Modalization of movement: The problem of sensus communis and the limits of phenomenology

Unity and the common qualities of experience: An ancient problem

As a philosophical problem, the unity of consciousness goes back to Plato (Burnyeat & Levett, 1990). In the dialogue “Theaetetus,” Plato’s Socrates refutes the notion associated with Heraclitus that knowledge is perception by pointing out that it would be absurd to consider the soul or perceiving subject as a simple container of the flux of sensations from the separate sense organs (Burnyeat & Levett, 1990). In other words, it is not enough to say that we “contain” sensations, something must account for the unification of the perceptions received from the sense organs in a thinking, perceiving subject. As it is well known, according to Plato, this unification of knowledge must come from resources immanent to the mind. What is central and still relevant to Plato’s account of knowledge is that he describes two different features of experience of, respectively, proper and common qualities of perception: sense perception amounts to the experiential qualities proper or specific to the sense organ that perceives them (e.g., red, round, warm). These proper qualities are fundamentally separate and irreducible to each other. In this image, saying that perception is knowledge would amount to saying that it is the eye that sees and not the perceiving subject, which would imply the consequence that each separate sense organ could be thought of as a perceiving subject in itself or even manifest a mind of its own. Since we cannot see an object of hearing, subjective perception or the soul in Plato’s description must possess a different kind of experiential feature, which can account for the integration or unification of the specific qualities of perception of objects. As Plato points out through Theaetetus, knowledge requires a capacity for discerning objects through universal qualities such as “being and not-being, likeness and unlikeness, sameness and difference, and also of unity and other numbers which are applied to objects of sense” (Plato, trans. 1931, p. 246). Although we cannot see hearing or hear sight, we can still identify features common to the different and irreducible objects of perception. For example, we can say that the specific perceptions of hearing and sight are respectively the same as themselves and different from each other. In the same way, we can say that each separate quality of perception can be unified in discerning them as two or more different or one each, i.e., by number, or that they share the quality of being, in the sense that they both exist or not. Thus, apart from the discrete features of each separate and irreducible perception located in the specific sense organs, Plato’s Socrates infers the notion of common features of experience such as the above-mentioned being, number, difference, sameness, etc., which makes it possible to unify perception in a perceiving subject.

Although both the specific reception of sense perception from the organs and their unification in common features amounts to what we today would call cognition, what is relevant to our current purpose is that Plato’s description separates the cognitive dimension into a passive and active process. In this account, the central point to distinguishing between proper and common or amodal qualities of perceptions is to argue that it is the mind’s immanent capacity for unifying passive sense perceptions into common features, which is the active component of subjective experience. As Socrates convinces Theaetetus in the dialogue, we do not perceive with our senses but rather through our senses (Plato, trans. 1931, p. 245). In this image of thought, perception constitutes a dimension of thought in which the “soul” or the subject thinks by means of integrating the passive sense perceptions in the activity of thought (Gregoric, 2007). Thus, according to Plato, perceptual experience is a process in which thinking actively applies its immanent common features to the passive sense impressions of the body. In other words, passive sense perceptions are not necessary elements of thought, but rather something which thought can choose to take up or activate as its means of thinking. In this sense, the active unifying faculty of thought that leads to knowledge is described as an entity separate and independent from the passive sense perceptions in a way that resembles a Cartesian dualism. As Gregoric points out, an important consequence of Plato’s integration of the senses on the level of thought is that this account forces us to attribute thinking to animals, because the concept of thinking becomes so broad that it entails the simple perceptual abilities of discerning between sense impressions necessary for hunting or finding food. Consequently, as opposed to Plato, Aristotle suggests that the integration or unity of the senses in subjective experience does not involve thinking, but happens at the level of perception by means of the koinê aisthêsis, which, in its Latin translation, came to be termed sensus communis ¹ and common sense in English translations. Aristotle’s notion of sensus communis should not be understood as a common understanding as it is used in daily language, which amounts to an activity of habitual thought, but rather as a non-specialized faculty that operates through all of the other distinct sense perceptions. Thus, common sense is not a sixth sense with a special sense organ added to the five basic ones, because, as Aristotle points out, its object is not simply incidental as in the collection of proper qualities that occurs in relation to the same thing or that we recognize as common to an object (trans. 1931a, p. 425a). As he argues, “the senses perceive each other’s special objects incidentally; not because the percipient sense is this or that special sense, but because all form a unity” (p. 425a). Accordingly, in a lemon, what we perceive directly is not the lemon, but the incidental proper qualities of distinct senses, e.g., bitter and yellow, which we then associate or infer to be a lemon because they happen to occur at the same time. The objects of common sense, common sensibles, are not the result of such incidental occurrences or inferences, but rather qualities directly immanent to what is perceived by the proper or distinct sense perceptions. Following this notion of a common force inherent to sensibility proper, Aristotle located the seat of the common sense in the heart and not the brain, arguing that the heart, unlike the brain, was connected with all the sense organs (trans. 1931b, pp. 439a, 456a; see also Gregoric, 2007, p. 7). Thus, contrary to the common features that Plato singles out, which generally relate to the mind’s active inferential abilities to distinguish between differentials, Aristotle, moreover, describes the common qualities as belonging to a result of a passive process of immediate but transparent sensibles integral to sensation proper. Consequently, Aristotle argues that “‘common sensibles’ are movement, rest, number, figure and magnitude; these are not peculiar to any one sense, but are common to all” (trans. 1931a, p. 418a). The fundamental observations behind the common sense is, not unlike Plato’s, that there are sensibles that are perceptible across several sense modalities, as he explains, “there are at any rate certain kinds of movement which are perceptible both by touch and by sight” (p. 418a). Thus Aristotle’s general description of common qualities resembles Plato’s, in the sense that both accounts pertain to the unity of consciousness in sensuous experience, however, the qualities that Aristotle emphasizes differ according to the fundamental disagreement in terms of at what level the unity or integration happens. Although Plato’s activity of unification immanent to thought is developed through education and experience in terms of thinking, his reliance on thought as the active element in perception fundamentally presupposes that the thinking unity is already given in perception and accordingly the common features amount to the process of representation or reflection of an already given unity. In this aspect, Aristotle’s account of unification at the level of sensation suspends and subordinates the process of thought and representation to the material processes inherent in perception proper. In short, Aristotle’s common sense is not primarily associated with representation, but rather the process of presentation, expression, or what modern science would perhaps conceptualize as emergence. One central exposure of this is seen in the privilege Aristotle gives to movement as the most primary element immanent to all other common qualities of perception:

