The Humanistic Psychologist

The Humanistic Psychologist
The Lived Body

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Online First Publication, August 15, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hum0000150
CITATION
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2019, August 15). The Lived Body. The Humanistic Psychologist. Advance
online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hum0000150
The Humanistic Psychologist
© 2019 American Psychological Association 2019, Vol. 1, No. 999, 000 – 000
0887-3267/19/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hum0000150
The Lived Body

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Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
University of Oregon
This paper begins with the common distinction between lived and physical bodies and shows
how and why a conjunction obtains with respect to personally lived bodies, a conjunction
furthermore apparent in lived-body experiences of sheer physicality. These beginning expo-
sitions set the stage for a detailed phenomenological analysis of the experiential character of
the lived body, an analysis anchored in what Husserl identifies as “the zero point of
orientation,” narrowed here to the zero point tout court, hence to the hereness of the lived
body. On the basis of this analysis, the paper shows how postural, embodied, and purely
spatial descriptions of the lived body, all of them in pursuit of validating a self and a
prereflective self-consciousness, fail to accord with the spatio-temporal and kinesthetic
nature of the lived body, how, in essence, the descriptions short circuit the lived body’s
spatio-temporal presence anchored in tactile-kinesthetic-affective realities. In the course of
doing so, it draws on psychological studies of infants that not only highlight but validate
those lived realities. It furthermore draws on a range of Buddhist writings that clearly
describe the self not as a directly lived reality but as a construct. In the end, the paper
critically underscores the value of being true to the truths of experience.
Keywords: separation and consonance of physical and lived bodies, zero point tout court,
self-givenness and “how it feels”, tactile-kinesthetic-affective body, phenomenological
methodology
Preliminary Concerns and Clarifications
What quintessentially describes the lived body? The lived body is animate. It is not
just alive, but moving. It is an animate form of some kind, an animate organism as Husserl
consistently describes it (Husserl, 1973a, 1980). We readily recognize this animate
organism when we begin at the beginning. We, and other forms of animate life, come into
the world moving. Movement is indeed our mother tongue. We are movement born and
remain animate until we die. From an evolutionary perspective and more, that is, from
cultural and social perspectives, animate forms of life survive and reproduce in virtue of
their movement—their ability to find food, their agility in fighting and avoiding predators,
their driving pursuit of mates, and with some forms, their diverse ministrations in raising
young, not to mention the ability of the young to learn “how to” from their elders. It is thus
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone,

Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, 211 Susan Campbell Hall, Eugene, OR 97403-
1295. E-mail: msj@uoregon.edu
1
2 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
hardly surprising that kinesthesia and tactility—and the earlier proprioceptive form of
movement sensitivity and awareness in invertebrates by way of tactility (Laverack, 1976;
Lissman, 1950; Mill, 1976; see also Sheets-Johnstone, 1999/2011)—are the first sensory
systems to develop. Animate forms of life are basically tactile-kinesthetic bodies. The
foundational significance of tactility and kinesthesia are, in fact, documented in prenatal
human studies that show not only that tactility and kinesthesia are the first sensory systems
to develop, but how, as fetuses, we initially move and touch our bodies: we raise our
eyebrows, for example, we put a thumb in our mouth, and more (Furuhjelm, Ingelman-
Sundberg, & Wirsèn, 1977).
Is this lived body categorically different from the physical body? When Sartre writes
that “consciousness exists its body” (Sartre, 1956, p. 329), was he writing of a lived or
physical body, an animate form or a material object? His observations and conclusions
leave no doubt and are edifying in this respect. Though specified ontologically in terms of
being for-itself, not in-itself, the body that consciousness exists is clearly an animate
being, a corps engagé:
The body is nothing other than the for-itself; it is not an in-itself in the for-itself, for in that
case it would solidify everything. But it is a fact that the for-itself is not its own foundation,
and this fact is expressed by the necessity of existing as an engaged, contingent being among
other contingent beings. As such the body is not distinct from the situation of the for-itself
since for the for-itself, to exist and to be situated are one and the same; on the other hand the
body is identified with the whole world inasmuch as the world is the total situation of the
for-itself and the measure of its existence. (Sartre, 1956, p. 309)
It is worth noting that Merleau-Ponty takes up Sartre’s linkage of body and world in
a quite central way throughout his rendition of the “lived” body, but in ways that skirt
along the top of Sartre’s precise experiential descriptions anchoring his analysis. For
example, when Merleau-Ponty states that the “lived body” is “a system of possible
actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal ‘place’ defined by its task and situation”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945, p. 250), he immediately generalizes further, adding, “My
body is wherever there is something to be done” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945, p. 250). It
is of note too that Gallagher and Zahavi take up Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “bodily space”
(Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 163) in ways that uphold its active function in life, but in
ways that fall far short of describing its fleshly realities, as when they write, “The body
tries to stay out of our way so that we can get on with our task; it tends to efface itself on
its way to its intentional goal.” They draw on a “pre-reflective awareness of our body” to
support their cognitional claim, “I can say whether I am running, walking, sitting,
standing, and what kind of effort or posture I am putting forth,” though they then
immediately add, ”But this prereflective awareness is not very detailed” (Gallagher &
Zahavi, 2012, p. 163). They, in fact, bypass kinesthesia and commonly invoke proprio-
ception instead, claiming, for example, that proprioception “involves . . . a non-
perspectival awareness of the body in an implicit spatial frame of reference” (Gallagher
& Zahavi, 2012, p. 163). In short, a veritable phenomenological analysis of the lived
body—its hereness and hereness in the flesh “in contrast to its mere presentification,
the empty merely indicative idea of it,” as in “memory or imagination, etc.” (Husserl,
1973a, pp. 19, 20, respectively; see the next section for the relevance of this
descriptive quote)—is nowhere to be found. Not either to be found is a veritable
phenomenological analysis of its “action,” that is, its inherently dynamic, kinesthet-
ically experienced realities of movement as an animate being, an animate organism.
And finally, not either to be found is an exposition of the learning that grounds its
THE LIVED BODY 3
knowledge of “something to be done” and how to do it. A body that already knows
predominates, a thoroughly adult body (see below for more on this liability).
As to the physical body, Sartre aptly describes it in terms of “solidity”: the physical
body is a thing, an object existing in the world among other objects. Sartre exemplifies its
thingness in a succinct description of touching an injured leg in the process of dressing its
wound: “What I cause to exist here is the thing ‘leg’; it is not the leg as the possibility
which I am of walking, running, or playing football” (Sartre, 1956, p. 304). Moreover as
he lucidly shows (Sartre, 1956, p. 326), in contrast to the physical body, the body that
consciousness exists is both a point of view and a point of departure:

