João Pina-Cabral
Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS)
Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Our EDGES project is centrally shaped by the notion of entanglement. For us, this concept constitutes more than a metaphor for the complexity that characterizes both the world (at a quantum level) and human socialities (at a transcendental level). Indeed, we believe that it is imperative to move beyond the distinctions of matter/spirit and action/thought. To do so, we need to see that the general principles applicable to inert substances at the microscopic level also apply to living substances and to the forms of sociality without which life itself would not be possible. Living entities are not substances; they are processes, and processes of pluralization (insofar as they are social).
In light of this, contemporary philosophers of biology are prone to conclude that, ‘given that everything is fundamentally in process, the challenge is to explain the emergence and the apparent stability of enduring things.’ (Campbell 2015, 2). Now, if this holds true for biology, which studies organisms, it must also hold true for social scientists like us who study relations between organisms and the world (see Pina-Cabral 2025). As the world of life is essentially processual and nothing lasts forever, that means that the relative durability of living entities—whether organisms or collective entities—must be our central challenge of analysis. The concept of entanglement, therefore, necessarily implies that of emergence—that is, the processes of divergence and differentiation through which identifiable entities and beings come into presence in our world at various scales of aggregation.
As Husserl has explained, the ‘natural attitude’ of humans is to assume that the world is made up of ‘things’—independent items that subsequently relate and collide with one another. According to this natural attitude, things exist because they are present, and they are present because … they are present. We do not ask ourselves how things come into presence, nor how they remain with us once they are absent. It is all so ‘natural’! Yet, as Derrida explains, ‘the interiority of memory, and the presence that resides within it, have no meaning whatsoever unless they are limited by the outside […]. It is the archive and writing that, by imposing limits, enable and secure memory’s finitude, thereby preventing it from dispersing itself infinitely.’ (Pimentel 2019: 135). He uses ‘archive’ and ‘writing’ here in a technical sense to refer to the traces left behind by life as a continuous process of differentiation: ‘Memory without writing, […] inside without outside, and generally, presence without sign, are […] nothing but a dream, a pipe dream, one might add.’ (Pimentel 2019, 135).
In fact, many decades have passed since quantum physicists demonstrated beyond any doubt that the ‘natural attitude’ constitutes a secondary effect—that is, it is a mirage, a theatre for life. In actual fact, entanglement is the fundamental condition of the world. The entities that we identify in the world (those presences, among which we ourselves, as persons, are but one more) are processes of reduction of the original entanglement. Entanglement, no matter how much it is shaped (signified) by us, never entirely vanishes. The door to the unknowable remains perpetually open.
The macroscopic entities that constitute our lifeworld are the result of processes of demarcation that we refer to as emergence. An entity emerges when it acquires a singularity of its own, which necessarily results from a scaling process through which the interaction among parts gives rise to properties not possessed by the sum of the parts. In this sense, the process of life is a complex process of emergence. Living beings are emergent entities insofar as they possess unique, singular qualities that arise from the interconnection of their parts with the whole, granting them a certain durability as distinct structures. ‘The reification of present beings into things, into ob-jects,’ Derrida asserts, ‘ensues from man’s interest-driven un-emphatic relation toward them, a relation based on affirming and securing, deliberating and reckoning, thinking.’ (Pimentel 2019, 91).
Emergent entities within life never fully detach from the entanglement out of which they have arisen. In the human case, all social identities—whether personal or collective—originate in participation among persons; that is, within the space of interpenetration through which individuals are constituted, both as organisms and as beings capable of propositional thought. None of us enters the world as a pre-determined individual; we emerge in life from within the living entities that preceded us and that, themselves, emerged before us (see Pina-Cabral 2017). As organisms and as persons, we arise out of plurality and never lose the traces of that prior plurality. Personhood is neither innate nor conferred, but rather the outcome of a capacity for transcendence that humans develop from infancy, as they are linguistically scaffolded and attuned to the affordances and constraints of social worlds.
Karen Barad proposes that, rather than characterizing sociality as a network of interactions—which assumes, in line with the natural attitude, ‘that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction’—we should adopt the notion of intra-action, which ‘recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. […] Distinct agencies are only ‘distinct’ in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements.’ (Barad 2007, 33). Thus, shifting toward a processualist view of biology does not entail abandoning its empirical foundations or succumbing, in any way, to a form of spiritualism. On the contrary, it is an indispensable move if we are to overcome the challenges posed by the mind/spirit dualism inherited from the Cartesian framework that underpins modern science.
The problem is that, within the natural attitude, people tend to conceive of the mind in atomistic terms—that is, essentially as a matter of the privacy of consciousness. In recent decades, however, the philosophers of embodied cognition have argued that we need to abandon this atomistic view, which treats the mind as a closed, non-material environment (e.g. Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). This new ontological approach posits that processes of quantum entanglement constitute the fundamental basis upon which life imposes space-time.Biology, then, turns out not to be the study of how material substances come to form life, but rather of how life itself is a process of instituting entities and presences. In sum, two new assumptions underlie these approaches to cognition: on the one hand, a processual metaphysics that shifts the focus from substances to processes (from substance to emergence); and on the other, a rejection of atomism that takes fully to heart the notion that living entities are at root partible and dividual (that is, they are both the result of an integration of parts, and prone towards merging with other entities).
