Action-Space and Time: Towards an Enactive Hermeneutics

Abstract

We argue that the understanding of space, as an extended, simultaneous totality, although useful in some scientific contexts, is not true to our embodied experiences of space. It is an abstraction, involving a de-temporalization of space that falsifies our experience. From the phenomenological-enactivist perspective, space is not already there, neutrally constituted in its objective extension; rather, it is enacted, put in place relative to action affordances that are both corporeal and intercorporeal. Moreover, these action affordances are permeated by an intrinsic temporality, so that the experience of space is fully temporal because it is fully embodied. Space, as the experienced phenomenon of a delimited embodied enact- ment, is also hermeneutically situated so that meaning emerges for the embodied agent just because of its dynamical relations to a set of physical and social affordances.