Ecology, Religious Experience, and the Politics of Autopoiesis
Abstract
This essay develops a structural account of autopoiesis through ecological thinking, focusing on how modularity generates surplus meaning within living systems. I examine Francisco Varela’s integration of autopoietic epistemology with Buddhist meditative practice, showing how his work opens a distinctive path for dialogue between science and religion and for studying the dynamics of mystical experience. Building on second‑order cybernetics, I propose an autopoietic approach to the lifeworld that highlights its ethical implications, especially in contexts of relational vulnerability and systemic interdependence. I further argue that theories of language games and paradigms can be productively combined with cybernetic autopoiesis to clarify how meaning emerges and stabilizes within social systems. Finally, I engage feminist critiques of the body‑subject, focusing on how the dominance of the masculine body shapes epistemic norms and how autopoietic thinking may offer alternative accounts of embodiment.
Introduction
Systems thinking aligns naturally with ecological thought, traditionally framed through oikos—the household of life. Ecology highlights patterns, relationships, and the dynamic interplay among organisms and environments. In this ecological theater, animals, plants, and microorganisms form an integrated oikos that invites us to rethink human belonging within the web of life.[1]
This ecological grounding leads to Aristotle, whose ideas of oikos and oikonomia offer an early account of how living systems organize and sustain themselves. His focus on relational management anticipates modern concerns with systemic interdependence. Building on this lineage, the chapter develops a politics of autopoiesis. Autopoietic phenomenology incorporates modular network architectures, showing how modularity generates creative by‑products and opens new evolutionary possibilities. Modularity becomes a source of surplus meaning.
The chapter also explores how the embodied mind connects with Buddhist meditation. Contemplative practice makes autopoietic processes of attention and self‑organization experientially accessible. From here, truth appears as an event of disclosure emerging through embodied and intersubjective enactment. This perspective places cybernetic models alongside language games and paradigms, clarifying how meaning stabilizes while remaining ethically open.
Cybernetic communication becomes an internal epistemic vitality when knowledge is treated as a self‑correcting organism–environment process. Linguistic suspension—bracketing habitual frames—reveals impersonal forces of control operating beneath everyday awareness. Suspending familiar structures exposes the systemic logics that shape adaptation and equilibrium.
The excursus engages Irigaray’s critique of Merleau‑Ponty, especially concerns that universal flesh and reversibility risk phallocentrism. A genealogical analysis of the body‑subject is needed to advance linguistic suspension as an epistemic method capable of moving beyond masculine norms.
Note: In this chapter, ecology, ethics, religion, and cybernetic models are treated in a deliberately loose constellation so that the religious dimension can be approached through autopoietic and public‑theological concerns without collapsing into natural romanticism or reductionism. A fuller treatment of these issues—especially the narrative sociology of religion, biological and cultural evolution, and the autopoietic‑cybernetic model of religious formation—will appear in Part II.
Ecological Thinking, Economy and Resilience
In Aristotle’s philosophy, the oikos refers to all members living within a household, governed by oikonomia—the management of the household oriented toward sustaining life and communal well‑being. This stands in contrast to chrematistikē, the art of accumulating wealth, in which the circulation of money becomes central not as a means to the good life but as an end in itself. Whereas oikonomia is directed toward the needs of the household and the flourishing of the community, chrematistikē prioritizes profit and endless accumulation, often at the expense of relational integrity and ecological balance. [2]
The synthesis between oikos and oikonomia can be reinterpreted today as an ecological mode of thinking grounded in eco‑justice and oriented toward the common good. For Aristotle, praxis is action aimed at excellence, whose purpose is inherent in the action itself—an expression of self‑realization (entelechy) within the ethical life of the polis. Poiesis refers to productive activity that results in an external product—what we might today call ecological or social habitat construction. This classical distinction becomes newly significant when read through the lens of autopoiesis, where praxis resonates with the self‑realizing enactment of life, and poiesis with the world‑shaping construction of ecological and social environments.
