Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 127–132, 2002.

© 2002 Kluwer AcademicVARELA

FRANCISCO Publishers.
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NEW IDEA Netherlands.
PERCEPTION AND LIFE 127

Francisco Varela: A new idea of perception and life*

RENAUD BARBARAS
Université Paris-1, Panthéon, Sorbonne, Paris, France
(E-mail: renaud.barbaras@wanadoo.fr)

Abstract. Connections among Varela’s theory of enactive cognition , his evolutionary theory
of natural drift, and his concept of autopoiesis are made clear. Two questions are posed in
relation to Varela’s conception of perception, and the tension that exists in his thought be-
tween the formal level of organization and the Jonasian notion of the organism.

I would like to say first that, for about 10 years, the person and work of Fran-
cisco Varela has represented for me a fundamental reference point on the
philosophical landscape owing to the fact that he embodies the convergence
of a scientific exigency and a phenomenological concern; but also as a model
of intellectual freedom and intellectual creativity. In fact, while a number of
philosophers today take permanent leave of phenomenology and metaphys-
ics in favor of analytical philosophy, in the name of a scientificity which they
claim, all the more so since they are more often than not in the most complete
ignorance of what science is, Francisco Varela starts from science, where he
occupies an eminent place, to go to the encounter of philosophy and of phe-
nomenology in particular. The interrogations and the hypotheses he works out
in the scientific domain lead him to take into consideration other types of
approaches, notably phenomenology, to which he finally brings his own con-
tribution. By this creative liberty, controlled only by the demand of knowledge
and supremely indifferent to all fashion as to all power, the work of Francisco
Varela seems to me to be truly exemplary.
I will be content to mention the aspects of his thought that represent to me
several significant contributions and therefore arenas in which to sketch the
horizon of an interrogation and possible debate. They concern the fields of
cognition, evolution, and the philosophy of the living thing, which are, of
course, closely interdependent. In the first place, in the field of cognition,
Francisco Varela refuses the objectivist point of view, which conceives per-
ception as internal reconstruction of a pre-given world, as much as the sub-

*Translated by John Cogan

128 RENAUD BARBARAS

jectivist point of view, which thinks the world as projected to the exterior or
constituted by the subject. That is because he sees and contests the underly-
ing presupposition of these two classical perspectives: that perception in par-
ticular, and cognition in general, would belong to representation. Reclaiming,
on a neurophysiological basis, a fundamental thesis of Bergson from the be-
ginning of Matter and Memory, he decides to think perception in terms of
action, more exactly, enaction, rather than in terms of representation. This
guiding thesis is nourished by the discovery of the essential relation between
perception, as such, and the motor functions, i.e., of the inseparability between
sensory processes and motor processes. All the while, Varela is aware that he
is using one of the central intuitions of Merleau-Ponty, in particular from The
Structure of Behavior: that of the dynamic constitution of the very object of
perception by the living thing. It is the animal that circumscribes, in the physi-
cal world, that to which it will be sensitive and it does so according to a vital
a priori.
Varela develops and demonstrates what remains in Merleau-Ponty a gen-
eral thesis. Such is the sense of the theory of enaction, which he specifies in
this way:

– “perception consists of an action guided by perception;

– cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensory-motor schemes
which allow action to be guided by perception” (1993, p. 235).

In other words, as his favorite experiment, of kittens being carried by other

kittens, shows, to see is not to extract visual traits of the object but to visually
guide the action directed towards them. While the theory of representation was
correlative to the initial position of a subject and object, as foreign to each
other, the theory of enaction leads to the idea of a mutual specification of
subject and object. To say that perception is contained or enveloped in an action
is to admit that what is perceived is, to that extent, constituted. Here, Varela is
in perfect consonance with an important bit of the post-Husserlian phenom-
enology of perception to which he brings a substantial contribution: it is not
an exaggeration to say that in this he is the contemporary heir to E. Straus and
V. Von Weizsäcker.
This theory of perception gives place to an incursion into the field of the
theory of evolution, which seems decisive to me. In fact, the theory of enac-
tion leads to evolution since once one has defined perception in terms of ac-
tion, which has a vital sense, it remains only to define the direction peculiar
to life, to characterize what is standard action and therefore cognition. More
precisely, it is necessary to take a stand vis à vis the dominant neo-Darwinian
 FRANCISCO VARELA: A NEW IDEA OF PERCEPTION AND LIFE 129
theory, according to which the perceptive and cognitive activities imply a form
of optimal adaptation to the world. But, just as the theory of representation is
dependent on the presupposition of a pre-given world, that is to say, on the
qualities of the object which the subject limits him- or herself to register, the
theory of adaptation has for its presupposition the idea of pre-given dimen-
sions of the environment, in regard to which the adaptation would be made
and according to which the selection would therefore be accomplished. As
Varela puts it:

