The book
- The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love
Humberto Maturana & Gerda Verden-Zoller (ed. Pille Bunnell)
- 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-Zöller 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.