Autopoiesis, from the Greek for ‘self-making’, is the idea put forward by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela that a living being is a system that keeps producing itself, making its own parts and the boundary that holds them together. For them, being alive is not a list of properties but this continual self-making, and living and knowing are one and the same process. In Therapeutic Shamanism, by comparison, knowing the world comes from direct experience and connection, and everything, stones, rivers and made things included, is alive and conscious, not only the beings that make themselves.
What does autopoiesis mean? #
Self-production. The word joins the Greek auto, self, and poiesis, making or creation. Maturana coined it, and it first appeared in the book he wrote with Varela in 1972, published in English in 1980 as Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living.
The simplest example is a single cell. Its chemistry makes the molecules that build its membrane, and the membrane keeps that chemistry together, so each makes the other possible. Living beings, in Maturana and Varela’s account, are networks of processes that produce themselves and specify their own limits; they are “continually self-producing”. For such a being, what it is and what it does cannot be pulled apart. A cell is not a thing that happens to carry on a process of living; the process is what the cell is.1
Who were Maturana and Varela? #
Two Chilean scientists who worked together for many years. Humberto Maturana (1928 to 2021) was a biologist at the University of Chile, known early on for work on vision, including the famous paper of 1959 on what a frog’s eye tells a frog’s brain. Francisco Varela (1946 to 2001) was first his student and then his colleague, a biologist, philosopher and neuroscientist who later worked in Paris. Varela was a long-standing Buddhist practitioner, helped to found the Mind and Life dialogues between scientists and the Dalai Lama, and wrote The Embodied Mind (1991) with the philosopher Evan Thompson and the psychologist Eleanor Rosch.
Their joint book The Tree of Knowledge was first given as lectures in Santiago from 1980 and was written for a general reader. It sets out their whole view in a single chain of argument, from the cell to human language and love.2
What does it say about what is alive? #
That life is a kind of organisation, not a checklist. Biology has often defined life by a list of features, such as growth, movement, reproduction and particular chemistry. Maturana and Varela point out that nobody can know when such a list is complete, and offer a single criterion instead, that a living being is one that makes and remakes itself. Reproduction is not even part of the definition, since a mule cannot reproduce and is still alive.3
Two further points follow. Whatever happens to a living being is decided by how that being is made; its surroundings can trigger a change in it but never dictate what the change will be. And a being and its surroundings change together over time, in what they call structural coupling, which is “always mutual”. Evolution, in this view, is a ‘natural drift’ with nothing steering it towards a goal, and every being that is alive is, for as long as it lives, as well adapted as any other.4 There is no ladder, with some creatures nearer the top.
What has it got to do with knowing? #
For Maturana and Varela, living and knowing are the same process seen from two sides. Knowing is not the making of a copy, inside the head, of a world ‘out there’. It is what a living being does in keeping itself going and finding its way, so that cognition is “an ongoing bringing forth of a world through the process of living itself”. Their own short version is that “All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing.”5
Others have taken this further. Varela, Thompson and Rosch built on it an ‘enactive’ account of the mind, and in Mind in Life (2007) Thompson argued that life and mind are deeply continuous. The biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber starts from the same self-making to argue that every organism meets its world with something like feeling, as good or bad for its own life. How far these ideas have been taken in thinking about plants, forests and the living world is set out in Is the living world intelligent?
Can a society, a forest or the whole Earth be autopoietic? #
People have tried to stretch the idea in both directions. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann applied it to societies, describing social systems as networks of communication that reproduce themselves. Maturana himself was wary of loose uses of his idea.6
The microbiologist Lynn Margulis, who developed the Gaia hypothesis with James Lovelock, applied it to the planet. She insisted, against Lovelock’s way of putting it, that the Earth is not an organism, since it does not reproduce, but an animate, autopoietic system, one whose surface recycles almost all of its own material wastes.7 See What is the Gaia hypothesis, and who was James Lovelock?
The philosopher of science Donna Haraway went the other way. Nothing, she argues, truly makes itself alone; living things are always made with others, and she proposed the word ‘sympoiesis’, making-with, in its place. Others, among them the scholar Claire Sagan, think both words are needed, the one for how a living system holds itself together and the other for how deeply it is entangled with everything around it.8
How does autopoiesis sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Set side by side, the two accounts can be compared on a few points. Maturana and Varela describe knowing as something done by a whole living being in relationship with its world, with being and world changing each other all the time, not as a picture held in a head. In Therapeutic Shamanism, shamanism is about direct, personal experience of connecting with spirit, and in shamanic reality everything is connected to, and a part of, everything else, so that things which look separate in ordinary reality are “protrusions from a deeper interconnected web of energy”.9
Maturana and Varela also hold that every living thing is, while it lives, as well adapted as any other, with no ladder of better and worse. Therapeutic Shamanism, on its own grounds, rejects the myth of human supremacy, the story that humans stand at the top of a hierarchy of beings. See What is the myth of human supremacy? and What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
How do the two accounts differ on what is alive? #
Over where the line between living and non-living falls, or whether there is one. Autopoiesis was worked out precisely to say what separates a living cell from things that do not make themselves, and on that definition a stone, a river or a machine is not alive. In Therapeutic Shamanism everything is made of energy, and that energy is both alive and conscious. The Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, all physical matter, from rocks and water to the air, the soil, a mobile phone or a car, are themselves conscious and alive, “just in a way that is very, very different to us”. That most modern humans do not perceive them as alive at all is, in this teaching, a sign of how far we have fallen; our animist ancestors knew that the mountain, the river and the waterfall were alive.10 See What are Stone People, and what gifts do they bring?
There is also a difference of method. Maturana and Varela reached their view as scientists, reasoning from cells, nervous systems and experiments on perception. In Therapeutic Shamanism the aliveness of the world is not settled by argument but met in experience, by allowing the possibility that everything around us is alive and conscious, in nature and in human-made places, and noticing what happens.11
What do critics say about autopoiesis? #
Its critics argue that it does not really define or explain what a living system is, and that its self-referring language lends itself to Maturana’s view that each of us brings forth our own world, which some read as close to solipsism; the biologist Pablo Razeto-Barry has noted that its influence on mainstream biology has been limited. Haraway’s objection, that nothing truly makes itself, is a criticism of the idea’s starting point.
On the other side, the idea has been taken up and developed far beyond biology. Thompson and the wider enactive school use it as a foundation for understanding mind, Margulis built it into her account of the living Earth, and Maturana and Varela themselves set out to walk what they called a razor’s edge between a world simply copied into us and no world at all.12