This distinction finds new relevance in the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who bridge praxis and poiesis through their theory of autopoiesis. In the ecological context of evolution, natural selection operates in a modified sense: “Organisms and the population offer variety; natural selection guarantees only that what ensues satisfies the two basic constraints of survival and reproduction.”[3] In this light, autopoietic systems do not simply adapt to a pre‑given environment; they co‑construct their own oikos through ongoing interactions that shape and are shaped by ecological and social conditions.
This position broadens the description of resilience beyond its traditional meaning as a buffer for conserving what a system has and recovering what it once was. More fundamentally, resilience thinking reincorporates the dynamic interplay of persistence, adaptability, and transformability across multilayered scales and attractor landscapes in social–ecological systems.
This dynamic must be clarified in relation to external perturbation, irreversibility, and the localization of energy redistribution as potential–active information, together with the punctuated innovation that characterizes evolvability. Life resilience is a specialized dynamic within the life field: it is constituted by perturbation, energy redistribution, and the transition from potential to active information. Resilience thus denotes the capacity of a system to steer away from undesirable pressures, innovate under conditions of uncertainty and surprise, and potentially transform itself into new trajectories that sustain and enhance ecosystem services, societal development, and human well‑being. [4]
Ecological Approach to Collective Behavior
According to Deborah Gordon, an ecological approach seeks to explain collective behavior—the behavior of a system rather than that of isolated individuals. The investigation of dynamic relational systems constitutes a systems approach, spanning both the natural and social sciences.
In accounting for the evolution of phenotypic plasticity, collective behavior operates through interactions and responses to shifting conditions, drawing on insights from dynamic systems theory and network science.[5] A systems‑network approach identifies three gradients: environmental stability—the rate at which interactions adjust to prevailing conditions; the spatiotemporal distribution of resources and demands; and the energy flow permitted by environmental conditions. These gradients are interrelated and together help redefine an ecological approach to collective behavior.
Rate, feedback regime, and modularity provide a framework for analyzing how interactions adjust collective activity within changing environments. Networks with high modularity operate more rapidly, with some nodes more densely connected than others, whereas low‑modularity networks—where nodes are more evenly connected—are suited to stable conditions and allow more thorough diffusion of information or resources.
Modularity is significant and ubiquitous in both human social interactions and biological systems. The modularity of a system influences its function and mode of operation in multiple ways. Systems biology shows that network motifs—groups of interconnected signal transducers within larger modular networks—serve as functional linkages that integrate inputs from different signals, facilitating variation in phenotypic development. [6]
Modularity provides the structural and functional building blocks that enable autopoietic living systems to remain flexible, evolvable, and efficient. It is essential for the evolution of autopoietic systems because autopoietic architectures are often organized into modules—such as organelles in a cell, functional groups in a society, or developmental spandrels—that can evolve or adapt independently. This enhances overall resilience by enabling parts of the system to change in response to environmental pressures without compromising the system’s essential organizational identity.
This synthesis calls for a politics of autopoiesis, analogous to Aristotle’s insight that oikos and proper economic arrangement are inseparable from the flourishing of the polis. An autopoietic politics is characterized by self‑creation, modularity, and epigenetic lifelines or specialized form of resilience with time-complexity that connect social and ecological factors for bursts of innovation.
In an ecological approach, the modularity of network feedback produces emergent by products—analogous to Gould and Lewontin’s spandrels—that can become functional innovations in evolving systems. It features autopoiesis as generating semantic ecology and social moral spandrels in ecological evolutionary processes.
Autopoiesis stands against social Darwinism because its modular differentiation generates rational division of labor and social moral spandrels—emergent solidarities and recognitions that sustain democratic participation. The common good thus arises not as a prescriptive ideal but as the emergent moral ecology of autopoietic life. If Aristotle characterizes the human being as a political animal whose flourishing depends on the common good and the wisdom of the mean within the polis, an autopoietic perspective reinterprets the polis as a modular, democratic civil society within an ecological approach to collective behavior.
