Chapter 48: Embodied Aesthetics

Traditionally, thinkers like Hegel and Santayana relegated the "lower" or "bodily" senses (smell, taste, touch, proprioception) from the aesthetic, claiming they draw attention inward to sensations rather than outward to external objects, thus reserving true aesthetic judgment only for the "higher" senses of vision and audition. The author introduces the thesis of embodied aesthetics, proposing that aesthetic experience can be derived from one's own body as perceived through senses beyond sight and hearing, primarily proprioception—the nonvisual sense of limb position. Expert dancers, for example, routinely rely on proprioceptive feeling to determine the aesthetic quality (e.g., grace, power, or beauty) of their movements, a practice foundational to certain dance forms like "gaga" which discourages visual focus. Extending beyond dance, this embodied appreciation is evident when pianists experience the emotional quality of music, such as Chopin's "exasperated despair," through the difficult, physical figuration in their hands. The argument relies methodologically on accepting first-person reports of such experiences as defeasible evidence. Furthermore, the chapter defends the sensory nature of proprioception against objections, particularly that of Elizabeth Anscombe, maintaining that it is a valid sense capable of grounding aesthetic experience and informing knowledge of bodily movements, even passive or unintended ones. To reconcile embodied experience with traditional requirements for aesthetic judgment, the analysis demonstrates that proprioception satisfies the need for metaphysical distancing by representing the body as both the subject of the experience and the object being sensed, which is evidenced by the possibility of proprioceptive misrepresentations and illusions (like phantom limbs or perceiving a bent knee as straight). While one's own proprioception is private, the thesis of extended-embodied aesthetics posits that the aesthetic qualities of others' movements can be perceived via kinesthetic sympathy or motor perception. This shared experience, supported by research on the brain's mirror system and frequently cited by dance critics like John Martin and Edwin Denby, allows observers to feel the grace, tension, or flight of a dancer in their own bodies, thereby meeting the intersubjective shareability criterion. Lastly, the chapter notes that dance aesthetics often relies on visual illusions (such as defying gravity), but affirms that one can also proprioceive the illusory movement—feeling the flight of a gravity-defying leap—solidifying the role of the body as a pathway to aesthetic pleasure.