The sense of movement

Tracing the history of this kind of philosophical understanding, I follow the example of the eminent genevois literary scholar, Jean Starobinski, who wrote on Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple, playing with the multiple meanings of “couple” in English⁸. Just as there is no love without a partner, even if that “partner” be a projection of self, there is no active subject without resisting object. The epistemic primacy attributed to the sense of movement, I argue, follows from the irreducible quality that the sense of movement is thought to have in revealing or displaying the relationship, or partnership, constituting being human in the world. Starobinski emphasised the history of the sense of the body in the story he told about the couple, action-reaction (and its physiological equivalent, stimulus-response). This was also the case in a major study of pre-modern Western beliefs about action and movement, Daniel Heller-Roazen's The Inner Touch. Heller-Roazen wrote on the legacy of Aristotle's argument that there must be a “common sense”, a capacity of the soul to unite the contents originating with “the five senses” (sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch) into a unified perception. Heller-Roazen drew on imagery that likened this “common sense” to an “inner touch” within the embodied knowing subject⁹. He pointed out the continuity of this imagery with the modern sense of movement. I take this further.

Locke and the empiricist culture of the Enlightenment much influenced the modern discussion of the sense of movement. Analysing the senses into their supposed elementary components, Locke and his successors gave a lot of attention to touch and then broke touch down into component parts, making possible the first clearly differentiated discussions of a sense of movement. The philosophical import of this stress on sensory knowledge has its most colourful form in the famous moment reported by James Boswell:

After we [Dr Samuel Johnson and I] came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it.

I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it - “I refute it thus”¹⁰.

Note the report of Johnson “striking his foot with mighty force”, that is moving, exercising his force against resisting force. His demonstration of the reality of matter did not rely so much on sensory contact as on sensory “couple”, activity-resistance. His philosophy was performative. Modern philosophers, of course, make a standard riposte to Johnson: the sensuous report of one particular sense no more addresses epistemological questions than the sensuous report of any other sense. All the same, there continues to be a literature, broadly phenomenological in orientation, which endorses the epistemological priority of touch/movement sense. In doing so, it gives a formal voice to ordinary people's intuitions. Hans Jonas provided a key statement. Starobinski, J. Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple. New York, 2003. Also, Starobinski, J. “The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation”, Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Pt. 2. New York, 1989, pp. 350-370. Daniel Heller-Roazen traced this to discussion in Augustine and his disciples: The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation. New York, 2007, pp. 136-137. Boswell's Life of Johnson, 2^nd ed, Vol. 1. Oxford, 1964, p. 471. The incident took place in 1763.

Reality is primarily evidenced in resistance which is an ingredient in touch experience. For physical contact is more than the geometrical fact of contiguity: it involves impact. In other words, touch is the sense, and the only sense, in which the perception of quality is normally blended with the experience of force, which being reciprocal does let the subject be passive; thus it is the sense in which the original encounter with reality as reality takes place¹¹.

This I understand as common opinion, witnessed by ordinary language which links touch and movement senses to statements about reality and significance. As have noted, we touch or are touched, move or are moved, psychologically, politically and spiritually as well as physically; we may be in contact or not in contact; there is tangible or palpable evidence - and doctors literally palpitate the body for such evidence; people stand on their own two feet, or stand upright; a person may have immovable beliefs; we take part in, or decry, political movements; and, as Hemingway wrote, the earth may move at the moment of most intense feeling.

I turn to two key steps in the argument, the first focused on the work of Des- tutt de Tracy and Maine de Biran, in the years just before and after 1800, and the second focused on the work of Edmund Husserl. The former step established action-resistance in phenomenological description of awareness (consciousness, in French conscience); the latter step is a key influence on modern philosophical discussion of the topic. First, I sketch essential elements of the background

It is a Western convention, since Aristotle, to refer to “the five senses”. The convention makes it appear that there are discrete senses, that there are five of them and that they are all members of the same kind of species of living faculty. Aristotle noted, however, that touch is in certain ways different from the others senses. His first point was that “the most basic of the senses, touch, all animals have”, implying that without touch animals simply would not achieve self-preservation and remain alive¹². This is not the case for the other senses. It therefore seemed correct to treat touch as primary, and, having taken this step, to describe the other senses as sharing certain things in common with touch, namely, a character analysable into active and passive components and dependency on movement. Further, Aristotle observed, the sensed qualities of touch are extremely heterogeneous: “touch... has a wide range of objects”¹³. References to touch in modern usage continue to have extraordinary richness, as they encompass contact, pressure, tactile qualities like roughness, silkiness and so on, temperature and vibration, not to mention the senses of movement¹⁴. In addition, as I have already noted, Aristotle discussed the necessity for a “common sense”. Discussion of these topics in De Anima remained a mainstay of education into the eighteenth century. By then, however, especially in the wake of Locke and empiricist argument about the sources of knowledge, there was more detailed and systematic attention to precisely what knowledge originates with which sense. It was common to link touch to the perception of the Jonas, H. “The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1954, Vol. 14, p. 516; also reprinted, revised, in Jonas, H. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Evanston, IL, 2001, pp. 135-156. Jonas was a student of Heidegger and understood his essays as contributions to philosophical anthropology. More recently, see Ratcliffe, M. “What Is Touch?” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2012, Vol. 90, pp. 413-432; Ratcliffe, M. “Touch and the Sense of Reality”, The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental. Cambridge, MA, 2013, pp. 131-157. Aristotle, De Anima, II. 413b. Ibid., II. 418a. This is well recognised in sensory physiology. One summary listed eleven kinds of sensory endings in the skin of the hand: Hsiao, S., Yoshioka, T. & Johnson, K.O. “Somesthesis, Neural Basis of”, Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Vol. 4. London, 2003, pp. 92-96. Katz, World of Touch, remains an unparalleled exploration of tactile richness. primary qualities of bodies, that is, to knowledge of what the new science of the seventeenth century had stated to be real - mass, impenetrability and extension. The other senses were associated with the secondary qualities. George Berkeley's A New Theory of Vision (1709) stimulated considerable discussion of the contribution of touch to notions of spatial reality and especially the perception of distance. Étienne Bonnot, abbé de Condillac and David Hartley subjected touch to more intensive analysis. In conjunction with medical and aesthetic appreciation of the bodily sense, or bodily sentiment, this resulted in differentiation of the sense of movement from the sense of contact. In the early years of the nineteenth century, references to “the muscular sense” (sense musculaire, Muskelgefühl or Muskelsinn, myshechnoe chuvstvo) began to appear¹⁵. Authors shaped discussion of the sense in the terms of a framework which pictured living activity encountering opposition and which conceived knowledge to originate in the “couple”, action-resistance. The literature articulated belief that movement is inherent to being alive and that the sense of movement, now attributed to the muscular sense, results in the most elementary knowledge of reality. The sense subsequently became the subject of intensive psychological and physiological research.

On occasion, authors referred to the muscular sense as a “sixth sense”. Charles Bell, an anatomist, was the first writer in English, in about 1815, to call the muscular sense the sixth sense¹⁶. This is an interesting expression, used in a number of different ways, though most frequently to denote a sense that goes “beyond” the conventional list of five senses and gives a person access to a special, unusual or even unprecedented form of knowing. Fontanelle, in his widely read popularisation of the new astronomy of the seventeenth century, stated: `It's quite possible we're missing a natural sixth sense that would teach us many things we don't know'<sup>17</sup>. In modern times, extra-sensory perception (ESP) is sometimes called a “sixth sense”. Most commonly, the sense is equated with intuition, knowing by direct feeling, and in Russian the sense may denote mystical insight. Osip Mandelstam, after his deeply “moving” visit to Armenia, wrote: “I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an `Ararat' sense; the sense of attraction to a mountain./ Now, no matter where I might be carried, it is already speculative and will abide with me”¹⁸. Calling the muscular sense a sixth sense significantly associated it with intuition, likening the sense to a feeling that gives unmediated knowledge of reality. The reasoning for the association was that the sense conveys a representation of the dual character of activity-resistance, a relationship of action, which we come to know as the self, and resistance, which we come to know as the world. It is the sense of really being in the world, the sense of the embodied self.

