Chapter 48: Embodied Aesthetics

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Welcome to the Deep Dive.

Our mission here is always the same.

We take dense, fascinating research and, well, we deliver the crucial insights, giving you a shortcut to being truly well -informed.

And today, we are strapping ourselves in for a deep exploration into philosophy.

We are, but we're going to put that philosophy to the test in the most physical way possible through the moving body.

That's right.

We are diving into aesthetics,

specifically exploring that boundary line between appreciating external art, you know, like a museum piece, and experiencing the art of our own bodies.

That's it, exactly.

For this Deep Dive, we are distilling a crucial chapter on embodied aesthetics, written by the philosopher Barbara Gayle Montero, and it's from the Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition.

Okay.

And the central question that drives this entire argument is, well, it's pretty profound.

Can you have a genuine, legitimate aesthetic experience of your own body, perceived not through a mirror, but through those internal physical senses we usually dismiss as, you know, lowbrow?

That concept alone, that an internal feeling could be an aesthetic object, it just flies in the face of centuries of philosophical thought.

Oh, completely.

And as we unpack the author's answer, it seems we're going straight to the core of 4E Cognition, specifically the concepts of embodiment and extension.

Right, and those provide the exact framework needed to defend this, this really radical idea.

So our mission today is pretty clear, then.

It's methodical.

We need to unpack the author's argument against the traditional philosophical backdrop, Define some complex technical terms like proprioception and kinesthetic sympathy, and then show how modern neuroscience actually supports the claim that the body is not just a container for the aesthetic mind, but an aesthetic object in and of itself.

Okay, so when we're done, you, the listener, will have a clear step -by -step understanding of this complex field.

That's the goal.

Perfect.

So let's unpack this by starting where the author does, with the traditional view.

Historically, philosophers had, I mean, absolutely no problem with the body being represented in art.

No, not at all.

The beautiful form of Michelangelo's David, or, you know, the dynamic lines of a classical ballet dancer.

Those have always been lauded as graceful and powerful.

But there was a hard, definitive line drawn when it came to deriving aesthetic pleasure from one's own internal lived bodily sensations.

Right.

And that rejection is deeply rooted in what the chapter calls the philosophical hierarchy of the senses.

Yes.

We have to understand this demotion of the so -called lower or bodily senses, so smell, taste, and touch, in favor of the higher or intellectual senses.

Which would be vision and hearing.

Vision and audition, exactly.

I understand the distinction, but why was one set of senses considered intellectually superior to the other?

Yeah.

What was the philosophical justification for that ranking?

It fundamentally comes down to focus and distance.

George Santayana, who was a really critical voice in this tradition, he argued that the lower senses call our attention to some part of our own body.

He pointed out that if you enjoy a complex flavor or you smell a great perfume,

the experience unavoidably involves focusing on the organ where the sensation arises.

Your nose, your tongue, your skin.

The sensation brings you back to your own physical self.

It's an internal focus.

Yes, an internal focus.

Whereas the higher senses, vision and audition, they're believed to direct our attention primarily toward external objects.

Right.

So in this traditional view, for an experience to be genuinely aesthetic, it has to be a transaction with something external, pulling your focus away from your own physical condition.

So if the sensation is a little too physical, if it brings you back to your own body in a self -aware way, it gets demoted.

It's not an aesthetic experience.

It's just sensual pleasure.

Precisely.

And this thinking was pervasive.

I mean, Hegel, for instance, explicitly stated that art is related only to the theoretical senses of sight and hearing, while smell, taste and touch remain excluded from the enjoyment of art.

Wow, just completely excluded.

Completely.

And Francis Hutchison, arguing along the same lines, reminded us that the ancient Greeks reserved the term kaon, which means beautiful,

only for the objects of seeing and hearing.

That sounds incredibly restrictive.

It's like they're demanding a kind of intellectual separation from the body.

That's the key distinction we need to grasp.

The idea was that aesthetic experience must be sensuous.

So it has to rely on sense experience, but it must not be sensual pleasure, which is defined as pleasure derived purely from our own bodily sensations.

The goal, in Santiana's words, was for the soul to be glad to forget its connection with the body during aesthetic appreciation.

This tradition essentially championed a kind of disembodied aesthetic where the physical self needed to just fade into the background.

