Abstract
In ‘Wondering the world directly’, Erin Manning criticizes phenomenology by drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the problems of his own project and the criticisms of José Gil. Manning claims that phenomenology goes ‘wrong’ in its privileging of the subject and processes of intentionality: the ‘consciousness–object distinction’. While phenomenology on this understanding alone is inadequate to account for movement and the body, process philosophy has the ‘ability to create a field for experience that does not begin and end with a human subject’. This article responds to Manning’s criticism by arguing that phenomenology never intended to perpetuate a concept of subject that fixes an inexorable gap between itself and objects. A historical assessment of subjectivity and intentionality in the work of five different authors, alongside critical points that address Manning’s misconstrual of phenomenology, leads to an understanding of movement that need not ‘outrun the subject’ or become a precarious limit to perceptual experience because of its primacy.
In Erin Manning’s article entitled ‘Wondering the world directly’, she suggests an alternative title of ‘ – or, How Movement Outruns the Subject’. It will be the purpose of this article to consider movement’s relation to the subject in light of Manning’s criticisms of phenomenology that draw upon Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the problems of his own project, and the criticisms of Deleuzian thinker José Gil. Manning suggests, through Merleau-Ponty, that what goes ‘wrong’ with phenomenology is the ‘consciousness–object distinction’ (2014). And further adds that what is right with process philosophy is ‘its ability to create a field for experience that does not begin and end with a human subject. There is no subject “of ” experience, no consciousness outside of the event unfolding’ (Manning, 2014). My contention is that phenomenology never intended to perpetuate a concept of subject that fixes an inexorable gap between itself and objects, or between consciousness and world; thus the problem of subjectivity that Manning fixates on is a misdiagnosis of phenomenology that creates an invisible enemy. In this article, I provide a fairer account of phenomenology in its treatment of the subject as a core philosophical problem, rather than an unexamined postulate. In a three-part analysis, I consider five central figures from the tradition to show how phenomenology does not ‘go wrong’ in its diverse philosophical encounters with subjects, objects, bodies, movement and world. My historical assessment of subjectivity and intentionality, alongside critical points that address Manning’s misconstrual of phenomenology, leads to an understanding of movement that need not ‘outrun the subject’ or become a precarious limit to perceptual experience because of its ‘primacy’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011). Ultimately, I point toward a phenomenology of – or with, total movement.
Often phenomenology is misdiagnosed as overtly subjectivist, even solipsist, by those who wish to run away from the irresolvable problem of an incumbent ‘I’ to which we were alerted most strikingly by Descartes who, on his philosophical way to find God, winds up in a realm where doubt makes no sense: the Cogito. External misconceptions lie with entering phenomenology at a point in Husserl’s monolithic study of consciousness – his transcendental turn of 1913. 1 This is a pivotal moment where with Cartesian spirit (what the critics are blinded by most) he permits a pure ego to emerge from the exclusionary brackets of a thought experiment, stripped of all transcendencies as an intractable offering of absolute consciousness. But this is also the moment where we find the main tenets of his insightful phenomenological method, a unique approach to knowledge that combats psychologism, neo-Kantianism, and the natural sciences to promote phenomenology as the fundamental, universal science attempting to go beyond the ‘world of appearance’ and get back to the things themselves (Zurück zu den Sachen selbst) (Husserl, 1983: 86). From here, Husserl embarks on a meticulous, fine-grained descriptive analysis of consciousness to build a meaningful world picture with a notion of subject that does not abscond into the arms of God, or chaos of the cosmos. Husserl provides the theoretical tools for his life-long engagement with differing fields of primordial experience that entwine subjectivity and objectivity in affective encounters with others (intersubjectivity) 2 and world (nature), 3 and offers us structural descriptions of mental, bodily, and emotional movements that are within the field of experience, never ‘outside of the event in its unfolding’ (Manning, 2014).
As a first point, and forming my discussion in the first section of this article, I agree that the dyadic consciousness-of structure in Husserl’s intentionality thesis has been a motivating factor for moves away from his philosophy by several figures within the tradition. In turn, I will touch on Emmanuel Levinas and Michel Henry, who radicalize intentionality through a revision of subjectivity to develop their phenomenologies. Historically it can be seen that intentionality is not a necessary or fixed tenet of phenomenology as Manning, through Gil, seems to understand. Therefore, it is not only possible, but also evidential that it has ‘considered the consciousness of the body outside of intentionality’ and provided a philosophy of movement (Gil in Manning, 2014). Part two leads to a much fairer assessment of Husserl on subjectivity, while parts one and two promptly clear the way for part three which draws on Jan Patočka's and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s phenomenology of movement to provide an account (as process philosophers purport to do) of a ‘more-than…actual movement’ in dynamic terms (Gil in Manning, 2014).
