Enactivism and monadology: Where are Baerveldt and Verheggen taking the individual and cultural psychology

The number of concepts which attempt to describe the exchange process betwe en individual and environment is legion. The proposal offered by Baerveldt and Verheggen (1999) to deal with some of the problems of conceptualizing t he exchange between individual and environment is reviewed and the authors' main idea-to construct the individual as an enactive and autonomous unit, on the one hand, and culture as the formative power of an individual's prox imal environment, on the other-is discussed in a historical perspective. Th e venture to cut down this number to only one rather idiosyncratic view is interpreted as an unjustified procrustination of a historically rich, compl ex and often controversial debate which aimed at the illumination of human thought and consciousness and at the exploration of the human capacity to i nteract with the environment and to both internalize and create culture. In dividuals' exchange with others in order to find pragmatic solutions for co mmon problems even in the sciences was a well-established tradition during humanism but began to vanish after Descartes's reduction of the human being to a thinking unit. The paradox stated by the authors is debated within th is historical perspective and their proposed solution for the problem is li kened to Leibniz's idea of conceptualizing individuals as monads interactin g in a pre-stabilized harmony.