Century after century – will it be soon, God? –
Under the scalpel of nature and of art
Our spirit cries, the flesh wears itself out,
Giving birth to the organ of the sixth sense.
NIKOLAI GUMILEV1
Everyday English language about the mind, now and for centuries past, firmly identifies five senses – ‘the five senses’: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. This is a social convention, though there are those who have thought there really are, ‘naturally’, precisely five senses. It is common to cite the classical authority of Aristotle, in De Anima, a text which was a mainstay of Arabic and then European education down to the seventeenth century and even through the eighteenth century. Aristotle dealt with the five senses in turn and described vision as superior to the others. Yet, at the same time, he identified touch as in some manner at the foundation of sensation generally and not straightforwardly comparable to the other senses. ‘The most basic of the senses, touch, all animals have … so is touch separable from the other senses,’ he wrote, implying that without touch animals simply would not continue to preserve themselves, to remain alive. Touch is the sense without which the animal (and person) ‘can have no other sense’.2 Touch is primary, and the other senses share or reflect the fact that it has passive and active dimensions (contact is brought about by movement) at the same time. Then, Aristotle noted, there are different kinds of touch awareness, indeed very many. ‘Touch … has a wide range of objects’. A reference to touch may denote awareness of very different kinds of things: contact, pressure, tactual qualities, temperature, vibration, not to mention the senses of movement.3 Indeed, one recent summary listed thirteen different types of nerve fibres running from the hand and supplying the brain with sensory (afferent) impulses.4 Aristotle himself even wondered whether touch should be called one sense or many.
The epigraph at the opening of this chapter is from the Russian poet Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova’s first husband, who was shot by the security services in 1921. In the last year of his life, he composed ‘The Sixth Sense’ and voiced a longing that the age might finally come in which the body will acquire a new capacity, a special organ for ‘sensing’ poetry. Here poetic language ran together allusion to intuition and to an actual sense organ. Indeed, the age had come to expand beyond the traditional five senses. In the same year, 1920, the Russian Expressionist poet Ippolit Sokolov wrote that there must be between ten and fifteen senses.5 Most obviously to a modern reader, perhaps, touch differs from the other four senses since its relations with things is not mediated by one localized organ: touch is present (though variably) all over the skin, and, if we include bodily sensations (tired muscles, stomach ache and so forth) under this heading, there is also deep touch throughout the body. ‘There is no neatly circumscribed “organ” of touch, other than the dynamic human body.’6 For this reason, Aristotle wrote that all the senses can be understood as kinds of touch. Developing such a view, we might conclude, the body is one sense organ. Jacques Derrida, in his study of touch, amplified the insight of Jean-Luc Nancy to this effect: ‘there is no “the” sense of touch’ – touch is the way in which animate beings are animate, not properly described one among five senses.7 This is a significant suggestion, to which we shall return. Ordinary speech, however, continues to differentiate the senses.
Another ancient writer to accord touch special status was the Epicurean philosopher, Lucretius. His poem On the Nature of Things, rediscovered in the West in 1417 and written in Latin much admired for its elegance, presented a fully materialist worldview.8 He explained all phenomena, including the soul, in terms of the motions of particles in a void. If all that exists are particles and motion, then the contact, the touching, of particles is the principle of change in the world, and the human sense of touch the basic source of knowledge of what exists and brings events about. Lucretius, like Aristotle, described the senses in turn, though when he came to touch, he had nothing to write that he had not implied already in describing the contact of particles. Touch just is what it is, con-tact (Latin, tactus, touch), particles touching each other. The challenge was to show how the other senses, like vision, also resulted from the contact of particles. (Lucretius thought that objects give off very fine films of particles, like a spider shedding its skin, which, moving, touch the eye.) In the seventeenth century, suitably distanced from Lucretius’s distinctly non-Christian views, this way of thinking became central to the new natural philosophy, the modern science of understanding nature in terms of matter and motion. This, too, gave touch special status among the senses.
