Feeling Our Way

Abstract

Every action, touch, utterance, and look, every listening, taste, smell, and feel is a living question. But it is no ordinary propositional one-by-one question, rather it is a plenisentient sensing and probing non-propositional enquiry about how our world is and how we anticipate its becoming. Using the notion of enkinaesthesia, this paper explores the ways in which an agent’s affectively saturated coengagement with its world establishes patterns of co-articulation of meaning within the anticipatory affective dynamics and the experiential entanglement necessary for expedient action and adaptation. An amplification and extension of the claims made by the most radical of the embodied mind theories transcends minimalist notions of embodiment and yields a new wave of embodiment theory. This suggests an immanent intercorporeality where the living being of other agents is experienced by us directly, without cognitive mediation.