Okay, so that deeply entrenched background really sets the stage for the challenge this chapter presents.

Because if the soul has to forget the body, how on earth do you account for an artist whose entire medium is their body, like an expert dancer?

They find intense aesthetic pleasure in the precise experience of their own bodily movements.

That is a massive tension right there.

It is the central conflict.

Yeah.

And to resolve it, the author proposes the thesis of embodied aesthetics.

This is our foundational claim.

And it's the first vital link to 4E cognition through that concept of embodiment.

And what does it state?

It states,

one can have an aesthetic experience of one's own body as perceived through senses other than vision and audition.

And the dancers are the primary evidence supporting this.

I've heard dancers and athletes talk about this all the time.

They say things like, it just felt right, or it felt clean.

They're implicitly accepting this thesis every time they make a movement adjustment based on internal feedback.

Think about an expert dancer refining a pirouette or a subtle hand gesture.

They might spend hours on a movement, not because the visual outcome changes drastically, but because they are striving for some internal quality.

And when you ask them why a certain configuration feels better than another,

they'll often say something like, I can feel that this particular way of movement is more graceful, or I'm getting a better connection here.

And that feel, that's not about looking in a mirror.

That's about proprioception.

Correct.

Proprioception is the core mechanism here.

This is a non -visual, non -auditory sense, sometimes it's even called the sixth sense, that tells us where our limbs are in space, the force being exerted, and the degree of effort involved.

Okay, so it's the receptors in our joints and muscles.

Deep within the joints, skin, muscles, and tendons.

It is literally how you can touch your nose with your eyes closed, or know that your legs are crossed under the table right now without looking.

It's the sense of self -location and effort.

And the chapter argues that for a trained dancer, this sense can be highly, highly refined, making it a platform for aesthetic judgment.

Precisely.

When dancers talk about proprioceptively feeling a movement as exciting or graceful or brilliant, they are making an aesthetic judgment based on their internal body sense, not merely on visual observation.

And that terminology immediately challenges that old hierarchy.

It really does.

Thomas Aquinas, for example, he claimed that we do not speak of beautiful tastes and beautiful odors.

But dancers absolutely speak of beautiful feelings of movement.

That's such a powerful, practical rebuttal.

I mean, if a dancer is rehearsing on stage, maybe it's dark, maybe there are no mirrors, they still judge a position.

They might say, the line is ugly, meaning the effort or the spatial configuration feels awkward or wrong.

Yes, or they'll say, I'm not feeling the connections, which implies a lack of internal dynamic flow.

Right.

This suggests that proprioception can, and reliably does, ground judgments of beauty, grace, and flow, and that directly contradicts the traditional demotion of these internal senses.

That's also a practical necessity, isn't it?

In complex dance forms, looking in a mirror is often impossible or even a bad idea.

It's often detrimental.

Turning your head to catch a glimpse in a mirror can completely ruin your balance or momentum.

On stage, the only true barometer for the immediate moment is that internal proprioceptive experience.

The trained dancer may come to trust that internal sense far more than vision.

And the source material also points out there are styles of dance that intentionally foreground this, that make it the whole point.

Yes, exactly.

Consider the Gaga dance technique.

It deliberately removes visual influence, sometimes by covering the studio mirrors, and encourages dancers to forget how they look.

Focusing purely on the effort, the weight, and the space around them.

So they're training that internal sense.

They're training that proprioceptive sense, and that deliberate shift confirms that the experience itself is a source of aesthetic satisfaction, totally independent of any visual confirmation.

Okay, let's broaden this out beyond dance, because this idea of an embodied aesthetic doesn't feel limited to professional movers.

It definitely isn't.

One of the most compelling expansions cited in the chapter relates to music, particularly piano performance.

And it focuses on the insides of Charles Rosen.

Rosen described how the physical act of playing certain complex pieces, specifically the etudes of Chopin, creates an embodied experience that mirrors the emotional content of the music.

How does that manifest physically for the pianist?

Well, Rosen discusses what he calls Chopin's ruthlessness.

Chopin's figurations, which are these intricate patterns of notes,

often push the pianist's hands into extremely awkward, strenuous positions.

So it's not just technically hard, it's physically weird.

It's physically awkward.

And Rosen suggests this is not merely a technical challenge, but an aesthetic one.

