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This chapter is an attempt to foreground the background by a critical examination of contemporary language practices that unthinkingly cast the background ever further into darkness. The practices oftentimes arise in the context of attempts to take experience into serious account. Such attempts, notably those in cognitive science, neuroscience, and diverse strands of philosophy, necessarily involve the dual challenges of studying experience and of languaging it, challenges that unfortunately can and often do go unnoticed. When they do, the subtleties and complexities of experience and the words that might do them justice are overridden either by traditional ways of thinking together with their traditional vocabulary or by the invention of a new global term that signifies a range of ideas putatively capturing the whole of experience, thereby putting subjectivity from the ground up into a linguistic nutshell. In constructive terms, the aim of the chapter is to show that movement and affectivity — what Husserl consistently referred to as "action and affect' and described as "the root soil' — are crucial existential dimensions of any cognitive human venture. Focal attention is thus due to them in any endeavour to uncover the foundations of human knowledge. It matters not whether the endeavour be that of an individual or a school of thought, or whether it is in the context of methodological concerns or of a scientific enterprise. Indeed, the chapter aims to show that elucidations of movement and affectivity are not just essential, indispensable staples of human knowledge and self-understanding; they are of fundamental importance in their own right. As such, they demand assiduous examination and fine-grained analyses to the end that their relegation to second-class back-ground status be recognized for the error it is and their integral and integrated relationship to cognition be justly brought to light.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230368064_10

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