For all these [common qualities] we perceive by movement, e.g. magnitude by movement, and therefore also figure (for figure is a species of magnitude), what is at rest by the absence of movement: number is perceived by the negation of continuity, and by the special sensibles; for each sense perceives one class of sensible objects. (1931a, p. 425a)

Consequently, rather than presupposing the unity of a thinking subject in an entity separate from the sense organs, Aristotle’s model aims to explain the very process of integration that leads to the emergence or presentation of a unified subjective experience. It is in this perspective that Aristotle also refers to the common sense as “that by which everything is perceived,” “the primary sense,” “master sense organ,” or “the first principle of sensation” (Block, 1961, p. 67). From this central role in perception, Aristotle associates common sense with a range of fundamental functions of experiential life, such as the difference between being awake and asleep (trans. 1931b, pp. 455a: 25–30); memory (pp. 450a: 10–22); the capacity to discriminate between the distinct senses (p. 426b: 20); ipseity or the experiential sense of being a self-identical subject of experience (pp. 455a: 15–20); and time consciousness (pp. 440a: 20–30). However, for the current purpose, Aristotle’s notion of common sense is of central focus because it presents us with an effort to capture the relation between sensation, movement, and experience in the unity of consciousness, which remains a fundamental discussion within psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and theory of mind.

Phenomenology and sensus communis

Since the establishment of phenomenology, the aspect of a unification of consciousness has been approached through the phenomenon of movement as a primary and immanent aspect of sensuous experience. It can be argued that it is exactly this primacy of movement which explains Husserl’s formulation of phenomenology as a critique of naturalism in science, as he describes in the chapter “The Ontological Priority of the Spiritual World Over the Naturalistic”:

the Body is at once Object of the spiritual world (it already is so by the fact that it is a bearer of sense for comprehension) as well as external thing in nature. My Body is not only an appearance for me but it is “animated” for me: in terms of consciousness, it is the organ of my original free movements. (1989, p. 295)

Husserl’s notion of a spiritual (geistige) dimension of consciousness should not be confused with a theological concept of a transcendent cause or be understood as something abstracted from or added to the physical or experienced world of the perceiving subject. Rather, Husserl states, spirit is “an immanent lawfulness to the formation of dispositions as substratum for the position-taking subject” (1989, p. 293). In other words, the spiritual world refers to the primary animation of a human or personal world.

Animation in this account is not something added or applied to the body to move from one position to the other, but it is “the fullness of the person” (Husserl, 1989, p. 293) given in the animating unity of “the I take position” (p. 293). What unifies perceptual consciousness is not a causal or representational relationship between the bodily sensations and a psyche or a mental world, because bodily sensations are always animated for us through the “spiritual sense” of “I do.” Thus, according to Husserl, an “immanent lawfulness” to the constitution of a subjective world, the spiritual sense, is what animates sensuous appearances in consciousness—i.e., intentionality. What is animated is an intention which is fused with, and cannot be separated from, the movement by which the object emerges. As Husserl (1989) shows in relation to the experience of a book (pp. 249–250), the perception of a physical object does not consist of simply applying or adding sense to the external object, but rather that the object is animated for us by intentionality as the immanent aspect of consciousness. In other words, perceptual consciousness is always consciousness of something by means of penetrating or fusing with the animated whole of the sensuous object. Consequently, in the same manner, in moving ourselves we cannot say that we are appending movement to our physical body as something which is added as a sense next to it, rather our body is animated for us and constituted by the spiritual sense of intentionality.

