Why Movement Keeps Disappearing

From the modern bifurcation to movement education and movement practice

Movement has been studied everywhere and almost nowhere

The sciences analyze muscular action, locomotion, motor control, and physical adaptation. Physical education teaches sports, exercises, and fundamental motor skills. Dance studies expression, effort, space, and form. Philosophy investigates the body, perception, action, and being-in-the-world. Each field tells us something important about particular movements or about conditions that make movement possible.

Yet the question: What is movement? repeatedly disappears beneath these other inquiries.

This is not simply an oversight. Movement becomes difficult to perceive because the intellectual framework inherited from modernity divides realities that movement holds together: mind and body, subject and object, interiority and exteriority, expression and function, meaning and mechanics. Within this framework, movement is usually treated either as the external displacement of a material body or as the outward expression of an interior state. In both cases, movement itself remains derivative. It is explained by something supposedly more fundamental than it.

Two historical lineages reveal this problem. The first runs through modern philosophy, from Descartes and Kant to phenomenology and the recovery of the lived body. The second runs through the history of movement education, from François Delsarte and Rudolf Laban to the movement educators of the twentieth century. One lineage is primarily philosophical and the other practical, but both struggle with the same inheritance. Both repeatedly approach movement, and both repeatedly risk losing it again.

Their convergence suggests the possibility of a field in which movement is no longer reduced to movements: a study and practice of movement as a fundamental way living beings inhabit, know, and disclose a world.

The Cartesian bifurcation

The modern problem takes decisive form in René Descartes’s division between res cogitans, thinking substance, and res extensa, extended substance.

On one side stands the mind: immaterial, inward, self-conscious, and that which thinks. The other stands the body: material, extended in mathematically describable space, and governed by mechanical causation. The person becomes most essentially a thinking thing, while the body becomes something the person possesses—an extraordinarily complicated machine, but a machine nevertheless.

This division does not merely separate two kinds of substance. It changes what can count as genuine knowledge. The objectively real becomes what can be measured, mathematically represented, and described from the perspective of a detached observer. Lived perception becomes uncertain or merely subjective. The world immediately encountered through the moving body is subordinated to a world reconstructed through representation.

Movement is caught within this bifurcation. Considered objectively, it becomes the displacement of extended matter. Considered subjectively, it becomes the expression of an intention, feeling, or volition originating in an interior mind. What becomes difficult to articulate is the unity we ordinarily live: I do not first formulate an immaterial command and then observe a material body execute it. I reach, turn, withdraw, balance, and orient as a bodily being already involved in a meaningful world.

Modernity therefore inherits a strange situation. Movement is constantly present, but the conceptual framework divides the mover into an inner experience and an outer mechanism.

Kant and the turn toward the subject

Immanuel Kant attempts to overcome the conflict between rationalism and empiricism by asking about the conditions that make experience and knowledge possible. The mind is not merely a passive recipient of impressions. Experience is structured through forms of intuition, such as space and time, and through conceptual categories that make an intelligible world possible.

This transcendental turn is indispensable to the later development of phenomenology. It argues that knowledge cannot be explained solely through objects acting upon a passive observer. The experiencing subject contributes conditions without which objects could not appear as objects at all.

Yet the division between subject and object remains. We know things as they appear under the conditions of possible experience, not as they are independently in themselves. Even the body, insofar as it is empirically encountered, appears as an object within experience. Kant deepens the account of subjectivity without returning the subject to the shared and lived world.

For the question of movement, this means that while the structures of experience become thinkable, the bodily and kinetic conditions of existence that the mover actually encounters the world with remain insufficiently developed. The conditions of existence through which we orient, approach, avoid, traverse, and inhabit space have not yet become philosophically primary and this means that the primordial relation that bridges the “subjective” and objective” remains hidden.

Delsarte and the search for the principle of art

In the nineteenth century, François Delsarte approaches a parallel problem(To the question of movement) through artistic practice. His concern is not simply to classify the arts, but to investigate the principle of art itself. He seeks a systematic relationship among inner states, bodily forms, and expressive signs.

For Delsarte, bodily gesture is meaningful. The outer form of the body communicates an inner affective reality, and artistic practice depends upon understanding the fitness of the sign to the state it expresses. Movement and gesture belong to the intelligibility of the person.