In both cases the central problem is to know whether the evolutionary processes can be
understood by means of the representationalist idea, according to which there is a corre-
spondence between the organism and the environment, a correspondence established by
the optimal constraints of survival and of the environment. To put it briefly, representa-
tionalism in the cognitive sciences is the precise counterpart of adaptionism in the theory
of evolution because optimality plays the same central role in each of the two domains. It
follows that all the empirical proofs which weaken the adaptionist point of view, ipso facto,
place the representationalist approach of cognition in difficulty. (1993, p. 262).

We see here how Varela profoundly articulates the theory of perception and
the thought of life under the species of the problem of evolution by placing
the common philosophical presuppositions into evidence. Let us note that, just
as Varela extends Merleau-Ponty as regards perception, he enters into conso-
nance with Heidegger as regards the theory of evolution – Heidegger reproached
the Darwinian scheme for presupposing a prior environment independent of the
activities of living beings.
From these insights, a theory of evolution such as the theory of “natural
drift,” which is the biological counterpart of the theory of cognition as enac-
tion, can be developed. This theory has its point of departure in the movement
from a prescriptive logic to a proscriptive logic, that is to say, from the idea
that whatever is not permitted is forbidden to the idea that whatever is not for-
bidden is permitted. In other words, selection brushes aside that which is not
compatible with survival and reproduction, so that everything that is viable,
that is, everything that constitutes an acceptable solution as far as survival is
concerned, is conserved. It follows that the precision and specification of the
physiological and morphological traits become compatible with their appar-
ent lack of relevance in relation to survival. From thence, the extraordinary
abundance of solutions produced by life.
This first assertion clears the way for the second central thesis: one cannot
retain the notion of a pre-given, independent environment; the notion of what
is an environment is inseparable from what the organisms are and from what
they do. In other words, the species specifies its own domain of problems to
130 RENAUD BARBARAS

be resolved and causes its own environment to emerge: we attend to a mutual

specification, to a codetermination between the living beings and their envi-
ronment (e.g., the color of flowers seems to have co-evolved with the vision
of the bees, sensitive to ultraviolet light), which is the equivalent, on the evo-
lutionary plan, to what enaction is on the cognitive plan. From there we get
the Varelian definition of the gene: “an element which specifies that which,
in the environment, must be stable so that this element is able to operate as a
gene, that is, correlated in a predictable way to a result” (Varela 1993, p. 270).
Apart from the fact that it certainly permits the removal of some dead ends in
the standard model, this theory of natural drift comes to converge conjointly
with the theory of cognition towards a new theory of the relations of the liv-
ing things and the world, of the subject and the object, which refuses both
monism and dualism (he speaks of “the middle road between monism and
dualism”) and opens out into the same type of ontological problem which
Merleau-Ponty encountered at the end of his life.
These new perspectives on cognition and evolution have for a common base,
a theory of living things which is, without doubt, the most indisputable theo-
retical contribution of Francisco Varela’s research and, in any case, the most
well-known. He places stress on autonomy as the distinctive trait of the liv-
ing and so defines it as an auto-poietic machine, that is, as a machine that has
the distinctive feature of being able to continually generate and specify its own
organization as it is constantly exposed to external perturbations. Varela de-
fines an autopoietic system in this way: it is “organized as a network of pro-
duction of components which:

– continually regenerate the network which produces them by their transfor-

mations and their interactions, and which
– constitutes the system as a concrete unity in the space where it exists, by
specifying the topological domain where it fulfills itself as a network” (1989,
p. 44).

It is obviously within the limits of this autopoeticity that the mutual specifi-
cation of the individual and the environment, as well as their dynamic inter-
action in cognition, are able to understand one another. In an article written in
English a year ago with Andreas Weber (Weber and Varela, 2002) Varela
resituates autopoieticity in a history of the theories of the immanent final-
ity which stretches from Kant to Hans Jonas and his theory of the metabo-
lism. It is clearly said there that autopoieticity must be understood as an
incarnate teleology, which allows the authors to conclude that “autopoieticity
is the empirical foundation necessary for the Jonasian theory of value”.
 FRANCISCO VARELA: A NEW IDEA OF PERCEPTION AND LIFE 131
It is from the perspective of this connection with Jonas that I will formu-
late the two questions which Varela’s theory brings to my eyes. The one con-
cerns living things, the other is of an ontological order. In the first place, I
wonder whether, as it is in fact claimed in this article (Weber and Varela 2002),
it is truly possible to account for cognition in all its dimensions from this model
of the living thing, and this applies equally to Jonas and to Varela. By starting
from autonomy, Varela gives himself the living thing as an individual consti-
tuted as such, self-centered as a self. Life is, in that case, the act by which it
maintains its organization and its concrete unity against the vicissitudes of the
environment. In other words, life remains the realization of its needs, that is,
self-maintenance, survival. But, it seems to me that it becomes difficult in these
conditions to account for the dimension of transcendence which characterizes
perception as such. Perception is in fact a relation with an immaterial being,
seized as such, and not in relation with what is going to satisfy the need by re-
establishing homeostasis; it is a relation to the other and not only to oneself
in the other. This difficulty is obvious in the Jonasian theory of metabolism,
but it seems to me that it continues in Varela: the object of cognition is subju-
gated to biological necessity rather than the biological being thought of at a
level such that it can allow a disinterested perception, so to speak. It seems to
me that we could achieve this by thinking of the living as auto-realizing rather
than as auto-conserving, that is to say, as essentially lacking an account of itself,
and by itself. Such a point of departure leads to placing desire rather than need
at the center of vital activity as a relation to what exceeds all finite satisfac-
tion, as desire of nothing, in the sense that nothing satisfies it, that is, as that
for which satisfaction is impossible. It is, on my view, on this sole condition
that one can establish the true transcendence of the perceived at the level of
the vital.
There is another difficulty of an ontological order. In Principles of Biologi-
cal Autonomy, Varela situates himself at the formal level of organization, that
is, of the relations between the elements. But, in Weber and Varela (2002),
the reference to Jonas leads to placing emphasis on the incarnated dimension
of autopoieticity, and the authors cite the fundamental text where Jonas af-
firms that “man is after all the measure of all things – not indeed through the
legislation of his reason but through the exemplar of his psychophysical to-
tality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness
known to us” (Jonas 1966, p. 23). From this positive anthropomorphism, it
follows that the question of the sense of the being of Nature, of physical real-
ity, as a living thing can arise there, becomes central. For Jonas, it is clear that
one needs to think materiality from the point of view of the interiority pecu-
liar to the living thing of which it shelters the possibility. As Jonas puts it, we
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must, without doubt, “take the presence of purposive inwardness in one part
of the physical order, viz., in man, as a valid testimony to the nature of that
wider reality that lets it emerge” (1966, p. 37).
So it is the gap itself between the living and the inert which is at stake, and
the status of nature as life arising there which is in question. If life must pre-
cede itself in any way in Nature, it bodes well for philosophy of Nature that
the recognition of the specificity of vital phenomena orients us. But this ob-
viously leads to calling into question the legitimacy of the formal point of view
on the living thing, which was Varela’s point of view, at least in his first writ-
ings. So, I think that we can ask ourselves, in the light of Francisco Varela’s
works, about the effect that the conception of life as autopoieticity has on the
ontological status of Nature.

References

Jonas, H. 1966. The Phenomenon of Life. Towards a Philosophical Biology. Chicago: Chi-
cago University Press.
Varela, F. J. 1979. Principles of Biological Autonomy. New York: Elsevier/North-Holland.
Varela, F. 1989. Autonomie et connaissance. Paris : Seuil.
Varela, F. 1993. L’inscription corporelle de l’esprit. Paris : Seuil.
Weber, A. and Varela, F. 2002. Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic founda-
tions of biological individuality. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1: 97–125
(this issue).