In a more detailed account of the body’s role in the constitution of sensations, Husserl (1989) points out two kinds of sensations involved in the construction of the spatial world. The first kind of sensation is that which constitutes perception “by means of the apprehensions allotted to [it]” (p. 62). In other words, the first kind are sensations in which the perceptual quality is correlated with an irreducible and extended corporeal feature or quality, such as when a “thingly roughness appears in the apprehension of the roughness-sensations, and corporeal warmth appears in relation to the sensation of warmth” (p. 62). ² Husserl’s description of the second kind of sensation refers to that which is necessarily involved in the apprehension of the first kind, but is not in itself captured in the perceptual experience—i.e., which does not have a corporeally extended modality allotted to it. This second kind of sensation is what Husserl describes as “kinesthetic sensation,” which he considers to be the motivating force for the first kind. In this account the intentional structure of sensation is described as a “two-fold articulation” (p. 63) between perception and movement, which corresponds to an intentional structure of sensation as an intricate relationship between a motivating force (movement) and motivated force (perception). From this point of view there is a fundamental affinity between the common qualities of the Aristotelian sensus communis and Husserl’s unifying notion of intentional sensation as a spiritual sense of fullness or wholeness behind perceptual experience. In terms of movement, the primary animation in Husserl’s spiritual sense of intentionality should be understood as an attempt to establish a meta-modality for perceptual experience.

However, the immanent spiritual sense and primary animation as a critique of naturalism seems to raise the central critical question of how a phenomenological perspective can approach the material nature of the unity of the subject. As described earlier, the particularly interesting question in relation to common qualities is whether we should consider them a primarily cognitive inferential achievement, as Plato speculated, or a sense immanent to sense perception, as Aristotle suggested. Husserl’s insistence on the ontological primacy of the spiritual or human world and the phenomenological notion of intentionality seems to suggest that the unity belongs to a third dimension, which he famously termed the “life world.” As Husserl explains, “[t]he subject can be motivated only through becoming what he ‘lives,’ what he is conscious of in his life, what is given to him subjectively as actual, certain, supposed, valuable, beautiful, good. These characters arise as motivated, just as, on the other hand, they are motivating” (1989, p. 384). Thus, opposed to the naturalistic description of motion as an extended causal relation, Husserl’s life world introduces intentionality as a unifying double movement or rather the self-relational movement of motivation, which can neither be reduced to a material or an immaterial entity. In other words, motivation is not only motivating it is also motivated, all at the same time, or unified in the same movement of being animated. Here Husserl’s main argument is that to be conscious of something is not simply a passive process of being motivated or moved by what is given as an object, what is given has its own active component in the way that it “arises as motivated,” which is not a cognitive or inferential process. What is central in Husserl’s notion of intentionality and life world is that it opens the possibility of thinking of movement as something in-between the material and immaterial.

Embodied intentionality as “common sense”

This basic phenomenological notion of movement as an ontological primacy to perceptual acts in-between the material and immaterial inspires Maurice Merleau-Ponty to give privilege to the body as our primary pre-condition for acquiring a world. This is perhaps most salient in his notion of movement as a pre-reflexive or pre-objective unity. Merleau-Ponty often describes this movement as an immanent relational dimension between seeing and being seen, or touching and being touched. The movement between seeing and being seen is not a movement between two dimensions of subjective being—e.g., a physical and a psychological, but rather a fundamental undetermined or infinite movement. One of the most famous exposures of this is in Merleau-Ponty’s image of his left hand touching his right hand, which he argues reveals an invisible dimension of subjective being:

The right hand as an object is not the right hand as it touches: the first is a system of bones, muscles and flesh brought down at a point of space, the second shoots through space like a rocket to reveal the external object in its place. In so far as it sees or touches the world, my body can therefore be neither seen nor touched. What prevents its ever being an object, ever being “completely constituted” is that it is that by which there are objects. It is neither tangible nor visible in so far as it is that which sees and touches. (2002, p. 105)

It is the immediate double sensation or potential reversibility between sensing and being sensed (the sensible) that, according to Merleau-Ponty, reveals the immediate or direct nature of movement as an invisible and temporal dimension of the body, which not only constitutes a pre-objective, but also a pre-subjective in the sense that it is a condition for constituting the body as the unity of sensuous experience. This aspect of movement is a transcendental condition irreducible to the actual sensation of movement. Although we have a quite particular feeling of moving and being moved, the sensation of movement is only to be actualized through other proper sense modalities. Movement is a self-referential phenomenon that mostly reaches our consciousness through other modalities. While vision and hearing, for example, refer to the reception of variations of external forces of light or sound exposed on the retina and eardrum respectively, proprioception and kinesthesia are self-referential in the sense that they refer to the forces of the body’s own ability to change or move. In other words, our sensation of movement through proprioception and kinesthesia appears transparent and self-referential in its functioning compared to the proper senses. In a phenomenological context, this self-referential aspect is a challenge in terms of accounting for the consciousness or intentionality of movement, because consciousness is phenomenologically defined as consciousness of something or being directed towards something. The challenge in accounting for movement is thus connected to the question of where movement comes from, what gives movement its intentional directedness, and what constitutes this capacity without reference to external forces.