This is an important advance, but Delsarte still works largely within the modern division between interiority and exteriority. An inner state produces or animates an outer form. Movement mediates between them, but the two sides as conceived in the bifurcation remain ultimately unbridgeable.

The significance of Delsarte’s work lies partly in the question he dared to ask. Just as the arts could be practiced without the nature of art itself being adequately examined, movements could be taught and performed without movement becoming an explicit field of study. His attempt to investigate art rather than merely the arts anticipates a distinction that will remain essential: the difference between investigating movement and cataloguing movements.

Laban. Effort, expression, and the language of movement

Talking about Rudolf Laban extends our practical genealogy through looking at his analysis of effort, space, and human movement. Where Delsarte seeks the principles of art, Laban seeks the dynamic qualities underlying observable actions.

Laban’s effort analysis considers movement through weight, time, space, and flow. He is interested not only in what path a body takes but in how the movement is carried out. Two people may perform an outwardly similar action while inhabiting it with profoundly different dynamic organizations.

His project spans both industrial and artistic life. In the workplace, movement analysis might reduce unnecessary strain and improve the worker’s relation to a task. In dance, it might illuminate expressive movement as a way human beings understand and negotiate existence. Through choreutics and kinetography, Laban also seeks ways to analyze spatial relations and preserve movements through notation.

This work greatly expands what becomes visible within movement. Movement is no longer exhausted by a change in location; it possesses qualitative, spatial, rhythmic, relational, and expressive dimensions.

Nevertheless, a fault line remains. Functional movement and expressive movement can appear as two different domains: movement for practical work on one side and movement for meaning or art on the other. This division repeats, in a subtler form, the separation of exterior mechanism from interior significance. Laban offers an extraordinarily sophisticated study of movements and their dynamic qualities, but he does not fully make the being of movement itself his question.

Husserl and the lived body

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology will begin a wake that will ultimately unsettle the Cartesian inheritance from within philosophy. Consciousness, he argues, is always consciousness of something. It is intrinsically directed towards objects of consciousness and has real structures of intentionality. He attempts to study consciousness through what he calls the epoche or the phenomenological reduction.

Husserl also distinguishes the lived body—the body as immediately inhabited and experienced—from the body considered as a material object. My hand is something I can observe, but it is also that through which I touch. My body is present within the world, yet it is simultaneously the bodily center from which the world becomes perceptually available.

His analyses of the “I can,” kinaesthetic awareness, and the correlation between bodily movement and perceptual appearance are crucial. An object is not given all at once from nowhere. As I move, different profiles appear. Perception unfolds through possible and actual bodily movement. The world is disclosed through an organized relation between movement and appearance.

Here movement begins to acquire epistemic significance. It is not merely an event occurring to a body after perception has already delivered us a world. Movement participates in how objects are perceptually constituted.

Yet Husserl’s continued reliance upon transcendental subjectivity leaves an unresolved tension. The lived body is central to experience, but the philosophical point of departure can still seem to be consciousness rather than bodily existence itself. Phenomenology has brought movement closer to the ground, but it has not fully begun from the mover.

Heidegger: being-in-the-world

Martin Heidegger radicalizes phenomenology by rejecting the isolated subject as philosophy’s starting point. The kind of being that we are—what Heidegger calls Dasein—is always already being-in-the-world.

This does not mean that a subject happens to be located inside a container called the world. It means that our existence is originally relational and involved. We encounter equipment through use, places through dwelling, others through shared practices, and possibilities through concern. Subject and object are derivative abstractions from this more primordial involvement.

Heidegger therefore opens a clearing in which the Cartesian bifurcation can be challenged at its root. The missing term in “I think, therefore I am” is not another fact about the thinking subject. It is the am: the question of being that the cogito presupposes without interrogating.

In Being and Time, Dasein’s being is disclosed through temporality—the ecstatic unity of having-been, making-present, and being-toward. Human existence is stretched across time and oriented toward possibilities.

