On the World of This Ordinary Body

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One of the most influential responses to modern representationalism has been to return to the body. Against the image of a mind separated from the world, locked inside the head and devoted to representing an external reality, much of contemporary philosophy of cognition has insisted that knowing means acting, perceiving, moving, speaking, feeling, and participating from within a situated embodiment. The mind would not first be inside and then go out toward the world; it would already be engaged with a world through the body.

This shift has been important. It made it possible to question the modern figure of the abstract, disembodied subject, transparent to itself, separated from history, affectivity, and the concrete conditions of existence. It is no accident that some of the central works of enactivism have emphasized precisely this dimension: The Embodied Mind, Mind in Life, Sensorimotor Life, Linguistic Bodies. In all of them, the same intuition appears: there is no mind without body, no cognition without action, no meaning without a lived world.

But this response contains a difficulty that has not always been thought through with sufficient radicality. The return to the body can become a new form of naivete if it assumes that the lived body, by itself, liberates us from abstraction, ideology, prejudice, or totality. Against the representational mind, the body then appears as a circle of authenticity. One is tempted to think that, in the face of the algorithm, the virtuous response is direct experience; in the face of calculation, what we must emphasize is the sensitivity that promises to preserve our humanity; in the face of abstraction, the demand to cling to an immediate presence; and in the face of artificial intelligence, that resistance means reclaiming embodied life. It is no accident that this drift is aligned with the emotivist turn, with the culture of mindfulness, and with the contemporary cult of fitness.

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