What the experience of movement seems to share with the proper sense modalities is the unified quality of ipseity—of belonging to the experience of my body. Consequently, as already implicit in Plato’s and Aristotle’s notion of proper and common qualities, what Merleau-Ponty suggests is that the “common quality” of movement is that which unifies the proper senses of the body. Movement as unifying cannot be grasped through tracing out a line in objective space or a collection of proper sensations as Merleau-Ponty (2002) explains: “Movement, understood not as objective movement and transference in space, but as a project towards movement or ‘potential movement’, forms the basis for the unity of the senses” (p. 272). A “project towards” movement in this sense does not mean entertaining an abstract image or mental representation of movement, but rather to be in a pre-reflexive background or anticipation immanent and contemporary to the concrete bodily movements. In phenomenological terms Merleau-Ponty also refers to this background as “motor intentionality” (p. 127), suggesting that it is through concrete bodily movement that the experiential unity of my body is constituted and given to me as experience. Another way of saying this is to maintain that even though movement is not reducible to a sense modality in the proper sense, to move constitutes the body as a system of direct relations to the world as given to me. In this way the bodily capacity to move invites Merleau-Ponty to rethink the classical notion of the material or physiological body unified as a collection of senses and perceptions. As Merleau-Ponty argues: “we do not know our body and the power, weight and scope of our organs as an engineer knows the machine which he has assembled part by part” (p. 367). Rather, he argues, it is through movement and the acquisition of habits that the body is constituted as a unified system or pre-objective background of perceptual potential. Although each limb has different backgrounds on which its identity and function is distinguished, it is in the unity of an “I can” that they form a system. Accordingly, impressions from the different limbs are not only related by mere interpretation or inference, but immediately present in the unified experience of, for example, weight. As he describes in relation to comparing the work of our hand to that of our fingers:

the “impressions” provided by each one of them are not really distinct and related to each other merely by an explicit interpretation, but present themselves immediately as different manifestations of the “real” weight, and the pre-objective unity of the thing is correlative to the pre-objective unity of the body. Thus the weight appears as the identifiable property of a thing against the background of our body as a system of equivalent gestures. This analysis of the perception of weight elucidates the whole of tactile perception: the movement of one’s own body is to touch what lighting is to vision. (p. 367)

Merleau-Ponty’s analogy of light and movement as immanent conditions for our senses of vision and touch approximates the relationship between movement and perception as a question of materiality. However, movement is still connected to intentionality as a mediating structure. Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, the objective notion of bodily movement is anticipated by a pre-objective background or pre-reflective schema in which movements constitute a “system of equivalent gestures” or a reservoir of directly available potential variations. Thus, as a manifestation of my subjective unity, I move my body directly and I do not have to plot out actual positions in objective space and transfer my limbs from one to the other. As Merleau-Ponty argues, I do not have to find my body and animate it, because in movement “it is already with me” (2002, p. 108). In his analysis of sensation, this immanent aspect of movement takes on an existential meaning that relegates movement to a “modality of existence” at the core of the pre-reflective unity of sensation.

One of the phenomena that, according to Merleau-Ponty, points to movement as an existential aspect at the core of the pre-reflective unity of sensation is the perceptual phenomenon of synesthesia. According to Merleau-Ponty (2002), synesthesia should not be understood as an exceptional phenomenon, but rather as the rule or the expression of a more fundamental “modality of existence” (p. 272), which points to movement as the core of perception. Referring to studies on subjects under the influence of mescaline, he argues that seeing sound or hearing color does not make sense if we consider vision or hearing “the mere possession of an opaque quale” (p. 272). What is missing from this reduction is attention to the intentional aspect of sensation and the fundamental question of what unites our “whole sensory being” or subjective sensibility as such. As opposed to this, Merleau-Ponty argues that the perceptual quality is always a particular modalization of a more general existence in the body’s capacity for synchronizing consciousness with the physical world. This is why, as he points out, “When I say that I see a sound, I mean that I echo the vibration of the sound with my whole sensory being, and particularly with that sector of myself which is susceptible to colours” (p. 272). In this perspective, the existential aspect of sensation is expressed as a form of bodily intentionality and is described as the capacity for movement that makes possible the communication between the different senses. Movement in this account is not objective movement or the change of position of particular perceptual qualities in extended space, but rather movement as a bodily potential to translate or move between the senses—the inter-communication immanent to sensation. It is in this interpretation of the synesthetic phenomenon that movement is once again highlighted as the significant core of perception, as Merleau-Ponty points out, “the problem of forms of synaesthetic experience begins to look like being solved if the experience of quality is that of a certain mode of movement or of a form of conduct” (p. 272). Consequently, much like Aristotle’s notion of sensus communis, which is integrated at the level of perception, the movement central to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description of the body as an intentional or a pre-objective unity or “motor intentionality” (p. 127) must be understood as an invisible dimension immanent to perception.

