Two regions where the human being stops belonging wholly to himself: in sensing, the world reaches in; in moving, we are taken up by it.
The Sense Zone and the Movement Zone in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the two regions that fall out of the human organism in opposite directions, set out in his third Zurich lecture of 12 November 1917, collected as GA 73, Anthroposophy Has Something to Add to Modern Sciences. Steiner had just paired the life of ideas with the nervous system, the life of feeling with the breathing rhythm, and the will with metabolism, a threefold physiology he published that same year in Von Seelenrätseln. Then he named two exceptions. In the Sinneszone and in the Bewegungsleben the human being no longer belongs wholly to himself but already partly to the outside world. The senses stand open like bays into which the surrounding world runs, and movement folds the body into the balance and dynamics of forces outside it. Steiner concluded that a theory of the senses and a theory of movement cannot be built on a closed organism.
The Sense Zone and the Movement Zone name the two edges of Steiner's anthropology where person and world overlap. Everything else in the body can be read as nerve, rhythm, or metabolism, and each of those has its counterpart in thinking, feeling, and willing. Sensing and moving refuse the scheme. In them the world is already inside the act, and the act already reaches past the skin.
In Steiner's Own Words
The zone of the senses, as I would call it, and the life of movement drop out of the context of the human organism in two directions. Modern science is on thin ice particularly when it comes to the theory of the senses on the one hand and the theory of movement on the other. Scientists working in psychology as well as in physiology understand very little, I would say, of these two opposite poles in human nature. This is because here human beings no longer belong wholly to themselves but partly to the outside world, with the soul living out into the outside world both in the zone of the senses, in the sphere of sensory life, and in the sphere of movement life.
What it Means Today
In 2004 the philosopher Alva Noë published Action in Perception with MIT Press, arguing that perceiving is not something that happens inside a perceiver but something a perceiver does. Three years earlier he and J. Kevin O'Regan had put the case in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in a paper titled "A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness." The claim is that seeing consists in a practical mastery of how sensation changes when you move: turn your head and the scene shears in a lawful way, and holding that law is what seeing is. Vision, on this account, cannot be located in the visual cortex alone, because part of what makes it vision is the moving body and the world that body moves through.
That is Steiner's boundary drawn again from the far side. Enactive cognitive science arrived at it by finding that vision research kept failing to explain perception from inside the skull. Steiner arrived at it in 1917 by finding that his own threefold physiology accounted for thinking, feeling, and willing yet left sensing and moving unaccounted for. Thalira synthesis: the two accounts agree on where the boundary runs and disagree about which way to cross it, since Noë extends the body outward into skilled action while Steiner has the outside world extend inward into the sense organ, and the honest reading is that both describe one overlap seen from opposite banks.
Where to Read More
- Anthroposophy Has Something to Add to Modern Sciences, GA 73
- Find at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]