In this conversation, that took place few weeks before his sudden and painful farewell, Vittorio answers my questions about many significant topics; including the notion of post-rationalism, the notion of self-organization, love and the mentalism; in such a deep and original way that it was always for me a unique and fascinating experience. It is this experience that I want to share with my fellows and friends through this publication.

POST-RATIONALISM

V. G.: The post-rationalism proposes the need of going beyond the rationality. This does not mean that we are denying rationality, this is not an irrationalist or spontaneouist position. On the opposite, I think that all that is the theme of the logical and rational thought, in a context of classical rationalism, is very important. Rationality is a very effective tool created by human being, it is their very evolutionary pride. It allows us to make many calculations, deductions and reflections that other animals cannot do. However, rationality does not works alone in human systems. Rationality works with emotionality, with the sensoriality and with all sensations of the corporality. The rationality is just a tool that organizes, regulates and develops these dimensions of the experience and because of that it always works on the contents of the emotionality, on the contents of affectivity.

It is interesting to remark also that the logical and rational thought, paradigmatic – as it is called by Jerome Brunner (1), it is a very specific cognitive instrument. The rational and logical thought is only concerned on finding the invariables of the experience, what makes them invariable, uniform. Post-rationalism means in this sense, how does it appears the meaning. A meaning that is mainly emotional, over which the paradigmatic thought will be structuring invariables, it will be looking for its consistency and continuity during the whole life span. It is a thought then that works over a structure of meaning, over a matrix of meaning, that it is fundamentally emotional.

Also, I would like to mention the way that rationality is seen as introduced by post-rationalism. It tries at the same time to develop a natural evolutionary history of rationality; in this way it is seen that rationality developed and evolved together with other functions of the human organism.

A. R.: When you say that we are going beyond rationality, according to what you are proposing, we meet these other aspects of the human experience; basically with everything that belongs to the emotional world, the sensoriality, the affectivity. Those aspects that are very relevant to understand the human experience, that they can not be reduced to what is properly rational or paradigmatic.

V.G.: Yes, that can be clearly seen in Hayek’s book "The Fatal Conceit" (2). A book that is perfectly compatible with psychotherapy. On it, Hayek makes a summary of the whole perspective of the systems that are self-organized and of complexity. This author states his positions from one of the most typical rational activity: economy. This science showed us in this twenty century that economic phenomena can not be predicted, comprehended or explained by just the principles of logic and rationality. If in economy phenomena like tradition, costumes, culture and believes of people are not taken into account, nothing can be predicted. Certainly, everything that is related to the logical apparatus is very important. As an example, logical apparatus like informatics, the pulse, the mathematical equations, statistics makes us learn how a stock can go up or down.

It is important to see how rationality gives us a whole picture, completely integrated, but by itself, rationality is unable to explain the complex mechanisms of how the value of shares can go up or down, since this depends upon people’s mentality, believes, traditions, the culture of the place, all those things escape the domain of rational logic. So, let’s suppose that a share costs a dollar, if I sell it for eighty cents, I think according to logic, that everybody will try to buy it, but maybe nobody will do, and this is because of beliefs, superstitions, prejudice, etc…

In this sense, rationality is like a myth because of which we want to transform our selves in gods, forgetting about our animal condition of primates. In such a way that we believe we are only logic. We think we are brain only.
 
 

SELF-ORGANIZED SYSTEMS

V. G.: In a simple way we can say that any system that has a minimal complexity is self-organized, even if it is a non-living system. As an example, a little eddy of air is a transient phenomenon that can stand for a few minutes, but on those few minutes, air is organized around a center meanwhile it can maintain its effective organization. It is a self-organized system and at the same time, it is a very simple phenomenon that is produced all around the world, in all self-organized systems.

A. R.: We can show that with that example, but let’s see how we work as a self-organized system?

V.G.: It is also what Hayek says, economy is a self-organized system by itself. The catalacsia is not a invention of human beings, that makes that once it is structured it will have an inner oscillation, that will regulate itself independently of external inputs. Hayek shows us that economy is a self-organized system, autonomous and because of that, independent of external inputs.

This means that self-organized systems do not belong exclusively to life; and the example of the eddy and the economy are on the border, in the boundary between life and matter. But, it is in the biological world where life appears as a self-organization. Life continues meanwhile it keeps self-organizing or self-sustaining as a system. Death is only that, the end of the self-organizing processes, and all the course of entropy also.
 

LOVE

V.G.: Love is the human emotional domain, in the same way as knowledge is the human cognitive domain.

A.R.: Defining love as the human emotional domain?

V.G.: Yes, in the same way as knowledge, belong to the same semantic space. What I say is, can you see it as an image? Can you visualize an image?

A.R.: Certainly

V.G.: Let’s visualize the organism that in one side self-organizing and on the other it is interacting with the environment. There is an organism that is self-organizing and on the other hand there is organized order. Then the organism that is self-organizing has a level of what in English is called cognizing. Moreover, the order structured by cognizing in its widest sense is known as reality. Reality is a way of both perceiving and conceiving things, it is the general knowledge. The other level is the emotioning. Then the order that is produced by the emotioning, that is parallel to the order produced bycognizing, is love. Love is the order organized by the human emotional domain in the same way as conceptual reality and knowledge is the order organized by human learning, by cognizing. In this sense, love is like knowledge. It is the order that is produced by the human emotional domain and it is different from what dinosaurs would have had if they had kept evolving.