However, the phenomenological concept of the body as a subjective unity in Merleau-Ponty differs radically from both Plato’s and Aristotle’s notion of the body as a collection of sense organs. Consequently, while both Plato and Aristotle want to point out a specific part of the body (head or heart) as the seat of the unifying common qualities, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body as a system of potential movement leads him to a different conclusion. Borrowing from the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, he argues:

My body is a ready-made system of equivalents and transpositions from one sense to another. The senses translate each other without any need of an interpreter, and are mutually comprehensible without the intervention of any idea. These remarks enable us to appreciate to the full Herder’s words: “Man [sic] is a permanent sensorium commune, who is affected now from one quarter, now from another.” (2002, p. 273)

Rather than isolating a specific part of the body as the seat of integration, Merleau-Ponty argues that it is the body as a whole that can be considered an existential “permanent sensorium commune.” Just as it is not the brain, but a person, that thinks, Merleau-Ponty could be interpreted here as saying that it is not the body, but rather the person, that moves.

Primordial movement and the phenomenological critique of “common sense”

Surprisingly, the most extended critique of Merleau-Ponty’s account of movement as the integrating force or sensus communis of embodied consciousness does not come from an anti-phenomenological stance. In her book The Primacy of Movement (2011b), the phenomenologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone has critically argued that Merleau-Ponty “never actually considers and reflects upon the phenomenon of movement itself except momentarily” (p. 208). What Sheets-Johnstone points out is that Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the primacy of the body as the main condition for acquiring a world reduces movement to the relationship between body and world or what is already given subjectively. Instead, she suggests a more radical primacy of movement as that which is always already there:

We come into the world already moving. We are indeed either movement-born or still-born. When we learn to move ourselves, we do so on the basis of what is already there: an original kinetic liveliness or animation. (2011b, pp. 200–201)

As opposed to other phenomenologists’ reliance on a primary structure of a transcendental realm such as Merleau-Ponty’s body and world and primary inter-subjectivity, Sheets-Johnstone (2011b) refers to movement as “animate organism,” “animate form,” (p. 114) or “primal animation” (p. 458), drawing directly on both Husserl and a biological perspective of animate life-forms and its organic scope of nature. With the biological perspective of humans as basically animate organisms, she proposes movement as a primordial process of human life or, as she expresses it, “movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement” (p. 119). Additionally, she argues that this basic primordial aspect is experientially or qualitatively accessible through the proper phenomenological method of Husserlian introspection and eidetic free variation (pp. 134, 187). According to Sheets-Johnstone, one of the biggest problems in Merleau-Ponty’s approach, as well as that of many of the contemporary phenomenologists inspired by his embodied ontology, is that it fails to base the descriptions of bodily movement on a proper phenomenological method of practical experience, introspection, and phenomenological reduction of self-movement, which, according to her, results in an account of movement that does not capture its qualitative dynamics. Consequently, although Sheets-Johnstone (2008), much like Merleau-Ponty, expresses in Aristotelian terms that “The sensu communis—the common sensible—that is movement engenders the same dynamics across sensory fields” (p. 216) or that “an infant’s responsivity and its ratification of meaning have their origin in the sensu communis that is movement” (p. 290), she also finds that this only serves as an approximation or general interpretation of a more detailed and genuinely phenomenological description of the experiential eidetic qualities of movement. She criticizes current uses of the Merleau-Ponty-inspired concept of embodiment, which she critically describes as “a lexical band-aid covering a three-hundred year-old Western wound” (2011b, pp. 310–311). She continues:

Embodiment fails to do justice to animate form; it fails to recognize the primacy of movement and its dynamic tactile-kinesthetic-kinetic correlates. When we have recourse to “embodiment,” we avoid coming to terms with bodies, with what is actually there, sensuously present in our experience, precisely as with the experience of moving and changing shape. (p. 312)

According to Sheets-Johnstone, the problem with this notion is that it covers up more than it reveals the experiential dynamics of “what is there” in the experience of movement. ³ Thus, Sheets-Johnstone’s critique of Merleau-Ponty as well as the notion of embodiment is part of a more general methodological critique of phenomenologists not staying true to what she considers the proper phenomenological method. Consequently, although Sheets-Johnstone (2011b) praises Aristotle’s dedication to the view that nature is a principle of motion and change (p. 104) as well as his fundamental understanding of sensation on the basis of experience (pp. 79–80), she also asserts that:

Surely, had Aristotle developed his understanding of animate movement pointedly in terms of proprioception and kinaesthesia rather than more generally in terms of a sensu communis, . . . he would have recognized their seminal importance to understandings of Nature and animate life. (2011a, pp. 149–150)

