Motor Intentionality

Merleau-Ponty's name (via Husserl's Bewegungsentwurf, "motor project") for the body's pre-reflective directedness toward a practical task — the "third term" between mechanism and representation that Part One of Phenomenology of Perception introduces as a new kind of intentional content, neither conceptual nor physical. The most compressed slogan: "Consciousness is originarily not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can'" (PhP, p. 139). Motor intentionality is MP's name for the I can.

Key Points

  • Not a representation, not a reflex. Motor intentionality is the body's pre-predicative grasp of what it can do in a given situation. It is directly directed on tasks without going through a conceptual mediation and without being the output of stimulus–response conditioning.
  • First posited by negation: the Schneider case. The patient Schneider (Gelb and Goldstein's famous brain-injured soldier) can perform concrete grasping movements effortlessly (scratch a mosquito bite) but cannot perform abstract movements on command (point to his nose). This dissociation cannot be explained mechanically (his muscles work) or intellectually (he can describe the movement verbally). What is missing is a third thing: the motor project of possibility itself.
  • "I can" vs. "I think." The Cartesian "I think that" cannot be the primary form of consciousness, because the body's relation to its task is not predicative. MP replaces the cogito with the possum as the original self-presence of the body engaged in the world.
  • The body is not in space, it inhabits space — a direct consequence of motor intentionality. The body does not calculate the spatial coordinates of its task and then move toward them; it lives through the motor intention, and space is given as "the variable reach of our intentions and our gestures" (p. 143).
  • Praktognosia. MP's term for the kind of "knowledge" that motor intentionality constitutes — "a manner of reaching the world and the object... that must be recognized as original, and perhaps as originary" (p. 141).
  • Seed of operative intentionality. Motor intentionality is the concrete bodily register of the more general operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalität) announced in the PhP Preface. They belong to the same family; motor intentionality is what operative intentionality looks like at the level of the motor-perceptual body.

Details

The Schneider Argument

The empirical pivot of Part One Ch III is the distinction between Schneider's concrete movements (which work) and his abstract movements (which fail). Asked to point to his nose, Schneider cannot — but when a mosquito bites him, his hand "quickly reaches" the point of the bite "without any preparatory movements" (p. 134). Asked to execute a military salute on command, he must first settle his body into "the overall position required by the task" and recite the verbal instruction in an interrogative tone (p. 134). Normal subjects, by contrast, "role-play" with the body — they "detach their real body from its living situation" and can treat the commanded movement as the merely possible movement it is (p. 134).

What is lost in Schneider is precisely the capacity to treat the merely possible as actually present. MP calls this capacity "the power of reckoning with the possible, which thus acquires a sort of actuality without leaving behind its place as a possibility" (p. 139). Motor intentionality is the name for this power: it is what allows a body to be oriented toward a task it is not performing and a space it is not actually occupying.

The move from empirical dissociation to conceptual conclusion is direct: since neither a mechanistic model (bodily reflex) nor a representational model (thought about movement) can account for the dissociation, a third kind of intentionality is required. MP summarizes: "We must acknowledge, between movement as a third person process and thought as a representation of movement, an anticipation or a grasp of the result assured by the body itself as a motor power, a 'motor project' (Bewegungsentwurf), or a 'motor intentionality' without which the instructions would remain empty" (p. 139).

The "I Can" Passage

The centerpiece formulation comes a few pages later (Part One Ch III.k, p. 139):

Consciousness is originarily not an "I think that," but rather an "I can." [. . .] Movement is not a movement in thought, and bodily space is not a space that is conceived or represented.

The consequence unfolds quickly: if the body is an "I can," then its relation to its world is not a subject–object relation but a power–field relation. Objects "no longer exist for the arm of the person suffering from apraxia, and this is what renders his arm immobile" (p. 140). The apraxic body is not disconnected from the world — it lives in a world that no longer solicits the body in the way a motor-intentional body's world does.

The "I can" formulation is almost certainly a conscious inversion of the Cartesian Cogito. The Cartesian ego grounds itself through an act of thought that needs no body; MP's motor subject grounds itself through a body that needs no explicit thought. The "I can" is neither empirical (it is not just a summary of what I in fact do) nor a priori (it is not a structure of a pure transcendental subject). It is the practical transcendental of an incarnate being.

Motor Project and the Body's "World"

Motor intentionality is not only about movement; it is about the structuring of the lived environment. Schneider "cannot deploy the thought of a movement into an actual movement" (p. 139) because the environment around him no longer polarizes his body into task-oriented postures. For the normal subject, by contrast, "each voluntary movement takes place in a milieu, against a background determined by the movement itself" (p. 139, quoting Goldstein). The body and its world are "only artificially separated moments of a single whole."

This is why the next pages move immediately into the slogan: "The body is not in space, nor for that matter in time. It inhabits space and time" (p. 139). The slogan is a direct consequence of motor intentionality: the body's relation to space is not Cartesian containment but praktognostic inhabitation.

