Metanoia

In my talk I will explore the notion of creative norms as proposed by Georges Canguilhem. I will also sketch out some related concepts as developed by Gilbert Simondon which can help us get a better grasp of this idea. Lastly, I intend to flesh out the implications of this notion for certain present day discussions in the enactivist literature.

Canguilhem introduces the notion of creative norms to designate a specific way in which organisms evaluate and normatively relate to their living conditions. As such, creative norms are closely related to his more widely discussed ideas on vital normativity. The latter notion is more general however, and includes both creative, and (what he terms) conservative norms. Conservative norms are those, which guide organisms in counteracting deviations from more or less fixed preferred states. Creative ones on the other hand are those which include a margin of indeterminacy, i.e. the capacity of organisms to plastically redefine preferred states or goals posited by such norms. As I will argue, the latter kind of norms are ubiquitous in the realm of the living, but they are also harder to conceptualize rigorously than their conservative counterparts. 

I will show that Simondon’s notions of metastability and individuation may be of help in this regard. I will also point out another, slightly different but equally productive route of developing the idea of creative norms a step further, namely one that is made available by the enactivist framework. With regard to present day enactivist discussions, I will make a twofold point. On the one hand I will argue that Canguilhem’s and Simondon’s insights can be fleshed out in greater detail on the basis of certain enactivist notions, at least to some extent. On the other hand, I intend to show that the intuitions behind the idea of creative norms can also enrich the enactivist position by guiding it in going beyond the notions of autonomy and adaptivity in its attempts of conceptualizing normative phenomena. In the last part of my talk, I will sketch out the notion of metaadaptivity in an attempt to give an enactivist account of creative norms.

In our presentation, we explore the phenomenon of vital normativity through the perspectives of Canguilhem, Merleau-Ponty, and Varela. We do so for two reasons: first, we believe that Canguilhem’s notion of vital normativity can be substantiated and expanded using the conceptual tools of Merleau-Ponty and Varela; second, we feel that vital normativity can shed light on some problematic aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s and Varela’s thought.

We begin with Canguilhem’s account of vital normativity, focusing on three aspects: polarity, institution, and transcendence. Life, according to Canguilhem, is a polarized, norm-following activity that gravitates towards preferred states (values or norms). Life also engages in normative activity, which means that, in addition to following norms, it can also establish or institute new norms. Finally, life transcends the norms it follows at any given point. After outlining some shortcomings in Canguilhem’s exposition—particularly the ambiguous status of “life” (problem of vitalism) and the process of “institution” (problem of constructivism)—we move on to Merleau-Ponty, who provides valuable resources for resolving these ambiguities. 

Drawing on neurological studies, Merleau-Ponty presents the body schema as the norm guiding the organism’s engagements with the world and serving as the reference standard for pursuing its preferred states. However, he also shows that this measure is highly plastic, allowing for environment-dependent adjustments, vulnerable to disintegration and open to beneficial specifications. In his investigation of early ontogenic development, he extends this work by showing a bidirectional relationship between events in the organism’s life and its anatomical and functional organization (so-called “institution”). This need for specification corresponds to an essential “lack” in the organism, which opens up a domain of significance for the organism and drives it beyond its current state.  As each imbalanced stage of development posits a problem that finds provisory resolution in unpredictable future events, thus opening new problems, life, according to Merleau-Ponty, exhibits an inherently interrogative character.

Finally, we connect these insights to Varela’s work on autonomy, operational closure, and sense-making. We elaborate on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas by highlighting a crucial but oft overlooked aspect of Varela’s thought: the persistent “mismatch” between autonomous organization and thermodynamic structure. For Varela, autonomy in living systems is based in “operational closure.” Operational closure, however, should not be understood as closedness, but rather a continuous circular (recursive) activity. Because of this ongoing circularity, each step in this recursive process necessitates further specification, resulting in a constant gap between organization and structure, with organization continually advancing beyond structure. On this reading, vital normativity consists of the continual effort to reconcile this disparity, creating a productive tension – a creative lack – that drives the system’s evolution and adaptation. Correlatively, sense-making is not the same as construction or projection of sense, but an ongoing attempt to overcome the “lack” at the root of living.

One key takeaway is that vital normativity should not be viewed as a unidirectional projection of values onto the environment, but rather as an ongoing, interactive process, where organisms pose “questions” to their environment and are shaped by the “answers” they receive. This open-ended dialogue frames living systems as normative entities that strive for wholeness but never fully attain it, driven by the productive tension between their totality and their local conditions. Life is not merely a process of resolving problems according to an organism’s preference but rather the creation of a field where significance emerges, continuously redefining the nature of problems and establishing the field of problematicity itself.

