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Kinesthesia: An extended critical overview and a beginning phenomenology of learning

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Even our capacity to perceive is not as basic as kinesthesia, for it depends on the latter for its own possibility (Sokolowski 1974, p. 97).

Abstract

This paper takes five different perspectives on kinesthesia, beginning with its evolution across animate life and its biological distinction from, and relationship to proprioception. It proceeds to document the historical derivation of “the muscle sense,” showing in the process how analytic philosophers bypass the import of kinesthesia by way of “enaction,” for example, and by redefinitions of “tactical deception.” The article then gives prominence to a further occlusion of kinesthesia and its subduction by proprioception, these practices being those of well-known phenomenologists, practices that exemplify an adultist perspective supported in large part by the writings of Merleau-Ponty. Following this extended critical review, the article shows how Husserl’s phenomenology enlightens us about kinesthesia and in doing so offers us substantive clues to the phenomenology of learning as it takes place in the development and acquisition of skillful movement. It shows further how phenomenological methodology contrasts markedly with existential analysis, most significantly in its recognition of, and its ability to set forth a developmental history, a veritable genetic phenomenology that is basically a phenomenology of learning anchored in kinesthesia. After showing how that phenomenology of learning finds mutual validation in a classic empirical study of infant movement, the article ends by highlighting how human “I cans” are grounded in “I move,” specifically, in the pan-human ability to learn one’s body and learn to move oneself.

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Notes

  1. Bermúdez’s account of tactical deception is conspicuously biased. Bermúdez labels certain researchers “primatologists,” namely, those who offer “a more parsimonious interpretation” of “interpersonal deception” (Bermúdez 2003, pp. 175–176):

    There are well-documented examples of primate behavior that some prominent students of animal behavior have thought can only be interpreted as examples of interpersonal deception (de Waal 1982; Premack and Woodruff 1978, and some of the essays in Whiten and Byrne 1988). But the consensus opinion among primatologists is that a more parsimonious interpretation of these behaviors is to be preferred (see, e.g., Gómez 1996; Hauser 2000; Povinelli 1996).

    Surely it is odd that de Waal, Premack and Woodruff, and Whiten and Byrne are referred to as “students of animal behavior,” while Povinelli and others are identified as “primatologists,” especially since Povinelli is a physical anthropologist and the “students of animal behavior” have experience as field primatologists, experience different from that in experimental laboratories such as those of Povinelli (see de Waal 1982; Premack and Woodruff 1978; Whiten and Byrne 1988).

  2. As shown elsewhere, thinking in movement generates and is generated by corporeal concepts (Sheets-Johnstone 2010b, 2013, 2017b). To be noted explicitly in this context is that the ability of human infants, human adults, and nonhuman animals to think in movement is not a perfunctorily recognized ability in circumstances “when something goes wrong” and otherwise lies buried. Such perfunctory recognition and burial fail to acknowledge the very knowledge—and with it the very familiarity—of those so-called “motor habits” that allow them to move efficiently and effectively in their respective Umwelten (von Uexküll 1957 [1934]) and that have been built up by thinking in movement. For the same reason, neither can ontogenetic learning be taken for granted without compromising a bona fide phenomenology of consciousness, agency, social cognition, and more (cf. Gallagher 2005). What thus warrants recognition is the fact that experience and judgment (Husserl 1973b) begin in infancy in humans and in other animal species that come into the world dependent for substantive periods of time on parents and others to feed them, shelter them, protect them, and so on, experience and judgment that center on thinking in movement in ways that allow them to move efficiently and effectively in the world.

  3. It is encouraging that a present-day neuroscientist laments this very elevation. See Janoff (2018).

  4. It is perhaps no wonder that a spatially pointillist and temporally punctual posture-tethered body is commonly described in terms of “sensations,” which are spatially pointillist and temporally punctual. For more on the latter topic, see Sheets-Johnstone (2006, 2012b).

  5. For a fuller discussion of the significance of movement in perception and what Husserl identifies as if–then relationships, see Sheets-Johnstone (1999/exp. 2nd ed. 2011).

  6. Merleau-Ponty’s “existential analysis” is based on the writings of neuroscientists Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb about their patients, notably “Schneider.” Moreover as noted elsewhere (Sheets-Johnstone 2018),

    Merleau-Ponty drew on the writings of Ernst Cassirer…sometimes without due citation. A remarkable difference exists between the two philosophers. While Merleau-Ponty read the writings of Gelb and Goldstein, Cassirer visited the Frankfurt Neurological Institute where Gelb and Goldstein conducted their research. He observed patients at the Institute and even had “frequent conversations” with a patient (unnamed, but quite likely Schneider) (Cassirer 1957, p. 239). It is not surprising, then, that Goldstein cites Cassirer substantively in his own writings (Goldstein 1939, 1940). Cassirer’s citations of Goldstein and Gelb in support of his differentiating “active space” and “symbolic space” are of particular interest insofar as they mirror Goldstein and Gelb’s original distinction, and in turn, Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between “concrete movement” and “abstract movement.”

  7. With respect to “I can,” Merleau-Ponty states in a footnote, “This term is the usual one in Husserl’s unpublished writings” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 137). Merleau-Ponty omits any mention of the derivation of “I can” and indeed an elucidation of just how the “term” is “the usual one in Husserl’s unpublished writings.”

  8. Gallagher and Zahavi’s claim is in fact preceded by a direct quote from Merleau-Ponty. The quote, however, concerns not “existential realities” of which Gallagher and Zahavi write, but what Merleau-Ponty calls “‘physiological realities’” that do not enter into our real-life, real-time experience (Merleau-Ponty 1963, p. 188): “[W]hen I witness events that interest me, I am scarcely aware of the perceptual breaks which the blinking of the eye-lids imposes on the scene, and they do not figure in my memory” (ibid.). In effect, ‘the body is not trying to stay out of our way’. It is we who, in ‘witnessing events that interest us’, do not turn attention to our eyes, and not only to their blinking, but to how wide they are opening and in which specific direction they are focused.

  9. For more on kinesthetic memory, see Sheets-Johnstone (2012a). We might also in this context pointedly ask: Where is the tactile-kinesthetic body and the tactile-kinesthetic experiences that anchor the claim, “the normal person can, in the absence of any movements, always distinguish a stimulus applied to his head from one applied to his body”? (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 108). Where is the kinesthetic learning and kinesthetic memory that anchor the claim, “[I]n the normal person every event related to movement or sense of touch causes consciousness to put up a host of intentions which run from the body as the centre of potential action either towards the body itself or towards the object” (ibid., p. 109). Where too is the thinking in movement that grounds the very formation of habits that come to inhere in kinesthetic memory as themes with variations?

  10. Sokolowski’s observations are equally cognizant of the intimate relationship of touch and movement, of what has been termed the “tactile-kinesthetic body” (see Sheets-Johnstone 1999/exp. 2nd ed. 2011). His observation of the relationship begins as follows: “The process of touching, furthermore, is a spatial motion, as one part of the body moves to another, and thus kinesthesia and touch are essentially related.” He ends his observation by pointing out that “the lived body is an identity within complex manifolds, tactile and kinesthetic, actualized and potential; it is the field where sensations, moods and feelings take place” (Sokolowski 1974, pp. 94–95).

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Sheets-Johnstone, M. Kinesthesia: An extended critical overview and a beginning phenomenology of learning. Cont Philos Rev 52, 143–169 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-09460-7

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