Abstract
This article highlights a neglected, if not wholly overlooked, topic in phenomenology, a topic central to Husserl’s writings on animate organism, namely, animation. Though Husserl did not explore animation to the fullest in his descriptions of animate organism, his texts are integral to the task of fathoming animation. The article’s introduction focuses on seminal aspects of animate organisms found within several such texts and elaborates their significance for a phenomenological understanding of animation. The article furthermore highlights Husserl’s pointed recognition of “the problem of movement,” movement being an essential dimension of animation if not definitive of animation itself. Succeeding sections testify to “the problem of movement” and the need to address it. They do so by answering the following basic questions: What indeed is livingly present in the experience of movement, whether our own movement and the movement of other animate beings, or the movement of leaves, clouds, and so on? What distinguishes kinesthetic from kinetic experiences of movement? How are movement and time related? Just what is the problem of movement and how do we address it? In what way is movement pertinent to receptivity and responsivity? Throughout these sections the article encompasses phenomenological analyses, elaborations, and implications of animation.
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Notes
Flora such as a rose and a linden, for example, are of course animate in the sense of being living and even moving in terms of growth and change. See also Pollan (2013) for burgeoning new understandings of flora.
Clearly—and particularly in light of the insuppressibility of kinesthesia—we do not have to wait until something untoward occurs that awakens us into awareness and deters us from continuing on our way. On the contrary, precisely because movement is a dynamic happening and because the dynamics of our everyday movement have become habitual and are within our repertoire of what Husserl terms our “I cans,” we can consult them at any time. In short, and as I have elsewhere shown (Sheets-Johnstone 2011a), any time we care to pay attention to our own movement, there it is. Furthermore, we all learned our bodies and learned to move ourselves as infants and young children (ibid.). From this pan-human ontological perspective, the idea of starting with “action” is actually adultist; movement obviously comes first. There would indeed be no action if movement were not present from the first day and before, present and there to be honed and perfected. In learning our bodies and learning to move ourselves by attending to our own movement, we forged an untold number of dynamic patterns that became habitual. Familiar dynamics—tying a knot, brushing one’s teeth, buttering one’s toast, writing one’s name, pulling weeds, sweeping, typing, playing a Bach prelude, and so on—are woven into our bodies and played out along the lines of our bodies. They are kinesthetic/kinetic melodies in both a neurological and experiential sense (Luria 1966, 1973). When we turn attention to these familiar dynamics, to our own coordination dynamics (Kelso 1995; Kelso and Engstrøm 2006), we recognize kinesthetic melodies; they bear the stamp of our own qualitatively felt movement patterns, our own familiar synergies of meaningful movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2009a, b).
“Agency” is actually an adultist term that fails to take Husserl’s insight into the origin of “I cans” into account, namely, that “I move” precedes “I do,” and “I can.” Agency as a repertoire of I cans (and an ever-expanding or possibly expanding repertoire of I cans) is basically a matter of “making things happen”: I can pull that toy toward me; I can close my mouth, turn my head, and refuse the spoon filled with food that someone is trying to put in my mouth. Moreover from infancy onward, we experience spontaneous dispositions to move: when something is put into one’s mouth, or when one puts something oneself into one’s mouth, one does not just let it sit there.
Sensations, specifically kinesthetic sensations, can, however, give one a static over-all sense of one’s body, as when one is gripped with pain or startled rigid in fear. Even so, it is notable that sensations commonly and simply “happen to you.” They are commonly the result of something, precisely as with a flash of light or an itch. Dynamics, in contrast, are something “you make happen.” You create them when you kick a ball, dry yourself after a shower, and so on. All such patterns of movement constitute a particular dynamic flow of energy that has equally particular spatial and temporal contours. For a further elaboration and discussion of sensations as spatially pointillist and temporally punctual phenomena in contrast to kinesthetically felt qualitative dynamics, see Sheets-Johnstone (2006).
The comet’s tail makes an appearance in relation to life as well when Husserl writes that “The Ego always lives in the medium of its ‘history’” (Hua IV, p. 339/350). Heidegger’s historical “enigma of motion” is close to the surface in such observations.
Heidegger’s meticulously resonant descriptive analysis of boredom (Heidegger 1995) might seem to come close to being a refutation of the claim, as might the simple expression that “time flies,” i.e., one feels that time is flying by. In no instance, however, does one feel time directly, and this because time is a concept, a fundamental human concept. The concept is definitively tied to movement, but while movement is experienced or experientially possible, time is not. Words definitive of movement are commonly ascribed to time, as in time flying, dragging, creeping along, and so on, just as words describing feelings such as boredom or enduring are commonly ascribed to underlying indirect feelings of time.
Specification of the body as the “zero-point of orientation”, as the “here” of every “there,” and so on, reinforces a purely spatial concept of “the body.” This sense and concept of “the body” reflects a purely spatial understanding of the world that is in large measure due to a concern with cognition, particularly cognition of objects in a surrounding world. The spatial perspective ties in with sensations rather than dynamics, and in terms not just of “the body” but of the surrounding world itself. In reality, that world is never the same from one moment to the next, in large part because of my very movement in it, but in large part too because the sky darkens, the air outside is now cold, the breeze from the north has picked up, the clouds are changing patterns, a cluster of leaves are swirling, and so on.
