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In the following section, some theoretical reflections on an experience-based understanding of the body will be highlighted. These reflections are the basis, first, for a thorough insight into the first-person perspective and, second, for an applied perspective presented in the chapter “Approaches to enhance body-anchored and experience-based learning” (see also chapter 9 in this book).

From a phenomenological standpoint, Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 144) defines the body as a mediator to the world and “our anchor in the world.” He writes further (p. 205): “External perception and the perception of one’s own body vary in conjunction because they are the two facets of one and the same act.” And he continues (p. 206): “Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of my body is made explicit in the language of external perception.”

This conceptual understanding makes it possible to overcome the dualism between mind and nature and between the inner and outer world. However, Waldenfels (1985, 163) notes that duality is still a part of our life concept: I have my body and at the same time I am my body. The understanding of the concept of the human body is – as Madison (1981, p. 24) states – a strange “mixture of being-in-itself and being-for-itself.” Merleau-Ponty (1962) is conscious of this ambiguity or rather, circularity, when stating:

The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought up by arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, pp. 88-89).

It is due to Sheets-Johnstone (1999) that experience and perception are highlighted as embodied in movement. Movement seems to be the concept where the body as an object and the body as a subject appear to be integrated. In that sense, we could argue that Sheets-Johnstone (1999) goes a step further than Merleau-Ponty in her phenomenological thinking, when she aims to “elucidate both the experience and foundations of thinking in movement” (p. 483). Essential to her integrative approach is a “non-separation of thinking and doing” (p. 485). She explicates her understanding by referring to the experience and action of a dancer who – while improvising – is thinking in movement. She writes:

Perceptions are plaited into my here-now flow of movement just as my here-now flow of movement is plaited into my perceptions. Movement and perception are seamlessly inter woven; there is no “mind-doing” that is separate from a “body-doing.” (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, p. 487).

In this concept, movement or action is an integral part of perception. Without movement there will be no perception and without perception there will be no movement or action. This understanding can actually be related to concepts presented by Uexküll (1956) and Uexküll (1986, 1991) and the Gestaltkreis model of Weizsäcker (1986) (see also Stelter 1998). All these approaches aim to overcome a body duality by integrating perception and action in one single unit or act.

Sheets-Johnstone (1999) emphasizes this perspective by being sceptical about the commonly accepted theoretical standpoint where thinking is exclusively tied to language and only takes place via language. In her understanding, thinking is a bodily affair and an integrated part of movement. An important perspective is – in my opinion – that she regards “movement neither as a vehicle for thinking nor as a symbolic system through which reference is made to something else” (p. 492). In her argumentation she seeks for support by referring to Merleau-Ponty, Goldstein, and finally Wittgenstein, whom Sheets-Johnstone (1999, p. 493) quotes: “‘When I think in language,’ Wittgenstein points out, ‘there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to verbal expression’.” Furthermore, she refers to the psychologist Jerome Bruner’s emphasis upon narrative as the primary form of discourse:

He [Bruner] writes that when young children “come to grasp the basic idea of reference necessary for any language use … their principal linguistic interest centers on human action and its outcome” (1990, p. 78). His point is that narrative structure is, in the beginning, concerned with movement, in particular, with “agentivity” (77). (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, p. 500).

Sheets-Johnstone (1999) continues her thoughts by reflecting on the term “agentivity” which she relates to her concept of thinking in movement:

‘Agentivity’ specifies a dynamic concept of action coincident with this articulable, essentially dynamic form [i.e., the tactile-kinesthetic sense of one’s own body]. “Agentivity” is thus intimately related to primal animation [in early childhood]. Primal animation indeed is the epistemological ground on which thinking in movement develops. (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, p. 501) italics in the original; supplementation in brackets by the author).

‘Agentivity’ or, in other terms, the dynamic concept of action, can function as the key to the understanding of experience and perception: Action is based on the active involvement of the person in his/her environment and expresses the dynamic relationship between the protagonist or perceiver and the perceived, where the lived and moving body is the mediator between the person and the environment. David Abram, an ecologist and philosopher, describes the dynamics of this process of perception by introducing the term participation, which he has borrowed from the French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl. Abram (1996, p. 57) emphasizes “that perception always involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives.”

While perceiving, we relate to the world in an active process of involvement. And we are always involved in and related to the world. Person and environment are co-dependent, that is, there is a unity between experience and perception on the one hand and movement and action on the other (Stelter 1998). But the expressive forms of being involved in the environment are manifold; for example, through gestures, speech, thinking, and emotions, through specific forms of movements and through many other types of involvement. Tamboer (1991) speaks about different modes or modalities of relating to the environment. These modes are expressive and person-context-bound forms of being and participating in the world. By embodying the world around us and by interiorizing the environment, things become meaningful; and this happens in an expressive form or mode which seems to be right for the subject in the here-and-now of the situation.