Abstrct
Embodiment is to the body as enaction is to movement.1 In each instance, the primary term of the analogy attempts to embrace an animate reality in a way compatible with the science or strand of philosophy being practiced. In each instance, however, the primary term is uncongenial to the basic reality it aims to capture and describe. The lack of fit is indirectly but substantively attested to by indices of books on embodiment and enaction: either no entry exists for the tactile-kinesthetic/affective body and kinesthesia or paltry entries exist. In effect, the foundational ontological and epistemological reality of life is missing: animation is nowhere on the map.2 The lack of fit and missing reality are furthermore attested to by the terms in which proprioception is discussed and the fact that a clear-cut distinction and substantive understanding of the difference between proprioception and kinesthesia is nowhere in evidence (see Sheets-Johnstone 1999 for more on this topic). Proprioception is, properly speaking, not a “matter of debate among philosophers” - seemingly, a matter of determining the correct answer to a multiple-choice question.3 Properly speaking, proprioception is a matter of all manner of bodily organs that sense movement and deformations, a primordial form of animate awareness that began its evolutionary career in surface recognition sensitivity - tactility in the service of movement - that evolved into different external sensors registering movement - chordotonal organs, hair plates, sensilla, cilia, and so on - and that, with the advent of internal bodily organs sensing movement through muscular effort, evolved into kinesthesia (Mill 1976; Laverack 1976; Wright 1976; Dorsett 1976; see Sheets-Johnstone 1999 for a close examination and study of the data). As is evident, proprioception is the broader term with respect to kinesthesia. It refers to a sense of movement and position that includes tactility and gravitational orientation through vestibular sensory organs as well as kinesthesia. As its etymology indicates, kinesthesia in its primary, that is, experiential, sense denotes an awareness of movement, hence an awareness of dynamics, hence an awareness of a qualitatively felt kinetic flow. The flow may be felt as smooth, expansive, abrupt, attenuated, jagged, linear, curved, constricted, slow, and so on, including any and all possible combinations as the flow unfolds. Given the inherent qualitative spatio-temporal-energic character of kinesthesia, it is hardly surprising that discussions of body and of movement that omit kinesthesia from their register omit the very stuff of life and the qualitative nature of that stuff. They omit animation.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay concentrates attention on embodiment. An essay titled “Animation: An Essential, Fundamental, and Properly Descriptive Concept” concentrates attention on enaction and is forthcoming 2009 in Continental Philosophy Review.
- 2.
Opportunities for putting it squarely on the map clearly exist. Consider, for example, Hanna and Thompson’s “animalist” solution to what they term “the mind-body-body problem,” the latter referring to the tripartite sectioning of what they describe as “something” that is “at once a conscious subject, a living and lived body, and an objective material thing” (Hanna and Thompson 2003b, p. 24). In particular, Hanna and Thompson propose that mind and physical body are simply “dual aspects of one’s lived body” (ibid.), and that lived bodies are animal bodies. Their appeal to “dual aspect animalism” (ibid., p. 30) is oddly devoid of any reference to animation, precisely that which would ground their solution in the empirical realities of animate life through reference to proprioception and kinesthesia, the tactile-kinesthetic body and coordination dynamics, and that would flesh out their reliance on “cognitive ethology” (ibid., pp. 31-32) as an academically reputable support for their animalist solution.
- 3.
See Thompson 2007, p. 464, n.3. Thompson cites José Bermúdez’s, Dorothée Legrand’s, and Shaun Gallagher’s “arguments” (as Thompson puts it) as to what proprioception is, that is, whether it is equivalent to prereflective self-consciousness or not and whether the latter consciousness is a perceptual or non-perceptual experience, encapsulating one’s body as object or as subject.
- 4.
An editorial concern that the word animation “does not express the bodily nature of cognition” is thus answered; no ‘embodiment’ needed.
- 5.
“We have chosen to take as a guideline the idea… that a successful scientific theory of cognition must account for phenomenality, that is, … for the fact that for a whole set of cognitive systems, and for the human one in particular, things have appearances. We will argue that on the basis of its past achievements in describing such phenomenality, Husserlian phenomenology can play a key role in helping to meet this requirement, provided that it can be naturalized, and even though Husserl himself strongly opposed naturalism. By ‘naturalized’ we mean integrated into an explanatory framework where every acceptable property is made continuous with the properties admitted by the natural sciences” (Roy, Petitot, Pachoud, and Varela 1999, pp. 1-2; second italics added).
- 6.
To my knowledge, neither cognitive scientists nor phenomenologists have written of “embodied” emotion, an odd omission in their conjoint program of ‘embodiment’ since emotions are commonly labelled ‘mental states’. Social psychologists and anthropologists have, on the contrary, embodied emotion. See, for example, Lyon and Barbalet 1994; Niedenthal et al. 2005, the latter only in terms of showing how “embodiment is critically involved in information processing about emotion” (p. 192).
- 7.
The qualities of movement do not change according to where one lives or in which culture one is brought up. What does change are the appurtenances that are or are not part of one’s everyday life: toothpaste, water from a faucet, a car, and so on.
- 8.
It should perhaps be noted in this context that Mark Johnson’s anchorage of ‘the body in the mind’ (Johnson 1987) shows how meaning is generated in and through bodily experience. His analyses are thus in a sense compatible with the basic dynamic principles outlined in this chapter. The compatibility is limited because foundational aspects of animation - kinesthesia, the tactile-kinesthetic body, the developing coordination dynamics of infancy, and the coherency of Leib and Körper - do not enter into the picture. Johnson’s primary concern is language and in fact basic elements in his analyses - ”image schemata” and “imagination” - are “embodied.” In his most recent book with George Lakoff (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), “embodiment” figures even more strongly.
- 9.
Sensations, however, may in some instances coalesce. A throbbing sensation, for example, may develop into a kinetic form. See Sheets-Johnstone 2006.
- 10.
We might note that agency is empirically linked not to an ontological entity called a self but to an epistemological subject in the form of animation and kinesthesia.
- 11.
Indeed, to speak of proprioception in terms of “proprioceptive feedback” is, to begin with, to speak in terms of a motorology, not of a living and lived-through dynamics as it unfolds and of that living and lived-through dynamics as a kinetic melody at the level of neurophysiological innervations and denervations (with respect to the latter, see Luria 1966, 1973).
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Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2010). Body and Movement: Basic Dynamic Principles. In: Schmicking, D., Gallagher, S. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2646-0_12
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