[I]f the ends which I pursue could be attained by a purely arbitrary wish, if it were sufficient
to hope in order to obtain, and if definite rules did not determine the use of instruments, I could
never distinguish within me desire from will nor dream from act, nor the possible from the
real. No project of myself would be possible since it would be enough to conceive of it in
order to realize it. (Sartre, 1956, p. 327)
His conclusion, that consciousness exists its body as the contingency of its being
(Sartre, 1956, pp. 334, 337), shows that the body is not united with psyche, but that “the
body is its substance and its perpetual condition of possibility” (Sartre, 1956, p. 338). The
lived body is thus essentially the body of actualities and possibilities. Sartre, in fact, shows
at length by the quite distinct examples of being in pain and of reading a book (Sartre,
1956, pp. 331–337) that the lived body is the body “I exist” (Sartre, 1956, e.g., pp. 329,
332, 334, 351).
The separation of physical and lived bodies arises not only in the context of differ-
entiating my personal animate being from a material object, but in the context of my
experiencing the body of others. The separation is thus in the service of understanding
both the experience of the body of others for me, and conversely, the experience of my
body for others. Moreover while the separation is not uncommonly described in terms of
the difference between first-person and third-person experience, the separation may also
rest on related or even prior distinctions: the distinction between what is private and what
is public, for example, or between the self and the social, or between existential and
scientific studies. As shown elsewhere, however, such contexts notwithstanding, the
separation of physical and lived bodies is open to question at a quite basic level, that is,
before one confronts a difference between one’s lived body from one’s objective body and
before one confronts the objective bodily appearance of others for oneself and one’s
objective bodily appearance for others, in effect, before one distinguishes what is exis-
tentially experienced from what is objectively experienced, and apart from related or even
prior distinctions.
However distinctively grounded, the separation overlooks the fact that for me, physical
and lived body are in a quite basic sense of a piece. What may be described as “existential
fit,” namely, a conjunction or consonance of physical and lived bodies, defines in a
foundational sense what is existentially viable: “[a]n intact readiness exists to take up the
living of a life. A particular subject is not merely alive in the world but livable”
(Sheets-Johnstone, 2009, p. 77). We readily see this bodily readiness in the appearance
and movement of a newborn and its development. In contrast, what is not existentially fit
is evident in progeria, for example, a human abnormality in which the physical body
prematurely ages before its time, a condition that prevents normal growth and joint
movement facility, and thus prevents the normal living of a life. In effect, a lack of
conjunction obtains between physical and lived bodies. Moreover with respect to a normal
4 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
conjunction, sensory-kinetic differences exist, and not only between species but among
individuals within any species. In essence, sensory-kinetic differences constitute a certain
kind of existential fit, that is, a certain kind of livability in the world, differences not only
broadly apparent in what any particular species can or cannot do, but differences in what
a particular individual within any species can or cannot do. Thus, other physical factors
enter into, or can enter into, the real-life real-time experiences of the lived body, factors
such as being short or tall, fat or thin, black or white, poor or rich, and so on, as well as
being born to particular parents and living in a particular culture. As pointed out
elsewhere, whatever the particular form of sensory-kinetic livability, it is anchored in a
conjunction of physical and lived bodies, which conjunction in turn anchors the devel-
opmental progression “I move, I do, I can” that Husserl describes (Husserl, 1989, p. 273).1
Indeed, “[a]ny particular domain of ‘I can’s’ is the differential expression of existential fit”
(Sheets-Johnstone, 2009, p. 77). Just such sensory-kinetic differences among members of
the same species were observed and described by Darwin in terms of variations: variations
in agility, for example, in alertness, and so on (Darwin, 1859/1968). In effect, from both
evolutionary and existential perspectives, physical and lived bodies are in a basic sense
quintessentially indivisible. In describing that indivisibility, existential fit describes both
what is readily livable, hence existentially viable, and kinds of livability, hence what is
existentially possible for a species and for particular individuals within that species
(Sheets-Johnstone, 2009, p. 78). We might note that Merleau-Ponty’s consistent reference
to “activity” that is “proper” to an organism actually adumbrates the fundamental unity of
physical and lived bodies but neither delineates nor describes that fundamental unity as a
basic existential fact of life (Merleau-Ponty, 1967, e.g., pp. 129, 130, 174). Merleau-Ponty
merely states, for example, “Situation and reaction are linked internally by their common
participation in a structure in which the mode of activity proper to the organism is
expressed” (Merleau-Ponty, 1967, p. 130).
The remarkable consonance of physical and lived bodies is furthermore evident in
experiences in which “the lived body rises up as wholly physical” (Sheets-Johnstone,
2009, p. 79). Such experiences are evident in nonhuman as well as human animal life—for
example, in Jane van Lawick-Goodall’s description (van Lawick-Goodall, 1974, p. 156)
of a young chimpanzee swinging from one tree branch to another, then dropping down and
somersaulting and frolicking on the ground. It is equally apparent in W. H. Thorpe’s
description of soaring (Thorpe, 1963, p. 363), in particular, of two birds riding a single
upcurrent of air that is taking them no place in particular. Such lived experiences are
anchored in a lived body’s sheer physicality. Sheer physicality is humanly evident not
only in gymnastics and in sports such as soccer, hockey, and American football, for
example, but in the art of dance and in love-making. Whether in nonhuman or human
animal life, the sheer physicality of the kinetically lived body is all-consuming (Sheets-
Johnstone, 2009, p. 79). Of integral import in this context is the singular prominence of
human tactility and the tactile-kinesthetic lived body. Nonhuman animals live the sheer
physicality of their bodies in movement. As shown elsewhere, “If a radical being in the
flesh is pre-eminently a human possibility it is because human flesh is above all a tactile
affair and conversely, because tactility is beyond all an affair of the flesh” (Sheets-
Johnstone, 2009, p. 79). The contrast between nonhuman and human animals is indeed
notable:
1
The developmental progression anchors the developmental awareness of if/then relationships
(Husserl, 1970, 1989, 2001).
THE LIVED BODY 5
What makes a sheer physicality of the flesh preeminently possible to humans is of course a
body which exists as flesh, a body that nonhuman animals do not know in a full-blown way.
They live the body as sheer physicality in movement, or more precisely, certain animals’ “I
cans” allow them to turn movement into a kinetic joyride. In such instances, it is not the body
tout court, but the body-in-movement that is lived. In other words, the lived body rises up as
wholly physical only as a body-in-movement. (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009, p. 87)
Attempts to probe and fathom a separation of physical and lived bodies are bound to
acknowledge the role of language in the separation. Indeed, the separation of physical and
lived bodies is upheld linguistically in the distinction between Körper und Leib. Husserl
straightforwardly recognizes this distinction when he affirms that “purely in terms of

perception, physical body and living body [Körper und Leib] are essentially different in
terms of “my own living body” and the “physical bodies in my perceptual field [that] come
to count as living bodies” (Husserl, 1970, p. 107). His distinction is clearly rooted in a
differentiation between my lived body and the appearing physical bodies of others. But
this distinction too is actually more complex and in need of clarification. Most impor-
tantly, there is a fundamental experiential difference between perceiving movement, that
is, perceiving the qualitative dynamics of movement—whether in monitoring one’s move-
ment, or in watching a tennis player run toward an oncoming ball and then swing his or
her racquet in striking the ball, or in watching the elongated suspension, folding, and
crashing of a wave—and feeling movement, that is, feeling the qualitative dynamics of
movement–whether in stretching one’s arms overhead upon getting out of bed, or in
running to catch a bus. A foundationally significant sameness, however, undergirds the
sensory difference between feeling and perceiving movement, a sameness anchored
precisely in movement. In particular, a certain qualitative dynamic is apparent in all
instances and this because movement is by nature, inherently, a qualitative dynamic. Its
qualitative dynamic is experienced across a range of sensory modalities, most intimately
of course in self-movement through kinesthesia, but in visual, tactile, and aural experi-
ences of movement as well, the latter not only as in hearing a melody, for example, but
in hearing someone crying or speaking, or even hearing a siren. It is furthermore
experienced in dual sensory form, in combined kinesthetic-tactile and combined kines-
thetic-aural modalities, the former obviously as in touching along the surface of something
and in pulling on a rope in a tug of war, the latter as in playing and hearing a Chopin
nocturne. Watching oneself move in a mirror and in fact monitoring one’s movement by
way of a mirror is similarly a dual sensory form, a kinesthetic-visual experience.
Moreover what is felt in moving in body-to-body contact with someone, whether in
holding hands and walking, in embracing, or in lifting another up, is a certain dynamic
flow of movement, a certain tactile-kinesthetic qualitative dynamic. In short, the qualita-
tive dynamics of movement, whether felt or perceived, are at the heart of the foundational
animation of lived bodies, and more broadly, in the movement of objects such as cars and
planes and in the animation of Nature itself, not only in the movement of ocean water, but
of tree limbs, leaves, wind, and clouds.
The above examination of ways in which a distinction between lived and physical
bodies has been or can be spelled out, and of ways in which their unity is evident in
existential fit sets the stage for a detailed investigation of the experiential character of the
lived body. Such an investigation brings to the fore the challenge of describing the lived
body, which means phenomenologically probing the realities of the lived body in depth to
the point that descriptions resonate clearly with real-life, real-time experience.
6 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
Fleshing Out the Zero Point
However lucid the phenomenological insights of Sartre and however confident the
claims of various researchers regarding the lived body, claims such as “My body is
wherever there is something to be done” and “The body tries to stay out of our way
so that we can get on with our task,” the distinctive and exacting starting point for
elucidating the lived body is found in Husserl’s writings, in particular, in his
pinpointing the Body—Leib—as the “zero point” of orientation (Husserl, 1989, pp.
166 –167). This existential fact of animate life is the key to fleshing out the basic
character of the lived body.