Religious Experience and Buddhist Meditation
Francisco Varela extends the concept of autopoiesis beyond biology, emphasizing organization as a fundamental category for understanding the diverse realities of social systems. Drawing on Aristotelian phronesis and Buddhist mindfulness, Varela highlights praxis as embodied ethical action—right action arising not from external rules but from situated, attentive presence in the world. He underscores the connection between praxis and phronesis, suggesting that right action is embodied, coming into alignment with the principles of Buddhist meditation. [7]
An autopoiesis‑based enactive approach seeks to bridge the living tradition of mindfulness and awareness meditation—rooted in the principle of co‑dependence—with phenomenology and cognitive science, particularly in their engagement with Madhyamika thought. The principle of co‑dependence applies to three domains: the relation between subjects and objects, the connection between things and their attributes, and the interaction between causes and effects. If all things are “empty” of independent existence, they arise only in co‑dependence; they arise co‑dependently because they lack any independent ground.
As Nāgārjuna states in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: “Nothing is found that is not dependently arisen. For that reason, nothing is found that is not empty.”[8]
The concept of groundlessness resonates with Buddhist philosophy, particularly the Middle Way, where it is central to the Madhyamika teaching of śūnyatā (emptiness). This teaching, as expounded by Nāgārjuna, remains a cornerstone of Mahāyāna Buddhism in East Asia and of Vajrayāna Buddhism in Tibet. Vajrayāna particularly emphasizes the connection between co‑dependent arising and the practice of great compassion, often articulated through the Eightfold Path. [9]
If all things lack independent intrinsic nature, this has profound ethical implications, fostering solidarity with marginalized communities and with all living beings through great compassion and the practices of the Eightfold Path.Nāgārjuna writes: “The sick, the unprotected, those stricken with suffering, the lowly and the poor—take special care to nourish them.” [10]
This perspective reflects an early vision of a polity oriented toward compassionate care and the common good. Such an epistemic stance is crucial for socially engaged Buddhism, which aligns with enactive theories of embodiment.
At this juncture, it becomes essential to integrate economic thinking about the common good with ecological approaches to sustainability, so that economics and ecology can function as companion disciplines in the co‑constitution of a just and sustainable world.[11]
Beyond this, I offer new insights into the politics of autopoiesis. This position will be further clarified through the lifeworld and systemic forms of life within a structurally emergent framework. It addresses the limits of universal relativism linked to dependent co‑arising, while highlighting a structural theory of co‑constitution, life’s emergence, and the semantics of prolepsis—adjacency, intertextuality, transposition, and traversing practice.
Across the religious course of development, emptiness and compassion form a narrative of intertextuality shaped by natural semantic drift—an ecological movement of meaning in which difference is preserved and recognized through adjacency. Emptiness grounds semantic openness, while compassion emerges as ethical surplus. Together they constitute the politics of autopoiesis as an ensemble of meaning articulated within the geometry of life.
The Mystical Mind and Metatheology
In the mystical traditions of Western religion, meditation aims at union with God and participation in ultimate reality. This aspiration parallels Advaita Vedānta’s non‑dual unity of Brahman and ātman and, in a different register, the Buddhist realization of śūnyatā. Mystical experience thus becomes the modality through which the human being enters the realm of the divine or the ultimate.
When speaking of a theology of Hinduism or Buddhism, the integration of neuropsychology with theology generates the category of neurotheology as a form of comprehensive metatheology. If theology concerns the ultimate concern of human beings, then this concern is that which determines our being or non‑being. A scientific framework that analyzes theology from the perspective of mind and brain participates in the complementary integration of science and religion. In this project, religion cannot be understood apart from mind and brain, just as mind and brain cannot be understood apart from the religious horizon that shapes meaning, value, and ultimate concern.