We summarize a large history. Many authors fixed on touch as the route to the most direct knowledge of what is real; indeed, touch achieved status as the sense through which there is knowledge of the primary, or irreducible properties of things, their massiveness, spatial dimensions, motion and resistance to us. Touch, it appeared, is the most direct, or the deepest, engagement of a living organism with ‘the real’, a condition of it being alive not dead. In Aristotle’s words again (in a passage where he argued that no one of the four elements, earth, air, fire or water, without soul, was sufficient to be the substance of a sense organ):
For without touch … [the animal body] can have no other sense, every ensouled thing being … a tactile body, and, while the other elements apart from earth might be sense-organs, they would all produce sensation by indirect and mediate perception, whereas touch consists, as its name suggests, in contact with objects. The other sense-organs seem to perceive by touch, but through something else, touch alone being thought to do so through itself.…
It is the deprivation of this sense alone that leads to death in animals. Just as it is impossible for anything that is not an animal to have this sense, so there is no other sense that something must have to be an animal except this one.9
This argument (which we are abstracting from what Aristotle wrote as a whole) has parallels in contemporary debate on the theory of knowledge. Its modern incarnation in phenomenology goes back to the work of Edmund Husserl in the first decade of the twentieth century, and it became widely spread in the second half of the century through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (first published in 1945). For Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who is both a biologist and a phenomenologist (and she was also, not coincidentally, a dancer), the sense of movement is simply the sense of life. Discussing the vexed question of the nature of consciousness, especially of the qualities of ‘feels’, like redness (an example of what are called qualia), she wrote: they are ‘integral to bodily life. They are there in any movement we make … They are not a “mental product,” but the product of animation. They are created by movement itself.’10 Developing a similar argument, the physiologist Alain Berthoz and phenomenologist Jean-Luc Petit linked Husserl’s discussion of the shaping of the world in kinaesthetic awareness to recent work on the brain’s active construction of what is taken to be the world. They boldly concluded that ‘on the basis of this theory, we can account for everything that exists for a subject with the meaning of being “a thing”’.11
Husserl took up phenomenal awareness of embodiment, or experience of life as contact and movement, as pivotal for the re-establishment of philosophy. We may think of this as a philosophical parallel, coinciding in time, to modernism in the arts, though Husserl worked without (to our knowledge) direct interaction with the arts. Husserl called for a rejection of the immediate philosophical past, judged inadequate by the high calling of his field. He sought to re-describe ‘the real’, and for this re-description he introduced a new technique (phenomenological reduction); and he turned to his own thinking for the authority to make statements about what is real. All awareness, he supposed, even the awareness of a philosopher thinking as intensively and as rationally as himself, is embodied. The phenomenal reality of this embodiment is given in and by kinaesthesia, the sense of being alive, moving, at each moment.
Already in the constitution of a sensed spatial something … we have a formation of a hidden, analytically exhibitable [demonstrable], constitutive synthesis; it is indeed an ‘appearance’ which refers back to the kinaesthetic ‘circumstances’ to which it appertains. We are always led back further analytically and arrive finally at sense-objects in a different sense, ones which lie at the ground (constitutively understood) of all spatial objects and, consequently, of all thing-objects of material reality too.12
For Husserl, analysis led to kinaesthesia as the ground of awareness of things, and to awareness that awareness is in a body. Kinaesthesia is involved in every apprehension that we exist as embodied in the world: ‘I am at all times in one or another kinaesthetic stance.’13 Husserl supposed that analysis can trace the phenomenal presence (‘in consciousness’, as ordinary language has it) of spatial things to the kinaesthesis, the movement of an organism as part of, in, the world, not as a mind or some kind of internal observer looking out on the world. Kinaesthetic awareness is awareness of a particular stance or movement; and the awareness is localized. The body is the bearer of spatialized locations, beginning with the double character of touch, which is at one and the same time touching and being touched. The pattern of localization is the source of knowledge of body differentiated from and having relation to objects:
Given with the localization of the kinesthetic series in the relevant moving member of the Body is the fact that in all perception and perceptual exhibition (experience) the Body is involved as freely moved sense organ, as freely moved totality of sense organs, and hence there is also given the fact that, on this original foundation, all that is thingly-real in the surrounding world of the Ego has its relation to the Body.14
Husserl’s argument made the basis of all knowledge, that is, the character phenomena possess which analysis cannot further reduce, the spatiality of the body given by kinaesthesis. In a course of lectures in 1907, he discussed at length the ‘animation’ binding apprehension of the existence of a world to the world. Going through the place of the visual and tactile senses in this apprehension, he argued that these senses alone are not sufficient to give rise to awareness of spatiality. This comes, he said, from self-movement, which, understood psychologically, we know in kinaesthesia. (He self-consciously adopted the foreign word.)15
The importance Husserl accorded to kinaesthetic awareness passed, transformed, into the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and of later phenomenologists concerned with Dasein, the being that has as its being the understanding of itself as being. Being is ‘being-in-the-world’, and this is disclosed with being itself. As Heidegger wrote, using an expression redolent with reference to touch: ‘In anything ready-to-hand the world is already “there”.’16 Subsequently, Merleau-Ponty developed this way of thought in the language of phenomenological psychology, a psychology setting out to show analytically how knowledge of self and world, that is, knowledge of embodied self in the world, originates in the facts of embodiment. The body ‘is the horizon latent in all our experience and itself ever-present and anterior to every determining thought’.17 Hence all perception involves an ‘attitude’ of the body, knowledge of which is given by the position and movement of the body, which is always position and movement in relation to some thing. These kinds of arguments, in the language of phenomenology, very much continue to inform the writings of those, like Petit, Ratcliffe and Sheets-Johnstone, who would find the base in awareness of movement or touch for a theory of knowledge that is also a theory of significance or meaning.
These philosophical discussions did not, and do not, describe a neutral, disinterested encounter of reflective subject and world, mediated by movement. Meaning is given in the perception of an event, not added on by some rational or affective judgement; movement is movement in evaluative relation to something. The relation is an ‘encounter’ that expresses a ‘concern’: ‘the fact that observation is a kind of concern is just as primordial as the fact that action has its own kind of sight’.18 This is well reflected in ordinary language usage, which makes clear that ‘contact with’, ‘movement towards’, ‘movement away from’, ‘touching the heart’ and so on, in the inexhaustible richness of language, are not simply spatial but qualitative, moral and aesthetic, expressions.
Relations of touch and movement, as well as of gesture, with ourselves, with other people and with things, relations embedded in a vast range of culturally variable practices, embody moral as well as material stances. As Ratcliffe wrote: ‘To make touch with the world is to be “in touch” with it, but it is about significant contact rather than just physical contact; the latter is an abstraction from the richness of tactual experience.’19 The embodied relations known in touch and kinaesthesia are the animated expression of the ethical stance. This is a very significant point. Husserl’s life-work, indeed, was a response to what he called ‘the crisis of the sciences as expression of the radical life-crisis of European humanity’.20 The crisis, which he and many other intellectuals and artists experienced, came with the massive expansion of the authority of the sciences (humanistic as well as natural). The ‘crisis’ was that this success appeared to rely on a positivist theory of knowledge, a form of knowledge revealing facts but leaving values without rational foundation. Phenomenology was a commitment to supply that foundation by grounding knowledge in the animated, living being that is ‘in touch with’ a world, a world of concerned relations, a world ‘ready-to-hand’. In however abstract a manner, the philosophy expressed the sensibility informing much modernist endeavour in the arts. To leap into the air, to take to flight, expressed joy, confidence in the body – it expressed ‘spirit’, as people say – the value, the being, not just the fact, of being in movement.
Hence, as we discuss in the chapters to follow, the significance of movement to the Russian modernists: in movement they sought to recreate the world – not only personal worlds, but the very possibilities of being-in-the-world. As young and idealistic dancers well understood, the leap into the air was a leap into a higher existence. In the 1920s, our Russian dancer would not have read Husserl, but she had her own answer, in performance, to the ‘crisis’ which drove the philosopher’s life-work.
The arts and philosophy, together with physiological science, advanced new techniques to arrive at and express ‘the real’. By drawing attention to the history of the muscular sense, we draw attention to the prior existence of an appropriate sensory, kinaesthetic language for what was found to be ‘the real’. It was appropriate language because discussions of touch, and more particularly of the movement sense, had recognized the double character, the relation, given in the senses, of moving to being moved (or of touching to being touched), self to other and ‘the I’ to the world. It was the language of embodied, not alienated, being.
To find a way through these complex matters, we turn to the history of what we call, in the title of our book, the sixth sense: the history of the sense (or senses) of movement. There is a lot to be learned. The stance of the body at every moment, in sleep or in the most violent activity, in passive states as in voluntary efforts, requires the co-ordinated activity of the moveable structures of the body. Such co-ordination requires something very like knowledge, conscious or unconscious, of the state the body is in and the state the person wishes to be in. Such knowledge is made possible by the existence of a system of sensory and motor nerves, linked in co-ordinated circuits, so that an organism is constantly up to date about what, in terms of posture and movement, it is doing. Where there is conscious awareness of posture and movement, we refer to kinaesthesia, which, speaking loosely, we may call a sixth sense.
The actual phrase ‘the sixth sense’ has, in fact, been used in a number of different ways. The historical search embodied in the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered usages referring to sexual feeling and to the remarkable sense of the bat, quite unknown to humans, and to repeated speculation that there are one or more senses going beyond what is normal in this material world. The use of the phrase to signal special sensory power is confirmed by an internet search, which will first throw up a US film from 1999 about paranormal or psychic powers. In the film, a young boy, disturbingly, sees and talks to the dead. Incidentally, the title of the film says something important about reference to a sense: reference is not to a passive reception (though it sometimes is), but to an active capacity. In this regard, the film’s use of the phrase approaches a further, quite widespread use, in which ‘the sixth sense’ describes an ability ‘to sense’, not through ‘the senses’ but, rather, through a power in the mind itself. This is sense understood as a kind of intuition. Intuition itself has been conceived among other things as a potential in each and every person’s mind, or as an esoteric gift found only in a small elite or in people of genius. Reference to the intuition of women and poets was, of course, once – and, as it may be, still is – a commonplace of folk (or everyday) psychology.
In addition to such usage (and this brings us to our subject), reference to the sixth sense denotes the sense (or senses) of movement. Before about 1800, authors did not clearly distinguish this sense from the sense (or senses) of touch. There was appreciation that touch involves more than mere surface contact, and there was even reference to ‘dark feeling’, but there was no precise specification of new ‘extra’ senses.21 Indeed, it is still common practice to use ‘touch’ to cover the whole range of both tactile and movement senses, and there may be good reasons for this (as Matthew Ratcliffe argued, for one) in the integrated way that tactile and movement senses discriminate bodily self and other bodies and tell us about their most fundamental sensory characteristics.22 Our usage denotes a sense that, unlike intuition or psychical knowledge, is very definitely embodied. All the same, as we shall see, language about the movement sense has at times (as in Gumilev’s lines) approached language about intuition and even approached the ‘aesthetic sense’ or a sense for poetry.
A very significant part of the history is about belief that the sense of movement goes beyond, or goes higher (or deeper), than the traditional five senses permit. It has been held up as the sense through which we know the ‘really’ real. This has coloured belief about the sense of movement with a noumenal aura, the kind of aura that surrounds reference to ‘life’. To round out the picture, we may mention in passing that, in Buddhist thought, it is possible to describe the mind and the objects towards which it is directed, that is, thoughts, as the sixth sense: ‘we feel that we perceive our thoughts with our mind just as we perceive a visible object with our eye.’23 This, however, lies outside the usage we discuss (whatever the possible value of Buddhist thought for cognitive neuroscience). Lastly, we recall a joke from Soviet times: ‘All people have five senses, but a Soviet person has one more. The sixth is a sense of deep satisfaction.’
Words are not passive labels but actors in shaping the world.
To our knowledge, description of the sense of movement as ‘the sixth sense’ dates from anatomy lectures that Charles Bell gave to medical students in London in the 1810s. There may be earlier usages, but Bell’s marks the entry of the phrase into science. Certainly, his concern with the sense of muscular movement was preceded by interest in the sense of balance and vertigo (an interest in what, in retrospect, has been called the first sixth sense to be discovered after Aristotle drew up his list of five senses).24 Bell, for his part, wrote:
There are five organs peculiarly adapted to convey sensations to the mind; or as I am more inclined to say, to rouse the faculties of the mind by exercising the internal organs of the senses in the brain … If I were willing to break in upon the received opinions in an elementary book, I would say that there was a sixth sense, the most important of all, the sense of motion; for it is by a sense of motion that we know many of the qualities of outward things, as their distance, shape, resistance, and weight.25
Two things are noteworthy. First, Bell felt he was innovating, going against received opinion in naming a sixth sense; and second, in spite of this, he considered the new sense ‘the most important’. In a brief description of the senses, he elaborated on what he thought this importance was, and he made it clear that he was referring to a sense of movement, not to tactile qualities. The sense was important, he held, because it reveals the fundamental, or primary, qualities of bodies (solidity, extension and motion), through muscular movement and through sensing resistance to it. This, he implied, lies at the heart of sensing difference between self and other. This primary knowledge is not the result of simple contact.
But it appears to me that these qualities of hardness, softness, solidity, figure, extension and motion, would be known to us, although we had no nerves in our finger ends at all! These qualities belong to what I would call the muscular sense, that conception of distance which we acquire by moving our body or our members, by pressing upon an object and feeling the resistance it occasions.26
Here Bell referred to ‘the muscular sense’. If he innovated by summoning up a sixth sense, he shared with predecessors and contemporaries the reference to ‘the muscular sense’ or ‘muscular feeling’ (Muskelsinn or Muskelgefühl, sens musculaire). Over the half-century from about 1780 to 1830, a number of intellectually significant authors – including Destutt de Tracy in France, Erasmus Darwin in England and Johann G. Steinbuch in Germany – made large claims on behalf of this sense, large claims because they linked the sense to the most basic knowledge of what is real. The fundamental sensory knowledge to which they pointed was the sense of activity, or movement, opposed to resistance. A number of authors made such knowledge the basis for a person’s very awareness of self and world.27
Bell, more than other authors at this time, related the sense to specific empirical knowledge of the nervous system. Believing in a sixth sense, he made observations linking the brain and the muscles in a kind of circle: he proposed that efferent, motor nerves carry impulses from the centre to the periphery and cause muscle contraction, and afferent, sensory nerves carry impulses from the periphery to the centre, enabling the mind to sense that a muscular contraction has occurred. This laid the basis for description of the structural-functional relations of the embodied control of posture and movement. Just as the brain informs the muscles when to contract, the muscles inform the brain when they are contracted. Bell’s work, announced to the Royal Society of London in 1826, was cited a century later by physiologists as the foundational study of the empirical science of co-ordinated movement. Bell was ‘the first to definitely postulate the existence of a muscular sense of a physiological parity with the other senses’.28
After the work of Destutt de Tracy and then Thomas Brown in mental philosophy, Steinbuch in experimental psychology and Bell in nervous physiology, the muscular sense became a defined interest and area of research. This happened exactly in the decades when modern, specialized, disciplinary science and philosophy developed (some historians even speak of a second ‘scientific revolution’ at this time), and this disciplinary activity structured subsequent research on muscular feeling. Most pertinently, physiology developed as an exemplary experimental science, establishing techniques for and standards of empirical argument about the psycho-physiology of the senses, the sixth sense included. Many contributors to research had medical backgrounds, as the opportunities for full-time ‘pure’ research expanded only slowly, and the clinical case study, in the vastly complex area of knowledge of body and mind, remained a highly important source of information and medium of argument. In descriptive and analytic studies of mind, the French philosopher, psychologist and diarist Maine de Biran had a special long-term influence. Transforming Tracy’s work, he discerned in the feeling of volitional effort the irreducible basis of the person or soul, and he set out to show how all knowledge has to be understood as having this sense as a foundation.29 This placed action, movement, at the heart of subjectivity and the embodied self. It was a direction of thought to be continued a century later by philosophers as diverse as Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.
The history of the muscular sense had begun with recognition of the special heterogeneous and distributed nature of touch, and with discussion of touch as, in some way, the most fundamental of the senses. There was input due to interest in balance. Also, from early on, there was considerable debate about the relation of touch to vision, most particularly about whether it is through touch that the eye learns to perceive distance. This placed the argument about relations between the senses at the centre of research. An appreciation of the fact that the senses interact (a subject of the influential work of the psychologist J. J. Gibson on ‘perceptual systems’) generated its own questions.30
Whatever the progress of natural science, work in mental science (or mental philosophy) continued to link discussion of empirical science and the theory of knowledge. There was seemingly endless examination, from many different points of view, of the acquisition and nature of knowledge, and reference to the muscular sense had a large place in this. As a result, it became a large and diffuse topic, spread across the whole range of discussion of mind and body, sensation and knowledge and living reality in general. Moreover, if the phrase ‘the muscular sense’ was hardly on everyone’s lips, everyday experience was experience of movement, and everyday psychology was replete with examples of the special tactile and movement skills of people without (or with much reduced) sight, of the special movements needed for craft skills, sport and the arts, indeed, for more or less everything. The acquisition of ability to play the piano, for example, was a staple of discussion of habit and learning. Everybody was familiar with people who had ‘butter-fingers’, or who were ‘a dab hand’ at something. Bell himself wrote for the educated public on the exquisite capabilities of the hand.31 Every school child and every soldier knew about posture.32 Women in corsets and men in high collars knew all too much about restricted movement. All the same, by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, there was also a large, specialized literature on the nature and functions of the muscular sense, a literature which, around 1900, reached general if not universal agreement that this sense is indeed, as Bell had suggested, a peripheral sense (though perhaps located more in tendons, joints and skin than in muscle itself). Many of the details still occupy researchers. In physiological psychology before 1900, however, there was a large and (at the time) seemingly unresolvable debate, with contradictory experimental and clinical evidence, about whether the sense was central, peripheral or both. That is, the science of the muscular sense circled around whether to understand the sense as based in central brain impulses (perhaps subserving the feeling of effort) or in peripheral muscles or joints (subserving awareness of movement after it has been carried out).
