Hanne De Jaegher

Enactiveepistemologyandethics:

Waysofparticipating

Centre for Life, Mind & SocietyIAS-Research

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Doestimeopenup

betweenus?

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Lovingandknowing

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Humanknowing

What really are our most sophisticated

forms of knowing?

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Humanknowing

What really are our most sophisticated

forms of knowing?

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What really are our most sophisticated

forms of knowing?

First Nations land rights treaties and negotiations

Humanknowing

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Enactivecognitivescience

(Varela, Thompson & Rosch 1991/2016; Thompson 2007; etc.)

Juan Muñoz

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Participatorysense-making

Juan Muñoz

(De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007); Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher 2018; …)

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Interaction processes between people influence and co-determine their intentions. Intersubjectivity understood as the interplay between interactive and individual autonomies.

People literally participate in each other’s intentions, by moving together.

Juan Muñoz

Participatorysense-making

(De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007); Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher 2018; …)

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• Billions of different bodies

• We move in a living stream of language, participate in weaving threads of meaning

• We incorporate and incarnate ways of speaking, notions, etc.

• We are always fully participating

• Ethical “maxim”: invite and support participation

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needforadifferentepistemology

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lettingthingsbe

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Theproblemoflettingthingsbe

Kym Maclaren

lettingothersbe13

LettingothersbeAn argument based on Merleau-Ponty’s notions of

Intercorporeality: an embodied shared world, acting on things through others

Intersubjectivity: mutual situating of self and other

=> Mutual, embodied “letting others be”, “actively taking up the project of letting others be”

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my knowing them

versus / &

phenomena

Letting the phenomena be

Adifferentepistemology

changes them

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letting bedisengaging overdetermining

Adifferentepistemology

! is engaging is paradoxical both known and knowercontinually changeand so does their relation!

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Wheredoweknowthisdynamicwell?

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Loving

Love relationships are the quintessential place where everybody finds and lives the dynamics of this kind of non-detached knowing,

theinherenttensionofbeingourselvesandbeinginrelation

(see also J. Benjamin (1988; 2018) on the inherent tension of recognition we must hold).

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Illustration

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Seeingandinvitingparticipationinautisticinteractions

(Sterponi & Fasulo 2010; Sterponi & Shankey 2014)(De Jaegher 2021)

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(Sterponi & Fasulo 2010; Sterponi & Shankey 2014;

Bottema-Beutel 2017)

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What love can illuminate about sense-making is ourdeepestinvolvement,asthebeingweare,inthoseweunderstand(people,things,events), and in the process of understanding them.

Only if we understand this involvement, do we properly understand .

Loving

humanknowing

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Loving

An engaged epistemology has its paradigm case in love relationships.

To understand this better, we need to better understand theinteractiveandtheindividualself-organizationsandnormativitiesatplay.

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Lovingandknowing

Who loves/knows matters. Lovers, knower and known are particular. Loving and knowing are concrete, relational, they are not universal, not neutral.

You cannot love, or know, abstractly.

To love is to navigate the various tensions between the tendencies and directions of one’s own becoming, the other’s becoming, and that of the relation. It is a co-becoming, in the tensions of relating. Paradox, struggle, tension, ambiguity.

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Lovingandknowing

Lovers (knowers) are concretely, existentially implicated in their relation

and

An existential dialectic plays out between the individuals and their relation.

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Continual, ongoing balancing act between too much and too little determination between the knower (who lets be) and the known (who is being let be).

=> Double-sided risks of determination: / being-determined (by the other, by the relation, and by themselves) and \ determining (the other, the relation, and themselves).

Lovingandknowing

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Somecriticalpoints

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Lovingandknowing

But: What about essence? Truth? Fact?

Essence, fact, and truth are relational, to be found in particular encounters between knower and world.

What happens in these encounters can be tested or verified by others.

But, more than this, we can expect essences, facts, and truths to be things that are never finished, constantly changing, and yet tangible and real within particular circumstances, within particular engagements.

