Like most philosophers (or so I imagine), I can never learn or reflect enough. One day we’ll know the truth, or know enough about everything, so that everything else makes sense. Like Pinky & The Brain we do the same thing every night with the hopes of one day taking over and understanding the world – only with (slightly) smaller egos and much less humour (sadly). My most recent world-dominating auto-didactic project then, is to gain something of an understanding of Hegel.
For better or worse, I’m following my usual strategy of reading a few secondary sources before diving in to the source material. One of the better things about this strategy is that interpreters since Hegel have had time to collate and discuss his work, yielding a much more understandable presentation of his views. On the other hand, many of these modern philosophers present Hegel in our modern language of philosophy and discuss him in view of modern issues. While this makes Hegel much more tractable, it leads me at least to see connections and juxtapositions between Hegel and modern philosophy that the man couldn’t have even anticipated, let alone commented on.
That being said, I am flabbergasted that I have not seen Hegel raised in connection with Enactivism, particularly to Varela and Maturana’s autopoiesis – a quick Google search doesn’t really yield anything, nor does a search in Phil-Papers. But the connections leap off the page and smack me in the mouth with every turn.
Just consider this extended quote from Evan Thompson’s ‘Mind in Life’:
“[Autopoiesis] is a condition of possibility for the dynamic emergence of interiority (Varela 1991, 1997a). As just remarked, however, this emergence of an inside is also the specification of an outside. Thus the dynamic emergence of interiority can be more fully described as the dynamic co-emergence of interiority and exteriority. Nevertheless, there seems to be an asymmetry here, for it is the internal self-production process that controls or regulates the system’s interaction with the outside environment (Varela 1991)” (Thompson 2007 p. 79)
This is Hegel’s organicism! Keeping in mind that Hegel could not have foreseen an application of his organicism to the origins of life, writing as he did before Darwin and Pasteur, I think we can construct an Enactivist-style Hegelian account.
Something irreducible to mechanism, life is the becoming of a unity-in-difference. Life is not a unity with the world, for unity would mean life is reducible to mechanism. But at the same time life isn’t wholly apart from the world, as a radically free subject like Kant would hold. Life is precisely the becoming of a unity-in-difference, constantly attempting to engage in unity with the environment through a self-constituted domain of difference (between ‘me’ and ‘that’, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ – Fichte’s ‘I’ and ‘not-I’).
In Enactivist argot: the chemical and mechanistic movement of particles goes through a qualitative shift when it changes from the flux and flow of naturalistic causality to a bounded autopoietic structure. With the arrival of autopoiesis, the minimal physical substrate of life, we have a distinct membrane that marks a difference between a subject and the world. But this difference is marked by a constitution not only of an ‘inner’ realm, but an ‘outer’ realm. It marks a unity-in-difference. Life is part of the world, constantly attempting to get a solid hold on its environment, but only through a dynamic realm of subjective interaction created out of a mechanistic unity.
This isn’t a quarter of what could be said about the connections between Hegel and Enactivism. I think the pragmatic application of meditation to experience present in ‘The Embodied Mind’ (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991) is an easy import into a Hegelian framework. Similarly, I believe that Hegel would have much to say about the concept of life itself, much of it amenable to such an embodied and embedded account. But I think I’ve risked enough anachronistic speculation for one day. Same time tomorrow night Pinky?
Great post. I like the cut of your jib. I don’t really have anything substantive to say since I know little to nothing about Hegel except what I have read in secondary sources.
One thing though is that I would be interested in seeing a more fleshed out account of “inner and outer” from an enactivist perspective. Sometimes I think enactivists equivocate on whether their notion of “interiority” constitutes a genuine subjective perspective or whether it simply refers to the interiority of the skin-bag. Moreover, in my opinion, many enactivists don’t seem to realize the phenomenal difference in subjectivity between an organism who has a psychological concept of “interiority” (given through culture and language) and an organism who knows nothing about such an interiority. The difference between these two organisms is like the difference between night and day.
Hey Gary, good to see you on here!
I agree that sometimes the Enactivist’s work seems to be vague about how things operate and interact at different levels (does interiority emerge at Merleau-Ponty’s vital order or human order? Are dynamic entanglements constitutive of this kind of emergence?) – but I think this is another place where a Hegelian concept can do some work. If we take life to be the embodiment of a self-knowing ‘Geist’, life will inevitably tend towards those creatures that do know more about themselves and the situations in which they inhabit. This will inevitably lead to the evolution of creatures that do have a sense of themselves and their place in the world around them. Eventually this will top out (at least, as far as I can conceive it, being limited to an understanding things as they are today) in the kind of meditative practice where we humans can reflect upon the contingent nature of our own existence, and our own place within the cosmos. This would complete the identity of unity-in-difference.
If only we could take this view of Hegel’s ‘Geist’ seriously. There is no guarantee that natural selection does tend towards intelligent life in this way. In fact if we look at the success of insects and bacteria, it would seem that minimal self-knowledge seems to be the norm. But this just means that we can’t read ‘Geist’ as self-knowing rationality, as Hegel does.
…my own super-top-secret view is that if we do look at life in a Hegelian, moving to the realization of Absolute Geist sort of way, Geist should be read as moving towards predictability and the minimization of error… and that this is entirely consonant with an enactivist view of things…. there will be more on this in the future I suspect.
Sometimes I think that if you think about truth and objectivity in a Nietzschean way – as ‘the will to mastery of the multiplicity of interpretations’ (or something like that), then the gradual progression towards predictability and mimimization of error turns out the same as the gradual progression towards truth and objectivity. On some readings of N and the Will to Power, this kind of inexorable progression does for N what Geist does for Hegel. I suspect that Nietzsche (and probably other of the German Idealists between Hegel and him) have a lot to teach enactivists about the relation between enactivism and the Big Philosophical Questions people have traditionally worried about.
Dave!
It’s high praise indeed to see you lurking this dark corner of the internets.
My Nietzsche is even poorer than my Hegel, but it sounds like there is great import for him (as with all the greats) to help make sense of some of this exciting enactivist shtick.
I think there is way for enactivists to preserve this notion of “self-knowing” provided that we have a proper (i.e. primordial) understanding of selfhood and knowledge. I really like Heidegger’s gloss on this concept. He says in Basic Problems of Phenomenology that
“The Dasein does not need a special kind of observation, nor does it need to conduct a sort of espionage on the ego in order to have the self; rather, as the Dasein gives itself over immediately and passionately to the world, its own self is reflected to it from things…This is not mysticism and does not presuppose the assigning of souls to things. It is only a reference to an elementary phenomenological fact of existence, which must be seen prior to all talk, no matter how acute, about the subject-object relation.”
And since knowing the things in the world (being thrown into them) is a mode of self-knowledge insofar as the perception of the environmental layout simultaneously gives us information about the layout and our place in it, we can say that primordial knowledge of the environment is primordial self-knowledge. This is especially true when we consider that an organism necessarily engages in body-body interactions as well as body-earth interactions. So I think there is a way we can rescue self-knowledge without falling prey to some kind of Cartesianism.