Levinas and Henry on Intentionality
Levinas – Reversing Intentionality for Alterity
Challenging Heidegger on the injustice of ontological notions of Being that reduce ‘other’ by the ‘same’ (/self, /being), Emmanuel Levinas demands that ‘the terms must be reversed’ in order to retain the ‘irreducible separation’ between them, and prioritizes an ethics of the other over freedom of the same. For Levinas this is justice: ‘I cannot disentangle myself from society with the other, even when I consider the being of the existent he is’ (1969: 47–8).
In Totality and Infinity (1969), Levinas reverses all ontological, dialectical and metaphysical presuppositions or ‘terms’ that subordinate or determine the other to venerate an ethics of interiority over exteriority. Husserl’s intentionality thesis comes under scrutiny since it is caught up with the perceptual activity of the same reducing the other to an object.
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Levinas does not rid his phenomenological project of intentionality, but instead reverses the relation between the intentional dyad constituting–constituted to keep the much needed irreducible gap between subject and object and protect his ethical structure. Rather than a subject constituting a world thematically, intelligibly, or through representation and closing the gap, Levinas insists on a different version of intentionality – one of ‘enjoyment’ (1969: 127). He declares that intentionality should involve holding on to exteriority by a positing of oneself in the world corporeally. The body indigent and naked is not a thing among things which I ‘constitute’ or see in God to be in a relation with a thought, nor is it the instrument of a gestural thought of which theory would be simply the ultimate development. The body naked and indigent is the very reverting, irreducible to a thought, of representation into life, of the subjectivity that represents into life which is sustained by these representations and lives of them. (Levinas, 1969: 127)
Here we see a phenomenology of the body. Levinas’s reversal modification of intentionality speaks of bodies ‘living-from’ the nourishment of the world, free from the limits of a constituting ‘I’ that an intentionality of representation makes. The interesting thing here is that Levinas deals with the aspect of intentionality that Manning, through Gil and Merleau-Ponty, finds problematic. But in this reversal between subject and world, one which muffles the I, the opposing gap between subject and object must remain, that is, ‘the consciousness–object distinction’ that equally stirs up all the trouble (Merleau-Ponty in Manning, 2014). Levinas sees intentionality working differently from Merleau-Ponty: ‘[i]n representation, the “I” precisely loses its opposition to its object’ (1969: 126), paradoxically provoking for Manning the kind of collapse that is desired and the separation which is detested.
This point illustrates how intentionality is understood differently among the major figures of the tradition. It should not be wrongly accused of being the source of metaphysical problems regarding the subject. Intentionality, considered in more methodological terms, is a structural device that organizes perceptual activity and the relation between subject, objects, others and world; it is not an ontological postulate describing what a subject is. In reorienting the role of the subject, Levinas creates a nuanced conception of intentionality that technically overcomes some of the issues that detractors of phenomenology highlight as problematic in its account of bodies and movement, moving.
Michel Henry – Subjective Body Prior to Intentionality
A second thinker with whom I would like to expand this discussion on intentionality is Michel Henry. His phenomenological ontology of the body directly challenges Gil’s claim that phenomenology has never considered consciousness of the body outside of intentionality. His philosophy of the body, which draws directly on the lesser-known French philosopher Maine de Biran, makes intentionality secondary as a phenomenological device for coming to know the body and its movement in its ‘very being of subjectivity’ (Henry, 1975: 55). The main claim here is that the body is ‘absolute subjectivity’: ‘a body “which is an I”’ (1975: 8). And through Biran, Henry weds consciousness and subjectivity to the body with the strictest ontological priority, generating no gaps between us knowing and being an I, and us knowing and being a body. On this account, intentionality does not come into play at all in the phenomenological knowing of our bodies. Contrary to Levinas, intentionality as a constituting device creates an idea or representation of the body as a transcendent being outside of being a body: a projected chimera of subject–object relations that is far from the reality of being a moving subjective body. Henry is critical of the Idealist tradition that starts with Descartes, moves through Kant and is carried on by Husserl, because it generates ‘disincarnate subject[s]’ (1975: 7). He insists on a phenomenological ontology that provides us with ‘real’ knowledge of the body and movement: But we know that man is an incarnate subject, his knowledge is situated in the universe, things are given him in the perspectives which get their orientation from his own body. Hence, must not the latter become the theme of an investigation which takes the real man as its object, not the abstract man of idealism, but this being of flesh and blood which we all are? (1975: 7)
Interestingly, Henry’s philosophy of a ‘flesh and blood’ body resonates (in part) with process philosophy, as it is suspicious of intentionality as a transcendental structure that creates a false distance between body and world, and our ‘wondering the world directly’. But in this refusal, Henry admits that an incarnate subjective body is a process of ‘internal transcendence’ described as the ‘original revelation of the lived experience to itself such as it takes place in a sphere of radical immanence’ (1975: fn18, 15–16). The essence of manifestation is a theory of ‘auto-affection’ that is personal, and characterizes phenomena as ‘coming in to be’; known in and by themselves; non-mediated; and, most importantly, non-constituted. Movement does not outrun the subject on Henry’s account for it is nothing other than subjectivity, a total ‘subjective movement’ (1975: 59).
