A Supertheory of Social Systems: Embodiment and Epigenetics
Abstract
I aim to engage with a supertheory of social systems through the lenses of embodiment and epigenetic inquiry, reinterpreting the evolutionary theory of differentiation via a unified concept of co-constitution—emphasizing structural coupling, environmental perturbation, and the conservation of adaptation in organismal development. This perspective offers a new linguistic framework in which the embodied speech act remains central to shaping the systemic construction of life and its sociocultural reality, challenging the rigidity of traditional system language. I attempt to reinvigorate Francisco Varela’s insights into autopoiesis, drawing on the homeodynamic theory of lifelines and epigenetics.
A Supertheory and Evolutionary Differentiation
In advancing a Supertheory of social systems, Niklas Luhmann draws on the work of Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, who, together with Francisco Varela, introduced the concept of autopoiesis to describe the recursive operations of self-referential systems.
According to Luhmann, such systems constitute “networks of productions of components that recursively, through their interactions, generate and realize the network that produces them and constitute, in the space in which they exist, the boundaries of the network as components that participate in the realization of the network.”[1]
Luhmann integrates the biological concept of self-organization—specifically, the principle of autopoiesis—into his theory of social systems, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between systems and their environment. In the case of social systems, these systems generate and reproduce their own elements—in this case, communication—while remaining structurally coupled through interactions with other systems and the environment.
Drawing on evolutionary theory, Luhmann reinterprets Darwin’s ideas of evolution. His contribution lies not in affirming a unified or predetermined order—as was characteristic of earlier notions of arche or divine providence—but rather in shifting the paradigm to understand biological and social development through the distinction between variation and selection. For Luhmann, Darwin represents a critical turning point, as evolution is no longer framed by fixed unities or first causes, but by the unity of a difference: that is, the structured interplay between variation and selection.
This evolutionary model, reflected earlier in the autopoietic concept of structural drift, is universalized by Luhmann into what he terms a “supertheory.” Within this framework, system communications and the differentiation of subsystems provide a comprehensive explanatory schema that extends beyond biology or sociology, encompassing multiple domains of complexity. Luhmann’s systems theory constitutes a supertheory due to its capacity to apply across various disciplines.
Supertheory is distinguished by its use of guiding distinctions—binary conceptual codes such as system/environment, variation/selection, legal/illegal, etc. These distinctions do not mirror reality in a descriptive fashion; instead, they function as semantic operators, enabling the theory to organize, process, and adaptively manage complexity in a reflexive manner.[2]
In this light, Luhmann’s systems sociology presents a paradigm that integrates biological, sociological, and epistemological insights—particularly in relation to autopoiesis and functional differentiation, which contribute to the reduction of world complexity.
Intentionality, Meaning, and Horizon
Extending phenomenology into the realm of self-referential systems, Luhmann appropriates Husserl’s phenomenology of sense, meaning, and horizon, redefining it within a cybernetic systems framework. Central to this appropriation is the concept of intentionality—the fundamental structure through which consciousness relates to an object. In Husserlian terms, intentionality refers to the correlation between noesis (the act of consciousness) and noema (the object as intended or meant). Intentionality thus constitutes a horizon of difference, wherein every act of consciousness not only posits a referent but also a surrounding field of possible meanings.
Luhmann incorporates several key Husserlian terms into the language of his systems theory. He writes, “The form in which consciousness executes its operations is called by Husserl (in connection with Brentano) intention.” However, Luhmann redefines this term in purely functional terms: “Intention is nothing but the positing of a difference.”[3]
Within this framework, sense (Sinn) emerges as the primary operation of intentionality: the differentiation of meaning from a background horizon. For example, consider a ship—not merely as an object in a static location, but within a horizon of movement, utility, and function. Its identity is constituted through potentiality—through the interplay between its actual position and its possible trajectories. Meaning, therefore, arises as a unity of the actual and the possible, dynamically structured by the horizon.
Self-Reference and Other-Reference
Luhmann radicalizes Husserl’s insight by reinterpreting sense as the operative medium of social systems, grounded in the distinction between self-reference and other-reference. Systems construct meaning not as a reflection of external reality, but as a self-referential operation—they generate their own elements and meanings internally while distinguishing themselves from an environment they cannot control but must continually respond to.
From this perspective, a system (such as law, politics, or religion) maintains its identity by continuously referring to itself. Yet, paradoxically, this closure is only possible within an open environment. Self-referential closure requires specific ecological conditions—constraints and enablers—that shape the system’s operational logic. Therefore, the system/environment distinction is not external to the system but is internally operationalized to process complexity, maintain boundaries, and remain responsive to perturbations.
Thus, Luhmann’s theory of self-referential systems integrates an open-systems paradigm with a phenomenological account of sense-making, where meaning is generated through internal differentiation and sustained through structural coupling with the environment. In this schema, systemic intentionality (analogous to noesis) corresponds to the system’s self-referential operations, while structural coupling (analogous to noema) reflects the system’s engagement with external referents. The core theoretical challenge Luhmann addresses is how closure creates openness—how systems remain self-contained while simultaneously adapting to and incorporating environmental complexity into their operative logic.[4]
Autopoiesis, Structural Coupling and Language
To distinguish a structural theory of autopoiesis, embodiment, and linguistic intentionality, I turn to Francisco Varela, who remains one of the key figures in shaping Luhmann’s systems theory.
Neuro-phenomenology, as defined by Francisco Varela, is “a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thus placing [itself] in the lineage of the continental tradition of phenomenology.”[5]
This discipline systematically explores the structural relationship between mind and consciousness through lived human experience, while also engaging in dialogue with cognitive science via network-based models of cognition.
What distinguishes autopoietic systems from machines or the closed systems of classical equilibrium thermodynamics is the recursivity of their operations. These systems not only produce and modify their own structures but also generate all the components and operational units they require. In other words, everything functioning as a unit within the system is also produced by the system itself. Autopoietic systems are, by definition, incapable of operating beyond their own boundaries—they are operationally closed, meaning their operations are internally determined and self-referential.
However, this operational closure does not imply isolation within the system. Rather, it presupposes dynamic interactions with ecological conditions—an environment that serves as the necessary correlate to the system’s self-organization.
Similarly, Maturana addresses the history of interactions within a composite unity and its medium, where both the unity and the medium operate as independent systems in each interaction, triggering structural changes in one another and selecting changes in each other. The history of interaction undergoes structural changes and configurations, which are triggered and selected through recurrent interplay with the medium. Adaptation is conserved, and selection is defined as the outcome arising from the history of these interactions. As a result, the structural configuration is structurally coupled to each other.
If the organization or adaptation is not conserved, the composite unity begins to disintegrate. The matrix of possible perturbations acts as a reference for selecting the path of structural changes occurring in the history of interaction. Structural coupling (conservation of adaptation) refers to a phenomenon in which no loss of organization occurs as the plastic composite unity undergoes recurrent interactions, each inducing structural changes. The autopoietic organization thus constitutes an invariant configuration of relations, around which the selection of structural changes plays a critical role.[6]
In my view, structural coupling is based on internal interactions within a self-referential system, as well as external interactions with other referential systems, which induce structural changes within a unified theory of co-constitution. This encompasses the aspect of structural drift at the organism level, mediated through language and communication within intersubjective relationships.
In Luhmann’s theory, system communication operates within a social cybernetic framework, while being structurally coupled in interplay with other reference systems. However, he downplays the significance of language in the network, where systems interact with one another.
In contrast, Maturana views communication as the coordination of behavior through recurrent mutual interactions among living organisms, or through mutual structural coupling. This mutual coordination is the key characteristic of communication, which is created through ‘languaging’ within the network of structural couplings among all living organisms. As the nervous system evolves, its complexity increases. In this view, the coordination of behavior is shaped by the dynamics of structural coupling, with linguistic behavior serving as the foundation for language.
The uniqueness of being human lies in our ability to continually weave the linguistic network in which we are embedded, interacting with one another. Through language, we coordinate our behavior and bring forth a shared world with others. Human consciousness can only be understood as a social phenomenon through language, which is embedded within the broader social context. This structural approach to language is essential in strengthening intersubjective communication within the social network. It cannot be reduced to systematized communication or the linguistics of the system.[7]
Rather, linguistic behavior emphasizes the significance of the subject in communication with others. It stands in contrast to system language, which is considered a social institution whose conventions constrain and govern individual acts of speaking within a systemic form of life. Taken as a whole, system language cannot be studied without considering the speaking subject within the communicative network.
According to Merleau-Ponty, “language is present in the speaking subject as a system of differentiations between signs and between significations and that speech operates, in one gesture, the differentiation in these two orders.”[8]
In examining the relationship between the signifier (in the act of speech) and the signified (codified in system language), we observe that the operation of differentiation in the process of signification occurs at the level of speech acts, which modify the already existing system of differentiation. Speech acts in the signifier are central to the process of signification and resemble system language (the signified) in a meaningful way. However, they are not reducible to system language, which is often taken for granted and fixed as the “signified.”
This approach involves a linguistic epoche to the system language, returning to the original or authentic speech act. Meaning in linguistic intentionality is created in the act of speaking and is directed toward a shared world, with reference to both direction and orientation.[9]
A critical concept of linguistic intentionality challenges the idea of an ideal speech situation between individual dialogue participants, as proposed by Habermas, which aims at universal consensus through argumentation. This is complicated by the differences between various language games—such as social, political, scientific, traditional, and religious—each governed by its own set of rules and prescriptive regulations. These language games are also shaped by the general-relative structure of the lifeworld, which underlies culture, language, and tradition.
A critical theory of epoche is employed to enhance structural coupling and co-constitution in the interaction between self-reference and other-reference, thus opening the discourse of the non-Western signifier to postcolonial realities and references.
The human subject in speech cannot be conceived as a collective universal subject pursuing common emancipation through the total regulation of diverse language games via legitimacy and rational argument. Instead, linguistic epoche replaces the universal or supertheoretical framework of communicative rationality—whether collective-subjective or system differentiations—with a general-relative rationality grounded in the lifeworld and immanent critique. This approach accounts for the specificity of diverse language games (such as race, pluralism, custom, tradition, democracy, and hybridity) within the cultural framework of alternative modernities, underpinning a politics of recognition and difference.[10]
Autopoietic Enactivism and Social Structure
Francisco Varela, a significant influence on Luhmann, further develops his framework through what he calls neuro-phenomenology—the study of how cognitive processes emerge from the autonomy and self-organization of living systems. Varela expands the concept of life as a unitary organization that is systemic, emergent, and self-constituting. His autopoietic theory contributes to a biology of cognition that he engages with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.
To achieve a more holistic understanding, it is necessary to account for embodied intersubjectivity—recognizing the human subject not simply as a passive observer or external actor but as a living, embodied organism that participates in communication within the broader autopoietic system of life. In this expanded view, communication is not only a systemic operation but also a relational and corporeal act, embedded in shared meaning and social practice.
Varela connects with Husserl’s famous dictum, “Back to the things themselves!” as a call to return to the world as it is experienced in its felt immediacy. This phenomenological imperative suggests that all knowledge emerges from our lived experience, embedded in the relational and embodied context of the world
In this vein, Varela draws on Merleau-Ponty’s clarification of Husserl’s call: “To return to the things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign language…”[11]
In other words, scientific models and abstractions are always secondary to the original, pre-reflective experience from which they emerge. This relationship can be analogized as follows: just as a map is not the terrain and a geography is not the forest itself, scientific knowledge too is only a representation. A symbolic system refers back to a primary, embodied engagement with the world.
Similarly, a prairie or a river in the countryside is not merely a conceptual object; it is an ecological and experiential reality—lived, navigated, and imbued with meaning through bodily presence and perceptual engagement.[12]
Varela emphasizes lived experience and the world as foundational principles of the phenomenological approach, offering a meaningful link between consciousness and meaning. By grounding phenomenology in the immediacy of experience, he invites a fresh perspective on subjectivity through the method of phenomenological reduction—a disciplined reflection that brackets assumptions in order to return to the structures of experience as they are lived.
Within this framework, embodied cognition is not seen as the passive reception of external stimuli, but as an active, perceptual engagement with the world—rooted in the recursive, self-organizing dynamics of living systems.
When the autopoietic principle is examined through the lens of Merleau-Ponty, the body becomes the primary site of cognition. Experience is not disembodied or abstract; it is fundamentally embodied and situated within the relational structures of the lifeworld. In this view, perception and meaning emerge through the body’s ongoing interaction with its environment, underscoring the enactive and situated nature of human cognition.
Therefore, “all the living relationships of experience,” are brought back, “as a fisherman’s net drawn up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed.”[13] “To return to the things themselves is to return to the world which precedes knowledge, of which the knowledge always speaks… [a human being] is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”[14]
At the heart of this phenomenological project lies the claim that embodied cognition demands a radical reflection on the genesis of meaning. The idea that “to live is to know” becomes intelligible only through phenomenological reduction and intentional arc—a reflective act that uncovers the structures of pre-reflective experience and makes them meaningful. Yet, this reflection is not an abstract or disembodied cognitive process; it is inseparable from perception in its bodily dimension and inherently relational through intercorporeality—the intertwining of bodies within shared social and material structures.[15]
Merleau-Ponty advances a project that synthesizes Gestalt theory with phenomenology. In this context, Gestalt refers to total processes that imply a unified whole or an ensemble of interrelated parts, where each part derives its meaning and function from its relationship to the whole. “The systems are defined as transposable wholes.” A structural theory of social behavior is embodied “life-world and its overarching structures.”[16]
Form and structure arise dynamically through total processes, whose properties cannot be reduced to the sum of their isolated components. In such systems, every change alters the overall structure, yet the system retains its identity by preserving the relational coherence among its constituent elements.
These systems exhibit relative autonomy, resisting reduction to linear, mechanistic causality. Instead, they are fundamentally perceptual in nature, with meaning emerging at each integrative level of complexity—from matter, to life, to mind. Each stage reflects increasingly sophisticated Gestalt configurations, where form is not fixed but generated through the dialectical relationship between organism and environment. This relationship expresses a general orientation toward the world, rooted in the body’s lived experience and its open-ended engagement with its surroundings.[17]
In a similar vein, Maturana and Varela, in their collaborative work The Tree of Knowledge, argue that the structure of a system determines its interaction with the environment, specifying which configurations of the environment can trigger structural changes in the system. There is a commensurability between the operation of the organism and its world. This autopoietic epistemology, in its discussion of cognitive attitude, navigates between the Scylla of representationalism and the Charybdis of solipsism.[18]
Given the structural theory of autopoietic systems, Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld is employed to strengthen the interface between biological cognition and the organism. The lifeworld emerges through an agent’s dynamic interaction with the environment. It is the structure of the system, embodied in the lifeworld, that specifies and strengthens its action within the environment.
Autopoiesis and Epigenetic Connection
The notion of structural coupling resonates with principles of epigenetics, which provide a molecular explanation for how environmental influences leave lasting biological marks—such as DNA methylation and histone modification—without altering the underlying genetic code. These epigenetic processes exemplify a central tenet of autopoiesis, as the organism’s self-production is inseparable from its environmental embedding.
For Varela, the organism and its space-time horizon occupy a central role in cognition, situated within the lifeworld. In this context, ethical praxis—informed by traditions like Aristotelian virtue ethics and Buddhist mindfulness—emerges as a core expression of embodied cognition. Cognition is thus not merely information processing, but an enacted, lived process rooted in the organism’s embodied engagement with complex historical, social, and ecological networks.
Varela’s epistemological orientation re-centers the organism as the focal point for understanding life, aligning with British neuroscientist Steven Rose’s theory of lifelines. Both thinkers reject reductionist models, such as the “selfish gene,” and instead advocate for a relational, developmental, and embodied view of life—one that acknowledges the profound significance of epigenetics in shaping human experience.[19]
Steven Rose, a prominent neuroscientist, introduces the work of C.H. Waddington, the biologist who coined the term “epigenetics” in the early 1940s to describe the causal interactions between genes and their products in the emergence of the phenotype. In the discourse of the epigenetic landscape, developmental pathways can diverge due to both environmental and genetic contingencies. Genes are positioned beneath the landscape, influencing the developmental trajectory of an organism, but they are not strictly deterministic.
Against genetic determinism, Varela challenges the notion of genetic information as solely encoded in DNA. Instead, he argues that the genetic code is embedded within the broader metabolic network. “It is clear, however, that DNA triplets are capable of predictably specifying an amino acid in a protein, if and only if they are embedded in the cell’s metabolism, that is, in the thousands of enzymatic regulations in a complex chemical network.”[20]
In the Santiago theory, cognition is not defined in term of a representation of an independent, pregiven world, nor has to do with the computer model of cognition as information process. An embodied dimension of autopoietic cognition is enactive, bringing forth of a world. This enactive stance entails epigenetic inquiry to DNA in social ecological connection. “It is only because of the emergent regulates of such a network as a whole that we can bracket out this metabolic background and thus treat triplets as codes for amino acids.”[21]
Emerging research in neural systems reveals that epigenetic mechanisms operate within the metabolic network and influence the genetic code without altering it. This research is critical in the active regulation of DNA structure, particularly at memory-associated genes within the nervous system.[22]
The autopoietic-epigenetic synthesis offers a biologically grounded understanding of evolution, challenging the conventional view that the nervous system passively encodes environmental information through internal representations designed solely to optimize adaptive behavior.[23]
Francisco Varela conceptualizes the nervous system as a unitary, recursive network embedded within an autonomous, self-regulating—or homeodynamic—organism. Rather than functioning as a passive processor, this system is engaged in a continuous, dynamic flow of activity, intrinsically coupled with its surrounding environment. The homeodynamic perspective emphasizes the living system’s ongoing, reciprocal interaction with its ecological context, rejecting the idea of fixed, pre-programmed responses.
By foregrounding autonomy, plasticity, and embodiment, this model offers a powerful critique of biological determinism and reductive frameworks often found in evolutionary psychology. It shifts the focus from linear causality and genetic programming to emergent, relational, and embodied processes that define life and cognition as co-evolving with the environment.[24]
Coda
A phenomenology of perception and embodiment profoundly influences Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, his enactive approach to cognition, and the concept of epigenetic connection—where mind, body, and world dynamically co-emerge. Varela’s enactivism, also known as neuro-phenomenology, posits that cognition arises from the continuous and dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment. A cognitive system does not passively receive information; rather, it enacts, or brings forth, its own world through structural coupling with its surroundings—an ongoing, reciprocal “dance” that co-shapes both the organism and its context.
Gestalt theory refers to total processes that imply a unified whole or an ensemble of interrelated parts, where each part derives its meaning and function from its relationship to the whole. This holistic aspect of structure finds its significance in the concept of autopoiesis. There is a meaningful relationship between the speaking subject and system language, where meaning operates in the linguistic epoché, challenging the notion of system language as something taken for granted.
Autopoiesis—the process through which a system brings forth its own world via self-production—constitutes a foundational pillar of the enactive approach to cognition. It is not merely a matter of internal regulation but a generative process in which the organism actively creates its own reality in co-constitution with its environment. Operationally closed yet structurally coupled to its surroundings, an autopoietic system does not passively register external stimuli. Instead, it co-determines both itself and its environment through enaction, generating a meaningful world rather than merely forming internal representations of an external reality.
For instance, the meaning of “food” is not pre-given but enacted through the organism’s metabolic engagement with its environment—eating, digesting, assimilating. This illustrates embodied cognition as arising from the organism’s entire mode of being, dynamically entangled with its world.
However, Luhmann has not fully integrated such insights on embodied cognition and the lifeworld. His focus remains on the logic of self-reproducing, communicative systems that operate like linguistic systems taken for granted, working independently of individual human consciousness. Only the communication system communicates without the human subject, rendering human beings inaccessible within communication. Society is defined as a system of communication, which locates human beings outside the operational realm of the system.[25]
In contrast to this anti-humanism, I propose a structural theory of autopoiesis, which frames the diverse fields of language games within society as part of the systemic construction of human life, emphasizing the ethical significance of embodied communication and human practice.
Systemic cognition, within this phenomenological and emergent framework, involves the continuous bringing forth of meaning along both ontogenetic (individual developmental) and phylogenetic (evolutionary) lifelines. Perceptual experiences—such as color—are not objective properties “out there,” waiting to be mirrored internally. Rather, they are enacted within a situated, embodied ecology of perception. Meaning emerges through sensorimotor engagement within a form of life or lifeworld grounded in bodily action.
Varela’s cognitive science explicitly challenges adaptationist and representationalist models, which frame cognition as information processing aimed at optimizing fit with a pre-given world. Instead, his enactive approach integrates mind and body, organism and environment, emphasizing the purposeful, relational dynamics through which agents co-create a shared social and ecological world. This epistemic stance aligns with an epigenetic approach to neural systems and their social-ecological constellations.
[1] Cited in Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., et.. al (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), xx.
[2] Ibid.,, 4.
[3] Cited in Hans-Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained From Souls to Systems (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2006), 182.
[4] Luhmann, Social Systems, 9.
[5] Francisco J. Varela, “NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem,”
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, No. 4, (1996), 330- 49.
[6] Maturana, Autopiesis and Cognition, xxi
[7] Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 290-1.
[8] Cited in James Schmidt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (London: Macmillan, 1985). 108.
[9] Ibid., 114-116.
[10] Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16. A critical theory based on genealogy seeks to write the present through the problematic regime of effective history and anamnestic reasoning (as proposed by Walter Benjamin). This approach engages with a structural theory of autopoietic embodiment and linguistic intentionality, emphasizing the structural coupling and co-constitution necessary for justice in the common good, which underlies both distributive and reparative justice.
[11] Varela, “NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY, 336.
[12] M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, ix.
[13] Ibid., xv.
[14] Ibid., ix. xi.
[15] Ibid., 63.
[16] M. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon, 1963), xiii. 47.
[17] Ibid.,161.
[18] Humberto Maturana and Francisco Valera, The Tree of Knowledge (Boaston: Shambhala, 1987), 134.
[19] “An Interview with Francisco Varela,” Wild Duck Review (2000).
[20] Francisco Valera, et al., The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, Mass.,: MIT Press, 1991), 101.
[21] Ibid.
[22] J. David Sweatt, “The Emerging Field of Neuroepigenetics,” Neuron 80, October 30, 2013. 624-632.
[23] Thompson and Varela, “Autopoiesis and Lifelines,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1999) 22, 909.
[24] Steven Rose, Lifelines: Life beyond the Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[25] Moeller, Luhmann Explained From Souls to Systems, 9.