Yet the lived body and movement receive remarkably little thematic development. Dasein handles, approaches, withdraws, dwells, builds, and takes a stand on its possibilities, but the bodily movement implicit in these descriptions remains largely unexamined. Heidegger clears away the subject–object ontology that concealed movement, but he does not fully bring movement into the clearing.

This omission creates the opening taken up by later phenomenology.

Merleau-Ponty: being-in-the-world as being a body

Maurice Merleau-Ponty places the lived body at the center of being-in-the-world. The body is not merely an object located in space; it is the “general medium” through which we have a world.

The body does not ordinarily move by calculating coordinates and issuing explicit commands. It possesses a practical orientation—a bodily “I can.” Through the body schema, the organism inhabits space as a field of possible action. Things appear as reachable, avoidable, climbable, graspable, near, distant, threatening, or inviting in relation to bodily capacities.

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motor intentionality is extremly important. Intentionality is not only a property of reflective consciousness. The moving body is already directed toward its world. In reaching for a cup, I need not first represent the exact position of my arm and calculate a trajectory. My body takes up the situation and moves toward a meaningful possibility.

Movement can no longer be adequately explained as either a mechanical event or the external execution of an interior mental representation. It is an intelligent, bodily responsiveness to a field of significance.

Merleau-Ponty brings philosophy remarkably close to movement as a primordial phenomenon. Yet movement often remains articulated through perception, intentionality, and the body rather than being developed explicitly as an ontological structure in its own right. The body is recovered, but the being of movement remains partly implicit.

Diem and movement as education of the whole person

While phenomenology is recovering the lived body philosophically, Liselott Diem and the movement educators are approaching a comparable insight through childhood education.

Diem refuses to equate movement with physical activity, isolated skills, or sport. Movement is a way of discovering oneself and the world. Its educational importance is simultaneously physical, affective, perceptual, social, and cognitive.

This changes the role of particular movements. Hanging, balancing, climbing, spinal articulation, object exploration, strength, mobility, and problem-solving games are not merely items on a list of exercises. They are media through which children encounter their capacities, negotiate uncertainty, discover spatial and social relations, and enlarge the worlds available to them.

Movements take their place on the basis of movement.

This may be one of the clearest practical anticipations of a genuine movement education. The goal is not merely to produce fitness, technical proficiency, or compliant bodies. It is to cultivate the whole person through exploratory participation in a world.

Diem’s work, however, did not possess a fully developed philosophical language capable of explaining why this practice was more than an innovative form of physical education. The practice intuited something that the surrounding culture could not yet adequately articulate.

The movement education movement

From roughly the 1960s into the early 1980s, movement educators drew upon Laban, Diem, educational dance, educational gymnastics, and heuristic games to develop a distinct approach to physical education.

Their frameworks frequently organized movement through four broad dimensions: body, effort, space, and relationship. Rather than teaching only standardized techniques, teachers created problems that children could solve through exploration. Educational gymnastics emphasized adaptability and discovery rather than the reproduction of an ideal form. Dance cultivated expressive and qualitative possibilities. Games placed movers within changing environments that demanded perception, decision, coordination, and cooperation.

At its best, this approach understood movement as the means through which a child remains dynamically coupled to an environment and comes to know a world physically, affectively, socially, and cognitively. The well-rounded mover was not simply someone who had accumulated many skills, but someone able to perceive and respond intelligently across diverse situations.

For a brief period, movement approached the center of childhood education.

Yet the movement education movement did not establish a lasting institutional foundation. Traditional physical education was easier to standardize, quantify, and assess. Movement education lacked a consistently shared vocabulary, placed substantial demands upon teachers, and became increasingly difficult to defend within institutions organized around measurable outcomes.

These practical reasons matter, but they point toward a deeper difficulty. The culture into which movement education was introduced still understood the body primarily as a physical object, education primarily as the transmission of explicit knowledge, and movement primarily as observable activity.

Without a philosophical account of why movement is fundamental to perception, knowledge, development, and existence, movement education could easily be reabsorbed into physical activity and sport.

Its practitioners had approached movement, but the question What is movement? had not been carried down to the conceptual foundations of the culture in which they were working.

Sam Todes: the perceiver as self-moved mover

Sam Todes’s Body and World makes movement a primary philosophical concern. Todes begins from the bodily perceiver as a self-moved mover.