The physical realization embodies the emotional state of the music, sometimes forcing the hand into positions that feel, and this is his quote, like a gesture of exasperated despair.

So the pianist isn't just listening to the despair in the music, they're literally feeling it in the tension of their own finger muscles and tendons.

Exactly.

Rosen states,

the performer literally feels the sentiment in the muscles of his hand.

The proprioceptive awareness here is absolutely integral to the aesthetic experience.

It suggests a profound identity between the physical effort required and the emotional content being conveyed.

That makes me reconsider how we judge creation in general.

The chapter suggests we can speculate on the role of embodied aesthetics in so many other creative arts.

For sure.

Think about singing.

When a professional singer makes an adjustment for vocal clarity or for tone, they aren't just hearing the result.

They are receiving complex proprioceptive feedback from their vocal cords, from their diaphragm, their throat, their mouth.

The feel of it.

The feel of that perfectly produced note, that sense of effortless resonance that could very well be an embodied aesthetic pleasure that's guiding their performance.

In sculpture too.

The sculptor isn't just looking at the clay, they are physically shaping it.

Yes.

A sculptor's aesthetic decisions about line and mass are guided by the resistive feel of the material.

How the clay or the stone pushes back against the hand, the wrist, the shoulder.

This is a mix of proprioception and touch.

They feel the quality of the emerging shape through their own body movements.

You know, I find the connection to writing fascinating.

The flow, the cadence, the aesthetic choice of a rhythm in a long sentence.

I wonder if a writer experiences a kind of embodied aesthetic when the words just flow out, feeling the right internal cadence, rather than just seeing the structure on the screen.

It's a very strong hypothesis.

Whether we look at a dancer, a pianist, a sculptor or a writer, the common thread is that the physical effort and the resulting internal sensation are not distractions from the aesthetic experience, but rather they are the experience.

Which is a body centric view that directly contradicts that traditional disembodiment championed by Hegel and Santayana.

OK, so we have the initial claim and it's backed by the lived experience of artists, but we know the traditionalists, the philosophers are going to resist this vehemently.

So now we need to tackle the two major philosophical challenges that attempt to dismiss this internal experience.

The first is about the trustworthiness of the source, right?

Can we actually trust what dancers say they are experiencing?

This is the question of the reliability of first -person testimony.

If aesthetic judgment is going to be based on an internal feeling, we have to address the skepticism that, you know, we are often mistaken about our own internal mental states.

We misremember, we self -deceive, we rationalize.

And that skepticism is entirely warranted.

So how does the chapter defend the dancer's report?

By using a methodological principle.

First -person reports are considered defensible evidence for experience.

OK, let's slow down and define that for the listener.

What exactly does defensible evidence mean in this philosophical context?

Think of it like a legal principle in a courtroom.

Defeasible evidence means that the claim is entitled to be accepted as true and we should perceive as if it is true, unless there are powerful, specific reasons to defeat it.

OK.

So if a dancer tells us, I feel grace when I execute this Jedi,

we accept that report as evidence of their experience.

So the default position is acceptance.

What would constitute a reason to defeat that evidence?

I mean, what's a powerful reason?

The author specifies strong grounds for doubt,

such as evidence that the subject is lying or is self -deceived, is answering based on highly leading questions, or is maybe coloring their experience based on a theory they just read.

Right, like if they just read this chapter and are trying to confirm the thesis.

Exactly.

But barring those strong counter -reasons, we accept the testimony.

This aligns with what's known as Burge's acceptance principle.

OK.

Tyler Burge's principle basically states that we are entitled to accept something as true if it is presented as true and intelligible, unless reasons exist not to do so.

And since expert dancers as a professional group consistently and universally use this language of proprioceptive aesthetic feeling, the burden of proof shifts dramatically.

The skeptic must now provide compelling evidence why all professional dancers are collectively mistaken or lying about their own experience, which is a very, very high bar to clear.

That seems to address the reliability of the report itself.

But now we hit the second, even more fundamental challenge, which, if it's successful, could collapse the whole theory.

And that is, is proprioception even a sense?

Right.

Because if it's not sensory, it provides no sensations, and therefore it can't possibly ground an aesthetic experience.

This brings us squarely into conflict with the very influential arguments of the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.