For this reason, the mind is mystical: the analysis of mind discloses a holistic field in which science and religion converge. Neurotheology studies theology from a neuropsychological perspective, recognizing that the human experience of the holy—its numinous resonance as interpreted and modulated by the brain—constitutes the platform on which metatheology begins.[12] Thus, metatheology attends to the evolutionary development of the inferior parietal lobule and its extensive connections with sensory association cortices. These neural circuits form the neurophenomenological substrate of mystical consciousness.[13]
When the mystical mind is cultivated without ethical and intersubjective grounding, it becomes vulnerable to pathological distortions. At the historical level, this appears in Japanese imperialism and certain strands of Zen during the Nanjing Massacre, where emptiness was severed from compassion and structural coupling with the lifeworld. At the political level, a similar pathology emerges when religion and politics collapse into ideological fusion, as seen in throne‑and‑altar regimes or contemporary forms of Christian nationalism. Such fusion at the neurophenomenological level overgeneralizes religion as ultimate concern, reducing it to ideological interpellation and conscription.
Neurotheology grounded in psychology fails to grasp meaning as an emergent property of neurodynamic rhythms, where consciousness, perception, and meaning co‑arise through embodied enaction and the organism’s structural coupling with its environment.
Religion in this regard signifies the self‑revelation of life’s ultimate meaning through experience, semantic drift, structural coupling, and surplus meaning within the lifeworld—a semantic theory of religion grounded in the ethical empathy and proleptic reconfiguration of meaning. This dynamic appears paradigmatically in St. Paul’s transformative encounter, where his religious experience is not reducible to neurofunctional activity but emerges from the transformation of his Jewish identity in structural coupling with the risen Christ.
Meaning emerges dynamically from the brain–body–world system, and Paul’s religious mind likewise arose not from a mystical experience itself but from the structural coupling between the meaning of the resurrection and his Jewish messianic framework.In characterizing St. Paul’s experience of the risen Christ and his theology of reconciliation, Paul reconfigured his Jewish expectation proleptically—where the future meaning of resurrection rewrote the present without erasing the covenantal past.
Cybernetics, Paradigm, and Ethical Imperative
Having established how religious meaning emerges through autopoietic coupling in the mystical, neurodynamic, and theological registers, we can now extend this framework to the broader social, linguistic, and systemic domains in which meaning is likewise generated. Religious and social meaning‑making share the same autopoietic–cybernetic principles.
The cybernetic model of religion is concerned with second‑order observation along with its ethical implications. Heinz von Foerster’s second‑order cybernetics emphasizes that the observer is always implicated in the system being observed. We do not perceive our blind spot as a black void in the visual field which requires reflective re‑entry to overcome.
This insight reveals the ethical dimension of cybernetics: the observer cannot escape responsibility for the distinctions they draw, the descriptions they generate, and the worlds they help bring forth. Cybernetics thus becomes not merely a theory of systems but a paradigm of ethical self‑implication.[14]
Von Foerster’s work is deeply influenced by Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis, which itself emerged from early cybernetics and systems thinking. He recalls how Maturana captivated him with the concept of autopoiesis—the organization of living systems.[15]
This position establishes two observers through their use of language, from which emerges a third concept: the elementary nucleus of society formed by the two observers. This triadic nucleus constitutes a form of linguistic boundary through which society emerges as an autopoietic domain. All three elements are required to maintain this closed, boundary-based open, and triadic relationship.[16]
As von Foerster warns, “if we fail to recognize autonomy of each, we may turn into a society that attempts to honor commitments and forgets about its responsibilities.” [17] This ethical imperative becomes especially significant when cybernetics is applied to social systems. Against this backdrop, to observe is to act, and to act is to assume responsibility for the worlds we bring into being.
Varela introduces a third, self‑indicating state that distinguishes between inside and outside. This state accounts for system integrity and autonomy, enabling a system to “re‑enter” its own logical space and generate a self‑referential loop. The third state, or “self‑cross,” represents the initial act of boundary drawing, maintaining dynamic disequilibrium with its environment. A calculus of re‑entry becomes the means of renewing second‑order observation and implying a paradigm shift.[18]
Structural coupling enables recursive exchanges that preserve difference while allowing paradigms to evolve through adjacency, translation, and synaptic crossing. In this view, a paradigm is not a closed framework but a dynamic boundary architecture—an identity that sustains itself through ongoing coupling with other systems, environments, and forms of life.