Writers began to substitute other words for ‘muscular sense’; there was a feeling that it was just too imprecise. William James complained: ‘This word is used with extreme vagueness to cover all resident sensations, whether of motion or position, in our members, and even to designate the supposed feeling of efferent discharge from the brain [that is, supposed outgoing impulses felt as effort].’33 In these circumstances, a new word, ‘kinaesthesia’, was quickly taken up, to describe sensory awareness of movement. The word appeared, in 1880, in a book on the brain for a public audience, a book in E. L. Youmans’s ‘International Scientific Series’, a major publication venture in the public spread of scientific knowledge. The author, H. Charlton Bastian, was a London neurologist, a specialist in brain and nervous disorder, who had for some time contributed to debate about the nature of the muscular sense.34 Relying largely on clinical evidence, Bastian was firmly of the view that the sense is peripheral. His labelling of the sense as kinaesthesia signalled that he thought it a sense like other senses, even if its sense organ is distributed throughout the body. From English, the word quickly spread to other languages and, by the end of the century, reference to kinaesthesia as a class of sensations was commonplace, not only in scientific discussion.
The dictionary later defined kinaesthesia as ‘the sense of muscular effort that accompanies a voluntary motion of the body’.35 This definition compounded a number of topics. In the nineteenth century, and in experimental psychology up to the second decade of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of effort, associated with voluntary movement, was indeed integral to discussion of muscular feeling. However, an increasing body of opinion (expressed in the quotation from James) thought that the feeling of effort and awareness of muscular contraction and position of the body and limbs were different things. The latter, as an authority like Bastian argued, are often barely conscious, or even unconscious, and have the function of guiding, or co-ordinating, movement and posture in the light of the contracted, or relaxed, condition of the muscles. The sense guides volition but is not the sense of effort in volition. Then C. S. Sherrington, in 1906, introduced the language of ‘the proprio-ceptive field’.36 In his original usage, the term denoted the whole class of internal sensations, many of them not conscious, by means of which the body has knowledge of its own state. By contrast, he discussed the sense organs as the source of information about the world outside. With time, usage (mostly) narrowed, and scientists referred to proprioception as the system, for the most part unconscious and automatic, responsible for the co-ordination of posture and movement. This firmly located the topic of the muscular sense in physiology. In contrast, reference to kinaesthesia persisted as part of language for describing the phenomenal world, the world of the experiencing, conscious person, the psychological world.
The research and interest was international. In Russian, the term ‘kinaesthesia’ is relatively recent; the academic Dictionary of the Russian Language of 1982 did not include it. Earlier, myshechnoe chuvstvo (muscular feeling) was used, a translation of the German from the light hand of the nineteenth-century ‘father of Russian physiology’, Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov. ‘During walking,’ he wrote,
the sensory excitation is given at every step, by the contact of the foot with the surface upon which the person is walking and by the feeling of support which arises therefrom. It is also given by the sensations which are born in the contracting muscles (the so-called muscular sense).37
Sechenov was himself a very active and mobile man, and in his writing he almost sang of movement: ‘Be it a child laughing at the sight of toys, or Garibaldi smiling when he is persecuted for his excessive love for his fatherland; a girl trembling at the first thought of love, or Newton enunciating universal laws and writing them on paper, – everywhere the final manifestation is muscular movement.’38 The sensations of this movement, Sechenov asserted, have meaning and purpose for the movement’s regulation, the accomplishment of movement.