She famously argued that our non -visual knowledge of where our body is and how it's moving is definitively not sensory or observational.

Why did she make that separation?

What was the flaw she saw in calling proprioception a sensory experience?

Anscombe's key point revolved around the idea that if knowledge is observational or sensory,

it has to be based on separately describable sensations.

Okay.

She used a thought experiment.

When your legs are crossed, you might feel a generalized pressure, maybe a tingle, maybe the fabric of your pants against your skin.

But those localized sensations of touch or pressure, she argued, are insufficient to explain how, you know, with absolute certainty that your legs are crossed.

I see.

So the feeling of the tingle is not the same as the knowledge of the position.

Exactly.

The localized sensations do not add up to the knowledge of the overall position.

And therefore, she concluded, proprioception cannot be sensory because its knowledge isn't grounded in these separately describable sensations.

So if the knowledge isn't sensory, where does it come from, according to her?

Anscombe offered the concept of director's knowledge.

We know the positions and movements of our body because we are the director.

We intend them.

We have directed the body to move or to assume a position.

Like an architect.

She used that exact analogy.

An architect who knows what a completed building looks like without needing to observe it, simply because she designed and directed its construction.

So if Anscombe is right, dancers cannot be experiencing the grace or beauty of their movements via proprioceptive sensations.

They're just experiencing their own intentions.

That's a serious challenge.

If the dancer's knowledge is purely intentional, just director's knowledge, then the whole idea of an aesthetic experience via an internal sense is pretty much undermined.

So what is the chapter's rebuttal to Anscombe?

Well, the rebuttal is incredibly effective because it strikes at the root of her assumption.

The first point is this.

Just because localized sensations like pressure or tingles are insufficient to explain knowing your legs are crossed,

it doesn't follow that the sense of proprioception itself is not sensory.

Proprioception is a distinct integrated sense and its information is not simply reducible to touch or pressure.

That seems like a very reasonable distinction.

I mean, we don't reduce vision down to the sensation of photons hitting the retina.

We see integrated color and shape.

Precisely.

And the second and perhaps stronger counter argument is that Anscombe's view completely fails to account for instances where our movements are not intended or directed by us.

Oh, right.

What about passive movements?

Exactly.

What about knowledge of passive movements if someone moves your arm while you are relaxed?

Or what about movements that fail to match our intention?

If I try to straighten my arm entirely, but an external force prevents it, I still know where my arm is.

That knowledge cannot be purely intentional or director's knowledge.

That completely undermines the director analogy, because if my intent fails, I still know the result.

Therefore, the chapter concludes that within the framework of forecognition, and this really reinforced the concept of embodiment proprioception, is a veritable sense providing conscious sensory information.

It cannot be dismissed merely as intention or as localized pressure.

It's a real source of information about our bodies and space, which is essential for grounding any kind of aesthetic experience.

Okay, so we've cleared the major philosophical hurdles.

Reliability confirmed.

Sensory status confirmed.

Now we can move into the traditional aesthetic requirements.

Many philosophers insisted that for something to be aesthetic, it has to satisfy requirements like being unified and non -perishable, which, as the chapter points out, dance easily satisfies.

But the most challenging criteria by far is aesthetic distance.

Yes, aesthetic distance.

If proprioception is truly, as the neurologist Oliver Sacks described it, the inner sense by which the body is aware of itself, then the subject, the perceiver, and the object, the perceived movement, are just too close.

They're fused.

And if the subject and object are fused, the experience is deemed impure or too subjective, and so it fails the traditional test of aesthetics.

Exactly.

The author tackles this by analyzing four different guises of distance, right?

Let's quickly dispense with the easy three first.

Okay, the first is physical distance.

This requires the aesthetic object not to be in direct physical contact with the observer.

And this is easily rejected because if you accept it, it would eliminate almost all sensory experiences.

Of course.

Light waves and sound waves physically impact us.

Fragrance molecules contact the nose.

Contact is pervasive, so physical distance is just a non -starter.

Okay, next up, practical distance.

This mandates that the appreciation must be divorced from practical needs.

A hunter admiring a deer right before killing it for food is perhaps an example of failed practical distance.

But a dancer dancing for the sheer pleasure of the movement, even if they are paid for it, is not dancing out of some immediate practical compulsion.

