There exists a middle ground from which the dilemma of having to choose between too much or too little individualism can be avoided and a more complete epistemological basis for conceptual understanding achieved. Finding this middle ground basically consists in re-thinking the nature of the mind and of human understanding while doing more justice to the deep interrelation between individual and social world. To this end I have recently proposed the concept of the socially enacted self (Kyselo 2014, 2013; Kyselo & Tschacher 2014). On this approach, the individual is not sufficiently determined in terms of active embodiment; instead it is thought to incorporate social and relational processes into the structure that makes up its identity as an individual. This suggests that without a “social loop” we cannot speak about the human self as a centre of individuation in any interesting sense. After all, humans do not merely distinguish themselves against a background of material objects, but, crucially, against the world of other humans. They become someone, an identifiable individual against a world of other individuals and social groups.
This idea should become clearer by reconsidering, or making more explicit, a number of insights already implied in diverse approaches in embodied cognitive science.
First, Noë’s crypto-individualism captures something essential about the ways humans access the world: we often experience the process of understanding as something we do by ourselves—the concepts we acquire and employ are ours and to a large extent we appear to be in control in our attempts to secure the world. Noë’s other important insight is that conceptual understanding is an achievement. It is a far-from-perfect endeavour, involving experiences of vulnerability, openness, of not always being able to own and to access the world.
The second insight is appreciated in the debate on extended cognition. Clark & Chalmers in their now classical paper “The Extended Mind” propose that a tool, such as a notebook or a computer, can count as part of the individual mind (1998). This essentially functionalist position goes against Noë and “beyond the sensorimotor frontier” (Clark 2008, p. 195)—the mind is not restricted to the body but spreads across neuronal, bodily, and environmental features. The extended cognition approach to embodiment has been criticised for being too liberal, since it lacks both a principled definition of “body” and of “cognition”. It remains unclear how an environmental prop or technology could be integrated into the cognitive architecture of an individual mind (Kyselo & Di Paolo 2013, see also Menary this collection). Yet, despite these shortcomings I believe there are two important insights in this extended functionalist account: first, that the individual should not be restricted to the biological realm (be it the brain or the body) but incorporates tools and technologies, and second, that the mind transcends the individual physiological body and that the world matters constitutively for determining the boundaries of the mind.
The third insight comes from the enactive approach to cognition, which proposes that the mind is basically an autonomous system that self-organizes its identity based on operational closure. The enactive approach thereby shares with extended cognition the idea that the individual is not clearly separable from the environment. On the enactive view, the individual’s mind is “defined by its endogenous, self-organizing and self-controlling dynamics, does not have inputs and outputs in the usual sense, and determines the cognitive domain in which it operates” (Thompson 2007, p. 43). Identity is therefore not a given thing or a property, but relational: brought forth through the individual’s on-going and dynamical interaction with the world. This approach adds an insight derived from philosophy of biology, namely that like living beings, cognitive beings create an identity that they strive to maintain, and that understanding the world depends on the purposes and concerns of that identity (Weber & Varela 2002; Thompson 2007) in that they guide and structure our understanding.[7]
The three variants of embodied cognitive science therefore all reject the mind–body dichotomy and emphasise a dynamical interrelation between embodied individual and world. All of them however, either miss or do not fully acknowledge that the world is social and that the individual is also a psychological and social being whose concerns are more than object-oriented. This is where the enactive approach to the social self comes into play. It basically elaborates on and integrates the above insights, i.e., action (sensorimotor cognition), co-constitution (extended cognition), and grounding in selfhood (enactive cognition), by adopting a much more radical perspective on the dynamical interrelation between the individual and the world—let us call this perspective deep dynamics. Deep dynamics means that the nature of the relation between individual and world is one of strong co-constitution: not only does the individual actively shape and structure the world, the world, too, affects the individual in its basic organisational structure. If identity and domain depend on each other in a strong and mutual sense, as the enactive approach to cognition has it, then even more advanced non-organismic or virtual notions of the body do not change the fact that the organismic bodily domain is an individualist domain (Kyselo & Di Paolo 2013). In other words, the organismic body cannot be related to the social at the same level of organisational closure. The enactive approach to the self would suggest instead that the level at which human selves can be usefully operationalised as autonomous identities is social, not merely embodied. Admittedly, by emphasising how conceptual understanding is shaped through social engagements with others, Noë’s approach obviously also implies a bi-directional relation between individual and world. Similarly, as we have seen above, Thompson’s sensorimotor subject is also clearly involved in intersubjective interactions (2005, p. 408). However, the bi-directional impact in these accounts is more shallow than in the present proposal, as they consider the (social) world to play a contextual or developmental role, or to matter with regards to shaping object-recognition. In deep dynamics, in contrast, we expand on the insight of extended cognition that the mind transcends brain and body by acknowledging that this not only the case through interactions with tools but also through our social interactions and relations with other subjects. The idea then is that qua being embedded in a social world, the self, and by that I mean the individual as a whole, constitutively relies on its interactions and relations to other subjects. According to this elaboration on the enactive account of selfhood, the self can be defined as a socially enacted autonomous system. It is:
a self-other generated network of precariously organized interpersonal processes whose systemic identity emerges as a result of a continuous engagement in social interactions and relations that can be qualified as moving in two opposed directions, toward emancipation from others (distinction) and toward openness to them (participation). (Kyselo 2014)
In line with the concept of operational closure, both types of processes, distinction and participation, are required to bring about the individual self. Without distinction, the individual would risk immersion or becoming heteronomously determined and forced to rely on the next best or a limited set of social interactions. But without participation and an act of openness towards others, the individual eschews structural renewal, thus risking isolation and rigidity (Kyselo 2014). The point, however, is that this form of operational closure contains social interactions. In enactive terms, this is to say that the individual is at the same time self-and-other-organized. As a consequence, the self is not a given nor an individual bodily achievement but also and necessarily co-constructed with others. Both the individual and the world (that is, other subjects) have a say in the constitutive mechanism of someone’s mind. In contrast to Noë’s presupposition, the mind cannot be equated with the active body. Rather, the sensorimotor body becomes the ever-evolving interface that in being with others co-generates the very boundaries of what we call the self (Kyselo 2014).
At this point, proponents of embodiment might still want to insist that there is something about the body’s role in grounding the sense of self that non-negotiably remains entirely independent from social interactions. I agree, if by “sense of self” one refers to the self as mere biological identity. However, if by “self” we mean the human self in distinction from other humans, then the proposed view challenges this intuition. It does this, however, without giving up the insight that the self has to do with individuation. The enactive notion of autonomy and self-organization saves the individual from immersion in the social world by appreciating that the distinction between individual and world is an organisational, not ontological distinction. Our sense of being a distinct someone is something that is achieved together with others, not just qua being a biological body.
The basic idea of the socially enacted self is therefore not to overcome the tension entailed in the body-social dichotomy but rather to welcome and recognise it as a necessary property of mind itself and to thus integrate this tension into a general theory of understanding. On this view, the individual mind has to continuously negotiate its identity as an individual agent and its understanding in dependence on other subjects. As a consequence, uncertainty, conflict, and a permanent need for negotiation and co-negotiation are part and parcel of being an essentially social human mind. This is why it might be useful to distinguish several senses of fragility. Fragile understanding is one of them. But on the enactive account of selfhood, mind itself is fragile.