For Thomas Kuhn, a major paradigm shift occurs when normal science reveals inconsistencies or contradictions in the face of anomalies. Kuhn emphasizes anomaly‑driven crisis, however, von Foerster shifts attention to the semantic rigidity of a paradigms—their apparent perfection concealing the very blind spots that precipitate their rejection. For example, Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system challenged the Ptolemaic geocentric model in the Almagest. Copernicus’s heliocentric model, though flawed, displaced the Ptolemaic system and marked a critical paradigm shift.[19]
The cybernetic model bridges position redeploys a theory of paradigms as historically situated language network, intersubjective communication, and ethical imperative. Paradigms are not static frameworks but autopoietic configurations enacted through communal practices and stabilized through recursive communication. It forms linguistic networks whose meanings emerge through overlapping similarities.[20]
Von Foerster describes society through the “many‑brain problem,” arguing that modern societies suffer from a participatory crisis. It arises when individuals are structurally excluded from the feedback loops that sustain collective meaning. In this situation, society becomes a “system”—a depersonalized establishment dominated by a monstrous, tyrannical figure that governs through absurd, illogical, and oppressive means. The cybernetic framework and its structural coupling imply the need for legal reform, particularly around racial justice, as viewed through the lens of radical constructivism.[21]
However, Jean‑François Lyotard critiques systems theory within the cybernetic framework as inherently technocratic, arguing that in postindustrial societies the normativity of laws is displaced by the performativity of procedures. Technology, authority, and power form part of the “regime of the problematic,” where legitimation no longer arises from normative deliberation but from the self‑authorizing authority of the system itself. [22]
Against postmodern critique, a cybernetic model of society and religion highlights self‑referential autopoiesis and its political implications through autonomy, responsibility, and choice—contrasted with authoritative decisionism. Von Foerster formulates a constructivist ethical imperative: “I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices.”[23]
Religion and the Genealogical Analysis
Von Foerster’s cybernetic model is influenced by Wittgenstein’s ethical position, but remains limited in developing the latter’s religious dimension. Religion manifests itself. As Wittgenstein notes, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is… The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling… There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.” [24]
The mystical shows itself through embodied meaning, not through propositional content. Religious experience arises through the self‑showing of the sacred within the lifeworld, mediated by narrative, ritual, and communal practice. Its capacity for renewal emerges through learning from other traditions—cultivating humility, spiritual poverty, and openness to mutual transformation.
Speaking a language is part of an activity—a form of life—structured by shared rules in adjacency with a plurality of other language games. The meanings of words emerge through “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss‑crossing,” [25] allowing for fluid, flexible understanding rather than rigid boundaries or fixed definitions.
Linguistic suspension becomes an epistemic grid for genealogical analysis, tracing elective affinities among ideas, discourses, interests, power, and governance as they are stratified across society, culture, institutions, race, gender, and epigenetic lifelines. This genealogical analysis remains underdeveloped in Wittgenstein, whose focus on language games does not fully address the structural stratifications through which meaning is historically produced.
Religious mediation functions as an embodied cognitive interface—an adaptive system that organizes meaning, coordinates collective action, and sustains communal identity. Religion is understood as connected to the irreducible, insofar as the structure of difference is embedded in its relations to finite provinces of meaning, bodily experience, the vivid present, and the history of religion. Its autopoietic practice is sedimented in historical conditions and cultural transmission, yet continually reactivated within the dialectical horizon of retention and prolepsis through radical reflection—an inquiry back (Rückfrage) to the origin of geometry and the lifeworld.
