Ontologizing Enactivism: Worldmaking with Ezequiel Di Paolo (dialogue with Tim Jackson)

Timothy Jackson and I were back in the saddle, this time to discuss Ezequiel Di Paolo’s article seeking an enactive ontology: 

Di Paolo, E. A. (2023). F/acts: Ways of enactive worldmaking. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 30 (11–12): 159-89. doi: 10.53765/20512201.30.11.159.

Ezequiel will be joining us to present in the biophilosophy track at this summer’s International Whitehead Conference in China. The article attempts to carry forward Francisco Varela’s enactive approach, which sometimes gets framed as more of an epistemological stance and reduced to a kind of transcendental phenomenology. Varela says,“I’m not a realist,” but also “I’m not a constructivist.” So what is the implied ontology of an enactivist account of cognition and life? Something very near to the groundless dependent co-origination of Madhyamaka.

The core of the article is an account of three modes of engagement between agents and worlds: interaction, transaction, and constitution, with constitution treated as the default (a strong reminder that “organism” and “environment” are intimately enmeshed). This implies a process-relational, scale-sensitive account of concreteness and virtuality, and a performative or expressivist theory of knowledge where all attempts at “representation” alter both agent and world.