According to Sheets-Johnstone, sensus communis as a general concept overshadows the more detailed and nuanced description of what it is that is embodied and how it becomes so. Thus, notwithstanding his great insights into movement and sensation, Aristotle’s concept of sensus communis is not experientially precise enough to designate the modality or modalization of movement that Sheets-Johnstone suggests. In different terms, what she appropriately points out is that to simply conclude, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, that “Man [sic] is a permanent sensorium commune” (2002, p. 273) does not bring us any closer to understanding how this unity is constituted. As Sheets-Johnstone (2011b) argues, when Merleau-Ponty describes movement as “motor intentionality,” he is primarily dedicated to an adult’s perspective in terms of a body that “has passed through its apprenticeship, and, having passed, no longer finds it necessary to look back upon its beginnings or wonder how it all came about” (p. 210). Thus, Sheets-Johnstone’s proposition is not to deny the notion of sensus communis, but rather to point out that these concepts do not bring us closer to an understanding of the emergent dynamics of what and how movement unifies experience and subject. In this effort, Sheets-Johnstone (2011b) often refers to results from developmental psychologists like Daniel Stern, Esther Thelen, and Linda Smith. Thus, in relation to the question of how sensus communis is constituted, it is a psychological possibility that it is via the infant’s movement—it is the concrete mastery of the body in the early coordinated movements which is a primary condition for the constitution of the sensus communis and, as a consequence of this, the conscious origo (Køppe, 2008). This does not mean to suggest that phenomenologists should attempt to imitate infant behavior, but rather “turning attention to our apprenticeship and to the grounding of that apprenticeship in animate form, in animation” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011b, p. 201). Consequently, whereas movement as the sensus communis in Merleau-Ponty is fundamentally a corporeal or rather an inter-corporeal phenomenon—a ready-made form found in the body–world relation—for Sheets-Johnstone, movement should be understood as a fundamentally primordial force of formation, in the sense that animation is antecedent to the body which is animated. In other words, movement foregrounds the body. In this sense movement is not only what is just there as a reducible mode of experience, but also what is yet to be experienced as modalization. Thus, accepting Sheets-Johnstone’s account could also be said to be accepting an inherent paradox in movement, in terms of an experiential modality that, so to speak, modalizes experience. As Sheets-Johnstone argues, even “space and time have their genesis in self-movement” (2011b, p. 126). This suggests that the moving body cannot be subordinated to any presupposed or transcendental notions of space and time, but rather that the experience of the body in movement is the primordial condition for the constitution of space and time. Movement in this perspective becomes a human capacity of formation, which we can only capture through the form of what it produces.

What is surprising, but also interesting, about Sheets-Johnstone’s critique of Merleau-Ponty and the naturalized and embodied ontology of sensus communis and the methodology of contemporary phenomenologists, is that to some extent it resembles what other scholars have pointed out as a critique against, or limitation of, phenomenology as such. In fact, as some have argued, this critique is already anticipated in Merleau-Ponty’s later works.

Merleau-Ponty, movement, and the end of phenomenology?

In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (2002) seems to mostly relate movement to something which is immanent to a consciousness, which is inter-subjectively embodied or inter-corporeal in nature. Thus, as described in the famous left hand touching the right, inter-subjectivity is already presupposed in the inter-corporeal relation in the self-movement of my hand as touching and my hand as being touched. As Merleau-Ponty explains in terms of seeing and being seen, “I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest” (2002, p. 425). In other words, to be an individual bodily being requires to a certain extent to be centered outside oneself, in the sense that “each one of us must be both anonymous in the sense of absolutely individual, and anonymous in the sense of absolutely general” (2002, p. 521). It is this double anonymity that carries Merleau-Ponty’s existential point of subjective being as a fundamental relation between body and world, which he sometimes describes as a fundamental ambiguity of being in the world. In this context, Merleau-Ponty does not give the radical primacy to movement, as Sheets-Johnstone is right to point out, rather, movement is always understood against the background of the inter-corporeal as that which is already there. However, in his later works, Merleau-Ponty also writes about movement as an invisible force of integration immanent to the ambiguous corporeal being, in such a way that it does not take a giant leap to interpret this absolute general anonymity as an approximation of a more radically primordial process, in the sense that movement is an immanent or an always already given dimension in the unification of an organization of perception and bodily functions. Thus, in his later works, Merleau-Ponty comes close to proposing the existence of an apparently self-contradictory dimension of an incorporeal aspect of the embodied being in the world, which could be said to be a radical primacy of duration, temporality, or movement. In describing the inter-sensory reversibility available to us while speaking to another person about our experience of a landscape he explains in “The Chiasm”:

It is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, by virtue of that primordial property that belongs to the flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever, being an individual, of being also a dimension and a universal. What is open to us, therefore, with the reversibility of the visible and the tangible, is—if not yet the incorporeal—at least the inter-corporeal being, a presumptive domain of the visible and the tangible, which extends further than the things I touch and see at present. (2007, p. 403)