It remains to say something about the now pervasive word ‘haptic’. When approaching this, it is helpful to remember the very considerable, complex contribution of the movement of the eyeballs in vision. There is, we might say, no vision without movement. A very extensive body of research from the time of Hermann Helmholtz (and even before) in the mid-nineteenth century to the present supports this. This topic has been a key site for research on the integration of sensory impulses. Then, in the 1890s, the development of historical and aesthetic studies of the arts included a new word, ‘haptic’ (from the Greek word for ‘I touch’ or ‘I touch lightly’), to describe the way in which vision includes awareness integrated with, or derived from, touch. A century later, ‘haptic’ became a buzz-word in intellectual commentary on the arts, commentary keen to reveal the embodied nature of the many faces of perceptual awareness (in ‘contact improvisation’ or other improvised dance, for example, or in appreciation of the layers of paint on a canvas). Contemporary reference to haptic sense may simply denote touch, or more especially active touch, and there is authority for this in usage by physiologists, or it may denote the place of touch activity in the formation of perceptions (including kinaesthetic perceptions) generally, notably visual ones. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari provided a much-cited reference to the latter, and this has been a strong influence in the rebarbative language of art and film theory.39 There is also a branch of engineering, ‘haptics’, concerned with information and the touch interface.
Deleuze and Guattari recalled the work of Alois Riegl on Late Roman Art Industry, published in 1901, in which Riegl, a German art historian, differentiated optic and haptic perception.40 By 1901, there had been more than a decade of constructive interaction between art history and the philosophy and experimental psychology of aesthetics, a decade which historians now perceive as laying the foundations for modern discussions. The experimental psychologist Theodor Lipps developed his theory of Einfühlung (empathy) at this time, arguing that the aesthetic quality of a work of art depends on the extent and manner with which the art work excites the observer to perceive and take pleasure in and thus, so to speak, participate in, the way the artist constructed a performance (whether of brush-strokes or of dance movements).41 There was a large discussion about this, which naturally involved the suggestion that what came to be called empathy may be crucial for appreciation of the plastic arts and arts of movement (including sculpture, theatre, film and dance). Indeed, the idea that kinaesthetic feeling is involved in empathy was there from the beginning of the discussion, in the work of Robert Vischer in the 1870s.42 Following this line of thought, theorists of art claimed that people perceive not only motions of living things but movements of a so-called pure or abstract kind by imitating them subjectively and producing them as internal plans (or motor cognitions). Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, who worked independently but also studied the research of experimental psychologists) re-thought this, reflecting the work of the sculptor and critic, Adolf von Hildebrand. In her discussion of sculpture, she elaborated on the importance of empathetic touch, including the movement sense, to aesthetic appreciation. In Lee’s understanding, this appreciation exhibits and reinforces the sense we have of being alive. As Carolyn Burdett commented:
We ‘realize’ the relations of the shape’s constituent elements because our own dynamic experience is projected into it: ‘the activity we speak of is ours’. We attribute balance, direction, velocity, pace, rhythm, and energy to a contemplated form, Lee writes, ‘but also thrust, resistance, strain, feeling, intention, and character’.43
Separately, in the voice of a self-made connoisseur, Bernhard Berenson famously announced that the painter
can accomplish his task only as we accomplish ours, by giving tactile values to retinal impressions. His first business, therefore, is to rouse the tactile sense, for I must have the illusion of being able to touch a figure … before I shall take it for granted as real, and let it affect me lastingly.44
In such ways, reference to touch, and with it reference to movement, and what is taken to be ‘real’, entered into writings at the foundations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussion of the arts.
The description of the place of the sense of movement in artistic culture turns out to require a very broad and deep imagination. It is an imagination with considerable contemporary resonance – in the flourishingly diverse world of dance, most obviously, but also in acrobatics (skateboarding!), walking, climbing, sport and the pursuit of health; in cognitive neuroscience with its interest in the motor brain; in automated control, prosthetics and robotics. As we have briefly outlined, there is a substantial history to all of this. This history, the history of the sense of touch understood in the broadest way, is replete with figures of speech which call touch and movement senses ‘the deepest’ as well as ‘the highest’. There is no contradiction in this. The metaphor of depth suggests that the sense of movement underlies and enters into the other senses, and that it precedes them in terms of both individual and evolutionary development (in both ontogeny and phylogeny). Our purposes, however, are not to elaborate biological or physiological knowledge and argue the empirical evidence for depth understood in this way. Rather, if we refer to ‘the deepest sense’, we do so to suggest that it is, in ways to be explored, the most profound – and hence ‘the highest’ – in cultural context. The context for our study is modernist Russia, to which we turn in the next chapter. In Russia, where in the arts and through political convulsions people invested very large hopes in transforming humans and ‘raising’ humanity, the ramifications of the movement sense were large indeed.