Roger Smith: The Sense of Movement. An Intellectual History (London: Process Press, 2019)
Sonsoles Hernández Barbosa, University of the Balearic Islands
The Sense of Movement addresses bodily perceptions of movement over the last four centuries. The work begins by presenting philosophical debates about movement as a vital force which emerged in parallel with the birth of modern science in the seventeenth century, linking these with modern notions about the operation of the human brain. As the author points out, the study of movement and its conceptualisation involves setting up a dialogue between current and past understandings of the sense of movement.
Although The Sense of Movement begins with these reflections about the operation of the world of the senses connected with the scientific revolution in the seventeenth-century, some of its arguments reach back much further in time, specifically to the Aristotelian classification of the five senses. The very use of the expression ‘sense of movement’ implies a direct confrontation with the Aristotelian philosophical tenet, which held that movement could only be understood in relation to the sense of touch. Indeed, the extent to which we can refer to a sense of movement that is independent from touch is one of the main issues addressed by the book. Many of the historical difficulties raised by this issue are to do with the fact that the sense of movement and that of touch cannot be pinned down to a specific organ, insofar as the skin covers the whole body. Today, however, a conceptualisation of the senses that goes beyond the five traditional senses, including the perception of pain, temperature and even time, is widely accepted.[1]
Smith, whose areas of specialisation straddle the fields of philosophy and the history of science, argues that it was around 1800 that philosophy began to address the issue of human movement, when muscular motion was first recognised as a specific sense, distinct from touch. Charles Bell, who in an 1815 work referred to muscular sense as a sixth sense, played a pioneering role in this development. In another section of the book, however, Smith argues against the independent study of both senses – touch and movement – stating that the history of touch cannot neglect movement as a sense. In this, he follows the recent arguments of philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe, who considers movement part of the sense of touch. Thus, while in some parts of the book touch and movement are jointly considered, in others Smith makes a clear distinction between them.
In addition to the problematic distinction between the senses of touch and movement, the book deals with two additional thorny conceptual issues, ‘kinaesthesia’ and ‘proprioception’, which are not always used consistently even today. The former was introduced by the neurologist H. Charlton Bastian in the 1860s as a synonym for the ‘sense of movement’ but Smith prefers to use the term to refer to the ‘conscious awareness of one’s own movement’ (p. 193); ‘proprioception’, on the other hand, is used to allude to what the neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington calls ‘the sensory nervous system, largely but not necessarily functioning without conscious awareness, central to the coordination of movement and posture’ (p. 10). Kinaesthesia, therefore, would imply conscious movement as opposed to proprioception, which involves a rearrangement of posture and movement that not always engages conciousness. As Smith points out, if we accept the existence of an embodied psyche this conceptualisation leads to an unsustainable dualism between body (unconscious) and mind (conscious) (p. 202). It is perhaps for this reason that other authors, in contrast with Smith, have preferred to understand proprioception as the perception of our muscles and internal organs.[2]
A final related aspect, which also hampers the imbrication of movement into traditional conceptualisations of the senses is the embodied conception of all sensorial impressions, which implies that all sensorial experiences mobilise more than one sense. In the same way that vision is embodied, the sense of movement does not depend solely on the muscles, but also on other mechanisms, such as retina images, the inner ear, tendons, joints, skin and other tissues, which means assuming the synesthetic character of all sensorial experiences.
Smith’s history of the sense of movement is a history of ideas. As such, the subject of study spans a number of fields, notably the history of science, the history of philosophy and the anthropology of the senses. The book is divided into fifteen independent chapters that could have been assembled into various sections in the table of contents, especially because some common threads readily come to mind, for instance that which links the postulates of natural science (Chapter 2) with thoughts on causality developed by natural philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Chapter 5).
The mechanist consideration of the concept of force as movement – for instance through the principle of action-reaction – allows the author to situate this concept at the root of evolutionist ideas, thanks to the assumption among naturalists that living beings are subject to the same laws that rule over Nature . The application of this principle to the human body and the understanding of the process of evolution undergone by it emerged in the fields of naturalism and physiological studies (chapters 8 and 9). As a way of example, Herbert Spencer’s study of the phylogenetic evolution of the human body suggested the sense of touch, which includes muscular tension, as the most primitive of the senses, from which the rest of the body’s sensorial capacities derived.
Muscular effort, understood as an active force that poses resistance to events was a concept shared by scientists and idealist philosophers. The seminal nature assigned to the sense of movement in the development of the foundations of the self is a central aspect in philosophical thought that threads through the book, from Berkeley’s (Chapter 3) and Condillac’s (Chapter 4) empiricism to idealism (Chapter 7) and the phenomenology of perception (Chapter 14). Smith’s book shows that Enlightened philosophy introduced the will as a key element in the capacity for motion. Will is no longer considered dependent on the activity of the soul, but emerges from ‘la faculté de vouloir’ (p. 76), which idealism developed further as the idea of causal action (‘the Deed’) as a source of knowledge (Chapter 7). Chapter 10 specifically focuses on psychological reflections around movement.
Chapters that consider the cultural implications of movement are of special interest, for instance chapters 12 and 13, which link the perception of movement and mountaineering and contemporary dance, respectively, in connection with the idea of the individual as an active agent (Chapter 11). This amounts to a dialogue with the cultural history of the history of the senses, although Smith explicitly states that his intention is not to take a cultural history approach to the history of movement.
Overall, The Sense of Movement is a key contribution not only to understand the sense of movement but also as a general reflection on the senses more broadly. From the perspective of the history of ideas, it is a fundamental text to understand the epistemological potential of movement, which tracks a theoretical tradition that acted as a counterweight to ocularcentrism and the consideration of vision as the objective and epistemological sense par excellence.
[1] Phillip Vannini; Waskul, Dennis; Gottschalk, Simon: The Senses in Self, Society and Culture. A Sociology of the Senses [2012]. New York: Routledge, 2014, p. 6.
[2] Vannini; Waskul; Gottschalk, p. 6.