Husserl succinctly specifies the zero point of orientation: it is a hereness in relation to
a thereness. The zero point of orientation thus describes a spatially anchored relation of
consciousness to its surrounding world, a consciousness that is a consciousness of
something. A consideration of the zero point tout court, however, separates the hereness
from the thereness. The quest to elucidate the basic character of the lived body is indeed
not concerned with the “of something” of consciousness; hence it is not concerned with
Husserl’s detailed exposition of the “two-fold articulation” of perception and the kines-
theses (Husserl, 1989, p. 63). Its characteristic hereness exists phenomenologically apart
from any thereness. The question of concern thus centers on the experience of hereness.
What is the experienced character and what are the experienced features of this hereness?
More precisely, what experientially constitutes hereness?
The experience of hereness is a felt bodily presence. That bodily felt presence is
preeminently constituted in kinesthetic experience, an experience initially of a felt
volume that has no definable boundaries. There are no arms and legs as such, no head
and torso, but an overall feeling of amplitude. Similarly, there is no right and left, top
and bottom, front and back. The overall feeling may be further elaborated tactilely in
terms of pressure, pressure of the body on whatever is supporting it, but a pressure
contained within the felt volume itself; hereness is in other words not stationed on the
floor, for example, or on a chair. Thus, while the experience of a voluminous presence
may be modulated by feelings of pressure, weight, hardness, or softness, it remains
unbounded and immeasurable. The tactile-kinesthetic body is simply alive to itself, to
its presence, to its being in a preeminently epistemological rather than ontological
sense. The hereness of the lived body in a felt bodily presence is thus initially a
stillness, a here-presence that is unchanging, hence an atemporal spatial presence.2
That initial spatial presence, however, is essentially and radically altered by move-
ment, not yet voluntary movement, but movement that arises quite naturally and
qualitatively transforms the hereness. Stillness is in effect temporalized in felt
expansions and recessions. Stillness is indeed qualitatively transformed by expansions
and recessions orchestrated by the flow of breath in and out. It may also be qualita-
tively transformed by involuntary shiftings, swayings, and so on. The zero point is
thus not simply a spatial hereness but a dynamic spatio-temporal bodily felt presence.
Movement is indeed indicative of a hereness that is not dead—much less akin to a
2
The initial spatially-anchored stillness of hereness may be experienced in everyday life as in
staring, for example, whether staring at something in particular or watching intently as something
unfolds. It may be similarly experienced in listening intently. It is furthermore directly experienced
in the initial stillness of the startle reflex when the liveliness of hereness is brought to an initial halt.
In all such instances, the breath tends to be drawn in and held, and the hereness of the lived body
is literally or figuratively at a standstill.
THE LIVED BODY 7
3
Condillac statue, that is, a wholly posturally defined, movement-deficient creature. A
veritable hereness is markedly not only alive but moving. Its aliveness is in fact
typically tested on the basis of movement. English novelist D. H. Lawrence implicitly
suggests that kinetic aliveness when he writes, “Whatever the unborn and the dead
may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh”
(Lawrence, 1932, p. 199).4 Indeed, what constitutes the zero point tout court, the
hereness of a lived body, is a dynamic felt bodily presence, a here being-in-the-flesh
that is movingly alive.
Given the above beginning analysis of the zero point tout court, it becomes evident
that to describe the hereness of the lived body as “a system of possible actions . . . with
its phenomenal ‘place’ defined by its task and situation” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945, p.
250), for example, or as “an implicit spatial frame of reference” by way of “propriocep-
tion” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 163) is to fail to do justice to the existential reality
of the hereness of the lived body, to its animated “being-in-the-flesh,” a reality that is
livingly evident in the fact that we come into the world moving. Husserl not only
recognizes that “Nature is at the first day” (cf., Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 267; see also
Merleau-Ponty, 1988, p. 133), but he is at pains to specify the nature of a person as “free
Ego,” and not only in the context of his analysis of the reasoning subject (Husserl, 1989,
pp. 269 –270), but in his lengthy beginning concerns with “The Constitution of Nature”
and “The Constitution of Animate Nature” (Husserl, 1989, pp. 3–180). As he points out:
Only Bodies are immediately spontaneously (“freely”) moveable, and they are so, specifically,
by means of the free Ego and its will which belong to them. It is in virtue of these free acts
that . . . there can be constituted for this Ego, in manifold series of perceptions, an
Object-world. (Husserl, 1989, p. 159)
Earlier he, in fact, points out:
It is the special quality of . . . animation which accounts for the fact that what is Bodily and
ultimately everything Bodily from no matter what point of view can assume psychic signif-
icance, therefore even where at the outset it is not phenomenally the bearer of a soul. (Husserl,
1989, p. 102; italics in original)
In short, from birth until death, animation is the foundational reality of being a lived
body. Moreover we recognize this body, this Leib, from the very beginning of Husserl’s
description of the zero point tout court of cognition, namely, in his identification and
specification of “the lowest level of the activity of the ego” (Husserl, 1973a, p. 76).
Husserl pinpoints this “lowest level” in terms of “interest” and “turning toward”; in effect,
he pinpoints a body of affect and movement (Husserl, 1973a, pp. 76 –79). He describes this
3
Condillac describes a statue having first this sense then that sense given to it, but that, lacking
movement, is powerless to know the world except in a purely happenstance way (de Condillac,
1754/1982). Such a body reduces the world to a series of random events, which, in the absence of
active exploration, could hardly give rise to the idea of full-fledged objects, let alone full-fledged
subjects.
4
Lawrence authenticates that kinetically- and kinesthetically-informed existential fact of life in
explicitly cognitive terms when he affirms, “That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly”
(Lawrence, 1980, p. 200). The lived body is indeed a basic source of knowledge: what is known and
what comes to be known spring from movement, that is, from moving and having moved, a fact
Husserl long ago recognized in his consistent specification of “two correlatively related functions”:
perception and “the kinestheses” (Husserl, 1989, p. 63).
8 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
body essentially as “receptivity” (Husserl, 1973a, pp. 76 –79). Thus, before the lived body
is in Sartre’s terms a body of actualities and possibilities, it is a body that is receptive: the
zero point tout court is a hereness further characterized by the basic existential disposi-
tions of interest and turning toward that constitute “the lowest level of the activity of the
ego.” Though Husserl does not consider the antithetical disposition of disinterest, both a
felt interest and disinterest are an affective inclination of the lived body: they constitute
a felt attraction or nonattraction, both of which clearly resonate experientially in bodily
felt ways. The same holds true with respect to turning toward. Though Husserl does not
consider the antithetical disposition of turning away, both turning toward and turning
away are kinetic: they each constitute a kinesthetically felt directionally inclined move-
ment. As with interest and disinterest, they too resonate experientially in bodily felt ways.
What Husserl recognizes as “the lowest level of the activity of the ego” is actually
conceptually akin to evolutionary biologists’ recognition of responsivity. Reciprocal
concepts thus obtain between phenomenology and evolutionary biology. A biology
textbook notes, for example, that “Plant seedlings bend toward the light; mealworms
congregate in dampness; cats pounce on small moving objects; even certain bacteria move
toward or away from particular chemicals. . . . [T]he capacity to respond is a fundamental
and almost universal characteristic of life” (Curtis, 1975, p. 28; see also Sheets-Johnstone,
1999/2011], pp. 501–510). Receptivity is similarly “a fundamental and almost universal
characteristic of life.” Moreover the zero point tout court obtains not only with respect to
human lived bodies but to nonhuman lived bodies, as in Husserl’s seeing “a playing cat”
not simply “as a physical organism” but “as a sensing and animated Body” (Husserl, 1989,
p. 185). His broad and inclusive recognition of animate life is, in fact, plainly evident in
his multiple references to “beasts” or “animals” in his writings on animate organisms: in
his specification of “an animal (man or beast)” (Husserl, 1989, p. 360), for example, in his
specification of the science of “somatology” (Husserl, 1980, p. 7), and in his specification
of animals as “analogues of ourselves” (Husserl, 1970, p. 187; see also pp. 227–228).
Within the Kingdom Animalia specifically, notably within phylum hemichordata and
phylum chordata, that is, within notochord and vertebrate forms of life, felt attraction and
movement are constituted affectively and kinesthetically. In short, across animate
and even plant life (Sacks, 2014), a foundational hereness exists that is anchored in felt
attractions— or nonattractions—and in movement toward— or away. The zero point tout
court that defines a lived body is thus grounded in an affectively and kinetically alive
hereness, a body that is a felt bodily presence that both constitutes and flows forth in
directly experienced tactile-kinesthetic-affective patterns of movement. This body of
affect and movement is directly recognized by Husserl in his description of Leib and soul:
The Body is, as Body, filled with the soul through and through. Each movement of the Body
is full of soul, the coming and going, the standing and sitting, the walking and dancing, etc.
Likewise, so is every human performance, every human production. (Husserl, 1989, p. 252)
In sum, the hereness of the lived body is clearly pervasive across everyday life and
more. It is thus hardly surprising that the unity of Body and soul is a consistent theme in
Husserl’s writings (e.g., Husserl, 1980, pp. 103–112; Husserl, 1970, pp. 106 –107).
Husserl’s delineation of the self-givenness of objects is notably significant in this
context. Husserl writes that “self-givenness” is:
the way in which an object in its givenness can be characterized relative to consciousness as
“itself there,” “there in the flesh,” in contrast to its mere presentification, the empty, merely
indicative idea of it . . . [as in] memory or imagination, etc. (Husserl, 1973a, pp. 19 –20)
THE LIVED BODY 9
Correlatively, the self-givenness of the lived body is precisely “‘itself-here’, ‘here in

the flesh’” in contrast to an “empty merely indicative idea of it.” In effect, as with what
Husserl describes as the self-givenness of an object, the self-givenness of the lived body
in no way indicates a self. With respect to the lived body, what is self-given is a bodily
felt presence, a dynamically felt spatio-temporal presence that is kinesthetically and
tactilely “itself-here,” “here in the flesh.” When this hereness of the lived body is reduced
to positions and postures “sensed” by way of “proprioception,” it is objectified beyond
recognition, as when Gallagher and Zahavi (2012) write:
I perceive that something is to my right or to my left only by having a proprioceptive sense

of where my right is and where my left is, ‘knowing’ my right hand from my left hand, my
right leg from my left leg. (p. 163)
It is equally objectified when they earlier state, “I have a proprioceptive sense of

whether I am sitting or standing, stretching or contracting my muscles” (Gallagher &
Zahavi, 2012, p. 155), and when they go on to affirm that “[o]f course, these postural and
positional senses of where and how the body is tend to remain in the background of my
awareness; they are tacit, recessive. They are what phenomenologists call a ‘pre-reflective
sense of myself as embodied’” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 155). To be noted and
emphasized first is that while we have various and even changing experiences of tension
and pressure when we raise an arm or make a fist, when we bend over and pick up a heavy
suitcase, and when we swing our arms and legs in the process of walking, we do not have
a sense of “stretching or contracting my muscles.” We have a kinaesthetic sense not of
muscles but of movement. Moreover when the lived body is confounded with selfhood or
“embodied” selfhood in any form, as with “a pre-reflective sense of myself as embodied,”
the confusion can easily ontologize fleshly realities into a wholly spatial presence, indeed,
into objectified positional and anatomical renditions of the lived body that basically
transmogrify its foundational spatio-temporal hereness and animation. A proprioceptive
sense of “where and how the body is” may indeed be what some phenomenologists call
a “pre-reflective sense of myself as embodied,” but not what all phenomenologists so
affirm and with good reason, beginning with the question of how proprioception can
possibly be a human sensory modality of posture and movement since no sensory organs
and neither afferent nor efferent neurological pathways anchor its declared reality.
“Embodiment” has, in fact, been put into question as a way of bypassing real-life,
real-time experiential realities and elucidations of the lived body (Sheets-Johnstone, 2015;
see also Sheets-Johnstone, 2019). Embodied renditions of the lived body oftentimes
conceive and describe it as an already accomplished adult body, for example. In effect, the
existential fact that we come into the world moving, and that, in addition, we have to learn
our bodies and learn to move ourselves are facts of life that are elided (for more on such
learning, see Sheets-Johnstone, 1999/2011). When an adultist body holds sway, it fur-
thermore is open to distinct concordances with “embodied” positional/anatomical rendi-
tions of the lived body (Sheets-Johnstone, 2019). Whether together or apart, an adultist
body and its positional/anatomical renditions overlook “‘here in the flesh’” realities of the
lived body, realities duly researched and affirmed by neurophysiologist Marc Jeannerod
on the basis of his extensive studies of “motor cognition” that include experimental studies
of pathologically afflicted individuals. Jeannerod’s conclusion on the basis of these studies
is indeed unqualified and decisive: “There are no reliable methods for suppressing
kinesthetic information arising during the execution of a movement” (Jeannerod, 2006, p.
56). As pointed out elsewhere, Jeannerod’s conclusion “documents kinesthesia and
10 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
implicitly but precisely corroborates a continuous internally-mediated sensitivity to move-