But!?

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Lovingandknowing

But: Is this a rosy picture?

No.

Letting be is never finished, knower and known, lover and loved are never finished.

It’s an ongoing tension that animates our lives, never letting us go, in a continual, inescapable, moving dialectic.

But!?

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Black feminists and decolonisation theorists teach us about thedangersofa“loving,knowingignorance”… (Dawn Rae Davis, Mariana Ortega, María Lugones, Frantz Fanon,…)

“We are all different bodies” (Di Paolo et al. 2018)

A deeper understanding of participation is needed, one in which we understandourownbeingtransgressed, our fundamental openness in ontologicalintimacy (Maclaren 2018).

It’s not “others” who are different (the subjects we determine), but everyone is different.

But!?

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This entails a significant change for science and for the scientist, which we can only understand if we understand “we are all different” in its full ramifications (i.e. if we understand oppression, from the inside).

I.e. if we re-ground our understanding of participatory sense-making, and unsettle the relation between scientist and “research object” and turn it into one of engagement, properly understood, or of transgression.

Cf. Varela’s Not One, Not Two. Arelationbetween3terms:theelementsandtheirrelation,inwhichallthreechange.

But!?

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Doestimeopenup

betweenus?

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References

• Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love. New York: Pantheon Press. • Benjamin, J. (2018). Beyond Doer and Done To. New York: Routledge. • Bottema-Beutel, K. (2017). Glimpses into the Blind Spot: Social Interaction

and Autism. Journal of Communication Disorders, 68, 24-34. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2017.06.008

• Davis, D. R. (2002). (Love is) the ability of not knowing: feminist experience of the impossible in ethical singularity. Hypatia, 17(2), 145–161.

• De Jaegher, H. (2019). Loving and knowing. Reflections for an engaged epistemology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. doi:10.1007/s11097-019-09634-5

• De Jaegher, H. (2021). Seeing and inviting participation in autistic interactions. Transcultural Psychiatry, forthcoming.

• De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory Sense-Making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(4), 485-507. doi:10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9

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References

• Di Paolo, E. A., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic Bodies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Fanon, F. (1952/2008). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. • Lee, K., & Park, M. (2021). Keeping care fully alive – An ethnography of

Moving-with carers and persons living with dementia. Journal of Aging Studies, 57.

• Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, "world"-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–19.

• Maclaren, K. (2002). Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of ‘Letting Others Be’. Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought, 4, 187-210.

• Maclaren, K. (2018). Intimacy as transgression and the problem of freedom. Puncta: Journal for Critical Phenomenology, 1(1), 18-40.

• Ortega, M. (2006). Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color. Hypatia, 21(3), 56–74.

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References• Rollo, T. L. (2015). Enactive Democracy. (Doctor of Philosophy), University of

Toronto. • Rollo, T. (2017). Everyday Deeds: Enactive Protest, Exit, and Silence in Deliberative

Systems. Political Theory, 45(5), 587–609. doi:10.1177/0090591716661222 • Sterponi, L., & Fasulo, A. (2010). "How to go on": Intersubjectivity and progressivity

in the communication of a child with autism. ETHOS, 38(1), 116–142. • Sterponi, L., & Shankey, J. (2014). Rethinking echolalia: repetition as interactional

resource in the communication of a child with autism. Journal of Child Language, 41(2), 275-304.

• Swaffer, K. (2014). Dementia: Stigma, language, and dementia-friendly. Dementia, 13(6), 709–716. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1471301214548143

• Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. • Varela, F. J. (1976). Not one, not two. CoEvolution Quarterly, 12, 62-67. • Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991/2016). The Embodied Mind.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. • Whyte, K. P. (2020). Against crisis epistemologies. In B. Hokowhitu, A. Moreton-

Robinson, L. Tuhiwai-Smith, C. Andersen, & S. Larkin (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies: Routledge

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