The Centrality of Motion

“From the very beginning of our life, and evermore until we die, movement keeps us in touch with our world in the most intimate and profound way. In our experience of movement, there is no radical separation of self from world. We move in space through constant contact with the contours of our environment. We are in touch with our world at a visceral level, and it is the quality of our ‘being in touch’ that importantly defines what our world is like and who we are. What philosophers call ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ (persons and things) are abstractions from the interactive process of our experience of a meaningful self-in-a-world. It is one of the primary facts of our existence that we are not now and never were, either as infants or throughout human history, alienated from things, as subjects over against objects. There is no movement without the space we move in, the things we move, and the qualities of movement, which are at the same time both the qualities of the world we experience and the qualities of ourselves as doers and experiencers.”

Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, 20.