This reversibility is also what Merleau-Ponty in his later works terms the chiasm or flesh, referring to the openness of the irreducibly intertwined relationship between body and world. Although the reversibility of the flesh or chiasm, as the above quotation reveals, does remain within the inter-corporeal, he also opens the possibility of an incorporeal being of the sensible as something yet to be thought. As Leonard Lawlor (1998) has pointed out, in his later writings the openness immanent to the coincidence of sensing and the sensible leads Merleau-Ponty to conceive of “being not as subject but as infinity” (p. 28). Lawlor interprets this as a manifestation of a conceptual limit of phenomenology, in the sense that the phenomenological notion of subjectivity hinges on a process of negation through relations of subject–object, figure–background, or body–world, which does not seem to be able to grasp the process of expression or subjectivity as a question of emergence. While Merleau-Ponty’s inter-corporeal dimension relates to the infinite movement between body and world, in which subjectivity always relates to the restriction or negation of an infinite movement in “the Other,” the incorporeal would entail what Lawlor identifies in Merleau-Ponty as the radical notion of a “positive infinite” or “infinite infinite,” in which “the actual existence of things partes ex partes and extension as we think of it (which on the contrary is continuous and infinite) communicate or are joined together” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 149). What is suggested in this proposition is that the notion of integration of different dimensions of being, or the subjective unity of the tangible and the visible, the body and world, or sensing and being sensed, all presuppose a common ground or plane on which subjectivity can come to expression. This “paradox of expression” (Lawlor, 1998; Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 144; Waldenfels, 2000) or the paradox of movement as pure expression or emergence consists in the absolute coincidence of subject and world or, as Lawlor remarks, what Merleau-Ponty describes as “one sole being” in The Visible and the Invisible (1968):

All that is partial is to be reintegrated, every negation is in reality a determination, the being-self and the being-other and the being in itself are fragments of one sole being . . . The very movement by which a this is pronounced in my life, or this life in the world, is but the climax of negation, the negation that destroys itself. (p. 64)

The “one sole being” thus represents an invisible and incorporeal fundamental univocity, which is phenomenologically unavailable to us because it “extends further than the things I touch and see at present” (Merleau-Ponty, 2007, p. 403). In terms of a naturalized and embodied notion of sensus communis, the notion “one sole being” seems to complicate matters by pointing to an infinite singular process immanent to the expression of embodied subjectivity. It is in this sense that intersubjectivity or intentionality towards other living beings as an organizing process comes to foreground the subjective level of experience. In Merleau-Ponty, this leads to a critique of Husserl’s phenomenology that some scholars have proposed as a limit in terms of accounting for the immanent nature of expression of sense (Lawlor, 1998) or the presentation of essences implied in the phenomenological notion of intuition of the perceived object (Barbaras, 2000). As Lawlor asks, “can phenomenology be anything other than a phenomenology of subjectivity (as the general form of all subjects)?” (1998, p. 27). This critique would suggest that phenomenology of experience cannot capture the expressive primacy of an embodied integrating sensus communis, since such a process would be fundamentally singular and pre-subjective. In relation to Sheets-Johnstone’s argument that subjective movement belongs to a primordial force of animation—i.e., that “movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement” (2011b, p. 119)—it could be argued that what even the most experientially and methodologically detailed eidetic variation, description, and phenomenological reduction exposes is in fact not the primordial movement as an immanent formation, dynamics, or emergent force of expression as such, but rather a form immanent to an experiential subject, i.e., the transcendental, which inevitably refers back to a fundamental ready-made fore-structure like Merleau-Ponty’s body–world relation. Barbaras (2000, p. 79) expresses this problem as relating to the presupposition of identity or consciousness in the presentation of perceptual objects. In other words, to conceptualize movement as something that forms primary to being formed in experience, as Sheets-Johnstone suggests, presupposes that there is an already “formed” relation of identity or recognition between the form and the process of formation. Consequently, if sensus communis is the process by which movement takes form—formation—it is difficult to argue that this process is available through a specific form or structure. As both Lawlor and Barbaras point out in different ways, albeit with no reference to Sheets-Johnstone’s critique, this issue is a question that Merleau-Ponty approaches as an unsolved problem and an explicit critique of Husserl’s phenomenology in his later works. As Merleau-Ponty writes in The Visible and the Invisible:

Every ideation, because it is an ideation, is formed in a space of existence, under the guarantee of my duration, which must turn back into itself in order to find there again the same idea I thought an instant ago and must pass into the others in order to rejoin it also in them. Every ideation is borne by this tree of my duration and other durations, this unknown sap nourishes the transparency of the idea; behind the idea, there is the unity, the simultaneity of all the real and possible durations, the cohesion of one sole Being from one end to the other. (1968, p. 111)