This interrogative skill aligns with the archaeological clarification of discourses that have degenerated into obscurity or oppression within the regime of effective history and its innocent victims. The meaning of religious geometry—the irreducible—thus inspires immanent critique, an open horizon, and emancipation, rather than the breakup of presence, deconstructive reversal, or the delaying of origin through the substitution of the supplement.[26]
Lived experience and neural dynamics converge to reveal how religious practices shape—and are shaped by—the recursive coupling of brain, body, and lifeworld. Meaning rises from the quiet choreography of mid‑level synaptic clusters—a trembling constellation of AM patterns where sensation, affect, memory, and the pulse of social life gather into a first shimmering field of significance, long before any global neuronal workspace flares into conscious light. This field is not given from above; it is woven from the self‑organizing interplay of brain, body, and world.
Consciousness is the turning back toward this already‑unfolding field, the moment when meaning becomes aware of its own movement. Time is born in this ontological gesture. Noesis awakens within a noema that has been flowing all along, and GNW serves only as the neural lantern that illuminates this reflexive return.
Religion emerges from this reflexive meaning field as a way of shaping a world—a world of transcendence, of stories, of ontological order, of the shared ethos that binds a community. It arises through the body‑subject’s enveloping embrace of the world, where meaning gathers like flesh, thick with contact and resonance, and cannot be understood apart from the structural coupling that opens the living seam between brain, body, and environment.
In this coupling—this trembling threshold where flesh meets world—patterns settle into the stable contours of meaning. This space is an attractor basin, a cradle where significance takes form and the innovations of life unfold.
If neurodynamics understands consciousness not as a mere reflection of the present but as a process that pre‑activates future possibilities, the attractor basin does not simply store past firing histories; it is subtly reorganized in anticipation of incoming inputs. In this sense, the brain is always open toward adjacent possibilities, and these possibilities enter the present neural rhythm as a form of proleptic arrival.
In evolutionary developmental biology, developmental plasticity is already recognized as a core mechanism for anticipating future environments; life continually develops toward the future. This anticipatory structure can be understood through epigenetic resilience and temporal complexity. Epigenetics does not merely preserve traces of the past but performs predictive regulation in preparation for future environmental conditions. Life does not “wait” for the future; it actively pre‑configures the future while inhabiting the vivid present. The future flickers within the proleptic horizon of perception, appearing as enacted anticipation.
Merleau‑Ponty’s notion of flesh deepens this insight: the body is not a discrete object but a crossing—a chiasm—between perceiver and perceived, self and world. His concept of “structure” refers to the organism’s integrated functioning within a general system of reference, emphasizing the dynamic interplay of perception, action, and environment. This chiasmic ontology becomes the basis for intercorporeality, the shared relational experience through which bodies form one inseparable flesh.
In this sense, intentionality becomes evolvability: a dynamic orientation through which the organism projects itself into the world and reorganizes its possibilities. This alignment between phenomenology and neurodynamics clarifies the biological architecture of intentionality. [27]
Meaning is not an abstract semiotic layer but the generative pattern of life itself—an autopoietic field in which religious experience, social interaction, and ecological belonging co‑emerge. Religious patterns and development can be seen in the change or innovation of religious paradigms, which are not fixed but historically situated. Religion serves as a synoptic hub, preserving boundary identity and reinforcing adjacency with other sociocultural realms, providing stabilization, social ethos, a general order of life, and meaning‑making.
The lifeworld is not colonized by system encroachment per se, but by the loss of this structural whole of recognition. When this safeguard erodes, systems close upon themselves, abstraction detaches from embodiment, and the lifeworld becomes vulnerable to domination without reciprocal consent.
Having established an autopoietic account of meaning across religious, social, and systemic domains, we can now confront one of the most contested terrains of embodiment and meaning: the feminist critique of sexual difference and the body‑subject.
Excursus: Feminist Philosophy of Irreversibility and the Body Subject
In Luce Irigaray’s critique of Merleau-Ponty, she argues that the universal flesh and reversibility risk phallocentrism by neglecting sexual difference and the alterity of the other. For her, the “two lips” exemplify a tactile irreversibility that differs from the reversible chiasm of one hand touching the other, revealing a structure she believes phenomenology cannot accommodate.