So this criterion is easily satisfied by the aesthetic pleasure dancers take in their art.

And the third one, psychical distance, which was coined by Edward Bullo.

This one sounds more psychological, obviously.

It is.

Psychical distance requires the observer to maintain a psychological separation.

You must not be in the same psychological state as if the represented act were real.

If you're watching a tragedy, you don't literally believe you are witnessing a murder and need to call the police.

Right.

You know it's a performance.

And the author argues that for the dancer, psychical distance is naturally satisfied through the sheer technical demands of the art form itself.

Because the technical difficulty keeps the dancer slightly detached from the role.

The French philosopher Diderot noted that the greatest actors must deliberately control and distance themselves from the emotions they portray in order to perform consistently night after night.

And dancers too are so intently focused on technique, on balance and execution, the how of the movement, that they are prevented from fully collapsing into the pure emotional role.

They are always aware of themselves as a person with a body executing a challenging task.

So those three distances are either rejected or satisfied.

That brings us to the crucial obstacle.

Metaphysical distance.

This is the hard line.

This is the big one.

Metaphysical distance requires a necessary separation between the object sensed, the aesthetic object and the bodily sensation.

The act of experiencing it.

We must be able to find both a subject of experience and a distinct object of experience, even if that object is internal to our own bodies.

And why is this subject object distinction so non -negotiable for traditional aesthetic philosophy?

Why is it so important?

Because of the need for shareability, which is absolutely central to Kant's aesthetic theory.

Kant argued that aesthetic judgments must be intersubjectively valid.

Okay, again, let's define that for the listener, maybe using a clear contrast.

Okay, think of it this way.

There are three types of validity.

First, you have objective validity.

That's a factual verifiable claim like the sky is blue.

Perfect.

Second, you have pure subjective validity.

This is a private, purely subjective report.

A pinprick hurts.

If I tell you the pinprick hurts and you disagree, we can't argue because it's only about my private feeling.

Right, your feeling is your feeling.

Finally, you have intersubjective validity.

This is something like that sunset is beautiful.

Now, this is based on a feeling of pleasure, but it's a judgment that everyone ought to agree about, which allows for genuine, meaningful disagreement.

So we can argue about the aesthetic quality of the sunset, why it is meaningful or why it isn't,

but we can't argue about whether my headache is real.

Exactly.

And if proprioceptive aesthetic experiences were merely sensual bodily sensations, like the headache or the pain from the pinprick, they would be purely subjective and purely private.

They would not be intersubjectively valid, and thus, they would fail the Kantian requirement for a genuine aesthetic judgment.

So this is the million dollar question.

Does proprioception allow for that necessary subject -object split to satisfy metaphysical distance?

It absolutely does, and this is where the philosophy of Merleau -Ponty proves invaluable.

The chapter draws on his phenomenology to argue that even though proprioception is a form of self -perception, the body can be simultaneously perceived as both the subject, the source of sensory awareness, and the object that is being sensed.

That duality is the key.

It moves the body beyond being just a container for our feelings.

To illustrate this, think back to the sculptor who is working on a sculpture of her own hand.

She can intentionally shift her attention.

She can focus on the tactile experience in the right hand as it molds the clay.

That's the subjective locus of sensation.

The subject.

Or, she can shift her focus and perceive the curves, the lines, and the posture of the left hand as an object in space.

The body is perceived dualistically.

But the truly definitive proof that the body is an object of proprioception, distinct from the subjective sensation itself, rests on the ability of proprioception to misrepresent reality, right?

This is the definitive stroke of the argument.

The fact that proprioception can misrepresent the world proves its objecthood.

Let's consider misrepresentation in a visual sense first.

A mirage misrepresents reality, proving the mirage is distinct from the visual process itself.

Got it.

Proprioception works the same way.

So how does proprioception lie to a dancer?

What's an example of that?

Choreographers and teachers see this constantly.

A dancer might be absolutely convinced based on their internal feeling that their knee is perfectly straight, when in reality it is slightly bent.

They appropriately experience the knee is straight, but the objective fact is that it is not.

That is powerful evidence.

The internal representation is false, which means the internal sensing mechanism proprioception is tracking an object, the knee, that can be perceived incorrectly.

Exactly.

And you can contrast this again with a pure subjective sensation, like pain.

If a pain appears sharp, it is sharp.

