Existence and Enaction: A Critical Review of the Encounter between Existential Philosophy and Enactive Cognitive Science

Summary

This article critically reviews the relationship between existential philosophy and enactive approaches to cognition, distinguishing three routes of influence: Merleau-Pontian embodiment, Heideggerian being-in-the-world, and Jonasian philosophical biology. It evaluates the encounter against three burdens: accounting for cognition of absent or abstract possibilities without requiring internal representations; explaining the development of the enculturated person; and relating the genesis of norms to their authority. The review finds that contemporary work on affectivity, selfhood, social interaction, language, and psychiatry achieves substantial integration but not a complete organism-to-person theory. The proposed framework of transformative continuity holds that later personal organizations remain embodied and continuous with living autonomy while introducing novelty not reducible to biological terms, rejecting both reductive deflation and unexplained discontinuity.

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Abstract

This article critically reviews the encounter between selected existential philosophies and enactive approaches to cognition. “Classical existentialism” functions as a retrospective review category, while enactivism is treated through the influential but contested distinction among autonomy-centred, sensorimotor, and radical approaches. The review distinguishes documented influence, mediated reception, conceptual affinity, and explanatory integration across three principal routes: Merleau-Pontian embodiment, Heideggerian being-in-the-world mediated especially by Dreyfus, and Jonasian philosophical biology, within a broader Husserlian background. It then evaluates the encounter against three non-equivalent burdens: accounting for cognition directed toward absent, abstract, or counterfactual possibilities without prejudging whether its realization requires internal representational vehicles; explaining the diachronic development and synchronic constitution of the enculturated person; and relating the genesis and social institution of norms to their justificatory authority and criticizability. Contemporary work on affectivity, selfhood, social interaction, language, and psychiatry achieves substantial conceptual and clinical integration, but it does not yet yield a complete organism-to-person theory. As an adequacy framework rather than a completed derivation, the review proposes transformative continuity: later personal, linguistic, and norm-governed organizations remain embodied and developmentally continuous with living autonomy, introduce organizational, semantic, and justificatory novelty not exhaustively translatable into biological or dynamical vocabulary, and reciprocally reorganize their biological and sensorimotor conditions. This framework rejects both reductive deflation and unexplained discontinuity while leaving open the empirical and philosophical work needed to specify the transition.

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