Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation

Abstract

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care.

Laying down a forking path: Tensions between enaction and the free energy principle

“…Any approach that hopes to provide explanations for human cognition must acknowledge this fact and supply the right theoretical articulations to work with it. Enactivists have proposed the concept of participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) as the keystone for developing an enactive approach to social, linguistic, and ethical agency (Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2021). This idea, in our view, is at odds with the notions of blanketed individual persistence of cognitive individuals at the heart of the FEP.…”

Pre-Molecular Assessment of Self-Processes in Neurotypical Subjects Using a Single Cognitive Behavioral Intervention Evoking Autobiographical Memory

“…This subgroup is thus interpreted as having a highly developed self-awareness, which is characterized by the progression from the pre-reflective self to reflective phenomenology and then to the autobiographical narrative interpretation [ 136 , 137 ] and high-level cognition [ 138 ]. Phenomenologically, this subgroup described the experiment as an oceanic boundlessness, i.e., experiencing a deeply felt positive mood and self-understanding.…”

Enactive and simondonian reflections on mental disorders

“…This form of naturalized normativity, however, bears the risk of understanding living processes in overly functionalist terms ( de Haan, 2021 ). Simondon’s distinction between norms and values is relevant here (see also Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2022 ). While norms can be understood as referring to the function of an individuated (stationary) system, values refer to the forces that drive individuation processes, which are operationally (rather than structurally) defined and, as such, can be seen as the genesis of norms.…”

“… 1 Indeed, some authors in recent enactive works ( Di Paolo et al, 2018 ; Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2022 ) are reluctant to use the term “the body” because it leads to a generalized and uniform idea of the body that disregards individual differences in terms of gender, race, ability, and so on. This is why the plural term “bodies” better reflects their concern to particular, diverse, and concrete bodies.…”