I'm always looking for threads of Feldenkrais in other disciplines. Here is a quote from Charles Sanders Peirce, an American philosopher, logician,
mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of
pragmatism" and the "father of semiotics." Here he describes a Feldenkrais lesson 50 years before Moshe Feldenkrais created his first lesson.
"Everybody knows the facility with which habits may be acquired, even quite unintentionally. But
I am persuaded that nothing like a concept can be acquired by muscular
effort alone. When we seem to do that, it is not the muscular action but
the accompanying inward efforts, the acts of imagination, that produce
the habit. If a person who has never tried such a
thing before undertakes to stand on one foot and to move the other
round a horizontal circle, say, as being the easier way, clockwise if he
is standing on the left foot, or counterclockwise if he is standing on
the right foot, and at the same time move the fist of he same side as
the moving foot round a horizontal circle in the opposite direction,
that is, clockwise the foot is moved counterclockwise and vice versa, he
will, at first, find he cannot do it. The difficulty is that he lacks a unitary concept of the series of efforts that success requires. By
practicing the different parts of the movement, while attentively
observing the kind of effort requisite in each part, he will, in a few
minute, catch the idea, will then be able to perform the movements with
perfect facility. But the proof that it is in no degree he muscular
efforts, but only the efforts of the imagination that have been his
teachers, is that if he does not perform the actual motions, but only
imagines them vividly, he will acquire the same trick with only so much
more additional practice as is accounted for by the difficulty of
imagining all the efforts that well have been made in a movement one has
not actually executed. There is an obvious
difficulty of determining just how much allowance should be made for
this, in the fact that when a feat is learned in either way, it can not
be unlearned, so as to compare that way with the other. The only resort
is to learn a considerable number of feats which depend upon acquiring a
unitary conception of a series of efforts, learning some with actual
muscular exercise and the others by unaided imagination, and then
forming one's judgement of whether the greater facility afforded by the
actually muscular contractions is, or is not, greater than the support
this gives the imagination. …all largely depend upon a unitary connection of all that has to be done and just when it must be done. It
is from such experiments that I have been led to estimate as nil the
power of mere muscular effort in the contributing to the acquisition of
ideas."
"Pragmatism in Retrospect: A Last Formulation by Charles
Sanders Peirce" in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, Justus Buchler, ed. Dove Publications, New York:1955, pp. 278-279. Original essay written 1906
