Love (Maturana)

In 1985, Maturana delivered a lecture in Santiago that began with a sentence his audience did not expect from a biologist: 'Love is the grounding of our human existence.' He was not speaking sentimentally or philosophically. He was making a biological claim, grounded in decades of research on living systems, about the precondition for social existence among organisms of the human kind. Love in Maturana's precise usage is the bodily disposition that opens the space in which the other arises as a legitimate other in coexistence. Not an emotion in the colloquial sense — not warmth or affection or attachment, though it may accompany those feelings — but a domain of emotioning, a configuration of the organism's body that determines what actions are available toward the other. Under love, the other is a being whose existence is accepted as valid alongside one's own. Under domination, the other is an object — a resource to be exploited, a threat to be neutralized, an