Wherever the intentionality thesis is modified or made secondary within the phenomenological tradition, its varying versions are evidently presupposed by a different notion of the subject, and how this subject relates to objects, world, and other. Having considered in brief two major thinkers from the tradition, I have shown that the body can be approached phenomenologically with or without a notion of intentionality. It is misleading to think that there is only one idea of intentionality and subjectivity informing phenomenology, as it is erroneous to assume that any moves and/or misinterpretations of Husserl by those following in his footsteps break with the tradition.
The Subject in Husserl
When Husserl came to France, he is at last acknowledged in France and gives some lectures at the Société française de philosophie, what does he speak about? What does he do? Cartesian Meditations! It means that France only got to know Husserl through a perspective, which I doubt represents the main thread of phenomenology. (Foucault, 2012; my translation)
In phenomenology, it is never simply a case of a subject standing in a privileged position with ‘pre-forming’ capabilities making a world. The world is never ‘pre-formed’ in such processes of constitution (Manning, 2014). This is not a correct view of phenomenology’s epistemological or its ontological stance. In his chapter on ‘The phenomenon of affection’, Husserl describes how the world instigates an affective allure on the subject, and even ‘awakens…an intention toward it’ (2001: 198). By affection we understand the allure given to consciousness, the peculiar pull that an object given to consciousness exercises on the ego; it is a pull that is relaxed when the ego turns toward it attentively, and progresses from here, striving toward self-giving intuition, disclosing more and more of the self of the object, thus, striving toward an acquisition of knowledge, toward a more precise view of the object. (Husserl, 2001: 196, emphasis added)
Husserl’s work on affection shows how limited the perceptual powers of a subject are in the world. Constantly caught under the strain of ‘rivaling prominences’ affecting an allure on our attentions: that voice over there, that flicker of movement in the corner of my eye, that nervous pencil tapping of a student, the room turning dark as a cloud covers the sun. Every moment is on the verge of combusting with competing ‘contrasts’, undifferentiated to begin with, and even only partially thematized in more active perceptual activity (Husserl, 2001: 197). Husserl recognizes that we are ill equipped to pay attention to all that happens. He never suggests that we can gain total awareness phenomenologically or otherwise, but rather that we must prime our attentions and turn toward the world (without opinion, presupposition and subject-laden conditions) and be open to the seductive allure of prominences. These limits to attention and awareness characterize consciousness as partial; memorially and expectantly exerted; and over-stimulated in this world of rivaling prominences. On this account, consciousness is just as much with as it can be of world. A world that is forming, becoming and prior to, calling us, but still enrooted structurally and temporally with our former experiences.
Manning on Gil on movement: Not ‘I’ am aware, but the event of movement is aware. Movement as dynamic form out of which certain bodying tendencies take shape. An affective tonality before a form, a velocity, an intensity, an elasticity, before the representation of this jumping/turning/sliding/falling form. (2014)
The idea that ‘movement is aware’ does not necessarily eradicate the I, me or mine, especially if we take Husserlian affection as a means for mediating the constituting forces of subjectivity. With affection, anything outside of the subject has a ‘self’, it too comes into awareness along with the subject, who is also disclosing more and more of itself in what Husserl terms a ‘constitutive-duet’. This duet is ‘being played’ at several levels in our perceptual process (Husserl, 2001: 52). Moreover, there are mutually reciprocating consciousnesses-of being played out between subjects and objects, deeming no clear hierarchy of form-maker over formed. Rather, an ambiguity is hinted at, a non-positional duet of call and response in the fullness (as fulfillment) and vagaries (unfulfillment) of perceptual experience.
