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FRANCISCO VARELA : A NEW IDEA OF PERCEPTION AND LIFE 127
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 127–132, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Francisco Varela: A new idea of perception and life*
RENAUD BARBARAS
Université Paris-1, Panthéon, Sorbonne, Paris, France (E-mail: renaud.barbaras@wanadoo.fr)
Abstract. Connections among Varela’s theory of enactive cognition , his evolutionary theory of natural drift, and his concept of autopoiesis are made clear. Two questions are posed in relation to Varela’s conception of perception, and the tension that exists in his thought be- tween the formal level of organization and the Jonasian notion of the organism.
I would like to say first that, for about 10 years, the person and work of Fran- cisco Varela has represented for me a fundamental reference point on the philosophical landscape owing to the fact that he embodies the convergence of a scientific exigency and a phenomenological concern; but also as a model of intellectual freedom and intellectual creativity. In fact, while a number of philosophers today take permanent leave of phenomenology and metaphys- ics in favor of analytical philosophy, in the name of a scientificity which they claim, all the more so since they are more often than not in the most complete ignorance of what science is, Francisco Varela starts from science, where he occupies an eminent place, to go to the encounter of philosophy and of phe- nomenology in particular. The interrogations and the hypotheses he works out in the scientific domain lead him to take into consideration other types of approaches, notably phenomenology, to which he finally brings his own con- tribution. By this creative liberty, controlled only by the demand of knowledge and supremely indifferent to all fashion as to all power, the work of Francisco Varela seems to me to be truly exemplary. I will be content to mention the aspects of his thought that represent to me several significant contributions and therefore arenas in which to sketch the horizon of an interrogation and possible debate. They concern the fields of cognition, evolution, and the philosophy of the living thing, which are, of course, closely interdependent. In the first place, in the field of cognition, Francisco Varela refuses the objectivist point of view, which conceives per- ception as internal reconstruction of a pre-given world, as much as the sub-
*Translated by John Cogan
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jectivist point of view, which thinks the world as projected to the exterior or constituted by the subject. That is because he sees and contests the underly- ing presupposition of these two classical perspectives: that perception in par- ticular, and cognition in general, would belong to representation. Reclaiming, on a neurophysiological basis, a fundamental thesis of Bergson from the be- ginning of Matter and Memory , he decides to think perception in terms of action, more exactly, enaction, rather than in terms of representation. This guiding thesis is nourished by the discovery of the essential relation between perception, as such, and the motor functions, i.e., of the inseparability between sensory processes and motor processes. All the while, Varela is aware that he is using one of the central intuitions of Merleau-Ponty, in particular from The Structure of Behavior : that of the dynamic constitution of the very object of perception by the living thing. It is the animal that circumscribes, in the physi- cal world, that to which it will be sensitive and it does so according to a vital a priori. Varela develops and demonstrates what remains in Merleau-Ponty a gen- eral thesis. Such is the sense of the theory of enaction, which he specifies in this way:
- “perception consists of an action guided by perception;
- cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensory-motor schemes which allow action to be guided by perception” (1993, p. 235).
