way-making and navigational mind readings

here’s the original post:

The following is adapted from a talk I gave in Heidelberg, Germany on September 24th, 2026. Please scroll down to find the explainers about navigational mind and the links to Mind & Life, as well as some photos of Heidelberg in Autumn and Arendt love.

Caring From Somewhere: Navigability, Resonance, and the Ecology of Mattering

by Andrea Hiott

Let’s begin with living bodies, and with what I’ve called mattering.

In Being and Time, Heidegger defines Dasein as the being for whom its own being is an issue. He calls the structure of that being Sorge (care/concern) but restricts it to humans who can somehow privately access their own existence. This was too limited for one of his students, Hans Jonas. Jonas argued that the definition does not stop at Dasein. In The Phenomenon of Life, selfhood starts with metabolism. An organism does not persist by keeping its exact configuration of matter but by exchanging it. It depends on that ongoing exchange; this is what Jonas calls needful freedom.

An organism must exchange itself in order to continue being itself.

That’s how I’ve come to think about what ‘needful freedom’ means at various scales.

Any organism’s being is this ongoing action in balance, and it’s never guaranteed. Its being is therefore always precarious so even the metabolizing cell must care (or have concern for) its own, ongoing becoming.

I am extending the original idea and asserting it as even more constitutive with my use of the word mattering. Using this term in English, I’m playing on the double meaning of matter as ‘to become’ and ‘bound up with care’-- for any life, mattering (being alive) is always both the becoming and the caring at once; so it is always significant.

A cell must matter to itself in order to metabolize, though this does not require it to have any sort of existential or ‘global’ sense of its mattering (in the ‘private access’ sense that I think Heidegger means it); it does mean that the parts of whatever we are designating as a cell have some shared concern, that is, the concern to keep this form mattering. Indeed, it is an observation of this mattering that allows us to do any such designating; we notice the form because it exchanges itself to preserve itself in that form of mattering.

Other things (atoms, flames, rocks) also matter, but not to themselves.

This is a shift in how Heidegger used care or concern via Jonas. All living beings matter to themselves. A rock or a flame or an atom is matter, but as far as we can tell, they do not matter to themselves—there is no ‘ongoing exchanging of itself towards preserving itself’.

To use an example that comes up often in the literature, a flame keeps its form while its matter flows through it, yet nothing is at stake for the flame in going out. For something to matter to itself is for it to exchange and thus to become part of a system of mattering beyond itself, whereby others also matter for it. Mattering that is not only becoming but also caring (and therefore living) begins when its becoming is also what is at stake for its continuance. This is living, where the world starts mattering.

In the living, to matter is ‘the care or concern to go on mattering’. The cell does not first exist and then care about its existence. Its existence consists in that it matters for itself. It continues only by acting towards its continuation, by exchanging itself with its encounter, and this is deeply precarious.

Mattering is the most constitutive action we can discuss; it is existence, but it is also what shifts existence into living. It is not an emotion or a moral attitude that has been added on to bodies or the movement of those bodies; it is always already its movement, perhaps later manifesting as emotions or moral attitudes.

Many in the enactive approach have built on Jonas in this direction. in Mind in Life, Evan Thompson argues for a deep continuity of life and mind, extending from (but also shifting and enriching) his work with Varela and Rosch in The Embodied Mind, Varela & Maturana’s idea of autopoiesis (self-creation), and the sense-making that is part of it all. Di Paolo later argued that autopoiesis alone cannot ground sense-making, because autopoiesis is all-or-nothing. That means a system maintains itself or it disintegrates. He added adaptivity to better account for the messiness of this ongoing exchange. An adaptive system is sensitive to whether it is moving towards or away from the boundary of its viability, and only continues to matter so long as it regulates itself, not crossing that line. This sense-making is not the mattering itself but how that mattering goes about its necessary exchange.

Neither mattering nor its means of exchange, its sense-making, requires perception. Bacteria moving up a sugar gradient can be understood as sensing without perceiving, if perceiving means having some representation-mediated access. It ‘cares towards’ the sugar, and the sugar comes to be how it matters to itself and continues mattering. Perception would be a continuation of this process; mind is a way of the continuation of living.

