Transcending Objectification: The Body-Subject and the Recovery of Ontological Wholeness in Kinesiology

Modern kinesiology has advanced through multiple ways of making the moving body intelligible, including scientific measurement, interpretive inquiry, and critical analysis. Yet when the body is approached primarily from an external observational stance, the athlete’s lived experience can become obscured. This article critically analyzes three dominant metaphors – “Machine,” “Container,” and “Symbol” – to reveal the ontological incompleteness of treating the sporting body primarily as an object of inquiry. To restore integrity, it proposes a shift toward the “Body-Subject.” Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, the article establishes the body as the ambiguous locus of both scientific measurability and subjective perception. It then introduces “Mutual Reference,” a hermeneutic framework in which objective data and lived experience mutually contextualize each other. This framework connects scientific precision with experiential depth, illuminating the sporting subject’s multidimensional reality.