Husserlian phenomenology offers more than a static transcendental account of phenomena. Critical of phenomenology taking the body as a mere ‘perceived as such’, 6 Manning through Gil argues that a body is not a ‘concrete phenomenon’, yet its ways can be ‘perceived’ if taken as a ‘metaphenomenon’: an idea that posits things in the world (bodies/movement) to be ‘at once’ ‘visible and virtual’ and a ‘cluster of forces and transformer of space and time’ (Gil in Manning, 2014). And yet, I see nothing at odds here with Husserl’s account of phenomena. A body appears. It is given in multiple perspectives qua ‘visible’, and is (as argued above) engaged in a ‘potentiality of affection that is not empty’, but in a horizonal and temporalizing relation that finds its conceptual root (like virtuality) in Aristotle’s distinction between ‘actual’ and ‘potential’ acts. Husserlian temporalization softens this sharp distinction (like total movement) to keep with the relativity and affectivity of co-constitution. Taking all of this into account, it seems that the role of the subject in Husserlian phenomenology has been harshly misconstrued.
To round off this discussion, Husserl’s phenomenology is a distinctive and humble attempt at describing ‘genetically’ only that which can be partially affirmed and pointed to within the unity of an experience. This is not to say that experience always determines a future leaving no room for ‘something being otherwise’. In fact, modalization is an essential feature of his phenomenological analyses (Husserl, 2001: 63–99, 363). Moreover, Husserl never defaults to some metaphysical, unaccounted for realm to speak about body, movement or consciousness – such as Merleau-Ponty (1968) seeks with ‘the invisible’. Identifying transcendental structures within immanence does not place the subject outside of the event any further than Gil’s, or Manning’s, ‘dancing body event’ (2014). Movement need not outrun the subject if phenomenology is understood in dynamic and genetic terms.
A Phenomenology of Total Movement
Manning says that: [i]f we understand phenomenology as defined by Merleau-Ponty as ‘a study of the appearance of being to consciousness’ total movement can in no way belong to the register of the phenomenological (1981b: 61). It is felt, but cannot be reduced to being. It is sensed, but not within a consciousness-of that belongs to a subject external to the event. (2014)
The expositions in this article have shown that phenomenology is much more than ‘a study of the appearance of being to consciousness’. Not to labour this point any further, I will now turn my attention towards ‘total movement’ (as described by Manning) and the very instances where such a concept of movement can very well ‘belong to the register of the phenomenological’. I begin with Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka’s thoughts on movement. We shall not consider movement as something that always-already presupposes a constituted being, but rather as that which constitutes being, as that which manifests such or such being by making it express itself following its own original way. (1988 [1970]: 103, my translation)
Patočka is echoed in Manning’s own thoughts, when she says (1) movement produces a body; and (2) ‘there is never a body as such…a body is its movement’ (2014). For Patočka, movement is ‘the instinctual and affective layer of our life’; it is prior to being, and is ‘our most elementary capability as beings disposing of bodies, beings that move and sense’ (1998: 143, emphasis added). How does his thinking meet phenomenology? Patočka, unlike Levinas, pursues a phenomenological ontology along Heideggerian lines to consider at its most fundamental level the modes of human existence. Patočka arrives at a three-level diagnosis of ‘existence as a movement’ that exceeds being in its support from below, foundationally characterized as ‘(i) the movement of sinking roots, of anchoring – an instinctive-affective movement of our existence’. This is the first level which logically moves being in the being of being’s existence’ to form level two, ‘(ii) movement of self-sustenance, of self-projection’, that is, the ‘work’ we do in the world. His third level is a ‘narrower sense’ of the ‘movement of existence’ as ‘a global closure and meaning on the regions and rhythms of’ the movements indicated in levels one and two (Patočka, 1998: 148). What we see here is an analytic of being that is brought into analysable existence. Not a subject constituting a moving body, but movement as the primordial condition for ‘control[ling]…our own organism…in all our further, freer modes of comportment, of relating to humans and things’ (Patočka, 1998: 148).
