It was on reading a couple of draft chapters of Nature's Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture, at Schumacher College in February 2005, that the expression 'a wise elder of an alternative West' first came to mind to describe the book's author, Brian Goodwin.¹ My impression that Goodwin is such a 'wise elder' became amply corroborated after a first reading of the entire work, just published last month (I should add that 'elder' does not have to do strictly with age, although it often goes along with a lifetime work of reflection and engagement).

I decided to write these notes in the belief that there is something of great insight in what some of these biologists – themselves, dissenting imaginations within their own fields – are telling us that I do not find in the best works of contemporary critical theory in the humanities and the social sciences. This is not to suggest that the latter are less important, but to encourage us all to read the work of some of these 'wise elders of an alternative West', who, coming from the science worlds, aim at reconciling social action with the dynamics of life itself. The two projects – critical theory in the humanities and the social sciences, on the one hand, and alternative science theory, on the other – are complementary and it is important to build bridges between them. Some intellectuals coming from the sciences have started the process in earnest, such as Goodwin himself (there are many others, of course, Vandana Shiva being among the most well known ones).

Let me mention, to start on a more intuitive vein, some of the claims to be found in Goodwin's book:

• Meaning, language, feelings and experience are not the prerogative of humans but are found in all living beings.
• Feelings are a property of many biological systems; organisms should be understood 'as sentient beings that create and know their worlds by exercise of intention and skill in which feelings are genuinely aspects of nature'.
• All organisms make sense of their genetic text and engage in purposive activity within their own context in order to create themselves and satisfy their needs. There is thus a meaning-based natural intelligence in all organisms.
• Creativity and adaptability are inherent aspects to all forms of life. There are lessons to be learned from how creativity works in the natural world for designing social worlds. Contemporary biology (e.g., complexity theory) can be one of our guides in this regard,
• Every organism is a member of a community (a species) with a shared language and a culture that makes meaning of its history (reads the inherited text) by creating forms that are appropriate to their context.
• As nature itself, humans are thrown into lives of meaning through relationships, that is, the process of finding meaning, coherence and wholeness through relational views and practices.

Let me now try to spell out some of these notions.

Since the 1970s at least, some life scientists have been telling us that there is much to learn from certain accounts of biological life that is applicable to social life (and I am not referring to sociobiology, as it will become clear shortly). Goodwin's own PhD supervisor, the biologist Conrad Waddington at Edinburgh, was among the pioneers in suggesting that the basic dynamics of non-human living systems might provide clues for what in today's jargon we would call sustainable social/natural systems (Jantsch and Waddington, 1976). The early notions of self-organization, non-equilibrium, non-predictability and autopoiesis of the 1970s have been expanded today to include the idea that the entire spectrum of natural manifestations – from non-organic to organic (human and non-human) forms of life – represents dynamic and open-ended processes. For humanists and social scientists, this is a most striking proposition: that there are similar processes underlying all human and non-human forms of life and that, moreover, it is imperative that we learn to see ourselves again as part of the 'non dualistic experience of being the stream' (Jantsch and Waddington, 1976: 2) if we are to avoid the human and ecological catastrophes that surely await us; this is the case if 'humanity' – whatever that means – continues on its current path led by the model of modern industrial civilization.