It cannot be mistaken about its own intrinsic quality of sharpness.

Proprioception, like vision, represents actual objects, your limbs, and is capable of misrepresenting their actual position or state.

This capacity for misrepresentation sets it fundamentally apart from mere subjective sensation and firmly establishes the body as an object of proprioception, satisfying metaphysical distance.

Excellent.

So the body is now confirmed as an aesthetic object, even when perceived internally.

But we hit one final massive hurdle, privacy.

Even if my body is an object for me, it's a private object.

I can proprioceive my own foet a turn, but you sitting in the audience cannot.

If the object of experience remains private, it still violates that contained shareability requirement.

That privacy issue would indeed doom the thesis if we stopped at individual embodiment.

But this is the point where the author transitions to the second key concept of Fourier cognition we mentioned earlier, extension.

We must extend this private aesthetic experience to the public realm.

And that leads us to the thesis of extended embodied aesthetics.

Precisely.

The thesis states,

one can have an aesthetic experience of another's body as perceived through senses other than vision and audition.

And the mechanism that makes this possible is?

Can aesthetic sympathy or motor perception?

So the idea is that the audience member sitting perfectly still is not just seeing the dancer.

They are, in a very real way, feeling the movement in their own body.

That is the argument.

Our own bodies, or more accurately, our motor systems, act as a window into the aesthetic properties of the dancer's movement.

When we observe a spectacular jump, we don't just judge it visually.

We judge it via the unconscious resonance in our own muscles, sensing the effort, the weightlessness, and the grace.

And this shared motor -based perception transforms that initially private proprioceptive object into something shareable.

That's the key.

This dramatically extends the application, then.

It implies that aesthetic judgment of movement isn't just limited to bodies moving in space.

The chapter argues we can attribute bodily -based aesthetic properties to non -bodily artworks that were created by bodies.

That's the power of extension.

We don't just feel the movement when watching a dancer.

We can feel the movement necessary to create a still object.

Think of the 18th century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herter's view on sculpture.

He argued that the eye in gathering impressions of sculpture becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching.

Wow.

So we're using our own bodily sense to mentally recreate the form.

Yes.

So when I look at an abstract painting, like a Kandinsky, and I identify a curve as graceful, I might be experiencing a kind of proprioceptive echo of what it feels like for my arm to move in that same graceful arc.

Exactly.

Or looking at an energetic splatter painting by Jackson Pollock.

The aesthetic judgment of energy isn't purely visual.

It's your motor system resonating with the explosive, dynamic, physical input that was required to create that work.

And this extends to music as well.

It applies directly.

When we listen to Chopin's difficult etudes, we're now arguing that the listener, through their own motor system, can feel the tension or that ruthlessness in their own hands, and thereby access the piece's aesthetic qualities in an embodied way.

That connection, the private feeling of the creator, becomes the shared feeling of the observer.

That's the critical link we needed for shareability.

So let's turn to the hard science that backs up this theory of motor perception.

This is where we bring in the third core concept of Fourier cognition,

embeddedness.

The notion that cognition is deeply rooted in our sensory and motor systems is crucial here.

And the idea of motor perception is now strongly supported by the neuroscientific understanding of the mirror system.

The action observation network, right?

Yes.

This circuit involving specific areas of the brain shows increased activity not just when a person executes a movement, but also when they see that same movement being performed by others.

So it's a biological mechanism that suggests our brains are hardwired to simulate or resonate with observed actions.

Yes, we are at a sub -personal level embodying the movement we see.

It's a deep neural underpinning for that philosophical claim of kinesthetic sympathy.

But beyond brain scans, what about behavioral and perceptual evidence?

How do we see this motor resonance affecting our everyday perception of art?

The chapter cites several really strong pieces of behavioral evidence.

Let's start with the perception of dynamic information in static images.

What did those studies show?

In studies conducted by Freyd back in 1983, subjects were shown static photographs of individuals or objects in motion, like a runner or a ball flying through the air.

Okay.

When later asked to recall the exact position in the static image,

subjects were consistently more likely to mistake the position as being slightly further along in the action than the position that was actually depicted.

So our brains aren't treating the image as static at all.

They're predicting and projecting the continuation of the movement.

Precisely.

We are representing the action dynamically in our minds and bodies, making the image move through our own internal motor schema.

And what about the drawing perception studies?

That sounds even more specific to an embodied aesthetic.

The drawing studies show that our interpretation of shapes is biased by what it feels like to physically draw them.

For example, if subjects watched a tracing of a geometric figure, like a circle, where the speed of the tracing changed, slowing down slightly on the curves and speeding up on the straightaways.

Which is how you would naturally draw it.

It is.

They tended to perceive the figure as a slightly flattened ellipse rather than a perfect circle.

Why would a circle being traced that way be perceived as an ellipse?

Because that pattern of slowing down on curves and accelerating on straighter sections is how a human hand naturally traces a shape with effort.

So the conclusion is that our perception of the shape isn't purely about the visual input.

It's about feeling what it is like to draw it.

Our motor system imposes an interpretation based on our own embodied capabilities.

That is a phenomenal connection, showing how our internal movement repertoire actually dictates how we perceive external geometric forms.

And finally, there is the audio motor influence, which links back so strongly to that Chopin example.

Studies show that subjects who listen to the sounds a pencil makes while drawing an ellipse, that specific rhythm and acoustic signature, were later biased in their own attempts to draw a perfect circle.

So they would draw them slightly flattened out.

Often, yes.

An acoustic input that represents a certain type of movement can actually alter the motor command of the observer.

The senses are profoundly interconnected, and the motor system is the receiving hub.

The evidence for embeddedness is strong, then.

Our perception of art, whether it's visual, oral, or kinesthetic, is rooted in our motor system, providing the necessary grounding for that thesis of extended embodied aesthetics.

That's the takeaway.

So now, let's see if this resonates outside the lab.

We need to look at the professional dance critics, who are essentially the experts in discerning and articulating the aesthetic quality of movement.

They provide the crucial first -person reports of the observer.

And John Martin, a hugely influential critic, was perhaps the most explicit about this concept.

He argued that the irreducible minimum of equipment demanded of a spectator is a kinesthetic sense in working condition.

Wow.

He called this phenomenon kinesthetic sympathy.

He wasn't subtle about its importance, was he?

He saw it as a prerequisite for full appreciation.

He implied it was essential.

His critical reviews often detailed this internal transfer.

He wrote of movement that gave a powerful kinesthetic transfer, or he described a dancer who leaves you limp with vicarious kinesthetic experience.

That language is not metaphorical.

It suggests that the proprioceptive feeling is what grounds the judgment of the performance's power and aesthetic quality.

It does.

So that addresses things like grace and power.

But what about the expressive or emotional qualities of a dance?

That's where Edwin Dembe comes in.

He wrote about feeling the tension resulting from a dancer imitating Greek poses, such as Nijinsky's portrayal in The Afternoon of a Fawn.

Okay.

Dembe was describing a strained, awkward comportment expressed a particular emotion.

And this kind of judgment, the appreciation of effort, strain, and tension, is fundamentally kinesthetic, understood through our motor perception.

It links the movement's aesthetic quality directly to its expressive quality.

So we're not just feeling the physical difficulty, we're feeling the psychological or emotional content that the difficulty embodies.

Exactly.

And the consistency among these experts is key.

Alastair McCauley, another critic, described Frederick Ashton's choreography as more kinesthetically affecting than any other, going on to say that in watching it, you feel the movement so powerfully through your torso that it's often hard to sit still.

That's quite a statement.

And Lewis Horst similarly spoke of dance having a direct appeal to kinesthetic response.

The professional language confirms the public shared nature of this experience.

Okay, we've established the consensus among experts.

Now we have to address the remaining skepticism.

And the primary objection outside of philosophy comes from the person who simply says, I don't feel it, so you must be making it up.

This is the lack of experience argument.

Why might someone fail to resonate kinesthetically with a movement?

The chapter's response leans heavily on the neuroscientific evidence we just discussed.

The motor repertoire.

Precisely.

The research on the mirror system shows that the resonance response is most pronounced when the observer is watching movements that are already within their own motor repertoire.

So if you have spent years training your body as a dancer, an athlete, or a musician,

your capacity for kinesthetic sympathy is far greater.

So the skeptic who hasn't trained their body to execute a complex plie or a powerful leap simply lacks the internal framework to fully resonate with the professional they're watching.