Question: Could we construe Manning’s and Gil’s total movement to be oscillating at Patočka’s first level of ‘instinctive-affectual’ movement? If all three share the same conceptual beginning, we find (at this first level) that the ‘presupposition’ for Being, for subjectivity, and even for Whitehead’s ‘superject’, is indeed movement (Manning, 2014). But before we can elaborate in existential terms how this Being or subject is such and such in the world, there is the logical problem of the presupposition itself. Movement as a presupposition logically comes before something. In Patočka’s case it is the existence of Being. Movement must be before something rather than nothing to be presupposed, it is the logical condition of its antecedence. Patočka understands this, and does not preclude existence to talk about movement’s primacy (1998: 148). But Gil and Manning do not. By eliding the subject to presuppose ‘a field for experience’ or movement, they are left groping in the dark for that which presupposes (Manning, 2014). There is no escaping the logical necessity of something coming before. Consequently the question becomes not ‘where am “I” in movement?’, but more importantly where is movement (Manning, 2014)?
Patočka’s ontological phenomenology primordially raises movement to bear the chief, dynamic role in existence, schematizes a three-level relationship between movement, being and world, and avoids exploding movement into ‘infinite’ and ‘vibratory’ shards that disform at great velocity to places where only neologisms can keep up (Manning, 2014). I will now turn to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone who, in ‘wondering the world directly’, precisely captures (even more so than Patočka) the dynamism of movement as primal animation in the register of the phenomenological (2011: 458–60). 7
But first, says Manning: Total movement is a way of bringing the concept of movement to the plane of immanence to make felt, as in the concept of the infinite infinite, that there is a continual folding into and out of immanence (by subtraction) into actualization. (2014)
The key concern I have with this quote is the ‘make felt’ order of experience that total movement requires. Could it be that rather than coming upon a field of pure immanence – an immanence devoid of any human transcendence/transcendental structures etc. – we find a mere impersonal placeholder for the I–me–mine that was asked to leave on the basis of linguistic habit (Manning, 2014)? Could this placeholding non-I–me–mine that still experiences feelings, affects, and is conditionally temporalized be, in fact, immersed in the background of a Husserlian pananimism (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011: 114–15)? 8 If so, we all begin at the same place. However, there is an epistemological complaint about total movement: ‘it cannot be known’ (Gil in Manning, 2014). And yet, what about all this feeling, affectivity – registrations of forces that inevitably shape ‘in an infinity of ways…what “I” will become in any given occasion’ (Manning, 2014), could we not turn to phenomenology for an experiential account of what is essentially at the core of these investigations in Manning, Gil and the entire tradition of phenomenology: ‘the feeling of being alive’ in movement (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011: 459)? Manning's and Gil’s attentions do not stray from a body dancing or doing yoga; there is no corresponding cadaver in the death of this I–me–mine. And yet, they shrink from ‘sentience’, ‘kinetic energies’, ‘affective tonalities’, this ‘feeling of being alive’ to default to some unperceivable cosmic (if not) proto-onto-theological impersonal force unknowable and unspecifiable to humankind. This ‘non-I–me–mine’ moves (actually runs) away from differentiation, meaning and sense that all self-propagating life forms are always already moving toward, and thus floats toward some kind of metaphysical involution.
Sheets-Johnstone argues that: [i]n making sense of the dynamic interplay of forces [actual and virtual] and configurations inherent in our ongoing spontaneity of movement…(2011: 118) [we should] not remain unspecified in an unanchored ‘sentience’ or ‘feeling of being alive’. On the contrary…[primal animation and its ongoing dynamic realities] describe the all-inclusive and spontaneously arising affective, tactile/kinesthetic, sense-making, subject/world nature of our being, precisely as enscapulated in the fact that we come into the world moving; we are not stillborn. (2011: 459, emphasis added)
That we shall ‘not remain unspecified’ is where phenomenology can meaningfully describe the unique specificity of all life forms which too make meaningful the feeling of this primal animation – or, total movement.
Conclusion
In this response, I have attempted to provide a fairer account of phenomenology on subjectivity and intentionality – themes misconstrued by a parochial view that critically suggests that phenomenology ‘goes wrong’ and so is unable to account for the body and movement. Considering the approaches of several figures within the tradition, I have shown this to be an unfair assessment; presented the diversity and complexity of phenomenological thought, which tackles in rigorous and constructive ways the problem of the subject; and indicated how phenomenology provides a more meaningful engagement with the overall shared sentiment of movement’s primacy to life.