While Goodwin is cognizant of parallels between his argument and non-Western knowledge and shamanic traditions, in Nature's Due he speaks strictly from within Western science or, rather, in the space that modern science itself opened up in between science and life: as science re-discovers the dynamic and meaning-making aspects of all forms of life – life's remarkable creativity – this discovery transforms science itself in unexpected ways, making it again more attuned to life. His narrative starts from a certain fall of science that happened with the Renaissance that replaced holistic modes of knowing – which saw the world as creative and meaningful – by one in which nature came to be seen as an inert background for human action, to be known mechanistically by science (as in Richard Hawkins saying, 'Each of us is a machine, like an airliner only more complicated' (1986), cited in p. 85). The mechanistic model, as Goodwin hastens to say, produced amazing results in many ways; however, it is now important to recognize (as many place-based and indigenous peoples have known all along, it could be added) that this form of knowledge applies only to limited aspects of reality, as novel trends in life sciences have demonstrated. The analysis of these trends is an important part of the book, which the author does in understandable language for the uninitiated reader. Among the trends reviewed are: deterministic chaos, that is, the idea that the world is not so predictable and controllable as most modern science assumed; the unexpected creativity of natural processes, including emergence and complexity, fractal patterns and self-similar formations (e.g., leaves, dendrites, root systems, bays, river basins, lightening flash, etc.); the role of self-organization in biological evolution and in the creation of biological form; power laws in networks; and so forth. (Incidentally, what underlies many of these self-organizing networks and self-similar formations is the coexistence of coherence of the whole with maximum freedom for the parts, with least effort and minimum energy used to arrive at the formation.) From this review, Goodwin suggests an initial conclusion that will reverberate throughout the book: that there are many beautiful and practicable examples of 'natural design' in operation, even if it takes a shift in scientific inquiry to ascertain them. The shift, as we shall see, is more radical than a mere change in methodology, scale of observation or even epistemology, even if these are involved; the shift entails an entirely different conception of life and, so, of science – a different ontology or theory of what life itself is.

Throughout the book, Goodwin is concerned with three concepts: coherence (how does nature and societies arrive at particular patterns and configurations, particularly those that seem successful?), wholeness and meaning. It is well known that meaning is reserved for humans, an assumption that Goodwin will radically revise. In reviewing the biology of the heart and the brain, for instance, he discovers the importance of chaos, emergence, relational networks and wholeness in the maintenance of health – a far cry from the reductionist approach to health based on the model of cell behaviour under the control of genes. It is the entire complex structure – from the molecular and the cellular to the community – that needs to be understood for effective prevention and treatment of diseases such as cancer. If relational networks are ubiquitous in biological life – from the brain to the ecosystems – it would make sense to mimic them in social life through appropriate community forms so as to tap into the healing power of community, a slowly rising trend that Goodwin also finds hopeful. 'Local biologies' might become an important concept in this regard; the concept suggests not only that cultural meanings have implications for health but also that health needs to be dealt with in a place-based and holistic manner. Similar principles should apply to food and agriculture, which the author discusses in passing in the chapter on health. From this deeply relational biology, the author thus draws lessons for equally relational and collective social forms and for relations with the natural world – the healing power of relationships, the ecological character of sustainable agriculture, etc. All of this, needless to say, goes clearly against the grain of individualizing modernity, the separation of nature and culture and so forth.

It is well known that conventional Western science enshrined 'objectivity' and rejected 'subjectivity' in knowledge making, giving overpowering importance to quantities as opposed to qualities. Understanding complex systems and wholes, however, requires both, in Goodwin's view. After being banished for centuries by science, qualities are making a comeback, a process that Goodwin belabours with care. Qualities are known through intuition, feeling and emotions, aspects for which science has had no place. According to this new biology, feelings and experience have a veritable causal dimension in the emergence and evolution of form that is undeniable. New approaches to perception, subjective experience, intentionality and cognition suggest that feelings are a property of many biological systems, amounting to a sort of 'pan-sentience', which 'transforms the nature of the world in which we live, since what we call "matter" is no longer "dead" but has the potential for experience at any level of appropriate organization' (p. 82). That the natural world might be one of pan-sentience is a strong finding in the face of a tradition that denies feeling and meaning to non-human life, since by definition only humans have consciousness and language. Building on the sustained work of the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Goodwin concludes that 'to live is to know' and to be human is to love. This biology of love – based on the fundamental embodiment of all knowledge, or what Maturana and Varela call the 'unbroken coincidence of our being, our doing, and our knowing' (1987: 25) – provides 'a basis for understanding organisms as sentient beings that create and know their worlds by exercise of intention and skill in which feelings are genuinely aspects of nature' (p. 82).

