Addressing the issue of naturalism in autopoietic enactivism through genetic and material phenomenology

Abstract

A central idea in autopoietic enactivism is that the living organism is an autonomous system that “enacts” or “brings forth” its environment. In this paper, I connect this thesis to the general philosophical framework developed by Varela, Thompson and Rosch in The Embodied Mind, which is centred on the concept of the co-determination of subject and object of cognition, and I liken this notion to the kind of correlationism that is found in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. However, I argue that there is a tension in autopoietic enactivism between its search for the biological basis of cognition, which seems to be oriented towards a metaphysics of Nature, and the concept of groundlessness, which seems to imply the renunciation of metaphysics. As a consequence, the concepts of Nature and naturalism in autopoietic enactivism turn out to be problematic. A similar problem arises in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in relation to its metaphysical implications and, in particular, to the possibility of a “legitimate naturalization of consciousness”. I find a way out of this issue by combining the genetic development of phenomenology with Henry’s material phenomenology. In the light of the investigation of the temporality of experience in these views, I suggest conceiving of Nature as the qualitative process that grounds the subject-object correlation, and I conceive of the resulting view as a form of neutral monism.