Yet if Irigaray grounds feminine language in an essentialized body subject, the autopoietic–epigenetic paradigm shows that bodies are already stratified across culture, society, and ecological lifelines. Real women are shaped by race, class, gender, sexuality, and epigenetic modulation; there is no primordial feminine body. Her “hoop-playing” linguistic economy becomes a metaphysical fiction unable to account for the multilayered lifelines of embodiment. [28]
Irigaray claims that phenomenology lacks the spacing required for questioning between two. She is suspicious of phenomenology as the “whole of philosophy,” assuming that everything is already given, whereas philosophy’s task is to restore a power to signify—a birth of meaning. For her, such restoration is impossible without altering the foundations of language. [29]
By contrast, phenomenology begins with linguistic epoché, which creates a structural interval that opens the field of questioning. This interval allows coupling with multiple realities while preserving identity. Husserl’s restoration of a “power to signify”—wild meaning—reveals language not as a fixed maternal ground but as a domain of emergence, where meaning arises through embodied differentiation rather than essentialized foundations.
Her proposal of a feminine divine seeks to sacralize the maternal body, yet this misfires against the lifeworld’s stratification across color lines, gender formations, colonial histories, and the “third spot” of sexuality. The female subject cannot dispense with the ecological and sociocultural lifelines that shape embodiment. In this regard, the chiasm is designed to allow mutual exchange while preserving ontological difference rather than solidifying sameness.
Merleau-Ponty’s flesh is not a maternal figure but a non-gendered, pre-subjective field of intercorporeality. This calls for linguistic suspension—an epistemic grid capable of interrogating the Eurocentric binary regime of sexual difference. Irigaray inadvertently reproduces the dualism she seeks to dismantle. Embodied formations such as bakla in the Philippines exceed binary codes and reveal the limits of any sexual ontology that cannot account for third-regime sexualities or stratified lifelines.[30]
Reversibility in Merleau-Ponty is structural, relational, and ontological: it names the intertwining through which identity is preserved in autopoietic differentiation. Irigaray’s “two lips” represent one configuration of relational alterity, but not an incommensurable alternative to the chiasm. Irreversibility lies not in sexual duality but in the temporal arrow of becoming. The chiasm is not a solipsistic loop but an ecological crossing in which identity is preserved through autopoietic differentiation.
Intertextual practice becomes a tessellating strategy of de-totalizing resistance against binary inflation. Patterned interlocking of distinctions and lifelines generates new semantic ensembles within the horizon of semantic realism. Synaptic crossings animate these patterns, illuminating genealogical realities through traversing practice. I call this relational emergence of meaning a semantic theory of genealogy—one that operates across the stratified lifelines of the socio-ecological realm.
Coda
Ecological thinking entails deliberate wisdom and practices for the common good, in which human beings live within a division of labor that must be managed well for flourishing. Religion is constructed in the experience of meaning through structural coupling with ultimate reality, which does not replace the self’s experience and expectation but fulfills them. The mystical mind does not overwrite the religious mind.
The religious mind is awakened through radical reflection upon its geometric source of meaning, reactivating its living presence through immanent critique, constructive renewal, and emancipation from what has been sedimented as hierarchical systems—whether in prejudice, obscurantism, or in the erasure of origin through the emptying strategies of deconstructive reversal.
The articulation of the lifeworld with second‑order cybernetics highlights the politics of autopoiesis, particularly in refining the systemic construction of sociocultural life and modularity while safeguarding ecological integrity and religion. Modularity becomes an effective strategy of surplus meaning, enabling facilitated variation, growth, and intersubjective communication.
As the boundary between human cognition and technological systems becomes increasingly porous, the mind participates in cybernetic loops that modulate perception, attention, and decision making. This episteme calls for a reflexive science that includes the observer within the system of observation, integrating description, embodiment, reflection, and self‑renewal—hallmarks of a second‑order cybernetic.
Meaning evolves through modular differentiation. Modularity generates semantic spandrels, just as the division of labor in well‑ordered social systems generates social spandrels—new roles, meanings, and solidarities within civil society. Surplus meaning thus becomes the semantic ecology of organic solidarity, grounding a politics of autopoiesis oriented toward democratic resilience and the flourishing of diversity.