Habit as Extension

The last step of the argument (Part One Ch III.m) is the doctrine of habit. Habit is the "power we have of dilating our being in the world, or of altering our existence through incorporating new instruments" (p. 145). The blind man's cane, the organist at an unfamiliar organ, the typist's "knowledge in her hands" — these are all cases where the body has acquired a new motor-intentional reach. The body "catches" (kapiert) the movement. What is acquired is not a representation of the movement but a new motor signification — "the motor grasping of a motor signification" (p. 143).

This matters for the scope of motor intentionality: it is not limited to fixed bodily capacities. The body is plastic in the way its motor-intentional reach is plastic. Through habit, the body's I can extends to include what previously required deliberation, and through disease it contracts.

Motor Intentionality and the Intentional Arc

At the culmination of the analysis, Part One Ch III.j introduces the intentional arc as the unity that connects motor intentionality to all other phenomenal functions: "the life of consciousness — epistemic life, the life of desire, or perceptual life — is underpinned by an 'intentional arc' that projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation" (p. 137). What "goes limp" in Schneider is the intentional arc as a whole; motor intentionality is the strand of the arc that Chs III–IV make perspicuous. The arc is motor intentionality generalized to cover memory, projection, evaluation, and habitual engagement together.

Genealogy: from "I Can" (1945) to Chiasm (1960–61)

The "I can" is not confined to 1945. It is the first form of a structural insight that MP reworks across his career, culminating in the late ontology of the chiasm. The genealogy runs continuously:

  • 1936 (*Texts and Dialogues* — Being and Having review, pp. 125–28): the earliest printed statement of body-as-being against Cogito-as-foundation. "I and [my body] form a common cause, and in a sense I am my body" (p. 125); "the Cogito is far from being the first principle, the condition of all valid certainty. The root of the ingenuous affirmation is rather the body's consciousness, which may well underlie all affirmations of the existence of physical objects" (p. 126). The 1936 register frames body-and-cogito as opposed types of knowledge (Marcel's "spectator's point of view" critique) rather than as motor-intentional capacity; but the structural priority of the body over the Cogito is already public-print articulated nine years before PhP. Cardinal pre-PhP attestation.
  • 1945 (PhP Part One Ch III.k, p. 139): "Consciousness is originarily not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can.'" Motor intentionality names the I-can — the body's pre-predicative grasp of what it can do. The I can is the slot that motor intentionality fills.
  • 1953 (Sensible World and World of Expression, p. 74, VIII2): encroachment (empiètement) as the 1953 proto-chiasm. "Feedback from the end of the process on the beginning" and "encroachment of the beginning on the rest." What the motor-intentional body does in 1945 — live forward into the task it has not yet completed, and have that not-yet modify the already-done — is redescribed as an ontological structure rather than an experiential one. Encroachment formalizes the I-can's double directionality.
  • 1954–55 (Institution and Passivity): the "hinge" (charnière) figure. "The instituting subject exists between others and myself, between me and myself, like a hinge." The body of the I-can is now also the hinge through which self-and-other are jointly articulated — institution as the structural frame for the I-can's operation, the middle term between 1953 empiètement and the 1959–60 chiasm.
  • 1960–61 (V&I): chiasm / reversibility. "My body [is] a sensible for itself" — the I-can extended from motor project to the perceiver-perceived circuit. The chiasm's "reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact" (V&I Ch 4, p. 147) is the late-ontological form of the same structural non-coincidence that motor intentionality names: the body's task-directedness that never coincides with its object.

Interpretive claim: the I can is not superseded by the flesh; it is absorbed into it. Motor intentionality becomes one register of flesh's reversibility — the register that operates between body and task, complementary to the body-world (flesh of the world) and body-body (touching-touched) registers. The answer to this page's Open Question 2 ("How does motor intentionality relate to the later doctrine of the flesh?") is given through the genealogy: the flesh is the late ontology of what motor intentionality already grasped in 1945. The middle terms (empiètement 1953, hinge 1954–55) are the evidence that this is continuous development rather than rupture. See chiasm §"Genealogy: From 'Hinge' to Chiasm (1959)" and §"Encroachment / Empiètement (1953): the Proto-Chiasm" for the complementary treatment.

Positions

  • MP holds motor intentionality as a third kind of intentional content, neither conceptual nor reflex, and uses the Schneider case as the empirical anchor.
  • Classical empiricism treats motor failure as a sum of elementary deficits (specific reflexes lost). MP answers: the Schneider dissociation cannot be decomposed into reflex deficits, because the structure of the movement is different (abstract vs. concrete), not its physical components.
  • Intellectualism / representationalism treats motor failure as failure of the symbolic function — the patient cannot represent the movement. MP answers: Schneider can represent movements verbally; what he lacks is a way of making the representation motorically active. So the deficit is neither at the symbolic nor at the mechanical level; it is at a third level that classical theories do not recognize.
  • Contemporary enactivism and embodied cognition (Gallagher, Noë, Thompson) have taken motor intentionality as a core methodological starting point. The link from PhP's "I can" to Noë's "access" account of perception is direct; the link from "praktognosia" to enactive accounts of skilled coping is explicit in much of the enactivist literature.

