One thing that baffles me about the common perception of the Alexander Technique is that it’s about having good posture (whatever it is that we mean by “good posture”). That it’s about imagining that there’s an optimal arrangement of our body parts, and making sure we keep ourselves in that arrangement.

If Alexander’s chief concern had been good posture, what do you imagine he might have titled his first book, the encapsulation of his thesis?

Because what he called it was “Man’s Supreme Inheritance”, and to me that doesn’t sound like a man concerned that we all sit up straight.

Like many of his contemporaries, Alexander’s imagination had been captured by the relatively new theory of evolution. (Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, just ten years before Alexander’s birth.) And evolution is where he starts his first book. His first three sentences take my breath away every time I read them.

The long process of evolution still moves quietly to its unknown accomplishment. Struggle and starvation, the hard fight for existence, working with fine impartiality, remorselessly eliminate the weak and defective. New variations are developed and old types no further adaptable become extinct, and thus life fighting for life improves towards a sublimation we cannot foresee.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p3.

This remains the most elegant, parsimonious description of evolution by natural selection that I have ever seen.

FM opens with a quote from The Golden Bough by J. G. Frazer. This is neither a book, nor an author, that I’m familiar with, however wikipedia tells me he was a classicist and social anthropologist who was influential in the study of mythology and comparative religion. His book offers the thesis that “mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought.” This fits with FM’s ideas of an increasing capacity for conscious reasoning thought.

FM goes on to explain that his principles may be equally embraced by the materialist, the atheist and the religious believer. Whatever we believe it is that gives humanity its capacity for self-awareness and conscious thought, FM’s ideas about how to constructively direct that ability apply to all.

The section where FM talks about man evolving the capacity to counteract nature itself is similarly breathtaking:

But through whatever influence these new powers in man came into being I maintain that they held strange potentialities, and, among others, that which now immediately concerns us, the potentiality to counteract the force of evolution itself.

This is, indeed, at once the greatest triumph of our intellectual growth and also the self-constituted danger which threatens us from within. Man has arisen above nature, he has bent circumstance to his will, and striven against the mighty force of evolution. He has pried into the great workshop and interfered with the machinery, endeavouring to become master of its action and to control the workings of its component parts. But the machine has yet proved too intricate for his complete comprehension.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p4.

Reading this made me wonder about what was happening in the world when Alexander was writing. Man’s Supreme Inheritance was first published in 1910. Looking at a list of world events for the first years of the 20th century, I see grand engineering projects like the start of work on the panama canal. There are tragedies where nature overcame our attempt to control it, such as the collapse of a dam in Spain, whose purpose was to hold back a reservoir near Madrid, a disaster that killed hundreds. Many mining disasters and tragedies of ships lost at sea are also recorded around this time. In 1905 London’s Natural History Museum exhibited a replica of a diplodocus skeleton, and two years later the skeleton was discovered of a Neanderthal boy, fuelling the popular interest in evolution. The world saw the beginning of scientific ideas that we now take for granted. In 1905, Einstein published three seminal papers, one of which earned him the Nobel prize, and this was a full decade before his most famous contribution of the general theory of relativity. Thanks to the work of geologists like Richard Oldham, we started to understand the structure of the planet itself, with its dense inner core and liquid outer core. There was political upheaval, such as the Russo-Japanese war and the Romanian peasants’ revolt. There was a call for political reform in the UK from the Suffragettes. There were medical breakthroughs such as a vaccine for TB, technological achievements such as transatlantic radio communication, and new modes of transport: taxis, buses, the beginnings of car ownership, large passenger ships, and the very earliest aeroplanes.

Alexander lived through a time of immense change, where a world we might recognise today was beginning to come into existence.

It therefore makes perfect sense when FM goes onto say “Man has ceased to be a natural animal… He has changed his environment, his food and his whole manner of living.” This statement seems even more true today than it did in 1910.

However, FM warns against atavism and lays out his central claim:

Conscious guidance and control is the one method of adapting ourselves not only to present conditions, but to any possible conditions that may arise.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p7.

Conscious guidance and control then forms the theme of this and his other three books, exemplified in the title of his second work, published in 1923: Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual. However, the claims that form the culmination of this first chapter of his first book are even more bold:

The physical, mental and spiritual potentialities of the human being are greater than we have ever realized, greater, perhaps, than the human mind in its present evolutionary stage is capable of realizing. And the present world crisis surely furnishes us with sufficient evidence that the familiar processes we call civilization and education are not, alone, such as will enable us to come into that supreme inheritance which is the complete control of our own potentialities.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, pp7-8.

I was curious as to what FM meant by ‘the present world crisis’. I found the original text of the 1910 edition, and this paragraph has been added at a later date. Given a whole new chapter entitled ‘Evolutionary Standards and their Influence on the Crisis of 1914’ was also added, I can assume that the ‘present world crisis’ refers to the first world war. He seems to be making the claim that we are not yet (maybe cannot yet be) aware of what we are capable of achieving, physically, mentally, and spiritually (and I do not know what he means by spiritual potentiality), but if we stick with our unreasoned processes of civilisation and education, we will never gain control of these potentialities.

And, to emphasise this point, his final paragraph of this opening chapter is as follows:

For in the mind of man lies the secret of his ability to resist, to conquer and finally to govern the circumstance of his life, and only by the discovery of that secret will he ever be able to realize completely the perfect condition of mens sana in corpore sano.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p8.

It is clear FM has grand ambitions of reeducation. Do I believe that we can govern the circumstances of our lives? I don’t believe we have complete control over our lives. I think there are events in our control and events we have no (or little) control over. I do believe, in general, it is possible to make the best of the situation you are in, and I think it is possible to reason through the best course of action and put that into practice. It is clear that my ideas are smaller than FM’s. However, at this point in time I am more concerned with the soundness of the ideas than the scope of the ideas. I will also point out that in the twelve years I have been associated with this work I have seen the simple, rational process of reasoning out the most effective means whereby a particular end can be achieved has brought about profound changes in individuals, in their life circumstances, and in their personal happiness. I think I do agree with FM that the process he describes in his books does give us control over our potentialities – i.e. those aspects of our lives that we have control over. I differ somewhat in what I think those potentialities actually are.

So, although these are not FM’s first writings (he had published pamphlets and articles since 1894), it is the first chapter of his first book. What does he want to say to us? He’s an educated man, interested in the world. He’s interested in ideas, in human discoveries, in human progress, and the gifts and dangers that brings. He’s considering how humans – shaped over millions of years by the processes of evolution – adapt to this now rapidly changing world. Rapidly changing because humans have reached a stage of development where we are able to exert such huge influence over nature. And he thinks the subconscious control that fitted us as slowly-evolving natural animals is no longer suitable for the unnatural, rapidly changing environment. He proposes the answer to be conscious control: direct our powers of intellect constructively so that we might rationally adapt ourselves to this and any future situation. And in doing so, realise our full potential.

FM thinks conscious control brings us into our (titular) supreme inheritance, which he defines as the complete control of our potentialities. He thinks we can govern the circumstances of our life, and realise the perfect condition of a healthy mind in a healthy body. In any situation.

I really don’t think this is about sitting up straight.