Mind in Nature: Enactivism as a Bridge between Transcendental Phenomenology and Aristotelian Naturalism

Rational normativity can be integrated into nature without reduction or dualism by drawing on Thomas Nagel's critique of reductive naturalism and Husserl's refutation of psychologism. The paper develops this through the philosophy of life, focusing on Hans Jonas's conception of the organism and the enactive notion of operational closure. While enactivism offers a non-reductive account of living organization, it remains metaphysically underdetermined; its core commitments are best understood within an Aristotelian metaphysics of life, where substantial form and formal causation ground a realist ontology of life–mind continuity. This Aristotelian naturalism situates cognition and rationality within nature without eliminating their normative character, while phenomenological analysis remains indispensable for explicating the first-personal and normative dimensions of mind.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how rational normativity can be integrated into nature without reduction or dualism. Drawing on Thomas Nagel’s critique of reductive naturalism and Husserl’s refutation of psychologism, it argues that adequate accounts of mind must respect the transcendental status of reason while also explaining how rational subjects belong to the natural world. The paper develops this problem through the philosophy of life, focusing on Hans Jonas’s conception of the organism and the enactive notion of operational closure. While enactivism offers a non-reductive, multi-level account of living organization, it remains metaphysically underdetermined. I argue that its core commitments are best understood within an Aristotelian metaphysics of life, in which substantial form and formal causation ground a realist ontology of life–mind continuity. This Aristotelian naturalism situates cognition and rationality within nature without eliminating their normative character, while phenomenological analysis remains indispensable for explicating the first-personal and normative dimensions of mind.