Nature as Entanglement: Autopoiesis, Enaction, Chiasm Reflections on Ecophenomenology and the Restoration of All Things

Contemporary discourse on the ecological crisis is split between technomanagerialism and preservationism, yet both share the premise that the human subject and the natural object were separate to begin with. This article reinterprets Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis not as a concept of isolated self-production but as a concept of relational self-production that persists within entanglement, deepens the discussion through Varela’s enaction and Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm and flesh (la chair), and reinterprets the result ecophenomenologically. When the environment becomes not merely the organism’s correlate but the field of the sensible that multiple perceivers inhabit together, two things emerge: the one who perceives is at the same time the one who is perceived, and nature is a productive power (naturans) that sustains us and exceeds our constitution of it. The conception of the organism as both subject and object of evolution then resonates with the conception of flesh as adherence to Being. Seen in this light, the ecological crisis is not a matter of resource depletion or environmental pollution but an ontological event in which humans sever for themselves the web of entanglement that has produced them. What is damaged, however, is not the condition of autopoiesis for life in general but the particular network of structural coupling within which humans have come to be; in this respect the article also distances itself from anthropocentric crisis narratives. This diagnosis implies that salvation and restoration taking the human alone as their unit amount to little more than a theological version of the modern dichotomy. Accordingly, the article proposes that the restoration of all things means finding a way of sympoietic coexistence within the ecological entanglement of human and nonhuman, and that the human is a participant who embodies that hope in the Creator.