By focusing on personhood as emergent and by grounding the origins of consciousness in intentionality, we open the way for a new anthropological synthesis—one that brings embodiment to the forefront without diminishing the complexity of the personal processes of transcendence that characterize linguistically informed propositional thought. To achieve this, we adopt a partible (non-atomistic) approach to personhood, and a processualist (non-substantivist) approach to embodiment. This opens the door, for example, to a fuller understanding of how ghosts and gods come to be part of our human world. Their lives piggyback on ours—not in an individual sense, but through the mediation of public forms of life (habitus) and the way these form guides to the imagination (for further development, Pina-Cabral 2025).
This implies that permeability between entities is inevitable—both in terms of the indeterminacy surrounding the emergence of an entity (whether a person or an organism), and insofar as it entails a relation of entanglement between parts and the whole: the parts interact with the whole. As Karen Barad explains, ‘To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the intertwining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.’ (2007: ix). Accordingly, emergence can never be without leakage, for the very existence of an entity-as-such depends on the background from which it has arisen.
To conclude, the presence of things and beings we identify in the world can never be fully deconstructed. We refer to this realization—that is, to the idea that there is no single ultimate substance from which all presences have been shaped—as metaphysical pluralism. This means that there are no things without signs; the original brushstroke was the one that created the world—as the great Chinese philosopher Shitao put it so long ago (see Coleman 1978). However, entanglement always pulls in both directions: there is always some trace of meaning in the signifier and vice versa. We can never entirely extricate ourselves from our immersion in the entangled web—things always carry an excess of baggage, a supplement; signs always say both more and less than what they mean. This excess/deficit is both a source of creativity and a constant threat that haunts all communication. Sociality is communication, and the anxiety produced by metaphysical pluralism is the intentionality of life.
In our EDGES project, when we speak of ‘entangling academic knowledge with indigenous knowledges,’ we are assuming that there are multiple possible ways of world-making (or worlding, as Heidegger put it—see Pina-Cabral 2017). Therefore, we want to place in dialogue the different modes of worlding characteristic of indigenous ways of life, on the one hand, and those that have emerged from the long global history of academic and university life, on the other. They constitute different ways of engaging with the affordances that the world offers us. They are neither uniform within each one of them (as there are many different forms of indigeneity, just as there are many different approaches to academic inquiry) nor inherently incompatible between the two. Indigenous knowledges are often informal ways of worlding, whereas academic or university knowledges tend to maximize the powers of writing. Scientific modes of analysis are shaped by principles of evidentiary constitution and analytical rigor that have evolved over long historical trajectories and that belong to all of humankind.
The often assumed notion that contemporary technoscience is somehow intrinsically ‘Western’ is politically unacceptable—all humans have an equal claim to the forms of agency-enhancement that technoscience affords and all cultures and traditions of the past have contributed towards their development. Thus, indigenous and academic knowledges are not alternatives to be placed in opposition to each other, since scientists themselves, in their personal lives, also engage in informal and pre-analytical modes of worlding.
The wave of so-called ‘post-truth’ attitudes that have gained such visibility of late in our media and political life are clear illustration that, even the custodians of technoscience (in this case, the bilionaires that have come to rule our world) can prove unwilling to live by the forms of worlding that underpin the development of the very technoscience that provides them with their fabulous earnings and outrageous power. Trump’s henchmen seek to control the technologies, but at the same time, they seek to deny the very conditions of constitution of these technological means by attacking the freedom of enquiry that is the ideal that has always guided the development of universities. They want to have their cake and eat it too. In attacking universities, however, they are also attacking the indigenous epistemologies that academics have come to identify, to engage with, and to respect. At root, they are attacking truth itself in the service of their desire to dominate and oppress the less powerful—not only the previously conquered peoples, but also the majority of their own settler (‘white’) populations.
Thus, when the project EDGES brings indigenous and academic knowledges into confrontation with each other, it is assuming much more than simply that these two modes of worlding are distinct: we are affirming that (a) the history of Western conquest and imperialism must be deconstructed in the name of ecumenical values of human fraternity; and (b) no one truly lives according to the logic of technoscience (the idea that ‘science’ is the ideology of modernity is a false dream), and therefore we must learn to live within the entanglement that constitutes the very basis of our originary presence as persons.
The constitutive presence of live persons is the result of a myriad processes of emergence; it is instituted by each of us when, as children, we learn to speak and thereby transcend our animal condition. It is in this originary presence that indigenous and academic forms of worlding (informal modes of being human versus technoscience) become entangled. To embrace entanglement is to know how to leave the door open—both to the past and to the future; it is to accept that pluralism is ultimately irresolvable. To take up the challenge of entanglement is to acknowledge that diversity is the irreducible ground of any order we may create in the world.
Bibliography:
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Campbell, Richard. 2015. The Metaphysics of Emergence. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Coleman, Earle J. 1978. Philosophy of Painting by Shi-T’ao. A translation and exposition of his Hua-P’u (Treatise on the Philosophy of Painting). The Hague: Mouton.
Gallagher, Shaun and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge.
Pimentel, Dror. 2019. Heidegger with Derrida. Being Written. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pina-Cabral, João. 2017. World: an anthropological examination. Chicago: HAU Books.
Pina-Cabral, João. 2025. Metapersons: Transcendence and Life. Chicago: HAU Books.