Embodying Aesthetics through Proprioception

1. Embodying Aesthetics through Proprioception Barbara Gail Montero Aesthetics and the 4E Mind University of Exeter 5 July 2016

2. Aestheticians have always esteemed the body.

3. Artworks—such as Michelangelo’s David

4. or Modigliani’s Reclining Nude

5. —are lavished with aesthetic honorifics: they can be beautiful, powerful, graceful, effortless or evocative, to name just a few. Other bodies are aesthetically valuable. But what about one’s own? Is it possible to derive aesthetic pleasure from the experience of your own body?

6. Traditionally, aestheticians have said “no.”   They reject the thesis of: Embodied Aesthetics: one can have an aesthetic experience of one’s own body as perceived through one of “lower senses” (any sense other than sight or hearing).

7. Looking is fine. . . just don’t touch.

8. Traditional view: Aesthetic experience while sensuous (depending on sense experience), is not sensual pleasure, not pleasure in our own bodily sensations. D. W. Prall: “experience is genuinely and characteristically aesthetic only as it occurs in transactions with external objects of sense” (1929: p. 28, 56). George Santayana, in aesthetic experience, “the soul . . . is glad to forget its connection with the body” (1955: p. 24).

9. My aim: Connect the soul to the body in aesthetic experience. Note that though the tradition goes against me, I am certainly not alone in breaking with it (cf. Shusterman 2008 and 2012, for example)

10. I. Prima Facie support for Embodied Aesthetics First person accounts: “I can feel that this particular way of movement is better than the other way.” feel= proprioception, our nonvisual sense of where our limbs are in space via receptors in the joints, skin, muscles and tendons. Better = aesthetically better

11. This common sentiment among dancers is my starting point. How do I know that it’s common? Both from comments I have heard from many dancers and from my own experience. None deny it!

12. With Greg, embodying aesthetics:

13. II. Not just dance A pianist experiences the music’s “sentiment in the muscles of his hand” (Rosen 1987). Singers? (The Alexander technique) Painters? Sculptors? Athletes? (see Cohen, 1991). Could the beauty or graceful feeling of a movement be a guide to what works in sports?

14. Is what dancers (or musicians or athletes) say a reliable guide to what they’re experiencing? I take first person reports as defeasible evidence for what is actually going on in a person’s mind. (This methodological principle follows roughly from what Tyler Burge calls the “acceptance principle,” which holds that "a person is entitled to accept as true something that is presented as true and that is intelligible to him, unless there are stronger reasons not to do so" (1993: 467).

15. III. Are there good reasons to doubt the claims of dancers who suggest that aesthetic qualities can be experienced proprioceptively? Reason 1: Elizabeth Anscombe (1957/2000, 1962) argues that there is no such thing as proprioceptive sensation: nothing shews you where your limbs are. But she overlooks proprioception itself.

16. Reason 2. The only two senses thought of as aesthetic (that is, thought of as capable of grounding aesthetic experience) are vision and hearing. Francis Hutcheson: “the ancients observe a peculiar dignity of the senses of seeing and hearing that in their objects we discern the kalon [beautiful], which we do not ascribe to the objects of the other senses” (1725/1973: p. 47).

17. Hegel, “art is related only to the two theoretical senses of sight and hearing, while smell, taste and touch remain excluded from the enjoyment of art” (1835/1975: p. 38). And if Hegel had considered it, he presumably would have excluded proprioception. Aquinas, “we do not speak of beautiful tastes and beautiful odors”—or, at least, if we do it is with a bit of awkwardness (1960: q. 27).

18. Response to Aquinas: Does it matter what we say?  Maybe Other aesthetic quality terms: delicate taste, enticing odor Dancers, too talk of experiencing beauty proprioceptively: “The movement is too abrupt,” “The line is ugly,” “I’m not feeling the connections”

19. Response to Hutchenson and Hegel Why should hearing and vision be the only two aesthetics senses? (Even if that’s how they spoke, why should we say that now)

20. Reason 3: The insatiability requirement: “the aesthetic want is not a perishable want, which ceases in proportion as it is gratified” (Bernard Bosanquet’s 1915: p. 4). Response: just as one can become physically exhausted in moving, one can become physically exhausted traipsing through a museum.

21. Reason 4: The distancing requirements:   (cf. Shaftesbury 1711, Kant 1790, Dickie 1964, Beardsley 1982, Bullough 1995, Iseminger 2003, etc.) Different kinds of distance: Physical distance, Practical distance, Psychical distance, Metaphysical distance

22. Physical distance: the object of appreciation cannot be in direct contact with you. This would be a problem since proprioception, as Oliver Sacks puts it, “is the inner sense by which the body is aware of itself” (Sacks 1995: p. x). But contact is pervasive. The light waves that bounce off a painting must come in contact with one’s eyes, no less than the molecules wafting from the perfume bottle must come in contact with one’s nose

23. Practical distance: No practical need or desire is satisfied. This doesn’t exclude the “lower” senses, such as hunger. And Barring St.Vitus dance, one is not compelled to dance

24. Psychical distance: Reaction ought not to be the same as if the depicted act were really occurring. Don’t go up on stage and prevent Hamlet from slaying Polonius. Not entirely clear how this applies to dance, but dancing seems to naturally distance the dancers from what they are portraying.

25. More trouble is: Metaphysical distance: We need to distinguish the object one senses from the bodily sensation. In other words, an aesthetic experience is about an object that is distinct from the experience of that object. In still other words, in aesthetic experience we must find both a subject of experiences and an object of experience.

