Introduction

In recent years, I have oriented my work toward a critical study of the thought of Francisco Varela and of the enactivism developed by his heirs. From that philosophical, historical, and ethical research a book has emerged, which I hope to publish soon, entitled Life in History. Beyond Biology, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Sciences.

This project continues the line opened in my three previous books: Constellations of Identity. Charles Taylor and His Interlocutors (2010); Planned Misery. Human Rights and Neoliberalism (2018); and Mind and Politics. Dialectics and Realism from the Perspective of Liberation (2024). A single concern runs through all of them: to interrogate the modern forms of closure of meaning—scientific, political, or spiritual—and to think, against such closure, the exteriority that exceeds it.

The text that follows is the proem of that book. The term, as is often said, comes from the Greek prooímion (pro- “before,” oimē “song”) and in the Hellenic tradition referred to the opening chant that introduced epic poems and philosophical treatises. It was not an external or explanatory introduction, but rather a threshold of meaning: the moment in which thought announces itself before unfolding into systematic development.

In this case, the proem serves three functions. First, it states the fundamental thesis running through the work: life is not grounded in the organism, nor in the subject, nor in the social system that emerges from their interaction, but is manifested historically as gift and dependence. Second, it indicates the methodological transition that structures the book: from biological, phenomenological, and cognitive analysis toward a historical–transcendental inquiry into the meaning of the living being in its temporal and relational inscription. And finally, it gestures toward the source that sustains all thought: an original alterity that cannot be thematized without being lost, but without which no historical experience would be possible.

I wrote this proem when the book was already complete. It does not attempt to summarize it, but rather to open the horizon within which it is inscribed. I offer it here as an invitation to understand what has motivated this study and this critique of enactivism, beyond its strengths and its limits: the intuition that life in history is always more than the self that thinks it, and that all philosophy is born, ultimately, from that exteriority which sustains us.

The Proem

To think life in history requires acknowledging that the starting point of any reflection on life cannot be life itself understood merely as individual experience or biological process, abstracted from the life that precedes us, sustains us, and survives us. That life—transcendent yet not dual, because it cannot be reduced to the individual being nor exist in the abstraction of individuation—constitutes the condition of possibility for every singular existence. To go beyond biology, phenomenology, or the technical approaches of the cognitive sciences does not mean denying the importance of these perspectives, but freeing them from the egocentric horizon that limits them. It means recognizing that beyond the order of living forms and the cognitive circuits that describe their autopoiesis, there is a life without me: a life that is not exhausted in the organism nor in the mind that interprets it, and that manifests itself historically as transmission, as memory, as responsibility.

Every closure—biological, phenomenological, or cognitive—arises from the attempt to understand life from the standpoint of the subject who experiences it. But life does not experience itself: it happens, and it always happens within a horizon that exceeds it. History is that horizon. Not a mere succession of events nor an external chronology, but the field in which life is given as relation, as inheritance, and as promise. Life is not the product of succession, but an event—a gift—and at the same time the origin of realities that would not exist without us. History bears witness to the fact that life does not belong to us. Each of us is the finite expression of a becoming that we did not begin and will not conclude. That is why history is not only the condition of our existence, but also the proof of our finitude. In it, the radical dependence that constitutes us is revealed: dependence on the past that forms us, on the others who sustain us, on the world that shelters us, and on the future that calls us. From that tension between gift and creation emerges the ambiguity of modernity: the claim to absolute autonomy as a forgetting of the gift that makes it possible.

Modernity attempted to escape this dependence through the ideal of autonomy. From biology to political philosophy, a single impulse shaped our notions of life and subject: to be free was to be self-sufficient. But autonomy, understood as the self-enclosure of totality, is an illusion that conceals the network of interdependencies that makes us possible. Every form of life, even the most elementary, lives only because it is in relation; every consciousness is constituted in encounter; every freedom is born from a prior bond. What we call autonomy is the superficial manifestation of an original heteronomy: we do not give ourselves life; we receive it. And this receiving is not passivity, but openness. We are capable of freedom because we are capable of response; freedom does not annul dependence, it fulfills it.

This inversion of the meaning of autonomy leads us to the ethical core of life in history. Living does not consist in self-assertion, but in assuming the debt of existence. Our life is woven together with the lives of others: of those who came before us, of those who live now, and of those who will come after us. History is the visible figure of that debt. In it are intertwined the voices, struggles, and wounds of those who have made it possible for us to be here. To think life in history is to think an ethics of recognition, a responsibility that does not limit itself to present coexistence, but extends to the community of the dead and those not yet born. Life without me is not an abstraction, but the concrete network of relations that sustains my being—the life in which I participate without ever being its owner.