The more complex or varied the exchange, the more bodies can be understood as mattering together at different scales. A human body is not only that mattering, it is also the mattering of its many cells. It is a constellation of matterings. Cells care for their continuation. So do tissues, organs, the immune system, resident microbial populations, the overall human form, and human forms in communities. Each is becoming with something at stake for itself, and each cares towards something different; the cell matters as the human body, but the human body also matters as its cells.

Further enactive work by De Jaegher, Fuchs, Di Paolo, Cuffari and many others extends this account to sensorimotor agency, and then to participatory and linguistic life. Each level brings new stakes. The body is all of these at once. Mattering is not either/or but we can better understand the many scales and layers of life if we consider how they are mattering to themselves and thus how they are exchanging themselves with their encounter.

Consider three positions within one such constellation.

The first is a cell in the lining of the gut. It exchanges itself, admitting some substances and excluding others. It signals to neighboring cells. Within a few days it dies and is replaced; before it dies it contributes to the conditions for its replacement.

It is part of the gut of a second position, a person walking home through a community they have lived in for twenty years. They turn at the local bakery, owned by their fellow community members, to buy their breakfast, as they usually do. They are mattering with that encounter in constant exchange of air and soon (once they are at the bakery) of food. But they are also mattering as part of their community, and they are one way the community is mattering as itself and thus continuing. The community is the third position.

The cell in the gut, the human body, and the community all matter and make it possible for one another to matter through their exchange and continued mattering. Together, they make life navigable.

But sometimes life is no longer navigable for some part of this constellation.

I would like to thus consider another person nearby, someone in the community who used to have a similar routine, but is now in the community clinic, depressed, no longer able to get out of bed or go to the bakery. The bakery’s food no longer matters for them, or perhaps it is that the community matters too much and this is somehow paralyzing. Perhaps something has shifted at one of those levels—in the relations of the body or in the relations of this person in relation to that community—but somehow the mattering in this constellation has been disrupted and there is less resonance among them.

What has happened that has disrupted this person’s exchange with themselves and their community?

Of course I’ve only offered three scales here (the cell in the gut, the human body, the community of bodies), and there are many other possible constellations. But at some level or other, the mattering has been disrupted.

The idea is to consider where the mattering has been disrupted. To approach it as a disruption of systems of mattering. Where is the necessary exchange breaking down? What has stopped mattering, or begun to matter too much in relation to with what it is exchanging?

How might we consider this in a way that helps us understand why it is no longer possible for this person to matter and exchange matter in the same ways?

We need some structure because matterings are not either/or and are therefore messy. What matters at one scale might align or diverge with what matters at another. And on a larger, bodily scale, what one body cares towards might be in opposition to what another is caring towards.

Biology usually describes this divergence through the metaphor of competition. But competition is conflict between systems that care towards different directions, so the mattering is always before the competing and a better framing for understanding the problems we seek to address.

To have a stake is to care; competition presupposes mattering. And illness is what happens when constellations of caring fall out of resonance.

This does not mean cells are kind.

A tumor is a system that matters for itself and the illness is that it will kill what it needs to exchange itself with. It cares for its own proliferation, seemingly successfully but mattering too much, in a trajectory that no longer resonates with the constellation that sustains it; eventually, its over-mattering is also the end of it.

When we say that a person has stopped caring, we are describing a loss of resonance among what matters for an overall constellation. Trying to better view those constellations of care helps us better assess the illness and see what sorts of mattering are leading to their own demise.

Where is the mattering breaking down or where is it exceeding its exchange with others?

This yields diagnostic questions. When a life stops being navigable, the first questions we may want to ask are what is mattering and what is being exchanged to continue that mattering and where has that accelerated or broken down?

To do this, we might consider the landscape in which this mattering is taking place and ask what regularities are affording what sorts of mattering for the person there.

In other words, we might consider how a body goes on mattering to itself and others by looking at its movement through various landscapes of regularity and their affordances.

This means considering navigability.

Bodies move through several landscapes at once: geographical, emotional, social, conceptual, virtual, etc. But a body makes its way through any one of those landscapes because it cares to go on mattering or because something matters there for it with which it exchanges itself. Disruptions can thus be considered when there is too little or too much mattering in relation with those landscapes such that one can no longer make their way and exchange themselves in a healthy way.