I would like to say that, under this approach, love is not any particular emotional tone. It is either a feeling, neither a state nor any specific mood state. In this sense the international scientific literature tends to confuse us many times, since there is too many theories identifying love with some emotional quality or a particular feeling. In my conception, love has to be understood as "the emotional domain where human beings, as intersubjective animals, dwell". In this space, the dimension of emotionality occurs in a continuum that is a continuum of getting close and moving away. It is a continuum of getting involved and separating.

A. R.: Now Vittorio, you relate love with sexuality.

V. G.: Yes, but in an evolutionary way. In the context of love as something properly human, the sexual revolution is extremely important. Human and bonobos are the first species’ that separate sexuality from reproduction. Sexuality is pursued by itself, it becomes something that keeps relationships together. This does not occur in other animals. In Chimpances, the female is reproductive during three months a year and during those ninety days, she always get pregnant. In that context, sexuality is strongly related with reproduction. Separating sexuality from reproduction is a typical expression of the human emotional domain. It is one of the faces of love. It is very important to state it, since there is also a change of the emotional space.

A. R.: Sexuality makes the emotional space change, in this sense, it modulates it?

V. G.: Sexuality is changed. It becomes wider and deeper; it is used not only for reproduction but for keeping affective relationships in time.

A. R.: But, that is like a new modulator of the emotional domain of love.

V.G.: It is an emergency, something that comes again; a resurgence. It is because of this that sexuality could become independent of reproduction. Then, erotism appears for the first time in human beings, understanding erotism as different from pornography. But it is erotism what makes us seeing sexuality as it is actually understood, perceived and lived differently than other animals.

A. R.: Vittorio, from an evolutionary point of view, given that bonobos- as humans- also have both an active sexuality all time and frontal sex. How did this influence human sexuality?

V. G.: I do not know. It is just a sign that there are many chances in evolutionary terms, there is no turn of the page. This chance that we see in chimpanzee reproduction is less identified in humans. Bonobos start doing other things like the humans. We have it in all mentalist activities of primates that are differently distributed. There is no continuity; there is no separation between human and non-human primates.

A. R.: Vittorio, somewhere you talked that there is a revolution, a congnitive revolution; but it is an affective revolution too.

V. G.: Both things go together, there is a cognitive revolution and also an emotional, revolution of an affective kind.

A. R.: Once the human being can see their self, it may have an affective experience. This also happens when they can recognize their selves as having an affective experience. Is it then when you talked about reconversion? The first reconversion is like the first time a human being can self refer this: "It is me that is feeling what I am feeling".

V. G.: Of course, it is becoming self-concious when changing your activity. It is being conscious not only of what you think but also of what you feel.

A.R.: That mean, being conscious of what I think is what raises mentalism?

V. G.: Being conscious of yourself and you think and feel about yourself .

A. R.: Both things together. These two things are tied from an evolutionary point of view.

V. G.: Of course they are a entirety, a person is an entirety, a total.
 
 

MENTALISM

A. R.: You proposed that it is with mentalism that a cognitive revolution is generated, but that implies that it goes together with an emotional-affective revolution. I would like you to further develop that idea.

V. G.: It is a turning point in evolutionary epistemology or, to put it simple, in human natural history. When mentalism appears, there is a proportional development in affectivity. We should remember that human mentalism happens because there is a development of language, of abstract thought and of everything related with cognitive aspects. But, there is an aspect of separation, a conscious of separation from nature close together with mentalism; of being differentiated from nature. For sure this was what it made the need for a improved emotional support, a better affective consistency that could somehow remediate this feeling of isolation, of existential solitude; the links with the groups should become then tighter.

As you may see it is a broad theme, over which we can talk extensively, but I would like to say that affectivity appears because of a push. It appears because of a need of cognitive evolution. It always seems to us that as much as we make the dimension of knowledge wider, the affective dimension get wider too. In this regard, love is the other face of the human space, it is its emotional dimension. Love and knowledge are like the two faces of the same coin, in other words, they are two dimensions of the same human reality

A. R.: Finally, Vittorio, the emergence of the self. Was it possible because in some moment the human animal was able to self-refer their experience? Were they able to perceive what they were feeling and thinking?

V. G.: Yes, of course. They became conscious of themselves, because of this consciousness of separation that I mentioned. But, there is another important aspect when the sense of self was deeply stabilized. It happened sometime that enabled an increase in self-reflexive thought, self-referred. It was then when this quality of consciousness aroused as self-consciousness. However, this quality of consciousness is at the same time the ability of working at the same time on our selves. At the same time as we get conscious that we are conscious, this implies a consciousness of separation and division. Because when doing this on that time, I am public of my own experience. Moreover, being observer of my own experience provokes a feeling of division of quite a strong desolation.

A.R.: Vittorio, as always it has been a pleasure talking to you because of the deep and originality of your answers. I deeply appreciate your generosity of sharing your thoughts with me.
 

Bibliography

1. Brunner J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
2. Hayek F. (1992) The Fatal Conceit, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
3. Maturana H. (1993) Amor y Juego. (Love and Play), Instituto de Terapia Cognitiva, Santiago de Chile