In other words, as his favorite experiment, of kittens being carried by other kittens, shows, to see is not to extract visual traits of the object but to visually guide the action directed towards them. While the theory of representation was correlative to the initial position of a subject and object, as foreign to each other, the theory of enaction leads to the idea of a mutual specification of subject and object. To say that perception is contained or enveloped in an action is to admit that what is perceived is, to that extent, constituted. Here, Varela is in perfect consonance with an important bit of the post-Husserlian phenom- enology of perception to which he brings a substantial contribution: it is not an exaggeration to say that in this he is the contemporary heir to E. Straus and V. Von Weizsäcker. This theory of perception gives place to an incursion into the field of the theory of evolution, which seems decisive to me. In fact, the theory of enac- tion leads to evolution since once one has defined perception in terms of ac- tion, which has a vital sense, it remains only to define the direction peculiar to life, to characterize what is standard action and therefore cognition. More precisely, it is necessary to take a stand vis à vis the dominant neo-Darwinian
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be resolved and causes its own environment to emerge: we attend to a mutual specification, to a codetermination between the living beings and their envi- ronment (e.g., the color of flowers seems to have co-evolved with the vision of the bees, sensitive to ultraviolet light), which is the equivalent, on the evo- lutionary plan, to what enaction is on the cognitive plan. From there we get the Varelian definition of the gene: “an element which specifies that which, in the environment, must be stable so that this element is able to operate as a gene, that is, correlated in a predictable way to a result” (Varela 1993, p. 270). Apart from the fact that it certainly permits the removal of some dead ends in the standard model, this theory of natural drift comes to converge conjointly with the theory of cognition towards a new theory of the relations of the liv- ing things and the world, of the subject and the object, which refuses both monism and dualism (he speaks of “the middle road between monism and dualism”) and opens out into the same type of ontological problem which Merleau-Ponty encountered at the end of his life. These new perspectives on cognition and evolution have for a common base, a theory of living things which is, without doubt, the most indisputable theo- retical contribution of Francisco Varela’s research and, in any case, the most well-known. He places stress on autonomy as the distinctive trait of the liv- ing and so defines it as an auto-poietic machine, that is, as a machine that has the distinctive feature of being able to continually generate and specify its own organization as it is constantly exposed to external perturbations. Varela de- fines an autopoietic system in this way: it is “organized as a network of pro- duction of components which:
- continually regenerate the network which produces them by their transfor- mations and their interactions, and which
- constitutes the system as a concrete unity in the space where it exists, by specifying the topological domain where it fulfills itself as a network” (1989, p. 44).
It is obviously within the limits of this autopoeticity that the mutual specifi- cation of the individual and the environment, as well as their dynamic inter- action in cognition, are able to understand one another. In an article written in English a year ago with Andreas Weber (Weber and Varela, 2002) Varela resituates autopoieticity in a history of the theories of the immanent final- ity which stretches from Kant to Hans Jonas and his theory of the metabo- lism. It is clearly said there that autopoieticity must be understood as an incarnate teleology, which allows the authors to conclude that “autopoieticity is the empirical foundation necessary for the Jonasian theory of value”.
FRANCISCO VARELA : A NEW IDEA OF PERCEPTION AND LIFE 131
It is from the perspective of this connection with Jonas that I will formu- late the two questions which Varela’s theory brings to my eyes. The one con- cerns living things, the other is of an ontological order. In the first place, I wonder whether, as it is in fact claimed in this article (Weber and Varela 2002), it is truly possible to account for cognition in all its dimensions from this model of the living thing, and this applies equally to Jonas and to Varela. By starting from autonomy, Varela gives himself the living thing as an individual consti- tuted as such, self-centered as a self. Life is, in that case, the act by which it maintains its organization and its concrete unity against the vicissitudes of the environment. In other words, life remains the realization of its needs, that is, self-maintenance, survival. But, it seems to me that it becomes difficult in these conditions to account for the dimension of transcendence which characterizes perception as such. Perception is in fact a relation with an immaterial being, seized as such, and not in relation with what is going to satisfy the need by re- establishing homeostasis; it is a relation to the other and not only to oneself in the other. This difficulty is obvious in the Jonasian theory of metabolism, but it seems to me that it continues in Varela: the object of cognition is subju- gated to biological necessity rather than the biological being thought of at a level such that it can allow a disinterested perception, so to speak. It seems to me that we could achieve this by thinking of the living as auto-realizing rather than as auto-conserving, that is to say, as essentially lacking an account of itself, and by itself. Such a point of departure leads to placing desire rather than need at the center of vital activity as a relation to what exceeds all finite satisfac- tion, as desire of nothing, in the sense that nothing satisfies it, that is, as that for which satisfaction is impossible. It is, on my view, on this sole condition that one can establish the true transcendence of the perceived at the level of the vital. There is another difficulty of an ontological order. In Principles of Biologi- cal Autonomy , Varela situates himself at the formal level of organization, that is, of the relations between the elements. But, in Weber and Varela (2002), the reference to Jonas leads to placing emphasis on the incarnated dimension of autopoieticity, and the authors cite the fundamental text where Jonas af- firms that “man is after all the measure of all things – not indeed through the legislation of his reason but through the exemplar of his psychophysical to- tality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness known to us” (Jonas 1966, p. 23). From this positive anthropomorphism, it follows that the question of the sense of the being of Nature, of physical real- ity, as a living thing can arise there, becomes central. For Jonas, it is clear that one needs to think materiality from the point of view of the interiority pecu- liar to the living thing of which it shelters the possibility. As Jonas puts it, we
