Existence and Enaction: A Critical Review of the Encounter between Existential Philosophy and Enactive Cognitive Science
Guo Chen
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) July 14, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18303542 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Review |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Existentialism Embodied cognition Enactivism Ontology Transformative learning Novelty Dualism Epistemology Cognitive science Internalism and externalism Counterfactual thinking Premise Philosophy of science Holism Constitution Perspectivism Mental operations Physicalism |
| Key findings | Contemporary enactive and existential approaches achieve substantial conceptual and clinical integration but do not yet yield a complete organism-to-person theory. |
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.