In this context, Merleau-Ponty argues, inspired by Henri Bergson, that the common form or expressive condition for ideation is duration, or the “guarantee of my duration.” Thus, in this case, the subject as an invariant temporal being of experience is not grounded in the being of extended time, but in duration as an intensity immanent to the being of time—i.e., that the immanent and primary condition for a single unity in time is the passive, autonomous, and infinite passing of moments. The perpetual passing of moments is immanent to the determined moment that passes, which makes the determined moment secondary to its becoming through something moving it or moving in it. The integrating movement of sensus communis is thus connected to duration that suspends the phenomenological question of being, and which could be said to be exchanged for the notion of becoming or in the process of becoming. In relation to Sheets-Johnstone’s eidetic intuition of movement, the problem that Merleau-Ponty could be said to critically address is the phenomenological notion of intuition or rather its immanent movement, which constitutes its potential presentation or its coming to expression as experience. What he argues is that reducing an experience to its essence requires an intervention, which would constitute a distance that makes it possible for us to become a spectator or otherwise experiencing being. Furthermore, our observations and our own being as a spectator should be brought to complete transparency in order to think experience without any ground—or “withdraw to the bottom of nothingness” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 111). Ultimately, this leads Merleau-Ponty to ask the critical question “would this still be an experience, since I would be soaring over it? And if I tried to maintain a sort of adhesion to it in thought, is it properly speaking an essence that I would see?” (1968, p. 111). It is in this context that Merleau-Ponty could be said to attempt to go beyond the body–world relation with his suggestion of a primordial duration or becoming as a common process which integrates experience. While Sheets-Johnstone points to movement as what is there as a unifying force beyond the body–world relation, in his later work, Merleau-Ponty points to duration. Sheets-Johnstone explicitly addresses this difference when she argues that our sense of time must be grounded in our sense of something in time and thus

we may ask whether the very eidos of time does not originate in primordial self-movement, and correlatively, whether our everyday verbal concept of time, as evidenced in our speaking of time as flowing, does not have its origin in that nonlinguistic eidetic intuition. (2011b, p. 133)

However, as the late Merleau-Ponty would perhaps point out, the eidetic intuition of something in time would already presuppose an intervention of observation and variation that presupposes a distance from the univocal constitutive or expressive aspect of movement, or rather duration as our potential for movement—duration as that which brings movement to expression. Another way of saying this would be to state that in order to account for movement as the fundamental sensus communis of experience it is not enough to argue that it is simply there in experience, without also asking the question of how it got there or where it came from—i.e., accounting for sensus communis as an emergent phenomenon, rather than a ready-made integrating aspect of experience. Consequently, it could be argued that Sheets-Johnstone’s critique of Merleau-Ponty and, in her view, the too-general notion of sensus communis in terms of the constitutional dynamics of movement is what could be considered a hidden critique against phenomenology as such. From this, it could be argued that Sheets-Johnstone’s notion of movement only seemingly leaves the inter-corporeal domain sensus communis and the body–world relation, since it methodologically returns the primacy of movement to an immanence of a subject of experience structured through force, effort, space, and time and not an expression immanent to movement as such. In other words, even though it is easy to agree with Sheets-Johnstone that movement is our mother tongue and that the experiential structure of movement is available as “what is there in movement,” it is not so clear how this would explain movement as an immanent process of formation as speculated by Aristotle.

Conclusion

As the discussion above illustrates, the phenomenological account of the ancient problem of sensus communis highlights the persistent challenge of accounting for the integration of the self and subjectivity and inevitably opens the question of sensus communis to the range of fundamental and yet unresolvable ontological paradoxes described. Although the material and cosmological notions of sensus communis as a primary element are exchanged, within phenomenology, with the notion of movement as an “immanent lawfulness” in an embodied subjectivity, this does not solve the most fundamental problems of accounting for movement or the integration of the sense modalities. Although the phenomenological accounts disagree on the more intricate conceptual descriptions of movement and the constitution of subjectivity, they at least seem to agree that movement is a primary pre-reflective constituent in the formation of an integrated subjective experience. As a pre-reflective aspect, however, movement obviously becomes a difficult phenomenon to approach as anything other than a conceptual field of disagreement. Sheets-Johnstone therefore has a point in arguing that sensus communis is perhaps a too-general concept, not because it does not capture or describe the core problem, but because the problem is too general. Thus, we have questioned on a general level, whether describing movement as an inter-corporeal phenomenon immanent to the subjective body gets us closer to an understanding of movement as a primordial relational force in the subject–object formation. In other words, we have arrived at the question of whether immanent movement between touching and being touched, or body and world in intentionality, should be understood as a primacy of inter-subjective dynamics between different bodies—i.e., the body as subjectively mine and objectively other, or whether it belongs to a more radically primordial force of pure pre-personal and immanent movement that anticipates both subjectivity and object formation. In terms of the latter, more radical interpretation, we conclude that such a domain would be inaccessible to phenomenology, because immanence within the phenomenological frame of subjective experience always has to be immanence to a consciousness or a perceiving body and thus cannot be pre-personal.