The Enactive Conception of Life

Enactivism proposes an alternative to functionalism in embodied cognition by focusing on how organic, sensorimotor, and social bodies are individuated through their material precariousness. This chapter analyzes the concepts of autonomy, agency, and sense-making from a dialectical examination of autopoiesis. The requirements for an organism to simultaneously self-produce and self-distinguish involve contradictory potentialities and tendencies. Overcoming this dialectic leads to a more concrete concept of self-individuation as an open, unfinished process extended over time—the enactive concept of agency. Even the simplest life-forms are always already self-individuating as behaving agents that enact a world.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract Enactivism offers research in embodied cognition an alternative to functionalism. It does so by theorizing the individuation of organic, sensorimotor, and social bodies in their material precariousness. In this chapter, we discuss the concepts of autonomy, agency, and sense-making as they emerge from a dialectical analysis of the notion of autopoiesis. Each of the requirements of self-production and self-distinction in this notion, requirements that an organism must satisfy simultaneously to stay alive, are shown to involve potentialities and tendencies that contradict each other. The overcoming of this dialectical situation is the passage toward a more concrete concept of self-individuation as an open, unfinished operation that extends over time. This is the enactive concept of agency. The implication is that concrete, material self-individuation is always-already, even for the simplest life-forms, the self-individuation of behaving agents that enact a world.