The enactive approach challenges the idea that the mind is confined to the individual, instead emphasizing its emergence through dynamic interactions between self-constituting identities and their shared environments, spanning ecological and social dimensions. Enactive research has identified three key dimensions of embodiment: organismic regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. Each of these operates as a recursively self-producing process network with its own norms of continuation. Any given situation is thus structured by a web of organic, sensorimotor, and social norms, whose unfolding involves a negotiation between these sometimes conflicting constraints. This very interplay—where different levels of normativity co-determine one another—is what makes the enactive perspective, in contrast to more moderately embodied approaches, fundamentally dialectical.
The workshop aims to critically examine the claim that dialectics—the process of transforming difference and otherness into dynamic identity—is embedded in the very nature of the enactive approach. While recent developments have made explicit use of dialectical reasoning, one could argue that dialectical thinking was already an implicit feature of enaction from its inception in Varela’s early work. Despite his rejection of “old-fashioned” Hegelian dialectics, if we take seriously the recursive, self-referential and transformative dynamics inherent to Hegel’s dialectical method, this dismissal becomes hard to maintain. Hegel’s logic unfolds through self-referential processes not unlike those found in complex adaptive systems, suggesting deeper affinities than enactivists have typically acknowledged.
During his early Jena years—the period that saw the gestation of the Phenomenology of Spirit and his transition to philosophical maturity—Hegel arrived at the insight that “cognition is always recognition.” If, as Heidegger suggested, great thinkers ultimately pursue a single fundamental thought, this may well be Hegel’s: cognition is, at its core, social cognition. This realization led him to demonstrate how individual consciousness, when examined in its inherent nature, is revealed to be Geist—a form of “socially extended mind.” In other words, individual agents are always already embedded in networks of social and ecological relations that shape their very identity. Put simply: every agent is a social agent.
In this respect, dialectics offers a valuable tool for enactivists seeking to account for the relationship between biological and mental life without collapsing into either reductionism—typical of biologically inclined approaches—or the subtle dualism found in neo-Pragmatist positions that emphasize discursivity and sociality at the expense of biological continuity. Neo-Pragmatist Hegelians tend to treat Geist as fundamentally distinct from nature, yet what is needed is an account that recognizes the qualitative difference of participatory sense-making and languaging while preserving their continuity with biological life. The transition to Geist should be framed not as a rupture from nature but as an extension of its intrinsic normativity, portraying cognition as rooted in biological autonomy while retaining a level of operational independence that cannot be fully explained by biological processes alone.
These preliminary considerations clarify how dialectics can serve as a tool for enactivists—a method for unpacking complexity, bridging the biological, sensorimotor, and social dimensions of cognition. To be effective in this role, dialectics must articulate the continuity between biological organization and historically sedimented social practices, as well as the qualitative shift this transition entails.
The workshop aims to explore this intricate terrain by addressing a series of open questions, including:
- Does the enactive approach need to make its dialectical moves more explicit and what kind of dialectics might be best suited to the task?
- How is normativity scaffolded across biological and social domains?
- What roles do evolutionary, organizational, developmental, technical, and socio-linguistic factors play in driving cognitive complexity?
- How do these perspectives account for the scaling up from biological to cognitive autonomy?
- Does the enactive approach favor an additive or a transformative account of rationality?
Program
September 22nd
9:15 Welcome
9:30-10:45 Italo Testa, Embodied Recognition and the Constitution of Personhood
11:15-12:30 Laura Mojica, Recognition as Implicated Engagement and the Dialectical Grounding of Normativity
Lunch break
14:00-15:15 Andrea Gambarotto, Enactivizing Dialectics: From Individual to Social Normativity and Back
15:45-17:00 Shaun Gallagher, Hegel and 4E Economics
17:30-18:45 Ezequiel Di Paolo, Circular Economies of the Mind: Mapping Marx to the Enactive Approach
September 23rd
9:30-10:45 Glenda Satne, The Transformative Character of Social Normativity
11:15-12:30 Dietmar Heidemann, Hegel and Transformative Rationality
Lunch break
14:00-15:15 Kate Nave, There’s no Such Thing as Schmlife: Organic Constitutivism and Escapability
15:45-17:00 Dave Ward, The Dialectics of Mind-Life Continuity
Contact informaton: andrea.gambarotto@uni.lu