Our world is structured through the morphology and movement of the body. We have fronts and backs, left and right sides, and an upright orientation.

We respond to gravity by achieving vertical poise, and from this orientation a horizontal field of possible movement opens around us. Near and far, here and there, attainable and unattainable acquire meaning through the capacities of a body that can orient and move itself.

Perception therefore depends upon movement more fundamentally than a representational account allows. We do not first receive a complete objective world and then decide how to move through it. The world appears as a structured field because we are bodily beings capable of self-movement.

Todes also attempts, in effect, to give Kant’s transcendental subject a body. Conceptual knowledge is grounded in a more primordial perceptual organization enacted by the active perceiver. The conditions of intelligibility are not only formal structures of thought; they are rooted in bodily orientation, need, poise, and movement.

Todes provides a powerful phenomenological description of the self-moved mover, although he does not fully develop movement and bodily form as explicit, equiprimordial structures of being. Nevertheless, his work shows that without movement we would not be able to come to know the world or ourselves.

Lydia A. Gerhardt: moving and knowing

Lydia A. Gerhardt develops the epistemic importance of movement within movement education. Her work examines how children come to understand spatial relationships through bodily movement.

A child does not initially learn up and down, front and back, sidedness, distance, and duration as detached geometrical concepts. These relationships are first lived. The child has a body with an orientation and sides; lies down, rolls, crawls, rises, falls, reaches, and moves upright; and gradually uses the moving body as an evolving center of reference.

Through movement, the child learns how objects relate to the body and eventually how objects relate to one another. Bodily-perceptual knowing provides a ground from which conceptual knowledge can develop.

Gerhardt’s educational work therefore parallels Todes’s philosophical claim: movement is not an optional supplement to knowing. It belongs to the genesis of an intelligible world. Education that impoverishes movement may consequently impoverish not only physical development but the perceptual and relational ground from which abstraction becomes possible.

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and the primacy of movement

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone makes movement itself philosophically central. Across phenomenology, biology, development, evolution, and anthropology, she argues for the primacy of movement and animation.

Movement does not begin as the product of an already completed self. The animate organism forms and discovers itself through movement. In Sheets-Johnstone’s formulation, “movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement.”

This reverses the usual order of explanation. We do not first possess a fully constituted self that subsequently directs a body. A sense of agency, distinction, possibility, and world develops through animation.

Movement is epistemic because it is through moving that living beings discover their bodies and surroundings. It is ontological because movement is the mode of being for the animate organism.

Sheets-Johnstone challenges the language of “embodiment” because it still implies that an independent mind has somehow been placed into a body. We are better understood as mindful bodies and animate forms whose capacities for thought grow from more primordial animate-bodily life.

Here the question of movement finally begins to emerge explicitly. Movement is not merely change, locomotion, behavior, or expression. It is a fundamental dimension of animate being. What she calls being-in-movement.

Ido Portal and the distinction between movement and movements

Within contemporary practice culture, Ido Portal has forcefully insisted upon the difference between movement and movements, and between a movement practice and a practice composed of movements.

A person may accumulate exercises, disciplines, and skills while never allowing movement itself to organize the practice. A practice of movements can remain a collection: handstands, squats, locomotion patterns, martial techniques, dance phrases, or mobility drills. A movement practice uses particular forms without identifying itself completely with any of them. Its deeper object is the adaptability, awareness, learning, and transformation of the mover.

Portal’s methodological contribution is substantial. He has synthesized practices across disciplinary boundaries and helped make movement thinkable as something irreducible to fitness or a single specialized art.

Yet the philosophical articulation often remains separated from the practical innovation. If movement is declared resistant to definition or beyond language, the practice can encounter the phenomenon without establishing why it matters, what distinguishes it, or how it relates to perception, knowledge, development, being, or wisdom.

This is not a failure peculiar to one practitioner. It reveals the historical fragmentation of the field.

Philosophy has developed concepts of bodily intentionality, self-movement, and animation without consistently producing corresponding practices.
Movement educators have developed practices that transform how people encounter themselves and their worlds without possessing a philosophical foundation adequate to justify those practices.

Movement remains divided between its theory and its cultivation.