ment” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2019, p. 145). As furthermore noted, “Jeannerod’s declarative
finding speaks reams about the foundational ongoing reality and existential significance of
kinesthesia, reams that should certainly lead phenomenologists to take kinesthesia seri-
ously and the challenge of elucidating its insuppressible living dynamics of signal
importance” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2019, 145; see also Sheets-Johnstone, 2014a, 109).
Notable artistic recognition and validation are given to these living dynamics by
internationally known twentieth-century American composer Roger Sessions who wrote
eloquently of how movement is integral to music. Sessions’ observations are not theo-
retically anchored but experientially anchored, and richly so:
It seems to me that the essential medium of music, the basis of its expressive powers and the
element which gives it its unique quality among the arts, is time, made living for us through
its expressive essence, movement. (Sessions, 1941, p. 105)
Time becomes real to us primarily through movement, which I have called its expressive
essence; and it is easy to trace our primary musical responses to the most primitive movement
of our being—to those movements which are indeed at the very basis of animate existence.
The feeling for tempo, so often derived from the dance, has in reality a much more primitive
basis in the involuntary movements of the nervous system and the body in the beating of the
heart, and more consciously in breathing, later in walking. Accelerated movement is, from
these very obvious causes, inevitably associated with excitement, retarded movement with a
lessening of dynamic tension. The experience of meter has the most obvious and essential of
its origins in the movements of breathing, with its alternation of upward and downward
movements. The sense of effort, preparation, suspense, which is the psychological equivalent
of the up-beat, finds its prototype in the act of inhalation, and the sense of weight, release, and
finality produced by the down-beat corresponds most intimately to the act of exhalation.
Sessions, 1941, p. 108)
Sessions amplifies his experientially anchored analysis of the integrality of movement

to music specifically with respect to melody and rhythm:
The other primary elements of music—melody and rhythm— derive from more complicated
but only slightly less essential muscular movements, which it has been fairly well demon-
strated, are reproduced in miniature by the human nervous system in response to musical
impressions. If we instinctively respond to a rising melodic pitch by a feeling of increased
tension and hence of heightened expression, or a falling pitch by the opposite sensation; if an
increase in intensity of sound intensifies our dynamic response to the music, and vice versa,
it is because we have already in our vocal experiences—the earliest and most primitive as well
as later and more complicated ones—lived intimately through exactly the same effects. A
raising of pitch or an increase in volume is the result of an intensification of effort, energy, and
emotional power in the crying child just as truly as in the highly evolved artistry of a Chaliapin
or an Anderson. (Sessions, 1941, p. 109)
The above passages from Sessions’ writings show that the foundational hereness of the
lived body is not a merely spatial placement nor some esoteric geometric or arithmetic
placement. Neither does its hereness define a positional or embodied presence or purely
spatial entity. On the contrary, what Sessions lucidly draws our attention to are the ways
in which movement, our own bodily life in movement, and our bodily life in making
music and in listening to music, is at the heart of life, its actually lived-through dynamics.
He, in fact, states that “in trying to understand the work of the composer, one must first
THE LIVED BODY 11
think of him as living in a world of sounds, which in response to his creative impulse
become animated with movement” (Sessions, 1941, p. 126).
As pointed out elsewhere, “Session’s keen, experience-based understandings of move-
ment, its dynamics, and its intimate ties to breath and to emotion point us toward a
recognition of kinesthesia” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2020a). They thus implicitly point us
toward recognition of an essential distinction, namely, between proprioception and kin-
esthesia. Many contemporary researchers identify proprioception as the movement fac-
ulty, giving prominence to it to the exclusion or virtual exclusion of kinesthesia (e.g.,
Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012; Montero, 2006a, 2006b; Montero & Cole, 2007). It is hardly
surprising that they fail to recognize the inherent qualitative dynamics that inform our
lives, let alone that inform artistic creations and appreciations. In this context, it is
important to acknowledge the fact that proprioception as a postural sense was first
described as such by Sir Charles Sherrington and that it is this postural sense that is taken
up by a sizable enough number of present-day academics (e.g., Bermúdez, 2003; Gal-
lagher, 2005; Gallagher & Cole, 1998; Thompson, 2007). In his original coinage of the
term, Sherrington defined proprioception as “the perception of where the limb is”
(Sherrington, 1953, p. 249). Gallagher and Cole uphold Sherrington’s postural specifica-
tion when they explicitly state, “Proprioceptive awareness is a felt experience of bodily
position” (Gallagher & Cole, 1998, p. 137). Gallagher and Zahavi do likewise when they
state, “Proprioception is the innate and intrinsic position sense that I have with respect to
my limbs and overall posture. It is the ‘sixth sense’ that allows me to know whether my
legs are crossed, or not, without looking at them” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 162).
Dorothée LeGrand repeats this very claim when she writes, “Like other perceptual
modalities, proprioception is phenomenological since a distinct qualitative feeling is
normally associated with the perceived properties: there is something it feels like to
experience that one’s legs are crossed” (Legrand, 2006, p. 106).
As elsewhere pointed out (Sheets-Johnstone, 2020a):
From an evolutionary perspective, proprioception is differentiated from kinesthesia not only

as a faculty that began in surface recognition sensitivity, a sensitivity subserving movement
through decompressions and deformations, but a faculty that over time evolved from outer
sensory organs such as cilia and slit sensilla into internal sensory organs such as chordotonal
organs, organs that are sensitive directly to stresses within the body itself (Laverack, 1976; see
also Lissman, 1950; Sheets-Johnstone, 1998, 1999/2011). Such organs are the evolutionary
antecedents of kinesthesia proper; that is, the internal sensory organs of kinesthesia, organs
found in muscles, tendons, and joints, are “descendants with modification” (Darwin, 1859/
1968) of the internal sensory organs of proprioception. They are kinesthetically rather than
tactilely rooted, and being kinesthetically rooted, they constitute a faculty that, unlike
proprioception, is a faculty subtending experiences of the qualitative dynamics of movement.
From this evolutionary vantage point (Sheets-Johnstone, 1998, 1999/2011), the external-to-
internal evolutionary modification of proprioception was the gateway to the evolution of a
directly movement-sensitive consciousness. Kinesthesia, the faculty that in the 19th century
was originally called “the muscle sense” (Scheerer, 1987; see also Bastian, 1880), endows
animate beings direct experience of the qualitative dynamics of movement.
The above clarifications and descriptions of the zero point tout court and the quint-
essential hereness of the lived body are open to validation, question, comment, and so on,
by anyone following through with a phenomenological analysis of the lived body. It
should be noted explicitly that to flesh out the zero point tout court is not to attempt a finer
experiential specification of “what it is like” or “what it is like for-me-ness” (Gallagher &
12 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
Zahavi, 2012; Zahavi, 2014; Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014). Neither is it an attempted finer
specification of a certain “feel” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014). It is a beginning phenome-
nological description of the lived body that shows it to be a dynamic spatio-temporal
presence anchored in the tactile-kinesthetic-affective body. Further investigations of “the
self” and “prereflective self-consciousness” are nonetheless warranted since the self and
prereflective self-consciousness figure centrally in many contemporary phenomenological
texts that take the lived body into account, most notably the texts of Shaun Gallagher and
Dan Zahavi.
The Self and Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness
The self is of central moment across a range of writings: psychological, Buddhist, and
philosophical. Its relevance here with respect to the lived body focuses to begin with on
two critically significant perspectives, which though seemingly antithetical are actually
mutually supportive: the identification of a “core self” and the identification of the self as
a construct. The core self is described at length by infant psychiatrist and clinical
psychologist Daniel Stern; the self as construct is described at length by Buddhist monks,
scholars, and meditation teachers. Stern’s description of the core self is anchored foun-
dationally in the lived body, preeminently in the tactile-kinesthetic-affective body; Bud-
dhists’ descriptions of the self as a construct are foundationally anchored in the living
reality of time. To appreciate the ways in which their descriptions run counter to both the
self— even “a minimal form of selfhood,”—and to a prereflective self-consciousness, we
turn specifically to each.
The integral temporal hereness of the lived body is of particular moment in relation to
the living reality of time described in detail in Buddhist literature, articulated throughout
Buddhist teachings, and experienced directly in Buddhist practice, namely, the living
reality of impermanence. Avowals of a “self,” whatever their form, are at odds with the
real-life reality of impermanence and are distinctly contradicted in Buddhist texts. Bud-
dhist monk Nyanaponika Thera (1965), for example, lucidly points out their incompati-
bility in detailing insights achieved through the practice of “Bare Attention”:
After the practice of Bare Attention has resulted in a certain width and depth of experience in
its dealings with the mental events, it will become an immediate certainty to the meditator that
mind is nothing beyond its cognizing function. Nowhere, behind or within that function, can
any individual agent or abiding entity be detected. By way of one’s own direct experience, one
will thus have arrived at the great truth of No-soul or Impersonality . . . , showing that all
existence is void of an abiding personality (self, soul, overself, etc.) or an abiding substance
of any description. (p. 38)
Buddhist monk and teacher Joseph Goldstein takes up the incompatibility of an

enduring entity with the reality of impermanence in differentiating between concept and
reality, recalling in the beginning Plato’s cave in which people are bound in such a way
as to take what is actually an illusion—shadows on the wall in front of them—for reality:
“Perhaps the most deeply ingrained concept, the one that has kept us chained longest in
the cave of shadows, binding us to the wheel of life and death and rebirth, is the concept
of self” (Goldstein, 1987, p. 31). He specifies this illusion as “[*t]he idea that there is
someone behind this flow, that there is some entity, some permanent element, which is the
essence of our being,” and goes on to point out specifically that:
THE LIVED BODY 13
[s]elf, I, me, mine are all ideas in the mind, arising out of our identification with various
aspects of the mind-body process. From the beginning this ‘self’ does not exist, yet because
we’re so firmly attached to the idea of it, we spend much of our lives defending or enlarging
or satisfying the imaginary self. Meditation helps us to see its conceptual nature, to see that
in reality it does not exist, that it is simply an idea, an extraneous projection onto what’s
happening in the moment. (Goldstein, 1987, pp. 31–32)
Notable too are Goldstein’s observations regarding “ownership,” beginning with the
ways in which “people’s lives are committed to the concept of place, of country, of
nation.” He points out:

On the planet, there are no divisions between countries. Our minds have created these arbitrary
divisions. . . . So many problems in the world—political and economic tensions and
hostilities—are related to the thought, ‘this is my nation, my country.’ In understanding that
the concept is only the product of our own thought processes, we can begin to free ourselves
from that attachment. (Goldstein, 1987, pp. 29 –30)
When he later observes (Goldstein, 1987, p. 33), “It is interesting that concepts remain
fixed while reality is always in flux,” he immediately references the body, pointing out,
“The word ‘body’ stays the same but the body itself is everchanging. The concept is static
but when we actually experience what is happening, we discover a flow of impermanent
elements.”
In short, the lived body is clearly not a spatial entity but a spatio-temporal bodily
presence. Its hereness is not static but dynamic. Freudian analyst and Buddhist scholar
Mark Epstein directly specifies what amounts to the temporal nature of a dynamic
hereness when he writes of “the transience of which we are a part” (Epstein, 1998, p. 72)
and when he earlier recalls Japanese Zen master Dogen’s thoughts about “‘being-time’,”
thoughts that emphasize a transience in which “the ability to embrace the moment takes
precedence over fear of its passing” (Epstein, 1998, p. 65). In an earlier text Epstein
(1995), explicitly states:
the distinguishing characteristic of Buddhist meditation is that it seeks to eradicate, once and
for all, the conception of self as an entity. In various critical ways, the three major meditative
strategies— concentration, mindfulness, and insight—all work to this end. (pp. 138 –139)
We find a further perspective on the incompatibility of a self with impermanence in the

writings of Buddhist monk, teacher, and clinical psychologist Jack Kornfield. In detailing
the course of meditative practice (Goldstein & Kornfield, 1987, pp. 55–56), Kornfield
describes how “the general emphasis of our meditation begins to shift from content to
process,” and how, in virtue of this shift, it becomes evident “how thoughts come and go,
moods come and go, body sensations come and go, ” and further, how:
We’re not the owners of this process. . . . The truth of our being is simply this process of
flowing change. Everything is impermanent . . . as much as we grasp and hold the body and
senses, the feeling, the memory, ideas, reactions, and observation, so much do we make a
separate ‘self.’ (Goldstein & Kornfield, 1987, pp. 55–56)
That separate self, as Kornfield shows, is a construct: “What we take to be a self is

tentative, fictitious, constructed by clinging, a temporary identification with some parts of
experience. Self arises, solidifying itself, like ice floating in water. . . . Identification and
clinging harden the water into ice” (Kornfield, 2009, p. 65). He succinctly observes:
14 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
All that we think of as “me” or “mine” is a flow of changing experience . . . with no enduring
entity behind the scenes controlling the show. In truth what we are is this changing process;
there is nothing substantial or solid. (Goldstein & Kornfield, 1987, p. 145)
Clearly, the reality of impermanence that invalidates a self, whether minimal or

full-blown, is intimately tied to the integral temporal hereness of the lived body. What the
integral temporal hereness reveals is a “process of flowing change,” a “transience,” “a
flow of impermanent elements,” a void of “an abiding substance of any description.”
Indeed, the lived body lives in movement: movement is its mother tongue and remains its
mother tongue across the whole of its life. In truth, movement and impermanence go hand
in hand, a fact Aristotle recognized centuries go in writing of movement and time

(Aristotle, 1984, 217b29 –224a17). Moreover that truth attests to the flowing nature of
both movement and time, a nature implicitly but precisely recognized by Husserl in his
writing of “this elusively flowing life” (Husserl, 1970, p. 178). That the ephemerality of
movement is undeniable impels toward a startling conclusion, namely, that what is
avowed and claimed as “self-consciousness” is in reality, the reality of an “in the flesh”
hereness of the lived body, a hereness that is basically a movement consciousness that is
itself in motion. In corollary to Husserl’s observation that “consciousness of the world . . .
is in constant motion” (Husserl, 1970, p. 109), lived-body consciousness is correlatively
in constant motion: it is in constant motion along a gradient of awareness depending on
circumstance, all the way from maximal as in making a surgical incision to minimal as in
brushing one’s teeth. Thus, in contrast to the claim of a “minimal form of self,” a “minimal
lived-body consciousness” is directly experienced in everyday life in the course of
kinesthetically felt familiar dynamics running off. The dynamics are indeed in the
background, but not at all absent. If they were, we could hardly “get on with our task,” let
alone know where we are in the process of “our task” and when to stop. Kinesthesia is the
modality of this lived-body consciousness, and as Jeannerod’s studies remind us, it is
insuppressible: “a continuous internally-mediated sensitivity to movement” informs our
lives from beginning to end.
In sum, avowals of a self and concerns to validate a self-consciousness are not only
incompatible with the reality of impermanence but deflect us from an acknowledgment
of impermanence to begin with, and in consequence, not just from a recognition of, but
from insights into the spatio-temporal realities of the lived body. Moreover it is notable
to recall in this context that the dynamic in-the-flesh hereness of the lived body is not a
mindless hereness but is, as Husserl emphasizes, a unity of Body and soul: “Each
movement of the Body is full of soul, the coming and going, the standing and sitting, the
walking and dancing, etc. Likewise, so is every human performance, every human
production” (Husserl, 1989, p. 252). The in-the-flesh dynamic hereness of the lived body
indeed describes not an embodied mind, but a mindful Body, an ever-present unity of
Body and soul that even in stillness abides in movement.
This in-the-flesh dynamic hereness of the lived body is implicit but no less apparent
in Stern’s detailed account of an infant’s core self. In particular, Stern identifies four
features of “self-experience” that, “taken together, constitute a sense of a core self,”
namely, self-agency, self-coherence, self-affectivity, and self-history (Stern, 1985, p.
70 –71). Stern specifically underscores their experiential reality by way of emphasis on the
words “sense of” as distinct from “‘concept of’ or ‘knowledge of’ or ‘awareness of’”
(Stern, 1985, p. 71): “Sense of self is not a cognitive construct. It is an experiential
integration” (Stern, 1985, p. 71). In short, the sense of a core self is a composite of
experience; it is not reified in any way, shape, or form. Stern furthermore pointedly
THE LIVED BODY 15
describes the features that constitute the sense of a core self as self-invariants: “An
invariant is that which does not change in the face of all the things that do change” (Stern,
1985, pp. 71–72). Thus, Stern describes agency as “having control over self-generated
action (your arm moves when you want it to), and expecting consequences of one’s
actions (when you shut your eyes it gets dark)” (Stern, 1985, p. 71). He describes
coherence as “having a sense of being a nonfragmented, physical whole with boundaries
and a locus of integrated action, both while moving . . . and when still” (Stern, 1985, p.
71). He describes affectivity as “experiencing patterned inner qualities of feeling (affects)
that belong with other experiences of self” (Stern, 1985, p. 71). He describes history as
“having the sense of enduring, of a continuity with one’s own past so that one ‘goes on
being’ and can even change while remaining the same” (Stern, 1985, p. 71). As he
comments shortly later, the emphasis in infant life “is on the palpable experiential realities
of substance, action, sensation, affect, and time” (Stern, 1985, p. 71).
It is of considerable interest to note that in the course of giving experientially anchored
descriptions of each invariant, Stern centers attention on an experimental study he and
other researchers conducted on four month-old Siamese twins who were soon to be
surgically separated. As described elsewhere (Sheets-Johnstone, 2016a, p. 54):
The twins were attached ventrally, between umbilicus and sternum and thus faced each other.
The experiment turned on the response of each twin who, while sucking her own fingers or the
fingers of her twin, experienced the fingers being pulled away, the experimenter pulling on
that particular twin’s arm. Stern and colleagues discovered that when the twin was sucking her
own fingers, she resisted her arm being pulled away and thus resisted her fingers being
dislodged from her mouth. In contrast, when she was sucking the fingers of her twin, she
strained her head forward in pursuit of the withdrawing fingers but made no resistant
movement with her arm. Clearly, the twins had not a postural sense of themselves, but a
tactile-kinesthetically-affectively anchored felt experience of themselves, a dynamic sense of
themselves that confirms both an instinctive “I govern” and an instinctive “I can” with
respect to my body (Husserl, 1973b, p. 97; with respect to an “instinctive” response, see
Husserl, 1989, p. 271)—phenomenological grounds of “a sense of agency.” (Sheets-
Johnstone, 2015; see also Sheets-Johnstone, 2014b)
What each twin experienced was not a “self” but an experiential composite of the four
invariants that constitute “a sense of a core self,” a sense anchored in a lived body, in
particular, in the tactile-kinesthetic-affective dynamics of that lived body. The “palpable
experiential realities” of agency, coherence, affectivity, and history indeed anchor just
such a body. That body is not perceived but felt, and felt immediately and directly. It is
its immediate and direct feltness—not a “me-ness” or a “mineness”—that experientially
anchors what Zahavi terms a “first-person perspective” or “first-person givenness” (Za-
havi, 2005, e.g., pp. 16, 26). In fact, what Zahavi identifies as “mineness” with respect to
experience (Zahavi, 2005, e.g., pp. 16, 61, 124 –125) is basically a reflective judgment, a
composite reflective determination and linguistic specification. The notion that “I am the
subject of this experience” is tied to what both he and Gallagher specify as “ownership”
in relation to others. Such “ownership” is exemplified in Zahavi’s claim, “Experiences
necessarily involve an experiential perspective or point of view, they come with perspec-
tival ownership” (Zahavi, 2014, p. 88), and in Gallagher’s claim, “Experience happens for
the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is
implicitly marked as my experience . . . it refers to the distinct givenness or the how it feels
of experience” (Gallagher, 2017). Whether specified in terms of “perspectival ownership”
or in terms of “my experience” and “the distinct givenness or the how it feels of
16 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
experience,” the claims implicitly document the zero point tout court, the real-life,
real-time hereness of the lived body, but without the slightest acknowledgment let alone
description of this spatio-temporal tactile-kinesthetic-affective bodily presence. Just such
a void is furthermore evident when Gallagher “offer[s] a positive account of the sense of
ownership by showing the role it plays in an enactivist (action-oriented) view of embodied
cognition” (Gallagher, 2017). The void is similarly apparent in Zahavi’s claim that
“occurrent thoughts, perceptions, or pains . . . are characterized by a first-personal
givenness that immediately reveals them as one’s own” (Zahavi, 2005, p. 124), Zahavi
offering no basis for the revelation. We may indeed well ask, what is the basis for
affirming that “occurrent thoughts, perceptions, or pains” are “one’s own”? Are occurrent
pains, with their twitchings, writhings, and grimacings, not part of the lived body’s
hereness? A similar critical concern arises in relation to everyday movement, as when
Zahavi claims, “When I reach for a cup, the movement is felt as mine” (Zahavi, 2005, p.
143). What is felt is movement, not “mineness.” In particular, a certain familiar tactile-
kinesthetic dynamic pattern runs off without monitoring. In fact, the movement of
reaching, like any movement, is felt as a certain qualitative dynamic which might be slow
or fast or any gradient in between, lethargic or energetic or any gradient in between, which
might require a sizable or minimal extension of the arm or any gradient in between, and
so on. When we move, we kinesthetically feel the dynamics of the movement as they
unfold, an insuppressible qualitative dynamics. A specific sensuous quality is indeed
kinesthetically experienced.
Just such dynamic realities are apparent in the Siamese twin experiment. Each twin’s
distinctive movement is a matter of tactility and kinesthesia, a matter of a tactile-
kinesthetically felt and feeling body that anchors and modulates basic subject-world
relationships. Indeed, what Husserl identifies within the abstractive epoché of the “sphere
of ownness” is not a matter of “ownership,” but of separating what is “‘alien’ or ‘other’”
from what are distinctly first-person experiential realities (Husserl, 1973b, pp. 96 –98),
experiential realities that, though not identified as such, constitute the zero point tout court
and that coincide with what Stern identifies as invariants of the core self, that is, the
hereness of the lived body. What Stern, in fact, identifies as “palpable experiential
realities” constituting “a sense of a core self” are incontrovertibly not just linked to the
lived body: they characterize it experientially. Moreover the invariants that Stern describes
are in accord with Husserl’s insights into receptivity, the body of affect and movement,
that is, of “interest” and “turning toward,” “the lowest level of the activity of the ego”
(Husserl, 1973a, p. 76). In sum, Stern’s analysis illuminates basic facets of experiential
life that enter into the “experiential integration” of “a sense of a core self,” eliding in the
process any reference to a concrete form of selfhood and prereflective self-consciousness.
It is significant that the findings of Stern in the Siamese twin experiment empirically
complement the phenomenological findings of Ludwig Landgrebe, a student of Husserl,
as well as those of Husserl himself. In the course of elaborating Husserl’s insights into “I
cans” and their anchorage both in “the freedom of this ‘Body’” (Husserl, 1989, p. 158, see
also pp. 73, 167) and in the “instinctive” and “involuntary” (Husserl, 1989, p. 270; see also
p. 346), Landgrebe succinctly states, “[the] ability to move itself is the most elementary
form of spontaneity” (Landgrebe, 1977, p. 108; italics in original). This “elementary form
of spontaneity” is evident in each twin’s response to her arm being pulled away and
testifies in fact to an elementary capacity of hereness: “the ability to move itself.”
Moreover a sterling empirical example of the progression of this “most elementary form
of spontaneity” is documented in J. A. Scott Kelso and Armin Fuchs’s reformulation of
a classic infant experiment conducted by Carolyn Rovee-Collier and colleagues. The
THE LIVED BODY 17
experiment—mobile conjugate reinforcement— has to do with an infant’s spontaneous

