Abstract: Gallagher addresses a wide range of topics from cognitive science and philosophy through a series of “enactivist interventions.” He contributes novel explanations in an erudite and highly readable manner. And yet the central conceptual problem of what it means to enact a world is not addressed explicitly enough.

For several decades, a diverse set of approaches to embedded, embodied, extended, enactive and affective cognition has been challenging the cognitivist orthodoxy. Recently, the prospect of a combination of ecological psychology and enactivism has emerged as a promising candidate for a single unified framework that could rival the established cognitivist paradigm as “a working metatheory for the study of minds” (Baggs and Chemero, 2018, p. 11). One obstacle to such an ecological-enactive approach is the conceptual tension between the firm commitment to realism of those following James Gibson’s ecological approach and the central tenet of enactivism that each living organism enacts its own world, interpreted as a constructivist or subjectivist position. Baggs and Chemero (2018) forward the concept of Umwelt, coined by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, as a conceptual bridge between the two approaches. Inspired by Kant, Uexküll’s Umwelt describes how the physiology of an organism’s sensory apparatus shapes its active experience of the environment. Baggs and Chemero use this link between the subject and its objective surroundings to argue for a strong compatibility between ecological psychology and enactivism. Fultot and Turvey on the other hand view Umwelt as steeped in representationalism, the rejection of which is a fundamental commitment of radical embodied cognition (Fultot and Turvey, 2019). Instead, they advance Uexküll’s “compositional theory of nature” as a conceptual supplement for Gibson’s ecological approach (von Uexküll, 2010, p. 171; Fultot and Turvey, 2019). In this paper, I provide a brief overview of Uexküll’s thought and distinguish a crucial difference between two ways of using his term Umwelt. I argue that only one of these ways, the one which emphasizes the role of subjective experience, is adequate to Uexküll’s philosophical project. I demonstrate how the two ways of using Umwelt are employed in the philosophy of cognitive science, show how this distinction matters to recent debates about an ecological-enactive approach, and provide some critical background to Uexküll’s compositional theory of meaning.

Key words: enactivism, ecological psychology, umwelt, jakob von uexküll, embodied cognition, philosophy of nature

Jakob von Uexküll’s (1864–1944) account of Umwelt has been proposed as a mediating concept to bridge the gap between ecological psychology’s realism about environmental information and enactivism’s emphasis on the organism’s active role in constructing the meaningful world it inhabits. If successful, this move would constitute a significant step towards establishing a single ecological-enactive framework for cognitive science. However, Uexküll’s thought itself contains different perspectives that are in tension with each other, and the concept of Umwelt is developed in representationalist terms that conflict with the commitments of both enactivism and ecological psychology. One central issue shared by all these approaches is the problem of how a living being experiences its environment. In this paper, we will look at Uexküll’s reception in French philosophy and highlight the different ways in which the concept of Umwelt functions in the work of Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze. This analysis helps clarify different aspects of Uexküll’s thought and the deeper philosophical implications of importing his concepts into embodied cognitive science. This paper is part of a recent trend in which enactivism engages with continental philosophy in a way that both deepens and transcends the traditional links to phenomenology, including most recently the thought of Georg W. F. Hegel and Gilbert Simondon. However, no more than a brief outline and introduction to the potentials and challenges of this complex conceptual intersection can be given here. Our hope is that it serves to make more explicit the philosophical issues that are at stake for cognitive science in the question of experienced environments, while charting a useful course for future research.

Key words: deleuze, enactivism, world, merleau-ponty, von Uexküll