It suggests that significant motor experience such as dance training might be a necessary prerequisite for this deep level of aesthetic appreciation.

Which means that appreciating great dance might require specialized training, just as appreciating great literature requires linguistic and cultural training.

It does.

And this neatly explains why the casual observer might not share the same kinesthetic experience.

That shifts the burden of proof back to the skeptic, doesn't it?

It suggests the limitation lies in their training, not in the aesthetic experience itself.

Now for the final counter argument, the illusion argument.

This argument is potent, particularly in the world of ballet.

Ballet aesthetics rely heavily on visual illusions, defying gravity, appearing elongated, making incredible effort seem effortless.

So the argument goes that what is aesthetically relevant is how the movement looks, the deceptive visual appearance,

not the underlying proprioceptive feel, which reveals the reality of gravity and effort.

So if the aesthetic experience is meant to be the illusion, why would the proprioceptive reality matter at all?

It would only matter if the proprioceptive experience was limited to the reality.

But the chapter argues for the possibility of a proprioceptive illusion.

A proprioceptive illusion?

How does that work in practice?

When a dancer performs a movement specifically designed to create the illusion of suspension,

extending their limbs precisely at the apex of a jump, they often report a corresponding proprioceptive sensation of being suspended mid -air or of feeling lighter than normal.

So the body's internal sense itself can be tricked or influenced to perceive the impossible.

Exactly.

The feeling of flight, or weightlessness, is itself part of the internal aesthetic satisfaction.

The illusion isn't just external, it's internalized.

And are there other examples of this?

The existence of proprioceptive illusions is confirmed in other contexts too.

Pilots and astronauts, when they become disoriented, experience powerful proprioceptive illusions regarding their position in space.

The key is that the body is capable of misrepresenting movement internally in ways that can actually enhance the aesthetic experience and that disarms the illusion argument.

This is a complete defense.

We've successfully moved from establishing the internal aesthetic experience of the creator that's embodied aesthetics via proprioception,

all the way to validating the shared public aesthetic experience of the observer, which is extended embodied aesthetics via motor perception and mirroring.

Indeed.

We have refuted the centuries -old philosophical tradition that demanded the soul forget its connection with the body.

We've demonstrated that not only is the body an aesthetic object capable of being perceived as such, but that our aesthetic judgments of others are deeply rooted in our own motor systems.

We've solved the problem of distance and privacy.

But there is one final lingering doubt, and it's about the process of creation itself.

If conscious awareness and proprioceptive focus are so aesthetically valuable, doesn't the deliberate act of focusing on how one is moving actually hinder expert performance?

Right.

I mean, aren't experts supposed to operate on autopilot in a state of automaticity to be truly fluent?

That is a critical question about expertise.

The belief that fluency requires thoughtless action is very widespread, but the author counters this by bringing in the philosophy of John Dewey.

And what does Dewey tell us about the creative process of the artist?

Dewey argued forcefully against the idea of the thoughtless artist.

He wrote that the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd.

The artist's action is not blind automaticity.

Rather, they are controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next.

So that intense proprioceptive awareness we were discussing earlier isn't a distraction from the art.

It's the necessary penetrating thought required for continuous self -correction and qualitative adjustment.

Precisely.

The conscious aesthetic enjoyment of one's own movement acts as a vital internal guidance system, allowing the artist to fine -tune the ongoing process.

And this aligns with philosophers like Nietzsche and Schusterman, who emphasize that focusing on the artist's embodied creative process of doing the feeling enriches our philosophical accounts of aesthetics far more than merely focusing on the passive reception of the finished work.

That was a truly detailed tour through the body as an aesthetic object, not just as something to look at, but as something to feel both for yourself and for others.

We hope this deep dive into embodied aesthetics has, well, completely changed how you view movement, artistry, and maybe even your own physical experience.

And if we take the point seriously,

that training is required to fully appreciate kinesthetic sympathy, just as it is required to appreciate great literature,

it raises a fascinating thought for you to consider.

What other forms of deep aesthetic experience might be currently hidden from us, simply because we haven't trained our bodies to feel them?

Perhaps there is an embodied aesthetic in engineering or gardening that we simply haven't activated yet.

An invitation to train ourselves physically to unlock new worlds of appreciation.

We wish you well on your continued learning journey.