Pille Bunnell – författare

This volume is grounded in a deep appreciation of the rich and cohesive constellation of ideas developed by Humberto Maturana which, taken as a whole, can be understood as a biocultural matrix of human understanding. As a way of thinking, these ideas comprise an epistemological shift that changes the way we regard 'reality' as we are compelled by his work to consider not only how we do what we do, but also how we know what we know.

The backgrounds of the contributing authors reveal how Maturana’s work resonates with a variety of domains that range from art to family therapy, from education to organizational life, and from biology to dialogue. At the same time, these authors offer transdisciplinary perspectives rooted in cybernetic understanding. The papers in this volume invite us to reflect on Maturana’s contributions to our ways of being in the world, and of constituting and living in the worlds we create.

The central concern of this book is us human beings. The authors' basic question is: 'How is it that we can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression?’ The authors answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of our biological constitution, concentrating on what they term emotioning, that is the flow of emotions in daily life that guides the flow of the systemic conservation of a manner of living. Maturana and Verden-Zoller claim that the fundamental emotion that gave rise to humans as sapient languaging beings was love, and that this remains our fundament even when other emotions become socially prevalent.