kicking movements. The significance of Kelso and Fuchs’s reformulation (Kelso & Fuchs,
2016) lies in its discerning expanded insights into infant movement and in the precise way
it complements the natural progression Husserl identifies from “I move” to “I do” to “I
can” (Husserl, 1989, p. 273), a progression apparent not only in infant learning but in
forms of adult learning. Such learnings span a diverse interpersonal as well as individual
range, hence not only playing an arpeggio on harp or piano, cracking an egg and
separating yolk from white, and developing carpentry skills necessary to building a house,
but throwing a ball effectively to someone who is waiting to catch it, dancing gracefully
with someone, and so on.
Being True to the Truths of the Zero Point
When we compare Buddhists’ experiential specifications of the self as a construct

and Stern’s experiential specification of “a sense of a core self” with straightforward
avowals of a self, we find notable and at the same time puzzling references. For
example, though Zahavi refers to Stern’s writings (Zahavi, 2005, 2014), the core self
that Stern explicitly names and describes in detail is not mentioned much less
highlighted in Zahavi’s expositions of a self that aim to validate a “minimal form of
selfhood.” Yet Zahavi himself equates what he describes as the minimal self with the
core self: “Thus, in my view, this experiential sense of self deserves to be called the
minimal self or the core self” (Zahavi, 2005, p. 106; italics in original). Zahavi does
not reference Stern in this context nor does he give a phenomenological description
of this “experienced” minimal self/core self except in terms of “first-person given-
ness,” “subjective feel,” and “what it is like.” Zahavi in fact critically states, “The
problem with the account offered by Stern . . . is that [he] conceive[s] of the embodied
self as an object and of embodied self-experience as a kind of object awareness”
(Zahavi, 2005, p. 204), seemingly oblivious of the fact that Stern explicitly describes
“a sense of a core self” not as a “concept,” “knowledge,” or “awareness,” but as an
“experiential integration,” and furthermore, that Stern does not write of “embodi-
ments” in any form: Stern writes of experiential realities of infant life. Zahavi in no
way describes the experiential “palpability” of these realities as Stern does, except in
quite passing, nondescriptive ways, as in stating, “[w]hen I reach for a cup, the
movement is felt as mine” (Zahavi, 2005, p. 143). Moreover seemingly following
Stern, Zahavi writes of the self’s “invariant” features, that is, the self’s “ability to
capture and articulate (invariant) experiential structures” (Zahavi, 2005, p. 128). One
wonders just what these “(invariant) experiential structures” might be, for Zahavi
gives no clue. Here and elsewhere, Zahavi provides no in-depth phenomenological
analysis that anchors either “a minimal form of selfhood” (Zahavi, 2014, p. 88) or
“some minimal form of self-awareness” (Zahavi, 2003, p. 88). On the contrary and as
noted above, he consistently resorts to “givenness,” “what it is like,” and so on, as
when he simply declares:
Self-awareness is there not only when I realize that I am perceiving a candle, but whenever
I am acquainted with an experience in its first-personal mode of givenness, that is, whenever
there is something it is like for me [sic] have the experience. In other words, pre-reflective
self-awareness and a minimal sense of self are integral parts of our experiential life. (Zahavi,
2005, p. 146; see also pp. 116 –124)
18 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
Here again, one wonders why there is a resort to, and an application of what amounts
to a third-person perspective on “our experiential life.” “What it is like” is a third-person
account of experience deriving from Thomas Nagel’s well-known article “What Is It Like
To Be a Bat?” When this third person account is applied to a first-person account, indeed,
to a reputed “first-person givenness” (Zahavi, 2005, pp. 119 –124), it elides a veritable
phenomenological analysis of experience. As pointed out elsewhere (Sheets-Johnstone,
2020b), “A veritable phenomenological analysis would certainly not describe experience
in terms of “what it is like,” affirming, for example, ‘To undergo an experience necessarily
means that there is something “it is like” for the subject to have that experience,’ and to
claim on that basis that ‘there must be some minimal form of self-awareness’” (Zahavi,
2003, p. 88). Neither, of course, would a veritable phenomenological analysis affirm that
experiences have what amounts to an anonymous “feel” to them, as when Zahavi affirms
that “experiences are essentially characterized by their subjective givenness, by the fact
that there is a subjective ‘feel’ to them” (Zahavi, 2003, p. 88). Oddly enough, “what it is
like” and a subjective “‘feel’” consistently go hand in hand as authentically offered
phenomenological descriptions by Gallagher and Zahavi (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p.
56; see also Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014):
The notion of prereflective self-awareness is related to the idea that experiences have a
subjective “feel” to them, a certain (phenomenal) quality of “what it is like” or what it “feels”
like to have them. As it is usually expressed outside of phenomenological texts, to undergo a
conscious experience necessarily means that there is something it is like for the subject to have
that experience (Nagel, 1974; Searle, 1992).
As documented on the basis of Husserl’s “zero point of orientation,” experiences are

first and foremost anchored in a hereness, a bodily felt presence. Prereflective experience
is indeed a direct and immediate bodily felt presence, a hereness, not a thereness. It is not
like anything but is a specific reality that can thus be elucidated phenomenologically. Such
phenomenological analyses emanate from phenomenological practice, which means they
begin with making the familiar strange, thus clearing the ground of beliefs, theses,
opinions, preferences, and so on. To start out with just such a specific experienced reality
rather than with theses, claims, argumentation, and so on, is to have the opportunity to
practice a methodology that elucidates that reality. When we in fact begin at the beginning
with infancy and even in utero realities, we are open to exploring just how we come to be
the learned adults we are. In such instances, we practice what Eugen Fink termed a
“constructive phenomenology” (Fink, 1995), a phenomenology that goes back to begin-
nings by way of observations grounded in descriptions of infants such as those given in
the research studies of psychologists/psychiatrists Daniel Stern, Colwyn Trevarthen, and
Jerome Bruner. Such descriptions underscore the dynamic nature of infant life with no
reification of a self in any form, whether minimal, full blown, or somewhere in between.
What they show is that infants experience themselves bodily. Infants could otherwise
hardly learn their bodies and learn to move themselves. In this respect their studies echo
Buddhist insights into the flowing nature of life and into the self as a construct. Tre-
varthen, for example, highlights the centrality of movement when he writes of 2-month-
old infants whose “movements of the whole body . . . accompany vocalizations and
movements of the lips and tongue,” and whose “[v]igorous calls or shouts are generally
combined with longer movements including waving of the hand” (Trevarthen, 1977, pp.
251–252; see also Trevarthen, 1979). In an article titled “Action and Emotion in Devel-
opment of Cultural Intelligence: Why Infants Have Feelings Like Ours,” Trevarthen
THE LIVED BODY 19
furthermore describes emotions “as manners of moving, and of responding to movement”

