Raphael Aybar

The author proposes that the phenomenological concept of intentionality is consistent with the idea that the living organism is structurally coupled with its environment, as stated by the theory of Autopoiesis of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. This theory affirms that living organisms produce themselves as systems in response to the disturbances they experience in their environments, and takes their responses as primordial cognitive acts. It is argued that their responses are intentional since they are elemental ways of standing in a world. In the first part, it is explained what Autopoiesis is, how cognition works in living organisms, and what structural coupling is. In the second part, it is stated that living organisms cannot be understood in mechanistic terms since they respond to a teleology inherent to intentional beings. In the last part, it is discussed how structural coupling and intentionality are analogous, and why intentionality is more comprehensive concept than teleology to describe the structure of individual organisms.

This article presents a transit from the establishment of the non-adequacy of theoretical knowledge in Levinas’ philosophy towards Derrida’s proposal, according to which the relation with alterity is animal and not human. It also analyses the way in which the theoretical attitude brings a primacy of the subject and a “reduction of the other to sameness”, and also how the deconstruction of subjectivity enables a non-theoretical relationship with alterity. From this, it considers that alterity, described by Levinas as “human”, appears to consciousness as fundamentally sensible. Finally, it discusses Derrida’s critique to Levinas, concerning a possible exclusion inherent to the concept of the “human”, and suggests considering animality as a common substrate to all alterity, proposal that goes beyond Levinas’ humanism.