A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy was the leader of a group of intellectuals and physicians which assembled in the reformed Institut national in Paris in the 1790s. The members of the group accepted the name of idéologues, signaling their debt to Condillac's theory of the sources of ideas and the place that theory had in a com- Relevant sources, besides Destutt de Tracy and Maine de Biran discussed below, include Erasmus Darwin, Charles Bell and Thomas Brown in English and J.C. Reil and Johann Georg Steinbuch in German (for which see Ritter, J. & Gründer, K. (eds.) Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. IX. Darmstadt, 2007, col. 851-856). Bell, J. & Bell, C. The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body, 4^th ed., Vol. 3. London, 1816, pp. 9-10 (also pp. 216-217). I used the phrase earlier, in Smith, R. “`The Sixth Sense': Towards a History of Muscular Sensation', Gesnerus: Swiss Journal of the History of Medicine and Sciences, 2011, Vol. 68, pp. 218-271. Irina Sirotkina and I played on the ambiguity of reference to insight and movement as sixth senses in Sirotkina, I. & Smith, R. The Sixth Sense of the AvantGarde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia. London, 2017. Fontanelle, B. le Bovier de. Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. Berkeley, 1990, p. 46. Mandelstam, O. Journey to Armenia. London, 2011, p. 91. prehensive system of pedagogy based on belief in the sensory roots of knowledge. It was the great strength of idéologie - and the reason for the claim sometimes made that it founded the science of man - that its proponents brought together the mind, the body and society in order to understand the sources of knowledge and rational action.

Condillac attributed the most basic knowledge that there is a world to the tactile sense of solidity. He observed that when the hand touches the body there is double sensation, the sensation of solidity and the sensation of being touched. This, he argued, is the basis for differentiating the self and the other, the “I” and the world. Tracy re-described this formative experience in terms of sensation of resistance. Further, he claimed that each and every sensation of movement involves an element of resistance, not just the hand touching the body, and this general awareness of resistance is the source knowledge of self and other. Building on this, Maine de Biran then argued that it is effort, sensed in action against muscular resistance, which is the irreducible source of knowledge of a self in a world. Effort versus resistance occurs each time a person moves, and for this reason, there is, Biran claimed, knowledge of self even without the encounter with external objects. He referred to the primary awareness of action as “effort voulu”, awareness of self as will.

Though Condillac had the reputation with the Romantics, and with historians of psychology later, of having put forward a picture of human nature as passive, this is not correct. Analysing the contribution of the senses, Condillac famously imagined a statue coming alive through the exercise of one sense at a time¹⁹. However, he gave his statue the capacity to move before it had any sensation. He assumed the presence of activity, and hence movement, in nature and in human nature. Being active, the statue's movement causes touch, which then teaches all the senses to judge of external objects. Tracy subsequently analysed consciousness of movement into “the couple”, sensation of active movement and sensation of pressure from contact, decomposing touch into a relation of movement and resistance. He thereby attributed knowledge of the external world, and with it knowledge of self, to conjoined sensory modalities, the one partner active (“motilité”), the other passive, resistance (“resistance”). Here, Tracy maintained, in touch in general, is the source of notions of le moi and le soi (“the I” and “oneself”). The active partner originates in the organism itself, in “la faculté de vouloir” (the faculty of volition). Referring to a “faculty”, we should note, Tracy referred to the capacity of an organised living body, not to a power of the soul: “for the will is...only a result of our organization”²⁰. He concluded that there is a sense of active movement, and as a consequence “the property of resistance to our will is thus at the base of all that we learn to know”²¹.

Biran is relatively unknown outside the French-speaking world. But within that world he has status as the philosopher who, understanding the superficiality of Enlightenment reasoning about sensory experience, returned to a Cartesian examination of reasoning itself, setting French thought on a distinctive path. For Étienne Balibar, Biran's writing is “the origin of French existentialism, and [.his Condillac, É. Bonnot, abbé de. Condillac's Treatise on the Sensations. London, 1930. “La volonté n'est... qu'un résultat de notre organisation” (Tracy, Destutt de. Projet d'éléments d'idéologie à l'usage des écoles centrales de la Republique Française. Paris, An IX [18001801], p. 69). This is from the idéologie, première section. For discussion of volition, see the idéologie, seconde section: Tracy, Destutt de. Éléments d'idéologie. IV^e et V^eparties. Traité de la volonté et de ses effets. Paris, 1815, pp. 53-138. “La propriété de résister à notre volonté de nous mouvoir, est donc la base de tout ce que nous apprenons à connaître” (Tracy, Destutt de. Projet d'éléments d'idéologie, p. 333; see also pp. 102122).