Na cestě k relačnímu výkladu afektivity: k dialogu mezi teoriemi vtělené kognice a fenomenologií

Summary

This article critically examines how phenomenology and embodied cognition theories explain affectivity. The author compares Joel Krueger's extended cognition and Giovanna Colombetti's enactivist approaches with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, finding inconsistencies. To resolve these, the author argues for a rigorously relational interpretation of affectivity, where it is not an internal state causally linked to external factors but a dynamic relationship between a sense-making agent and their meaningful environment.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The aim of this article is to briefly introduce and critically analyze the dialogue between phenomenology and contemporary theories of embodied cognition in relation to the study of affectivity. The author explains how these theoretical approaches interpret the dynamic relationship between affective experiences on the one hand and bodily behavior and intersubjectively observable processes taking place in the environment on the other. He first summarizes the positions of Joel Krueger and Giovanna Colombetti, who draw on the theories of extended cognition and enactivism, and then compares them with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach. In this way, there are found to be inconsistencies in Krueger’s and Colombetti’s approaches, whose resolution, in the author’s opinion, requires the working out of a rigorously “relational” interpretation of affectivity. From this point of view, affectivity is not understood as an internal phenomenon causally linked to external material factors, but strictly as a dynamic relationship between a sense-making agent and his or her meaningful environment.

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