One of the extremes of mechanistic and reductionist thinking, which is also being debunked by recent trends, is that of the genetic arguments about many aspects of life, from evolution and heredity to disease. Triggered by the story about DNA as the secret of life, and taken to unprecedented highs by genome sequencing, these views shaped the imagination of a generation. However, recent studies of genetic and molecular organization are producing an entirely different picture, that of evolution with meaning. It is in this "changing the story of the gene" that Goodwin anchors his argument about a hermeneutic biology – asking not about the meaning of life, but about a life with meaning. Appealing to structural linguistics and phenomenology, he suggests that all organisms make sense of their genetic text and engage in purposive activity within their own context in order to create themselves and satisfy their needs. There is thus a meaning-based natural intelligence in all organisms (different, of course, from human symbolic cognition) that operates on the basis of embodied knowledge. 'The implication is that an organism is a member of a community (a species) with a shared language and a culture that makes meaning of its history (reads the inherited text) by creating forms that are appropriate to their context. This view places organisms firmly within a perspective of creative culture that we recognize as one of our own aspirations. We see intuitively that species live meaningful and appropriate lives, and we seek the same condition' (p. 98). This is, of course, a radical proposition that enables Goodwin to re-link (religar, as Leonardo Boff puts it, also drawing on complexity theory) nature and culture ('Nature and Culture Are One, Not Two' is the penultimate chapter title, on the Goethian science of qualities). Of course, it goes without saying that 'all species on earth seem to know their job except humans' (p. 98).

The goal of hermeneutic biology – one could say, of ecological living in general – becomes one of co-creation and participation. Scientists can become co-creators of [the] world with beings that are much more like us cognitively and culturally that we have hitherto recognized ... We are within the history of that unfolding... The modernist attempt to structure our existence in terms of objective absolutes leads to nothing less than our imprisonment in an amoral enterprise, while the postmodern attitude set us free, not to do as we like, but to behave ethically ... [Thus] The task before us now is to rethink our place in the stream of creative emergence on this planet in terms of the deeper understanding of the living process that is now taking form. The life of form, of which we are a part, unfold toward patterns of beauty and efficiency that satisfy both qualitative and quantitative needs in such a way as to maintain diversity of species, cultures, languages and styles of living (100, 101, 110; emphasis added).

The emergence of form in biological life (morphogenesis, in the sense of both form and behaviour) has been of course a long-standing preoccupation within biology, but one to which complexity theories have given renewed orientation. Part of this re-orientation has come from observing closely what happens at phase transitions, particularly how order emerges from disorder at a particular, 'critical' point (the typical example is the transition of gas to a liquid). It is at points such as these – and in general processes that take place at the 'edge of chaos' – that creative emergence in the world happens or may happen. This, again, happens in living and non-living systems. In one of the book's last chapters ('The Life of Form and the Form of Life'), Goodwin takes this observation and some developments in embodied theories of cognition as points of departure to challenge the dualist trap of splitting mind from matter, thoughts and feelings. If matter has qualities of feeling or experience, it follows that we need to 'feel our way' (not just think our way) into new possibilities. If, following the logic of emergence, many physical and biological forms arrive at coherent, beautiful forms and structures in an economical way, is it because they obey a general principle of skilful action, in the sense of the appropriate behaviour for the context in which they find themselves? If this is the case, we can thus think about 'skilful action' in the human domain as well as the kind of agency that goes into creating coherent wholes. This involves 'a way to put mind and matter together through feeling or experience in such a way that they actually belong together as a unity; they are not simply stuck together by an arbitrary say-so' (p. 124). (For a related view of skilful action in 'disclosing new worlds', as applied to social action, see Spinosa et al. (1997); see also Varela's concept of 'ethical know-how' (1999). These are all informed by phenomenology.)

