Day 4: Varela Knows How and What

"We always operate in some kind of immediacy of a given situation." -Varela

As if this quote wasn't illuminating enough, my internet resisted all attempts to connect over the weekend so these next few entries are late.   Varela is a fascinating theorist.   I must admit I struggled through his paper to some extent initially and am now digging my way through it again in light of the film and our discussion on Maturana (see next post).  It seems that both of these men are connected.  

Varela himself stated that he felt at times the wandering troubadour.  Displaced in many ways by the chaos erupting in his home country of Chile, Varela spent a significant portion of his life moving from home to home (the United States then back to Chile).  It appears that he eventually settled on France.  Tragically he died relatively young in 2001.  

Having known a few people who have died of cancer before their time (in my opinion), I wonder if the chaos of his life and early illnesses helped intensify his thoughts on Microworlds and Microidentities.  I think these concepts of the complex cognitive structures of even the most simple tasks and Varela's belief in how individuals live in the immediacy of the time and space they occupy will be the concepts that stick with me the most.

Francisco Varela

Like Naess, Bateson, and Capra, Varela comes from a scientific background.  He was a biologist whose research on the vision function of the eye was ultimately transcended by reflective thinking on more complex cognitive process.  It would cause him to wonder about current theories in cognition and theorize that "...a radical paradigm shift is imminent."  

I am familiar with paradigms and paradigm shifts.  Thomas Kuhn writes about scientific revolutions, the social construction of knowledge, and paradigms in his classic text The Structure of Scientific Knowledge.  Based on what I have observed about cognitive theory as it relates to the pedagogy of educating teachers like me at the turn of the new millennium, the paradigm and praxis train has yet to arrive.