From this perspective, the ideal of autopoiesis—life producing itself—reveals its ontological limit. If every production presupposes a source, no life can be fully autopoietic. Life is not produced; it is received. Biology describes the mechanisms by which organisms maintain their organization, but those mechanisms already express a prior condition: that of belonging to a web of meaning that exceeds them. Phenomenology, for its part, illuminates the way in which life is given to consciousness, but in doing so tends to return it to the horizon of the self. In both cases, life becomes trapped within the circle of experience. To break that circle is to recognize that life has a meaning prior to us, that reaches us from exteriority, and that in that exteriority life discloses itself.

Here the Mahāyāna tradition offers an insight of great precision. From within the metaphysics of the subject that dominates our culture, emptiness is often interpreted as a pure impersonality and compassion as a disposition without an object. But this reading distorts its original meaning. Candrakīrti distinguishes three forms of compassion: compassion for the concrete being who suffers; compassion for the being understood in its impermanence; and compassion for the being understood in its emptiness. These are not three hierarchical stages, but three co-implicated dimensions. Emptiness does not negate the concrete being; it redeems it from isolation. To see the other as empty is not to annul them, but to recognize that their existence is interwoven with mine. Likewise, there is no emptiness without form, because the form of the object is the very manifestation of emptiness.

The metaphysics of the subject in the Western tradition has tended to break that unity, privileging the universal over the concrete, the spiritual over the bodily, contemplation over action. Thus emptiness becomes reduced to immanence and compassion to introspection. But the Mahāyāna teaches the opposite: compassion is not a flight from the world, but its full assumption. Emptiness is fulfilled only in form, and form is true only when it expresses emptiness. That inseparability constitutes, in fact, the very principle of life in history: the impossibility of thinking transcendence apart from its temporal embodiment.

At its deepest core, Christianity does not oppose this vision, but realizes it in a personal and historical key. In the figure of Jesus, transcendence does not appear as a separate absolute, but as relation: being is given in the face of the other, in incarnation and self-giving. Christian love, like Mahāyāna compassion, denies the closure of the self. But whereas the Mahāyāna expresses that opening as the negation of self and dependent arising, Christianity embodies it as communion. These are two languages that converge in a single truth: transcendence is not separate from the world, but fulfilled in it. The divine is not outside time, but is donation within time. Thus finitude is not a limitation opposed to the infinite, but the form through which the infinite becomes history.

This coincidence within difference makes it possible to overcome both the apparent impersonality of emptiness and the latent anthropocentrism of personalism. In both cases, what is affirmed is radical alterity as principle. There is no life without relation, and no relation without transcendence. Life without me is not dissolution into the impersonal, but openness to a source that exceeds me. That source is what the Christian tradition calls love, and the Buddhist tradition calls compassion. Both name the same ontological gesture: the donation that constitutes the real.

For that reason, the fundamental philosophical act is not self-consciousness, but faith as the affirmation without proof of that which makes morality possible. Reinterpreted historically, that faith is also the recognition of the reality of the other. Only an act of faith—an ontological trust—allows us to affirm that there is life beyond my experience. That faith is not irrational; it is the original gesture of all reason. At the heart of every philosophy there beats an implicit theology, not as dogma but as the recognition that thought depends upon a source that does not think. Life without me is that source.

Thus the central hypothesis of this work may be stated as follows: life in history is the finite manifestation of an original alterity.

Neither biology nor phenomenology can truly account for that alterity, because both begin from the living subject. Only a philosophy that recognizes exteriority as principle—a philosophy of history as the becoming of the Other—can think life in its truth. To go beyond biology and the phenomenology of the cognitive sciences does not mean abandoning the world, but restoring its depth: returning to life its historical and transcendent character, affirming that beyond the “mandala” there is life, and that this life—life without me—is what sustains us.

Conclusion

My deepest concern in writing this book has been to think through and respond to a truth that seems to have faded from our awareness: life without me, life without us. The life that precedes us and should outlast us, but which today stands gravely threatened. Standing at the edge of the abyss of war and environmental devastation, I have sought to think life beyond modern culture which—after its egocentric, ethnocentric, and anthropocentric wager—now places its trust in systemic logics that only deepen our path toward destruction.