Biology of Wonder_ Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science ( PDFDrive.com )

Francisco Varela, it becomes clear that a transformed biology must use a
new vocabulary with its new style of thought. It has to speak about life
in a way that acknowledges both its physical and subjective sides and
balances them. The new language must do justice to behavior — but also
to the feeling that the behavior and its experienced aspects, mean for the
organism as a subject. Within the framework of classical biological
science, this may sound like heresy — and it poses serious
methodological challenges, to be sure. But whoever dares to breach the
entrenched biological dogmas is rewarded with an inestimable gain:
nature and mind are no longer separated. We can glimpse the actual
functioning of organisms. The deep chasm yawning between ourselves
and other beings, between how we feel and how we describe the world,
closes for the first time. For the first time, we are welcome. We belong to
the world.
In this new biology, the drive to live — which we can observe
everywhere and which we also know from within ourselves — becomes
the primary axiom. It replaces the blind “struggle for life” of biological
Darwinism. To make clear some of the unexpected consequences of my
viewpoint, I will call this striving to exist the First Law of Desire:
everything that lives wants more of life. Organisms are beings whose
own existence means something to them. They have interests like us —
although these interests are not necessarily conscious. But all organisms
are carried by the same sensation that human subjects feel from the very
beginning: existential concern with the meaning of every encounter, the
touch of every other being and the things that other beings produce.
Organisms are focused on being in the right place and on avoiding the
wrong place — the way the rose beetle senses that the inside of a rose is
a good place for him and the paved road a bad one.
What completely mesmerized me in that long past summer was the
fact that I could see that concern. It radiated out in every tiny
movement, in every gesture. It became clear that even if plants and
animals do not have consciousness, they nevertheless have an inside with
a distinctive, vibrating gestalt. I could nearly walk into it. I could dive
inside it and touch it. I saw that the inner life of organisms displays itself
at their surface. Like all important insights in nature it is not hidden, as
Heraclitus would have us believe; it is revealed.
Therefore we have to posit a Second Law of Desire. This law subverts