Beyond the realism-idealism trap with enactive perception
Thomas van Es
University of the Basque Country
Sept. 7, 2023, 9 a.m. UTC // Sept. 7, 2023, 9 a.m. in UTC
Is our perception of the world objective and accurate, or is it subjective and relative? This is the core of the realism-idealism question for perception. In its roughly 30 years of development, enactivism has been interpreted as taking up just about every possible position in this debate: realist, idealist and somewhere in-between. I will argue here that we should reject the question, because it is ill-posed for an enactive view on perception. This is because the question requires a categorical separation of organism and environment that enaction opposes and the reification of perception. Here I will outline the positive counterproposal. By centering the interaction, enactivism resists ontological anti-realism, while an object ontology becomes interaction-dependent. Instead, enactivism is compatible with a process-first ontology. This implies, I suggest, a collapse of the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal world and the world in itself. Indeed, by rooting consciousness in the complex organization of process networks, the Kantian rift between mind and world ceases to be useful. This provides us with a non-reductive, process-centric view of the world as interacting and organizing process networks. If time permits, I want to briefly allude to an ethical aspect to the realism-idealism question before concluding.
