The authors' basic question is: How is it that people can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression? They answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of humans' biological constitution.

The central concern of this book is us human beings. The authors' basic question is: 'How is it that we can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression?' The authors answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of our biological constitution, concentrating on what they term emotioning, that is the flow of emotions in daily life that guides the flow of the systemic conservation of a manner of living. Maturana and Verden-Zoller claim that the fundamental emotion that gave rise to humans as sapient languaging beings was love, and that this remains our fundament even when other emotions become socially prevalent.