The Biologic of Autopoiesis

Abstract

Although it might seem a bit odd to apply a term like “cognition” to non-human living beings, the path to such a conception has already been paved from within biology itself by Humberto Maturana in a paper entitled “Biology of Cognition.”¹ Of course we cannot assume that what Maturana means by “cognition” is the same thing as what Hegel means by it, and indeed there are important differences between the two conceptions. Nonetheless this work of Maturana’s is instructive here for two reasons: 1) at the very least it shows that thinking of non-human living systems as being in some sense “cognitive” is not foreign to theoretical biology; and 2) it can also reveal the pitfalls of neglecting a proper philosophical articulation of concepts at the ontological level insofar as, due to this neglect, Maturana winds up falling precisely into the trap Hegel warns us about by assuming a quasi-Kantian distinction between what things are in themselves as opposed to what they are for us as “observers.” In his introduction to Autopoiesis and Cognition published ten years later, Maturana made it clear that he had not abandoned this assumption: “In fact, knowledge always implies a concrete or conceptual action in some domain, and the recognition of knowledge always implies an observer that beholds the action from a meta-domain.”² But it is precisely the uncritical assumption of essentialist determinacies that leads him to assert such metadomains, and the conception of metadomains ultimately backfires on him.