Connections

  • is the concrete register of operative-intentionality — operative intentionality is the broader Preface concept; motor intentionality is its bodily-motor instance
  • underlies body-schema — the situational body schema is what motor intentionality configures
  • is unified by intentional-arc — the arc is motor intentionality generalized across the whole field of experience
  • is grounded in motivation-mp — motor projects are motivated, not caused or entailed
  • is the positive counterpart to the failures exhibited in the Schneider case
  • is extended by habit — habit dilates the motor-intentional reach; see merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception Part One Ch III.m
  • is the 1945 form of what the late ontology will call the body's "power" of the flesh (flesh-as-element)
  • critiques both empiricist and intellectualist theories of motor action
  • is the "I can" against philosophy-of-reflection's "I think"
  • anticipates the enactivism of Gallagher, Thompson, Noë

Open Questions

  • Is the Schneider case as clean as MP takes it to be? Contemporary neuropsychology has raised questions about Gelb/Goldstein's original characterization. If the empirical substrate wobbles, does motor intentionality stand as a transcendental argument independent of it?
  • How does motor intentionality relate to the later doctrine of the flesh? V&I does not use the term "motor intentionality," but the reversibility of the touching and touched is its descendant. Is this a renaming, or a transformation?
  • Can motor intentionality do double duty as both a transcendental argument (required for any embodied subject) and an empirical hypothesis (tested against cases like Schneider)? MP seems to assume it can, but the two modes of support pull in different directions.

Synthetic Claims

The synthetic interpretive layer (wiki/claims.md) names this page as a Wiki home for the following supported claim. Supported claims may be cited as stable synthetic claims without provisional framing per CLAUDE.md §Claims Register Format.

  • supported claim, see claims#sb-1942-kinetic-melody-origin — the kinetic-melody / melody-as-form-of-the-whole register, currently treated by the wiki's melody HUB as PoP-and-after, is established at full HUB weight in SB 1942 (Ch I raw 402–404 piano-melody; Ch II raw 982–984, 1144 kinetic-melody-of-behavior; Ch III raw 1528 Uexküll's "every organism is a melody which sings itself"). The genealogical re-attribution shifts the corpus melody HUB origin point by three years; the kinetic-melody register grounds motor intentionality as the body's pre-predicative grasp of a temporal-Gestalt task — the "I can" already operating in 1942 as a structural feature of behavior-as-form.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception — Part One Ch III, especially sections b–l (p. 105–141). The Schneider case (b–d), concrete vs. abstract movement (c–e), motor project and motor intentionality (e), function of projection (f), intentional grounds (g–h), existential analysis (i), the intentional arc (j), intentionality of the body and the "I can" (k), body inhabiting space (l), habit (m). The argumentative apogee is "Consciousness is originarily not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can'" (p. 139).
  • merleau-ponty-2020-sensible-world-expression — the 1953 course extends motor intentionality into "praxis" as constitutive ground: "praxis is the elaboration of the conditions themselves, preadaptations, initial projection of internal conditions of equilibrium, a priori of the organism" 37. Distinguished from Bergsonian "action" (where problems are given biologically). "To be able to move in the human sense and to be conscious are the same thing" 125
  • merleau-ponty-1992-texts-and-dialogues — Being and Having review of 1936, pp. 125–28: the earliest printed attestation of MP's body-as-being / anti-Cogito polemic. "I am my body" (p. 125); "the Cogito is far from being the first principle" (p. 126). The 1936 register reads Marcel's Embodiment, the central given of metaphysics as the displacement of Cartesian first-philosophy by a body-grounded one. Genealogically the most distant attestation in the wiki (nine years before PhP, twenty-four years before V&I).
  • merleau-ponty-1942-structure-of-behavior — the 1942 origin site of MP's kinetic-melody register, the temporal-Gestalt structure of behavior that motor intentionality operationalizes in PhP as the body's pre-predicative grasp of a task: Ch II raw 982–984 (the first elements of excitation as the first notes of a melody); Ch II raw 1144 (kinetic-melody as cortical coordination); Ch III raw 1528 (Uexküll's organism-as-melody). The 1942 attestation makes motor intentionality's PhP formulation a development of the kinetic-melody register established three years earlier. See claims#sb-1942-kinetic-melody-origin (supported).
  • heinbokel-2021-johann-to-maurice — Heinbokel quotes PhP 139 ("Consciousness is originarily not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can'") in the Schneider section as part of his methodological-epistemic reading of MP's existential analysis. Motor intentionality is used referentially rather than developed; Heinbokel's primary contribution is the case-report-as-coherent-deformation thesis. See schneider-case §"Schneider as Methodological-Epistemic Exhibit (Heinbokel 2021)".