phainomena

PAULO DE JESUS
6. From Body to Embodiment
Let us begin by recapping what the body is and what cognition is for AE. The
body refers to the “living organism as a whole and to its appropriations of nonorganic
structures and processes as they are integrated into the autonomous
self-sustaining network” (Kyselo and Di Paolo 2015: 531 emphasis added), while
cognition is the active sense-making of the organism. For AE the body is an
adaptive autonomous system and embodied cognition is the system’s situated
sense-making abilities. As we saw above, certain organizational features allow
for the system’s direct engagements with its environment to be intrinsically
teleological and meaningful for the system.
The question that now presents itself is: what exactly is it that connects
particular organizational properties, mechanisms if you will, to subjectivity,
meaning, and value? Or, to put it slightly differently, what is it about the body
that allows it to be the source of meaning? This question is made possible
because, as we noted above, AE’s conceptual framework leads to a dyadic
conception of the body, where the body is both an autonomous network and a
sense-making subject.
It is by drawing from the existential bio-philosopher Hans Jonas that AE
connects the dots between the body and embodiment. 4 According to Jonas
(1966) scientific biology is incapable of accounting for the inner subjectivity
of living organisms because it is only concerned with “biological facts” (Jonas
1966: ix). But in adopting this stance it falls into a self-contradictory position,
which ultimately results in the negation of not only the subjectivity of other
living organisms but of human beings too. However, Jonas argues that if
we take Darwin’s theory of evolution seriously and at the same time simply
acknowledge our own undeniable inner subjectivity, it would be incorrect to
deny that subjectivity is a natural property of all living organisms. But how
exactly does this particular insight relate to embodiment?
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4 For the purpose of this section I will maintain the dyadic distinction implicit in the
AE account and will refer to the autonomous system as “the body” and the enactment
of the sense-making subject as its “embodiment”.