Énaction

The prospect for the énaction proposed by Francisco Varela is a paradigm which defends the idea that the Cognition is initially incarnated and who thus tries to exceed the trap of “the representation”.

Thus the world is neither completely objective, a prédonnée reality which we reach through representations, nor completely subjective, pure projection creation ex nihilo of a world of representations.

To say that cognition is incarnated is to take into account the fact that each species has its clean Umwelt (Jacob von Uexküll) as would say the biosemioticians. Species-specific ( specie-specific ) Umwelt which was enacté through the evolution. The evolution is taken, not like a clearly finalized process but like “derives natural” to take again the term of Varela.

Taking as a starting point the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, Varéla intends to concretize the relation between the human Expérience and the Science. For this purpose it stresses that an enormous heritage created by the Buddhist tradition already faced the Nihilisme that the Occident undergoes, more or less since “God died” of Nietzsche, which announces the loss of any absolute base without to transform this loss into existential freedom.

Indeed in Occident, it is almost free to criticize the Objectivisme today, and what results from it is rather often another form of absolutism. The interpretationnism which locks up the direction in the subject, or the Constructivisme S radicals, according to us.

We need according to the author a “thought planetary”, able to accommodate and discuss with uncertainty, of a “average way”. What is interesting is that its intuitions are largely in resonance with engagements of the complex rationality defended by Edgar Morin. (V.M.M.P.S.H.)

Sources

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experiment , 1991, MIT Close (translation in French by Veronique Havelange: the body Inscription of the spirit: cognitive sciences and human experiment , Threshold, Paris, 1996).

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