(Trevarthen, 2005, p. 63). In addition, he emphasizes the sensitivity of infants to “ani-
macy” (Trevarthen, 2005, p. 80) and more broadly, emphasizes the way in which animal
bodies are “motivated with intrinsic rhythm and intensity in the ‘vitality’ or ‘sentic forms’
of emotions” (Trevarthen, 2005, p. 64). In this context, he actually stresses the dynamic
temporal dimension of emotion and movement. It is notable that Stern too implicitly
stresses the temporal dimension of emotion and movement when he writes of “vitality
affects,” exemplifying them in kinetic terms such as “surging,” “fading,” “bursting,”
“fleeting,” and so on (Stern, 1985, p. 54). In none of these descriptions of infant life is
there a minimal or full-blown entity called the self. The descriptions in fact support the
observations of Bruner who, in his lengthy questioning of “self” in the context of his book
Acts of Meaning, emphasizes the fact that “the principal linguistic interest” of young
children “centers on human action and its outcomes. . . . Agent-and-action, action-and
object, agent-and-object, action-and location, and possessor-and possession make up the
major part of the semantic relations that appear in the first stage of speech” (Bruner, 1990,
p. 78). Bruner ends the book with a simple statement: “I have tried to show how the lives
and Selves we construct are the outcomes of this process of meaning-construction”
(Bruner, 1990, p. 138). Clearly, the idea that a self is a construct has wide affirmation
beyond Buddhist texts.
The pervasive present-day practice of embodying particular topics of research—from
self and subjectivity to language and even to movement and the body itself—is of
particular concern in the context of these detailed clinical and experimental accounts of
infancy. Consider, for example, the following claim:
[I]t now appears that even very young infants present a surprisingly rich form of self-
awareness rooted in an ecological experience of their body and their body’s practical relation
to the world. They seem to grasp implicitly that they have a body, and they feel that this body
can be made to do things, including imitate the expressions and gestures of others— despite
neither having seen their body nor possessing any sort of linguistic or narrative understanding
of it. This capacity points toward a range of embodied self-experience and skills . . . that
operate without narrative intervention. Additionally, our ability to enact prenarrative embod-
ied skills so efficiently suggests that there exists a primitive form of bodily self-experience that
is independent of narrative articulation. The young infant is immediately acquainted with its
body and the things its body can do; . . . This immediate acquaintance with oneself as an
embodied perspective on the world is a phenomenologically minimal form of self-experience.
(Krueger, 2011, p. 42)
Such a description of infant life is adultist and in stark contrast with descriptions by
Stern and other infant/child psychologists/psychiatrists. Moreover with respect to an
infant’s “embodied self-experience,” “embodied skills,” and “embodied perspective,” we
may pointedly ask: when we come into the world as newborns, are we embodied?— or do
we as bodies, embody? More generally, does embodiment in any form enlighten us as to
the realities of the hereness of being a body, a felt bodily presence? Even further, we may
ask, what possibly is the meaning of “embodied self-awareness”? If it is true that
“self-awareness is intrinsically embodied self-awareness” (Zahavi, 2005, p. 160), then the
tactile-kinesthetic-affective body—the body Husserl consistently describes as the body of
“action and affect” (Husserl, 1977, 1980, 1989)—warrants acknowledgment and detailed
description. In short, if self-awareness and self-experience are “embodied,” then there are
indisputably bodily experiences anchoring the awareness and experience. In effect, it is
insufficient simply to declare that “the body is in some fashion experientially present in
20 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
the perception or action” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014) and that “experiential aspects of my
embodiment permeate my pre-reflective self-consciousness” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014).
Within the phenomenological tradition, readers justly expect to be enlightened as to just
what these “experiential aspects of my embodiment” are. Further still, if “I experience the
movements of my body as my own actions” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014), then the real-life,
real-time experience of those “actions,” that is, likely familiar patterns of movement,
warrant description. Phenomenological methodology provides the resources for just such
descriptions. From this methodological perspective too, one may justly question if not
inveigh against the notion of infants “having” a body—“They seem to grasp implicitly that
they have a body.” As should be apparent, the distinction between having a body and being
a body is quintessential to veritable understandings of the lived body. In fact, what Merleau-
Ponty identifies as the “reversibility”—the “chiasm”— of touching and touched hands in
which “the ‘touching subject’ passes over to the rank of the touched ” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968,
p. 134), thus in which “touching subject” becomes touched object, is directly related to the
distinction between being and having a body. In particular, when “‘the touching subject’
passes over to the rank of the touched,” it passes to the rank of an object, the “rank” of having
a body. Moreover the distinction between being and having, subject and object, touching and
touched, is basically, that is, phenomenologically, rooted in an experiential difference between
feeling and perceiving: with respect to touching and touched, the experiential difference is
between tactilely feeling one’s hand and tactilely perceiving one’s hand. A touching subject’s
tactilely feeling hand is precisely coincident with the zero point tout court, with a bodily felt
presence, a hereness anchored in being a body.
Embodiments fail not only to differentiate between being and having a body and
between feeling and perceiving, but to provide bona-fide phenomenological specifi-
cations:
Phenomenologists distinguish the prereflective body-awareness that accompanies and shapes

every spatial experience, from a reflective consciousness of the body. To capture this
difference, Husserl introduced a terminological distinction between Leib and Körper, that is,
between the prereflectively lived body, that is, the body as an embodied first-person perspec-
tive, and the subsequent thematic experience of the body as an object. (Husserl, 1973a, p. 57;
Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014)
To define the lived body as an “embodied first-person perspective” is surely phenom-

enologically wayward. Such a Leib is not only void of the felt and temporal dimensions
that constitute it as an animate organism, it is not descriptive of the “Body full of soul”
a Body and soul that Husserl explicitly states “form a genuine experiential unity” (Husserl,
1989, p. 176), a “concrete unity” (Husserl, 1989, p. 168). Clearly, that Body is not a
convenient or handy haven for something needing a physical home, thus not a body that
“embodies” a first-person perspective, self-experience, and the like.
A final phenomenological truth of the zero point warrants specification, a truth
concerning the sensuous basis of experience. That basis is bypassed in a surprising range
of instances in which what is “felt” is described as the “how of experience,” and the “how
of experience,” as “mine” and “mineness”:
When I think about Paris, smell crushed mint leaves, listen to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet,
or move my left arm, all these various experiences seem to share a certain feature; they are
all felt as mine; they carry a subtle presence of self. . . . The mineness or for-me-ness . . . [is]
the unique mode of givenness or how of experience. It refers to the first-personal perspectival
THE LIVED BODY 21
character of experience; it refers to the fact that experiences I am living through present
themselves differently . . . to me than to anybody else. (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 226)
When experiences are grounded in “mineness or for-me-ness” as their “unique mode

of givenness or how of experience,” the sensuous basis that is foundationally present in the
felt hereness of the lived body is not simply overlooked but overridden—just as it is when
experiences are consistently described as “essentially characterized by having a subjective
‘feel’ to them” (Zahavi, 1999, p. 111) or as having “a certain (phenomenal) quality of
‘what it is like’ or what it ‘feels’ like to have them,” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014). Indeed,
just how does what is felt “carry a subtle presence of self” except as a construct inserted
into the real-life, real-time experience of the felt tactile-kinesthetic-affective body? This
same question can be asked of Krueger’s claim that upholds Zahavi’s claim of a “minimal
self.” Krueger writes:
[*T]he minimal self captures the feeling of phenomenal interiority that is perhaps the central
aspect of selfhood—the feeling that I, and only I, have this particular first-hand mode of access
to the goings-on in my head at this very moment. (Krueger, 2011, p. 28)
Not only is “the feeling of phenomenal interiority” not elucidated through phe-
nomenological analysis, but to specify “feeling” as “the goings-on in my head” is both
anatomically puzzling and factually telling of a perspective in which a fundamental
and centuries-old disjunction obtains. The same disjunction is actually found in
definitions of “self-experience,” but with a distinctly metaphysical cast: “At its most
primitive, self-experience is simply a question of being pre-reflectively aware of one’s
own consciousness, and the experiential self in question is precisely defined as the
very subjectivity of experience” (Zahavi, 2014, p. 24); “The self I am defending is the
experiential self, the self as defined from the first-person perspective—neither more
nor less” (Zahavi, 2014, p. 73).
As a “felt” or “subjective” experience, the “how of experience” is anchored in
sensuous modalities, notably those of the tactile-kinesthetic body and its related
affective dispositions, a fact admirably if implicitly demonstrated by Stern’s experi-
mental Siamese twin study. Real-life, real-time experiences of how it feels clearly
warrant description. Moreover to connect experienced “how it feels” with self-
givenness, mineness, and so on, all on behalf of instantiating a self, is actually to
mistake a how for a who. If asked “how it feels,” one would not say “mine” or
“for-me-ness” or “self-givenness.” One would precisely describe “how it feels,” the
word “it” referring to a specific feeling—sad, anxious, hopeful, joyous, and so on. The
question asks for a fine-grained description of that lived experience. It is notable that
in his exposition of Husserl’s phenomenology, Zahavi quotes Husserl’s specification
of the nature of prereflective experience in relation to reflection, the former experience
being something that “is already there for me as a ‘lived-experience’” (Zahavi, 2003,
p. 89). What phenomenological reflection elucidates is precisely a description of that
lived experience, thus not what the feeling “is like,” but what the character of that
feeling is, what tensions, pressures, propulsions, dispositions, and overall dynamics
one finds reverberating in a bodily felt presence, a hereness. We actually find the
beginnings of such a description in psychiatrist Nina Bull’s study of emotions in
which subjects were hypnotized into an emotion and asked to describe it. With respect
to fear, for example, one subject reported “First my jaws tightened, and then my legs
and feet . . . my toes bunched up until it hurt . . . and . . . well, I was just afraid of
something” (Bull, 1951, p. 59). With respect to anger, subjects mentioned “wanting to
22 SHEETS-JOHNSTONE
throw, pound, tear, smash and hit,” and what restrained them was “always the same,
clenching the hands” or some similar restraining movement (Bull, 1951, p. 65; italics
in original). Of further interest is that hypnotized subjects were then read their
description of an emotion and asked to feel it. They were then told, “You are now
locked in this physical position. There will be no changes in your body—no new
bodily sensations— until I specifically unlock you” (Bull, 1951, pp. 79 – 80). In this
locked position, they were then asked to feel another emotion, one different from the
one in which they were “locked.” Subjects were unable to do this. They said, for
example, “I reached for joy— but couldn’t get it—so tense”; “I feel light— can’t feel
depression” (Bull, 1951, pp. 84, 85).

