brought about by one's own
distinguishing oneself as the observer. This, of course, is not a
metaphysical answer that purports to explain t~ genesis of an
entity which "exists" as ontic subject capable of
"knowing" an ontic world. Maturana does science and is
careful to do it in a scientific manner. This entails that
he refrains from smuggling metaphysical assumptions into his
model, assumptions that cannot be justified because they are
logically unjustifiable. He has expressed this in various ways:
... an observer has no operational
basis to make any statement or claim about objects,
entities or relations as if they existed
independently of what he or she does.9
And in the interview with Riegas he says:
"nothing can be said about a transcendental reality",
(p. 53).
This position is by no means new. One cand find
it in Vico, Kant, Schopenhauer, and recently in Richard Rorty.
New, however, is the biological interpretation of the
experiential world, which lays out the circumstances under which
an observer can be brought forth. If one takes this
interpretation as working hypothesis, it has far-reaching
consequences for our conceptual relation to the experiential
world. Like all scientific models, Maturana's
"explains" the how of the phenomenon it deals
with - the genesis of the observer - not the why. This is
par for the scientific course. Physics for example explains how
it comes about that heavy objects "fall", by means of
the concept of gravity; that heavenly bodies exert a
gravitational pull, can perhaps be reduced to the curvature of
space; but why space should be curved in an ontic world is
a question to which the physicist neither has nor needs an
explanatory answer - he may merely observe that the assumption of
curved space makes possible some useful calculations and
predictions. Those physicists who have become aware of the
epistemological foundations of their science, have said this
quite clearly, because, like Maturana, they have realized that it
is their own concepts, their own operations of distinction that
bring forth the experiential world which they describe in their
science.
Coherence instead of
Foundation
At the beginning I spoke of the circularity in
Maturana's theory, and then I tried to explicate, from my
perspective, some sectors of the conceptual circle. If I have
been at all successful, it should now be easy to dismantle one of
the major objections that are made from more than one side
against Maturana. Gerhard Roth's precise formulation may serve as
an example.
The conception of such a cyclical
theory raises the problem of the foundation and of the
beginning. Either one begins with the epistemological
explication concerning the observer, the conditions and
the objects of his observations (distinction of objects,
system-parts, etc.) in order, then, to reach a
constructivist theory of living systems; or one begins
with an objectivist explanation of the organisation of
living systems which then leads to a theory of the brain,
of cognition, and eventually to a theory of the observer.
Maturana attempts both simultaneously...
This conception must fail, because it
gets entangled in the contradiction between the
constructivist and the objectivist approach.10
(p.88).
The problem of foundation and the problem of
beginning, as becomes clear already from this introductory
passage of his critique, are in Roth's view closely interwoven
with one another. This may be adequate in the treatment of
traditional theories of knowledge, but in the critique of an
epistemology that explicitly excludes knowledge of an objective
world-in-itself, such interlinking seems to me inadmissible.
This lack of ontological foundation is a
criticism that has been voiced by quite a few readers of
Maturana. Interestingly, it is identical to the main criticism
made by the anonymous reviewer of Vico's De antiquissima
Italorum sapientia in the Giornale de' letterati in
171111. Vico, the review said, had produced an
excellent exposition of his philosophy but had not furnished a
proof of its truth. For a constructivist who has deliberately
discarded the notion that knowledge should correspond to
an independent ontological "reality", the
request of such a proof is an absurdity because he could not
supply it without contradicting the central thesis of his
philosophy, namely that knowledge cannot and need not reflect
an ontological world but must be judged by its function in the
experiential world and by its coherence.
Maturana, even more explicitly than Vico, says
that knowledge manifests itself in "effective action".
Re also makes it clear that his theory is deliberately circular.
Thus it inappropriate to demand a beginning. A circle is
characterized by, among other things, the fact that it has no
beginning. In Maturana's edifice every point arises out of the
preceding one - much as when, in thick fog on an Alpine glacier,
one places one foot in front of the other without ever seeing
what lies further ahead or further behind one; and as sometimes
happens in such a fog, after hours of walking, one realizes that
one is walking in one's own footsteps. The fact that one has
begun the circle at a specific place could be perceived only from
a higher vantage point, if the fog had lifted and made possible a
comprehensive view. But the fog that obstructs our view of ontic
reality cannot lift, because, as Kant already saw, it is
inextricably built into our ways and means of experiencing. For
that reason, a meticulous investigation such as Maturana's, can
only show that, regardless of where we step into the circle, we
can neither come to an end of the path, nor, if we retraced our
steps, to a beginning. At best we could perhaps recall the point
we distinguished as a presupposition at the beginning of our
search.
If everything said is said by an observer on
the basis of his or her operations of distinction, this must be
considered valid not only for particular domains of the
experiential world but for everything we do, think, or talk
about. In Maturana's view of the world, one can request neither
external ontological foundations nor an "absolute"
beginning. Both demands are not only meaningless but also
superfluous. "Foundation" in the ontological sense
presupposes that one considers access to an observer-independent
world possible. Maturana denies that possibility, and it is
therefore quite consistent that he does not specify an obligatory
external starting-point, for this would be equivalent to an
"unconditional metaphysical principle" which would have
to be considered valid without experiential justification. On
which the theoretical edifice could be erected by pure logic. The
critics' misunderstanding may have originated from the fact that
Maturana, like the rest of us, is obliged to use a language in
his expositions that has been F;. shaped and polished by more
than two thousand years of realism - naive or metaphysical - a
language that forces him to use the word "to be" which,
in all its grammatical forms, implies the assumption of an ontic
reality. An attentive reader of Maturana, however, can hardly
help noticing that almost everything he says, is intended to
"orient" us away from that inevitable implication.