A further point may be added with respect to a postural notion of the body and a lack of recognition of kinesthesia in preference to talk of proprioception. With respect to the latter, Zahavi, for example, writes that “Not only can I be, live, feel, and move my body, I can also know and describe it theoretically as a complex of physiological organs” (Zahavi 1999, p. 109). What is lacking are precisely phenomenological analyses of living, feeling, and moving my body, but these can be accomplished only through a recognition of kinesthesia in the first place, and a recognition of the fact that we do not come into the world ready-made with all our habits in place and all of the familiar dynamics that go with those habits. Telling too is the fact that if one avers that in the course of everyday life “I do not have observational access to my body in action” but only “non-observational proprioceptive and kinaesthetic awareness of my body in action” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, p. 162), there can hardly be reason for saying “I live, feel, and move my body.”
As to proprioception, it is vital to distinguish postural from kinetic experiences, particularly when one writes, for example, that with respect to what Husserl describes as the co-articulation of perception and “the kinestheses” (Hua IV, pp. 58/63) “the kinaesthetic experiencing [manifests] positions in a system of possible movements” (Zahavi 1999, p. 97). Distinguishing between proprioception and kinesthesia is as phenomenologically essential as distinguishing between sensations and dynamics. In short, to say that “I have a proprioceptive sense of whether I am sitting or standing, stretching or contracting my muscles and to claim that “these postural and positional senses of where and how the body is … are what phenomenologists call a ‘pre-reflective sense of myself as embodied’” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2012, p. 155) are a phenomenological overreach in each instance. While we may certainly “sense ourselves” stretching, for example, and contracting, we do not have a “sense of ourselves” stretching or contracting muscles, at least not in the everyday sense Gallagher and Zahavi describe. We have direct and immediate experiences not of muscles but of movement, and in particular, of distinctively different kinesthetically-felt spatial dynamics in stretching and contracting. In fact, we have distinctively different overall dynamics in stretching and contracting that include temporal and intensity differences as well, precisely as Luria’s description of movement and “complex sequential activity” as kinesthetic melodies so perfectly captures (Luria 1966, 1973).
In truth, Husserl unwittingly deflects attention from the kinesthetic dynamics of animate life by consistently writing of “kinesthetic sensations.” See Sheets-Johnstone (2006) for further elucidation of the felt dynamics of life.
It is in these dynamic kinesthetic realities and animation, for example, that an awareness of the three-dimensionality of space originates, i.e., it originates in the context of perceiving one’s own movement as having a three-dimensional character. When an infant stretches its arms overhead, reaches for a toy, kicks its legs, or runs its hands over a ball, it forms or begins to form a conception—specifically, a non-linguistic corporeal conception—of the three-dimensionality of space. This objectifying perceptual dimension of self-movement is secondary to the original felt kinesthetic dynamics of self-movement. It might be noted that when spatial subjectivity is “enclosed in the body,” i.e., “embodied,” the temporal is not surprisingly put “all in the head” via internal time-consciousness. But in fact, it is only when the foundational reality of constitution passes over the foundational reality of animation that temporality is “all in the head.”
We might in this context recall Husserl’s words: “consciousness of the world is […] in constant motion” (Hua VI, p. 111/109). That observation implicitly validates the inherent animation of animate organisms. Harking back to the question of why there is movement rather than stillness, we might in fact posit in answer that movement is the temporal measure of all things.
It is of interest to point out the similarity between Husserl’s phrase, “elusively flowing life”—“Not even the single philosopher by himself, within the epoche, can hold fast to anything in this elusively flowing life”—and Kornfield and Goldstein’s phrase, “this process of flowing change”—“The truth of our being is simply this process of flowing change” (Kornfield and Goldstein 1987, p. 56). A further similarity is of moment with respect to an awareness of the dynamic nature of consciousness or mind, namely, in Husserl’s affirmation that “consciousness of the world […] is in constant motion” and Kornfield and Goldstein’s affirmation that in meditating, “We can begin to study the whole process of the movement of mind” (ibid. p. 55).
It might be noted that appeals to tactility in particular on behalf of grounding intersubjectivity in the exteriority of one’s own body overlook completely the phenomenological realities of movement (e.g., Zahavi 1999, p.169). Kinesthetic perceptions are notably three-dimensional, not only as when one is learning to walk and to throw efficiently but as when one is learning to make surgical incisions and to drive. Kinesthetic perception is equally integral to understanding foundational forms of “bodily awareness” that ground “our ability to encounter an Other with an internal manifestation of alterity” (1999, p. 169). It is indeed unnecessary to opine that “When my left hand touches my right, I am experiencing myself in a manner that anticipates both the way in which an Other would experience me and the way in which I would experience an Other” (1999, p. 169). In short, when movement is consistently passed over by tactility and examples of touching (e.g., 1999, p. 105), a kind of functionalism obtains, a functionalism that in the end instrumentalizes the body and conceals its kinesthetic melodies (Luria 1966, 1973), obliterating the qualitative dynamics that undergird, structure, and sustain its movement.
All references that follow adhere to Thomas Sheehan’s translated textual quotations from Sein und Zeit in Husserl (1997).
It is important to emphasize that Heidegger’s concern is not with the phenomenon of movement itself—which, being ignored or passed over, itself constitutes a veritable phenomenological gaping hole as well as an “enigma”—but with the historicality of Being.
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This paper is a sizably expanded version of the paper given at the inaugural Satellite Session of the Society for Phenomenology of the Body taking place at the 2013 conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Eugene, Oregon. The session was dedicated to “Husserl’s Concept of Animate Organism.”
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Sheets-Johnstone, M. Animation: Analyses, Elaborations, and Implications. Husserl Stud 30, 247–268 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-014-9156-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-014-9156-y