Life's immanent force shows in a multiplicity of forms in nature. Goodwin comments on this notion as it developed in traditions such as those of Spinoza and, particularly, Goethe, but also from some peculiar contemporary biological works that feed from these traditions to build a hermeneutic biology. With these authors, one may say that we need to learn to be 'readers of the book of life' (the wonderfully imaginative title of one of the books he cites, by biologist Anton Markos in Prague), and act accordingly. This reading of course will have to be based on both detailed empirical observation and theory building, as in the best science traditions. It must be based on a brand of holistic realism that accepts that nature exists and expresses itself in form in embodied reality. In this Goodwin joins other efforts at positing a post-constructivist, neo-realist epistemology that while accepting fully the mind-independent reality of the world refuses the binarisms of conventional realism (distinction observer/observed; mind/body; etc.; e.g., Deleuze and Guattari, flat ontologies, perhaps some fields such as ecological economics); in Goodwin's case, his 'holistic realism' raises the question of feelings and experience as an epistemological issue and possibility.

Goodwin's concluding chapter is not intended as a summing up; it rather surveys a few trends that he finds hopeful, particularly in the fields of ecology, alternative economics (cooperative arrangements and local economies and currencies), design and architecture (based on renewable energy). Although Goodwin does not blast capitalism in the book, in these last pages it becomes clear that he finds the current economic paradigm and systems most destructive and obsolete. As other visionary thinkers, he leaves us with the possibility of a transition as a cultural transformation that will either carry us into a new age on earth or will result in our disappearance from the planet. The choice is in our hands. I am optimistic that we can go through the transition as an expression of the continually creative emergence of organic form that is the essence of the living process in which we participate (p. 177).

Like a caterpillar, humans need to undergo a metamorphosis in which most structures will have to be shed (self-digested, actually, in the case of insects, a veritable meltdown), preserving only some crucial foci from which new forms, behaviours and structures may emerge.

Social scientists and humanists have traditionally been skeptical of big claims such as these, for good reason. However, our deeply anthropocentric and secular (largely modernist and logocentric) modes of inquiry seem to be falling short to the task of thinking about the kinds of transformations that are needed in the face of the current social and ecological catastrophes. Some biologists seem more attune to this type of inquiry; this is itself a historical development. But there are some parallel ideas in the social sciences in terms of a call for a transition. The following, for instance, is from sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, one of the main architects of the World Social Forum process (2002: 13): The conditions that brought about the crisis of modernity have not yet become the conditions to overcome the crisis beyond modernity. Hence the complexity of our transitional period portrayed by oppositional postmodern theory: we are facing modern problems for which there are no modern solutions. The search for a postmodern solution is what I call oppositional postmodernism... . What is necessary is to start from the disjunction between the modernity of the problems and the postmodernity of the possible solutions, and to turn such disjunction into the urge to ground theories and practices capable of reinventing social emancipation out of the wrecked emancipatory promises of modernity.

What these calls have in common is an acute sense or modernity's inability to tackle today's problems, such as massive displacement, ecological destruction, and poverty and inequality. What I am suggesting is that there is also an 'oppositional postmodernism' emerging from some trends in the sciences (it has actually been there for quite a while), and that it has important and unique elements to contribute to the larger task of bringing about socially and imaginatively the transition. Critical intellectuals from many fields will find in these works elements of interest: for instance, about alternative genealogies of modern science – indeed, the existence of an alternative, less Eurocentric and colonialist West; about how to go beyond the two most deadening aspects of modern eurocentrism (pervasive binarism and simplification of complexity, which are part and parcel of the coloniality of nature, gender, knowledge and power); about the pluralization of modernity/ies; about potential, mutually enriching conversations between alternative western traditions and non-modern knowledges and traditions (i.e., those of indigenous peoples, peasants and afro-descendants in many parts of Latin America); about the kinds of collective action needed to contribute to bringing about change in the direction of ecologically sensitive worlds (including the question of whether social movements can mimic the dynamical processes and structures of self-similar and self-organizing networks); and of course ideas about design, process and form in many domains, from the economy to cities and communities.