Enactivism and the Relational Turn
There are profound and explicit connections between the enactive/Merleau-Pontian framework you outlined and the process/relational ontologies in physics and philosophy you mentioned. Scholars like Evan Thompson and philosophers of physics have increasingly argued that these domains converge on a single metaphysical insight: reality is constituted by relations and events, not pre-existing substances.
- Connection to Whitehead's Process Ontology The link between Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "flesh of the world" and Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy is direct and well-documented. Both reject "substance ontology" (the idea that the world is made of static things) in favor of a dynamic ontology of events. Ontology of the Flesh vs. Process: Merleau-Ponty's late work describes the world as "flesh"€”a reversible, chiasmic tissue where perceiver and perceived are intertwined. Whitehead similarly describes reality as a "process of becoming" composed of "actual occasions" that prehend (feel/grasp) one another. The Middle Ground: Just as enactivism seeks a middle ground between representationalism and solipsism, Whitehead's process ontology avoids the extremes of scientific materialism (pure objectivity) and subjective idealism. Both posit that experience (or "feeling" in Whitehead's terms) is fundamental to nature, not an emergent anomaly. Structural Coupling as Concrescence: The enactive concept of "structural coupling" (Varela/Thompson) parallels Whitehead's "concrescence." In both views, an entity does not exist before its interaction; it becomes itself through the dynamic integration of its relations with the environment.
- Connection to the Relational Turn in Physics The "relational turn" in physics provides a formal scientific analog to the phenomenological insights of Merleau-Ponty and Varela. Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) Carlo Rovelli's RQM posits that quantum states are not absolute properties of a system but are relative to the observer interacting with it. Parallel to Enactivism: This mirrors the enactive claim that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world but the enactment of a world through action. In RQM, properties (like position or spin) only exist in relation to an interaction, just as meaning exists only in the sensorimotor coupling of an organism and its environment. No "View from Nowhere": Both frameworks dismantle the "god's eye view." There is no observer-independent state of the universe; there is only the network of interactions. Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) James Ladyman's OSR argues that the fundamental stuff of the universe is not objects but structures or relations. Objects are merely "nodes" in a relational network. Leibnizian Monads: Your quote about Merleau-Ponty's objects being "mirrors of all others" aligns perfectly with OSR. If relations are primary, then an entity is nothing more than the sum of its relational interactions with the rest of the universe. AdS/CFT Correspondence: While Maldacena's work is a specific mathematical duality, it supports the broader holographic principle often cited by OSR proponents: the information defining a volume of space is encoded on its boundary (a relational surface), suggesting that "interior" substance is derivative of relational data.
- Connection to John Wheeler's Participatory Universe (PAP) The connection to John Archibald Wheeler's "Participatory Anthropic Principle" (PAP) and "It from Bit" is perhaps the most striking, as it directly addresses the "central mystery" you quoted regarding the shared universe. Observer as Participator: Wheeler's insistence that we must replace "observer" with "participator" is the exact slogan of enactivism. Both assert that the universe is not a spectator sport; the act of measurement (physics) or perception (phenomenology) brings specific realities into actuality from a field of potentiality. Solving Wheeler's Mystery: Wheeler agonized over how private acts of participancy yield a shared world ("Is there any point partway between all and none?"). The Enactive/Relational Solution: The solution lies in structural coupling and consensual domains. Organisms (or physical systems) do not create solipsistic worlds; they co-enact a shared world through recurrent, stable patterns of interaction. QBism: Modern developments like QBism (Quantum Bayesianism), which traces its lineage to Wheeler, explicitly use enactive and pragmatist philosophy to argue that while experiences are private, the "rules" of betting (quantum mechanics) ensure a coherent, shared reality among agents.
In essence, these frameworks collectively argue that being is relational. The "object" is not a hard shell hiding a secret essence, but a stable knot in a web of dynamic interactions, whether those interactions are biological (enactivism), experiential (Whitehead/Merleau-Ponty), or quantum mechanical (Rovelli/Wheeler).