Insofar as my interpretation of Maturana's
autopoietic theory is a viable one, I cannot discover any
inconsistencies in it that would destroy its coherence.
From my point of view, however, coherence is a
necessary but not a sufficient criterion for the evaluation of an
all-comprehensive philosophical system. Leibniz' monadology, for
example, left nothing to be desired with regard to coherence;
nevertheless it did not succed as an applicable view of the
world. In the final analysis, the value of Maturana's work will
depend on whether the success, which its applications in the
praxis of our experience are having at present, will turn out to
be a lasting one. And finally - what to me seems
"emotionally" more important - we shall have to see
whether the beginnings of an ethic he has recently brought forth
will help to fulfill the hope that a consensual domain can be
created on our endangered planet, a domain established around the
consensus on collaboration that might make possible the survival
of a human culture.
Notes
(*) Fung Yu-lan, Chuang-tzu: A
new selected translation. Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1933.
Quoted by Alan Watts in The Watercourse Way, Pantheon
Books, New York, 1975, p.52.
1. One difference is that, for
me, with the activity of distinguishing, there arises the
activity of relating, without which there would be no construction
of more complex conceptual structures. That all knowing begins
with making distinctions, was said not only by the ancient
Chinese philosopher, but in our days also by George Spencer Brown
(cfr, his Laws of Form, London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).
2. Cf. my "Wissen ohne
Erkenntnis", in Gerhard Pasternak (Ed.), Philosophie und
Wissenschaften: Das Problem des Apriorismus, Frankfurt/Bern:
P. Lang, 1987.
3. Objectivity, in
Maturana’s texts, does not indicate the opposite of the
"subjectivity" of a single individual, but is used in
the sense of classical philosophy, namely to signify the
intention or requirement to represent the world as it is
"in itself", without any additions, subtractions,
or distortions caused by the experiencer.
4. Hans Vaihinger, Die
Philosophie des Als Ob. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 2nd
edition, 1913. In the "Preliminary Remarks" to the
introduction to his brilliant work, Vaihinger reproaches
Pragmatism because, as he says, it sinks to "Utilitarianism
of the worst kind" (p. XI), when it calls true
"whatever helps us to put up with life". Some 300 pages
later, however he writes: "... today’s set of
categories is merely the product of natural selection and
adaption". He is referring to "categories" in
Kant’s sense. With this statement he clearly places
Darwin’s theory of evolution into an ontological reality and
turns the "categories", i.e., the key elements in our
conceptualisation of the experiential world, into
"utilitaristic" tools of survival.
5. Cf. Humberto Maturana.
"Ontology of observing: The biological foundations of
self-consciousness and the physical domain of existence". Texts
in Cybernetic Theory, American Society for Cybernetics, 1988;
p.36.
6. Cf. Humberto Maturana,
"Reality: The search for objectivity or the quest for a
compelling argument". The Irish Journal of Psychology,
1988, 9 (1), p. 26.
7. Carmen Luz Mendez, Fernando
Coddou & Humberto Maturana. "The beginning forth of
pathology", The Irish Journal of Psychology, 1988, 9
(1), 144-172.
8. Further discussion of the
conceptual muddle arising from the word
"representation" will be found in my
"Preliminaries to any theory or representation", in C.
Janvier (ed.), Problems of representation in the teaching and
learning of mathematics. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Earlbaum,
1987 - Here I would merely mention that it would be quite wrong
to conclude from this example that German is a richer or more
precise language. Coincidences of different concepts can be found
in the other direction as well. (e.g., the two English words
"to isolate" and "to insulate" are invariably
translated with one and the same German word, in spite of the
fact that there is a clearly specifiable conceptual difference).
9. Humberto Maturana,
"Reality: The search for objectivity or the quest for a
compelling argument". The Irish Journal of Psychology,
1988, 9 (1), p.30.
10. Gerhard Roth,
"Wissenschaftlicher Rationalismus und holistische
Weltdeutung". In Gerhard Pasternak (Ed.), Rationalitaet
und Wissenschaft, (Vol. 6), Bremen: Zentrum Philosophische
Grundlagen der Wissenschaften, 1988.
11. Vico’s De
antiquissima was published with an excellent Italian
translation by Francesco Saverio Pomodoro and the discussion in
theVenetian journal by Stamperia de’ Classici Latini,
Naples, 1858.
Acknowledgement
I am indebted to Heinz von Foerster for
useful critical comments on a draft of this paper.
Abstract/E. Von
Glasersfeld
Humberto Maturana is one of the few authors
that nowadays engage the construction of a wide, complete,
esplicatory system, comparable to those of Plato or Leibniz. His
"autopoietic" approach includes also the origin of the
observer, meant as a methodological prius who provide
itself a view of the world. Here I try to follow the way Maturana
sees the birth of res cogitans (entity which gains
awareness of what it's doing). I try to demonstrate that the
basic activity of distinguishing can certainly lead to the
distinction with which the observer is separated from anything
observed. But I conclude that - at least for this interpreter -
the origin of active consciousness remains obscure, that is, what
works as the agent of distinguishing.
