Ritualizing intersubjectivity: a Xunzian-enactive account of social formation

Abstract Contemporary phenomenology and cognitive science have increasingly converged on the idea that social understanding is embodied, interactive, and enacted in real-time engagement. Interaction theory and enactivism have challenged cognitivist models of social cognition by emphasizing direct perception, affective attunement, and participatory sense-making. Yet while current interactive approaches offer sophisticated accounts of how intersubjective coordination emerges in local encounters, they remain comparatively underdeveloped in explaining the various ways that such coordination becomes normatively stable, scalable, transmissible across time and integrated into complex social formations. In this paper we argue that (1) the phenomenological concept of sedimentation as it applies to enactive accounts of habit and organizational routine, and (2) a Xunzian account of ritual ( li 礼) as a theory of social formation, can help to clarify some aspects of how such coordination is cultivated and sustained. Such accounts help to explain how, to a significant extent, intersubjectivity is a culturally and institutionally cultivated achievement. By bringing Xunzi into dialogue with phenomenology and contemporary debates on intersubjectivity, we hope to contribute both to comparative philosophy and to ongoing efforts to integrate social, affective, and normative dimensions of embodied cognition.