In this talk, I clarify the origins and implications of an organismic notion of cognitive normativity, drawing upon the notion of habit and Jean Piaget’s sensorimotor schemes as elaborated in “Sensorimotor Life” (Di Paolo, Buhrmann, & Barandiaran, 2017). Firstly, I explore the concept of habit as foundational in cognitive normativity. Habits embody a basic sense of normativity as self-maintenance arising from the organism’s ongoing interactions with its environment. A key tension arises between habitual and intentional behavior. While habitual behavior is generally conceived as emerging from repetition, intentional behavior involves goal-directedness. Traditionally, these have been conceptualized as emerging from different neuro-behavioral systems and responding to different normative sources. I explore how these two conceptions of behavior (habitual and goal-directed) can be reconciled and unified under an organicist conception of sensorimotor or cognitive normativity.

Organisms, like zombies, nearly extinct Jedi knights or perhaps more gently, like a character in a play who keeps exiting and then somehow returning to the stage, keep having a ‘return’ or a ‘revival’ in bio-theoretical and bio-philosophical thought. Most of the time, they return as key elements of proud empirical claims to “overturn mechanism”; truth claims, in fact: organisms are x, are defined by properties y and z, and so on. I have tried to achieve some (friendly) critical distance on such literal truth claims about organisms in past work (Wolfe 2010, 2014, 2023b), but it is never a clearly resolved issue, for at least two reasons. First, because the strongly opposite view – a kind of pragmatic, constructivist approach along the lines of ‘handsome is as handsome does’, in this case approaching organisms as heuristic constructs – seems to leave something out; some of their “vital materiality,” perhaps, which is characteristic of biological systems. Second, because the empirical definitions keep changing (Claude Bernard’s organicism is different from Francisco Varela’s, and both are different again from the metaphysics of organism in Hegel or Hans Jonas; this is a point of disagreement between me and staunch defenders of organicism who treat it as monolithic). But there is another way in which organisms can and do return: as what one might call meaning-makers (following a line of inquiry often associated with Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt-research). It is a very different approach to organism, to their existence and to ‘what makes them tick’ to say they are defined by metabolism, or organizational closure, and to say that they are defined by the production of meaning (and the responsiveness to meaning). This approach has a definite biosemiotic flavor to it, but instead of reiterating those analyses, I will explore it on the basis of insights from Uexküll, Kurt Goldstein, Georges Canguilhem and Jean Starobinski. Organisms in this context bear some resemblance to the ‘organism as figure of subjectivity’ narrative familiar from the German Idealist and Romantic tradition (which Canguilhem in 1947 wanted to ‘bring back’ into biophilosophical work: Canguilhem 1947a, Wolfe 2024); yet they have a processual, performative quality which makes them rather less foundational or internalist; less like the corps propre of embodied and/or enactivist phenomenology which is defined by its subjectivity (Wolfe 2023a). Hopefully, the return of organisms as meaning-makers is neither tragedy nor farce.

The self-manufacturing (autopoietic) organization of living organisms implies a straightforward foundation for a kind of normative realism. Organisms must constantly invest physical work to ensure their continued existence. More specifically, they must maintain organizational closure throughout their life and reproductive cycles. This requires the constant construction and reconstitution of context-dependent constraints towards this aim, both inside the organism and in the relevant part of its experienced environment. This translates into the most basic norm of all life: survivability. It is not only a prerequisite for the persistence of living systems, but also for their evolution. Optional further norms that facilitate flourishing can then be constructed on top of this basic normative scaffold. I will present a naturalistic philosophical account of this kind of evolving and complexifying normativity, based on the work of Rosen, Hofmeyr, among other authors, and will discuss the use and limitations of formalized modeling approaches in its study.

Reproduction, often understood as an individual capacity for self-propagation, has been insufficiently examined within the framework of organicism. Traditional organismal normativity, which focuses on autonomous individuality, presents challenges when applied to reproductive processes. In standard evolutionary biology, reproduction’s normative aspects are typically tied to fitness maximization, an external perspective that remains fundamentally individualistic. However, reproduction, particularly sexual reproduction, is inherently relational, necessitating the union of gametes to form a zygote. Thus, we need a deeper exploration of the normative dimensions that drive and define reproductive processes in organic entities.

Traditional perspectives often frame reproduction as an imperative driven by genetic inheritance and individual survival, potentially overlooking its broader, systemic roles within organic life. Moreover, efforts to conceptualize reproductive normativity on a collective scale have faced significant obstacles, including (1) the complexity of defining and attributing reproductive normativity to collectives such as species; (2) the challenges associated with inclusive fitness theory; and (3) the intricate interplay of conflict and collaborative interdependencies in reproductive and life processes.

Drawing on previous research that examines reproductive phenomena like pregnancy, agency, and collaborative interdependencies from an organismal-relational approach (Nuño de la Rosa et al. 2021, Etxeberria et al. 2023; Nuño de la Rosa 2023, Etxeberria 2023), this paper explores the normative dimensions and systemic roles of reproduction. It emphasizes the interconnected and dynamic processes that shape reproductive functions in organic entities.