26. Metaphysical distancing allows aesthetic judgments to meet Kant’s requirement that (1790/2007) aesthetic judgments (judgments based on aesthetic experiences) must be “shareable” and capable of grounding genuine disagreement. “This pinprick hurts” is not shareable. That table is marble is shareable

27. Although proprioception is a type of self-perception, the self in question is not merely sensory. As Merleau-Ponty (1945/2005) points out, we perceive our bodies as both subject and object, both as the locus of sensory awareness and as the object of such awareness.

28. He gives an example of touch: when one hand touches the other it is possible to move back and forth between noticing the tactile experience of touch and what one is having an experience of (p. 130–131). Try it!

29. In proprioception can we perceive the body as both object and subject Although there is a sense in which one’s own body is not part of the world (when the world is considered as that which exists apart from oneself), the relevant contrast is between one’s body and one’s bodily sensations, between the positions and movements of one’s limbs and the sensations one has of these positions and movement, between body as subject and body as object.

30. Perceiving the body as object, rather than as subject only, allows for misrepresentation. Proprioception does as well. However, the analogy to Merleau-Ponty’s example of touch is not complete.

31. IV. Is Proprioception Private? Full shareability would seem to required that the objects of aesthetic perception are not (in principle) private. Proprioception seems is a form of object-perception, but are the objects private? “Of course not! The body I proprioceive is the one you see.”

32. But you can’t proprioceive my body. The objects of tactile experience are not private in this way. One can—I have—question whether the shareabliliy requirement is inviolable. My “Beetles in the box” argument. Instead let’s ask: Is the object of your proprioceptive experience proprioceived only by you?

33. Can you Proprioceive Someone Else’s Movements? Our bodies as a window into the aesthetic properties of not only our own movements. Via “kinesthetic sympathy” or “motor-perception” we may come to appreciate various aesthetic qualities of the movements of others. The observer, sitting motionless can experience,e in a bodily way, the dancers’ movements.

34. When you see a graceful curve on a Kandinsky painting, are you perhaps, in part, indentifying it as graceful because in looking at the painting, you have a bodily experience of your arm moving in a graceful arc?

35. When you identify a Jackson Pollock paining as energetic is it in part because you can feel the energy of movement it takes to create such a painting?

36. When listening to Chopin are you in part appreciating the stretch that Rosen talks about?

37. V. Support for the existence of Proprioceptive shareability/kinesthetic sympathy/motor perception Neuroscientific and behavioral research on the “human mirror system” or “action-observation network,” and the “action resonance circuit” lend support for the sub-personal components of such motor-perception.

38. As do the words of dance critics: John Martin: in order to appreciate dance fully one must make use of "kinesthetic sympathy" (1972: p. 15). “Not only does the dancer employ movement to express his ideas, but, strange as it may seem, the spectator must also employ movement in order to respond to the dancer's intention and understand what he is trying to convey” (p.15). • “The irreducible minimum of equipment demanded of a spectator,” Martin tells us, “is a kinesthetic sense in working condition” (p. 17).

39. His reviews of dance were rife with references to the qualities of dance appreciated via kinesthetic sympathy, or motor-perception: The dynamic variation in a dancer’s movement that gave it a “rare beauty and a powerful kinesthetic transfer.” “A gesture which sets up all kinds of kinesthetic reactions.” Or a dancer who “leaves you limp with vicarious kinesthetic experience.”

40. Alastair Macaulay: Fredrick Ashton’s choreography is “more kinesthetically affecting than any other ballet choreographer’s,” and that in “watching [it], you feel the movement so powerfully through your torso that it is often hard to sit still in your seat” (2008). A dance that is “less visual than kinesthetic” (2012).

41. Louis Horst: describes the “lyric beauty” of a dance choreographed by Anna Sokolow as having “a direct appeal to kinesthetic response” (Horst 1954, as quoted in p. 114 of Warren 1991). And Michael Wade Simpson describes the finale in a piece by Helgi Tomasson as “satisfying musically, kinesthetically and emotionally” (Simpson. 2005)

42. How do we know that such critics really have the sorts of experiences they claim to have? Again, as long as there are no good grounds to question such first-person knowledge, it seems that they should be accepted.

43. VI. Is Kinaesthetic sympathy aesthetically relevant? Some dance critics appear to experience a kinaesthetic sympathy upon watching dance.  They find it aesthetically relevant, but is it? McFee (1992) thinks that it isn’t because “the focus on the performer is not appropriate to an art form such as dance” (p. 273).

44. But just as a musician makes aesthetic choices when playing a score, so does a dancer when dancing set choreography. My claim: we should accept dance critics’ views that kinesthetic sympathy is aesthetically relevant to evaluating dance.

45. Analogy: Scientists are experts at identifying what sorts of things exist in the world. • Thus, it is reasonable to maintain that electrons exist unless we reason to doubt this. ( Bas van Fraassen’s (1980) constructive empiricism?) • Our attitude towards the posits of art critics (including dance critics) should be analogous. • Correlatively, if dance critics generally accept the aesthetic relevance of kinesthetic sympathy, we should take it as such, unless there are good arguments to the contrary.

46. A good number of prominent dance critics accept the aesthetic relevance of kinesthetic sympathy. • There are no good arguments to the contrary. • Thus: the bodily experience of kinesthetic sympathy is relevant to aesthetic appreciation

47. VII. Endro and some lingering questions • Dancers have embodied aesthetic experience of their own movements and observers can have embodied aesthetic experience of dance • I hereby connect soul with body in aesthetic experience.

48. Does loss of movement affect aesthetic experience of movement? Drawing from his interviews with para- and tetraplegiacs Jonathan Cole and I have been thinking about how loss of movement affects one’s aesthetic appreciation of movement

49. But mustn’t dance be automatic? I claim that in focusing on her own movement, a dancer can aesthetically enjoy her own body.

50. “But doesn’t deliberate focus on how one is moving hinder one’s performance of that movement?” “Doesn’t a dancer need to perform automatically and without any thought or awareness at all?”