Chapter 4: The Enactive Conception of Life

The Enactive Conception of Life begins by analyzing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical formula regarding the subject as a project of the world, using this to ground a non-reductive naturalism that views mind as an inherent aspect of living organization rather than a separate computational layer. A significant portion of the text is dedicated to critiquing functionalist and computationalist approaches in cognitive science, arguing that they rely on unjustified assumptions of stationarity and fail to account for the open-ended, precarious nature of cognitive becoming. The discussion proceeds to a detailed reconstruction of autopoietic theory, distinguishing the enactive view from classical autopoiesis by introducing the concept of a primordial tension between the requirements of self-production (which demands openness to energy flows) and self-distinction (which requires operational closure for identity). The author argues that this tension is dialectically overcome through adaptivity, a capacity for active regulation that allows the organism to monitor its viability and manage its coupling with the environment. This adaptive autonomy serves as the naturalistic grounding for agency, normativity, and teleology, effectively operationalizing the process of sense-making. Furthermore, the chapter advances the notion of co-definition between organism and environment, moving beyond mere structural coupling to describe a history of mutual shaping and historical plasticity, illustrated by biological examples such as visual adaptation in Moken children and epigenetic variations in maternal care. Finally, the text suggests that these processes of individuation and world-projection are inherently social, hinting at the collective nature of sense-making where subjects and worlds co-emerge through participatory dynamics.