So, if we come back to the individual in the community clinic now, we can ask: what sorts of disruptions can we notice in various landscapes of mattering? And how are they competing? What regularities might we shift such that some tension can be eased enough to restore regulation or balance?

Though I do not have time to go into here, doing this means looking at the body’s resonant trajectory in those landscapes, its path of affordances or historical path of mattering that can be traced for each body, for every body arrives at the present with a history of attunement.

It also means considering a body’s orientation, the arrow of what is mattering now. And how this orientation is or is not shifted by the ‘landscape of affordances’ at play.

The more resonance (coherence of lived vibration) between the mattering and the orientation and landscape, the better the navigability—that means the historical trajectory has prepared the body to be moved by what the landscape offers, in the direction of what is now mattering in some landscape of affordances.

So to come back to the person in the community clinic who is depressed, we could begin to notice what matters and what exchanges have mattered in what landscapes and find what paths have been disrupted.

We can notice the different relations of space and time for bodies that are experiencing disruptions of mattering.

As Thomas Fuchs has written, in depression, the lived body congeals and becomes heavy; instead of carrying the person into the world, it becomes a barrier of its very navigability.

It can seem as if there is too much space to find any one path, or to find the energy to continue the exchange, to continue mattering.

In such situations, there’s less resonance between bodies, less exchange, or it is that social disruption itself that has also disrupted the mattering. This is another way that mattering is always ecological, because it is always a matter of exchanging to continue mattering.

Here it’s been helpful for me to think about Sanneke de Haan’s way of distinguishing basic sense-making, in which things have valence for an organism, from existential sense-making, in which a person takes a stance on themselves and their world. The depressed body is still mattering, still living, but it matters less to itself.

If depression seems to broadly be about less mattering and less exchange, then anxiety could be about heightened caring and heightened exchange, though often in more confined or narrowed trajectories.

Here I find Edmund Husserl via Matthew Ratcliffe’s 2024 paper on losing certainty helps. Having certainty means tolerating openness, being able to accommodate many outcomes. Losing certainty means that expectation narrows, competing possibilities appear, and what Husserl calls problematic uncertainty predominates.

Another way of thinking of this is that the anxious body resonates intensely to a small set of paths and loses resonance with the rest of its landscape, often then traversing the same loop, limiting the exchange needed to matter in a way that is coherent with other scales.

I offer these quickly, too quickly, as examples of how this can be further developed. But the idea is that in these cases (depression and anxiety), the question “caring for what, where, and relative to which landscape?” can help us better assess the disruption because we do not have to take the disruption as if it is a fixed category. It is the disruption of ecological regularities of a specific landscape and orientation wherein mattering (for oneself and for others) has been disrupted for a given body.

The cell, the walker, the community, and the person in the clinic each care from somewhere— within a trajectory, towards what matters, encountering a landscape of regularities. The person in the clinic experiences a disruption of resonance somewhere in this (or another similar) constellation, a shift in navigability; this is a disruption in what matters and thus also of the capacity to continue mattering.

Jonas located freedom and need together in the first metabolizing cell. That is where becoming first comes to matter, and where mattering becomes ecological. We are free because we are in need, and we are all in need of one another’s caring. The task is to find new ways to consider what matters and how the paths of affordances for mattering shift in different landscapes.

We all care from somewhere.

And our mattering is what is most basic to our present, past and future together here.

A Note on all this:

I write every couple of Wednesdays about the navigational approach to mind. This one is adapted from a conference talk I gave recently at the Universität Heidelberg in Germany. It’s about ‘mattering’, a term developed for my doctoral work in phenomenology & the cognitive sciences. I’d also like to share an episode from Mind & Life about these topics. I’m grateful to Dr. Johanna Magin for asking me to be a guest. I recommend listening to other M&L Europe conversations such as these with Evan Thompson, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Hanne De Jaegher and Amy Cohen Varela. Mind & Life starts with a name you hear me mention often, Francisco Varela. As always, I also recommend learning about his work…

and now onwards to today’s post…. with photos & more from Heidelberg and Arendt…

This is a reading of the post per request from readers who needed audio options. The original post with links can be found here:

This is a reading of the post below. I was asked to make an audio podcast of all the readings for those who have trouble reading and want to listen, and this is it.

CLICK BELOW TO READ THE ORIGINAL

“Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact.” - Judith Bulter