Ezequiel A. Di Paolo: Dialectics of the abstract and the concrete in the enactive approach
The enactive approach to life and mind has seen significant advances over the last decade. It offers a well-developed embodied and situated alternative to mainstream perspectives in cognitive science and neuroscience which are based on the brain-as-computer metaphor. Enactive theory puts forward a series of tools to uncover the continuities between life and mind, between personhood and history through key concepts of agency and sense-making. Several of these ideas are dialectical in nature. Enactive interventions have recently moved into questions of human becoming, language, mental health, ethics, and the arts. However, one could say that the foundations of the enactive approach, and not just its applications, continue to be under development. Part of this development consists in revealing convergences and complementarities with other schools of thought. One perspective with strong resonances with current work in enaction is Evald Ilyenkov’s philosophy. Some of these resonances have inspired recent developments in the enactive approach, particularly as it moves from central ideas of autonomy towards the historicity of linguistic bodies. The latter concept is developed through an explicitly dialectical model where social interactions move from the abstract to the concrete via a series of transformations of internal tensions.
In this talk I will cover some of these ideas and illustrate some of the parallels between the enactive perspective and Ilyenkov’s own work and later scholarship. These parallels include Ilyenkov’s reflection on biology, on the concept of activity, on the relations between dialectics and historicity, and on the concept of the ideal. This by no means will fully account for all the potential convergences, complementarities, and possible tensions, but I hope it will allow me to make the case that this dialogue is fruitful for the development of a critical, non-dualistic, non-individualistic account of human life and mind better suited for facing our current global challenges.
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo is a Research Professor at Ikerbasque, the Basque Science Foundation in Spain and a Visiting Professor at the University of Sussex, UK. He obtained an MSc in Nuclear Engineering from the Instituto Balseiro in Argentina and a DPhil in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex. His interdisciplinary work on embodied and enactive approaches to life, mind, and society integrates insights from cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, AI, and computational modelling. He is the (co)author of over 180 academic publications including the books Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal (2017, Oxford University Press) and Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language (2018, MIT Press). His recent research focus is on embodied intersubjectivity, language, and the use of dialectical thinking for advancing on unresolved ethical and political questions in biology and psychology.