Here the politics of autopoiesis enters not as ideology but as a structural consequence of modularity: a systemic architecture rather than a normative assertion. The justice of the common good is anchored in social moral spandrels—the emergent solidarities and meaning ensembles that arise from differentiated, interdependent lifelines.
Therefore, I offer new insights into the politics of autopoiesis and the religious configuration of the mystical mind in terms of lifeworld, intertextuality, and enriched experience—against the limitations of universal relativism or the totalizing impulse to unify diverse religious paths into a single metaphysical invention of God.
A politics of autopoiesis affirms the primacy of embodied intersubjectivity, shared responsibility, and an immanent critique of totalizing systems, safeguarding the structural whole of recognition through linguistic suspension and genealogical discernment. This interpretive grid incorporates feminist critiques of the gendered body subject, including the irreversible operation between the “two lips.” It acknowledges that gendered philosophy exceeds binary codes of sexual difference in contact with a third regime of gender.
The autopoietic self is sexually closed yet open to structural coupling with other sexualities and gender identities. Tessellation expresses a mosaic pattern that covers a surface without empty spaces, allowing each configuration to sustain its own mode of existence across multiple realities without being reduced to binary opposition.
The politics of autopoiesis examines how essentialism emerges across multiple realities stratified through society, culture, and ecological–cybernetic lifelines—through the systemic construction of reality rather than succumbing to the binary logic of opposition. Within this framework, a geometry of life is concerned with each pattern having its own meaning and right within the definite provinces of life resilience. In the multilayered realities of life, sexuality is disclosed through the lived experience of the body, yet its capacity to form a stable domain of meaning depends on cultural–ecological resilience. For this reason, the generalization of sexual difference always carries risks within the geometry of life.
An autopoietic skill of linguistic suspension navigates alongside semantic realism, acknowledging tessellating contributions to truth claims through transposition and intertextuality while enriching one’s particular identity. An autopoietic understanding of religion affirms Wittgenstein’s insight that the divine shows itself beyond the limits of linguistic grammar, while also recognizing that the sacred manifests through multiple religious language games. Divine disclosure is not confined to a single tradition but emerges through embodied practices, symbolic grammars, and culturally embedded ways of life.
[1] Higashi and Burns, Theoretical Studies of Ecosystems.
[2] Aristotle’s Politics, 2nd ed. trans. Carnes Lord, I, 11, 1258b, 33–34.
[3] Valera, et al., The Embodied Mind, 185.
[4] Folke, et al. “Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability,” 20.
[5] Gordon, The Ecology of Collective Behavior, 2-3.
[6] Ibid., 7-8, 77.
[7] “An Interview with Francisco Varela,” Wild Duck Review, 1-7.
[8] Ibid., 223.
[9] Valera, et al., The Embodied Mind, 221, 223.
[10] Cited in Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, 199.
[11] Odum and Barrett, Fundamentals of Ecology, 5th., 2.
[12] Eugene d’Aquili and Newberg, The Mystical Mind, 3-15.
[13] Ibid., 180-1.
[14] Varela, “The early days of autopoiesis: Heinz and Chile. Systems Research” (1996) 13(3): 407– 416.
[15] Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding, 283.
[16] Ibid. 284.
[17] Ibid., 286.
[18] Valera, “A Calculus for Self-Reference,” International journal (1975), Vol.2. 6.
[19] Foerster, Understanding Understanding, 284.
[20] Kuhn, “Postscript-1969,” The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., 203.
[21] Foerster, Understanding Understanding, 196.
[22] Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 47.
[23] Ibid., 282.
[24] Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico‑Philosophicus, 6.44. 45. 6.522.
[25] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 66.
[26] Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, 7, 11–12.
[27] Freeman, How Brains Make up Their Minds, 35.
[28] Irigaray, Sexual Differences, 182, 183.
[29] Ibid., 184.
[30] Manalansan, IV. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora.