This white paper develops a Maturana-informed viability grammar: a disciplined set of diagnostic distinctions for asking how living systems, persons, institutions, cultures, and civilizations conserve or negate the conditions of living. Rather than beginning with abstract systems theory or imposed categories, the paper proceeds from Humberto Maturana’s biological and epistemological method: the observer, distinction, explanation, living organization, organism–medium congruence, structural coupling, emotioning, languaging, conversation, culture, and love. From this ground, the paper derives a life-coherent diagnostic grammar organized around conservation, constraint, margin, disturbance, present structure, regulation, relevance, and possible doings. These are not treated as metaphysical primitives, but as reflective questions that help living see what it is conserving.
The central claim is that viability cannot be reduced to survival, adaptation, stability, resilience, or functional persistence. A manner of living may persist while conserving fear, domination, humiliation, extraction, self-negation, or ecological destruction. Life-coherence therefore asks whether a conserved manner of living preserves the biological, relational, cultural, and ecological conditions through which living remains livable. The paper argues that love, understood in Maturana’s precise sense as the relational domain in which the other arises as legitimate in coexistence, is not sentimental but foundational. Suffering is interpreted as the conserved negation of love; healing as the restoration of trust, self-respect, respect for the other, and possible living; reflection as living becoming able to see how it is living; ethics as care for consequences in coexistence; responsibility as answerability for participation; freedom as the reflective possibility of conserving otherwise; and transformation as a new conservation beginning to live.
The paper concludes by presenting the diagnostic primitives as instruments of life-coherent inquiry and by emphasizing a recursive safeguard: the grammar must be applied to itself. Its purpose is not to master life from outside, but to help persons, institutions, cultures, and civilizations ask what they are conserving, what consequences follow, and whether another manner of living can begin.
