[[BARBARA MONTERO]] # LLM Summary ## [[Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense]] ### I. The Prima Facie Case for [[Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense]] - [[The author]] argues that proprioception is an [[aesthetic sense]], meaning it allows us to experience beauty, grace, and other [[aesthetic properties]]. - This is supported by the way dancers talk about and evaluate their own movement: > "it is natural, at least for dancers, to talk of experiencing beauty proprioceptively. A dancer, during a rehearsal onstage—a situation in which there are no mirrors—may claim that a certain movement or position is beautiful or, since dancers tend to be a self-critical lot, com- plain that [[the beauty]], or whatever other aesthetic quality he or she is aiming at producing, is lacking: 'The movement is too abrupt'; 'The line is ugly'; 'I'm not feeling the connections' are all phrases that roll naturally off a dancer's tongue" - While vision is also important for dancers' aesthetic self-evaluation, proprioception plays a [[key role]], with dancers often trusting proprioception over vision. - Much of a dancer's work involves "constant aesthetic refinement of movement qualities based on proprioceptive input." ### II. The Traditional Exclusion of Bodily Senses from the Aesthetic Realm - Traditionally, only vision and hearing have been considered aesthetic senses, while smell, taste, and touch have been excluded. - The traditional view holds that [[aesthetic experience]] depends on "transactions with external objects of sense" and that in such experience "the soul ... is glad to forget its connection with the body." - However, [[the author]] points out that the reasons given for privileging vision and hearing are flawed. - For instance, vision and smell both involve sensory contact despite one being considered "distant" and the other not: > "The light waves that bounce off a painting must come in contact with one's eyes no less than the molecules wafting away from the perfume bottle must come in contact with one's nose." - Additionally, the supposed insatiability of [[aesthetic experience]], which has been used to rule out certain senses, applies less to proprioception than other senses like taste: > "Although one gets physically exhausted in moving, as one might get physically exhausted in looking at paintings in a museum, one seems to never tire of the experi- ence of moving in aesthetically valuable ways." ### III. Proprioception as Bodily Yet Corrigible - A key objection to considering proprioception an [[aesthetic sense]] is that it seems incapable of representing external objects, only one's own bodily sensations: > "proprioception, it might be claimed, cannot focus our attention beyond ourselves, for it is by definition a type of self-perception; it is, as Oliver Sacks puts it, 'the inner sense by which the body is aware of itself.'" - However, [[the author]] argues that proprioception does represent objects (namely bodily positions/movements), [[not just]] sensations, as evidenced by the possibility of proprioceptive illusion and misrepresentation: > "Choreographers often see dancers make mistakes based on such misrepresentations: a dancer might proprioceptively experience his or her knee as perfectly straight, when it is in fact bent, or a hand as directly above his or her head, when it is behind." - More dramatic cases like phantom limbs also show proprioception representing non-existent objects. - So proprioception, like vision, is corrigible and refers to objects beyond mere sensation, even if the "objects" are one's own bodily states. ### IV. Privacy and Proprioception - Even granting that proprioception represents objects, there is a further objection that these objects (particular bodily movements) are necessarily private, precluding the inter-subjective agreement required for [[aesthetic judgments]]. - The author grants that proprioceived movement-tokens are typically private, but argues this is no bar to aesthetic judgment. - To illustrate, he gives the thought experiment of a musical world where all performances are in private soundproof rooms: > "Imagine a world that had a convention by which musicians were allowed to play music only while alone in soundproof rooms. There would be no recorded music, no chamber music, no orchestras (definitely a sad situation), but I could enjoy the Goldberg Variations by playing them on the piano in a soundproof room, and you could do the same." - In this scenario, musicians could still make aesthetic judgments and have genuine disagreements about the music, even though the tokens of the music are only ever heard privately. - This depends on them being able to establish that they are playing the same type of thing, even if they can't hear each other's tokens: "I could watch a (silent) film of you playing, we could discuss our interpretations, and so forth." - If one judged the music tranquil and the other did not, they would assume either that they were playing it differently or that one was mistaken, not that it was mere difference of opinion. - Analogously, proprioceiving dancers can establish that they are doing the same types of movements and thus make inter-subjective aesthetic judgments even if each only proprioceives their own token movements. ### V. The Interdependence of the Proprioceptive and the Visual - A key objection is that proprioceptive aesthetic judgments may reduce to or depend on visual judgments—proprioception simply tells you what the movement would look like. - The author grants that proprioceptive judgment sometimes depends on visual imagination, but argues this is not always the case and that the dependence can also go the other way. - He gives the thought experiment of an entirely blind dance community, arguing they could make proprioceptive aesthetic judgments without vision: > "Imagine an isolated community of the blind... Could some form of dance develop in such a community? One can imagine dance evolving out of the movements that two people in bodily contact might make in response to music. Since such dancers could observe each other through touch, it seems that they could intelligibly con- verse about the various experiences they have while engaged in dance. This, it seems, would indicate that for such dancers, proprioceptive experiences are not derived from visual experiences." - He argues that even some ordinary visual judgments of aesthetics, e.g. judging a curve graceful, may depend on imagining how it would feel to make that shape with one's body. - So rather than proprioception simply serving vision, "the vis-ual and the proprioceptive work hand in hand" in aesthetic judgment, with each informing the other. ### VI. The Role of Proprioception in Observers' Aesthetic Judgment - The author argues that audience members watching dance proprioceive the dancers' movements and that this plays a role in their aesthetic experience. - Recent empirical discoveries concerning mirror neurons, which fire both when observing and performing an action, support this idea: > "If, as a team of researchers puts it, 'by means of [the mirror neuron] sys-tem, the observer during action observation is placed in the same 'internal' situation as when actively executing the same action,' observing dance may give one the internal experience of dancing." - A number of other empirical results also suggest that seeing others' movements kinesthetically activates one's own body, e.g. our tendency to perceive a circle as an ellipse if it is traced in a way consistent with how we would draw it. - The author suggests that, in watching dance, this amounts to proprioceiving others' movements: > "When proprioceiving (as I would like to put it) a dancer move, there is a causal chain that starts with the dancer on stage and culminates in your kinesthetic experience representing the dancer's movement. To be sure, part of the causal path in the latter case involves vision (rather than wires, vibrations of speakers, and so forth), but it is not clear why this should be relevant. One hears grandmother's voice in virtue of hearing the vibrations of the speaker in the telephone and, if I am right, one proprioceives the dancer's movements and positions in virtue of seeing the dancer move." - He argues that this enhances the observer's aesthetic experience and helps explain why kinesthetic familiarity with dance enhances one's aesthetic appreciation of it. ### VII. The Aesthetics of Proprioceptive and Visual Illusions - A final objection is that the aesthetic experience of dance depends on the visual illusion created (e.g. of floating or flying) rather than on the proprioceived reality. - The author grants that some aesthetically irrelevant aspects of the dancer's proprioceptive experience (e.g. pain) are screened off for the observer, and that illusory appearances are often crucial to the aesthetics of dance. - However, he argues that there can be proprioceptive illusions as well as visual ones, and that these are also aesthetically relevant: > "If one can proprioceptively experience a leap that defies gravity, this means that there are proprioceptive illusions... I would claim that one of the wonders of dancing—one of the reasons why dancers will put up with the pain it often involves—is that dance allows one, as it were, to experience the impossible." - So the aesthetic illusion is not confined to vision but can be proprioceived by both dancer and audience. </answer>