As indicated above, the question being answered on behalf of instantiating a self
is not “how it feels,” but who is feeling,” just as the correlative answer to the question,
“whose feelings are these?” centers precisely on “mine.” One can readily see from this
clarified linguistic perspective how ownership enters into and is basic to claims on
behalf of a self. One can equally readily see from this clarified linguistic perspective
why the foundational hereness of the body, a hereness that naturally, essentially, and
incontrovertibly constitutes a felt presence, is given scant recognition let alone
phenomenological analysis in ownership concerns with a self. As with the murkiness
and undisclosed reality of “a subjective ‘feel’,” when experiences are bundled into
“mineness” and that “mineness” is declared to “carry a subtle presence of self,” the
very bodily felt presence anchoring that declared “subtle presence” warrants descrip-
tion. When it is left unelucidated, a foundational reality of animate life is omitted.
The insuppressible modality of kinesthesia is of obvious import in this respect, as
is the nature of kinesthetic awareness. In particular, what I kinesthetically experience
in a felt bodily sense is not the sense of ownership (cf., Gallagher, 2005; Gallagher &
Zahavi, 2012) but a first-hand— or first-body—felt qualitative dynamic, precisely an
“I move,” without an identifying “I” being in any way substantively part of the
immediate and direct experience (Sheets-Johnstone, 2014b, pp. 258 –259; Sheets-
Johnstone, 2016b, p. 35). If asked to describe that immediate, direct, nonreflective,
and nonmonitored experience (the latter in contrast to monitored as when learning a
new skill or stepping along a steep and narrow cliff), one could from a Buddhist as
well as a phenomenological perspective specify simply “moving, moving”: “There is
no one to whom this changing process belongs, there is no owner of it” (Goldstein &
Kornfield, 1987, p. 22; see also p. 144). The insuppressibly felt qualitative dynamics
inherent in “moving, moving” are experientially present and all that is experientially
present. In fact, the moment I put an “I” or an “ownership” into the experience, I am
perceiving the movement, not feeling its dynamics pure and simple. Putting an “I” or
“ownership” into the experience may well constitute a linguistic or reflective speci-
fication: I am perhaps answering a question—“what are you doing?”— or thinking
ahead—“I’m hoping to finish this gardening project today.” In sum, the hereness of
the lived body confutes a “how of experience” postulated in support of validating a
self (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 226, Zahavi, 2014, p. 22), a “how” that specifically
relates to the “subjective feel” of experience (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 56;
Zahavi, 1999, p. 111; Zahavi, 2005, p. 116), to “how it feels” (Gallagher, 2017;
Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014).
The above critical observations regarding claims of a self and of prereflective
self-experience together with critical concerns about the ways in which these claims
bypass the lived body lead directly to foundational truths of experience, truths of the
zero point tout court that vindicate kinesthesia and the import of the tactile-
THE LIVED BODY 23
kinesthetic-affective body. As emphasized earlier, the felt ongoing presence that

constitutes the lived body’s experienced hereness is not simply a spatial presence but
a spatio-temporal presence foundationally grounded in the tactile-kinesthetic body.
Specifications and definitions that fail to recognize that foundationally grounded felt
presence rely upon a “diachronic unity” that bestows a needed temporal dimension
upon the self, an ongoing self-presence of sorts by way of “the stream of conscious-
ness”: “the phenomenological account of diachronic unity [is] an account that does not
posit something called the ‘self’ as a separate entity over and above the stream of
consciousness” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2014). The absence of kinesthesia and more
broadly, the tactile-kinesthetic-affective body, in such a “the stream of consciousness”

are absences that may well be likened to “an absence of the body below the neck”
(Ekman, Campos, Davidson, & de Waal, 2003, p. 273).5 The import of the absence is
thickened rather than reduced by ‘embodiments’. What such critical observations
essentially document is the import of Husserl’s insights anchored in the zero point of
orientation. On that essential basis the realities of movement and affect that constitute
the lived body’s hereness become apparent and with them receptivity in the form of
interest and turning toward, the “lowest level of the ego.” This specifically delineated
“lowest level of the ego” might actually be appropriated by those wanting to defend
a minimal notion of self in a veritable phenomenological manner. The lowest level of
the ego might offer them a phenomenological base on which to posit a minimal sense
of self, and this, of course, by way of the lived body, the zero point tout court of
orientation. In other words, recognition of the lowest level of the ego might give them
anchorage for a construct of self conceptually anchored in the ongoing bodily felt
spatio-temporal dynamics of the lived body, its foundational hereness.
5
The absence is noted by an unidentified audience member in a panel discussion on “Expres-
sion” during a conference on “Emotions Inside Out: 130 Years after Darwin’s The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals.” The unidentified audience member comments, “I’ve been so excited
by this whole presentation of this session because everybody is coordinated into one unit, but what
has fascinated me is the absence of the body below the neck [laughter].” He or she goes on to
explain: “I was fascinated by hearing the words, by seeing the faces, but I did not see the talking
by the fingers, by the hands, by the movement, poise, and pattern of the people that were moving,
sitting, or shifting.” He/she then asks “if there is any further matter going on with the body as a
Gestalt when you are communicating with your voice and your face.”
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Author Note
In her first life, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone was a dancer/choreographer, professor of

dance/dance scholar. In her second and ongoing life, she is a philosopher whose research
and writing remain grounded in the moving body. She is an independent interdisciplinary
scholar affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon where
she taught periodically in the 1990s and where she now holds an ongoing Courtesy
Professor appointment. She has published over 90 articles in humanities, science, and art
journals. Her ten books include The Phenomenology of Dance; Illuminating Dance:
Philosophical Explorations; the “roots” trilogy–The Roots of Thinking, The Roots of
Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, The Roots of Morality; Giving the Body Its
Due; The Primacy of Movement; The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader;
Putting Movement into Your Life; Insides and Outsides: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
Animate Life. She was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced
Study at Durham University in the United Kingdom in the Spring of 2007 for her research
on xenophobia, an Alumni Achievement Award by the School of Education, University of
Wisconsin in 2011, and was honored with a Scholar’s Session by the Society of Phe-
nomenology and Existential Philosophy in 2012.
Received April 2, 2019
Accepted May 21, 2019 䡲

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The Humanistic Psychologist

The Lived Body

The Lived Body

Preliminary Concerns and Clarifications

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone,

consciousness exists is both a point of view and a point of departure:

straightforwardly recognizes this distinction when he affirms that “purely in terms of

Fleshing Out the Zero Point

character of the lived body.

Earlier he, in fact, points out:

Correlatively, the self-givenness of the lived body is precisely “‘itself-here’, ‘here in

I perceive that something is to my right or to my left only by having a proprioceptive sense

It is equally objectified when they earlier state, “I have a proprioceptive sense of

implicitly but precisely corroborates a continuous internally-mediated sensitivity to move-

retically anchored but experientially anchored, and richly so:

Sessions amplifies his experientially anchored analysis of the integrality of movement

From an evolutionary perspective, proprioception is differentiated from kinesthesia not only

The Self and Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness

Buddhist monk and teacher Joseph Goldstein takes up the incompatibility of an

nation.” He points out:

We find a further perspective on the incompatibility of a self with impermanence in the

That separate self, as Kornfield shows, is a construct: “What we take to be a self is

Clearly, the reality of impermanence that invalidates a self, whether minimal or

in hand, a fact Aristotle recognized centuries go in writing of movement and time

experiment—mobile conjugate reinforcement— has to do with an infant’s spontaneous

with someone, and so on.

Being True to the Truths of the Zero Point

When we compare Buddhists’ experiential specifications of the self as a construct

As documented on the basis of Husserl’s “zero point of orientation,” experiences are

furthermore describes emotions “as manners of moving, and of responding to movement”

Phenomenologists distinguish the prereflective body-awareness that accompanies and shapes

To define the lived body as an “embodied first-person perspective” is surely phenom-

When experiences are grounded in “mineness or for-me-ness” as their “unique mode

depression” (Bull, 1951, pp. 84, 85).

kinesthetic-affective body. As emphasized earlier, the felt ongoing presence that

broadly, the tactile-kinesthetic-affective body, in such a “the stream of consciousness”

Gallagher, S. (2017, September). Self-defense: Deflecting deflationary and eliminativist critiques of

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2019). Kinesthesia: An extended critical overview and a beginning phenom-

In her first life, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone was a dancer/choreographer, professor of

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