Proprioception as an aesthetic sense

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 64, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 231-242

  Montero, Barbara ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 37849016531     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0021-8529.2006.00244.x     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. See J. R. E. Ramsay and M. J. Riddoch, "Position-Matching in the Upper Limb: Professional Ballet Dancers Perform with Outstanding Accuracy," Clinical Rehabilitation 15 (2001): 324-330.
2. Bell is usually credited with the first clear formulation of the notion of "muscular sense." See Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body (London: Logman, 1826).
3. The term "proprioception" was coined by Charles Sherrington in his Silliman Lectures, published as The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1906).
4. D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Judgment (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1929), pp. 28, 56.
5. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p. 24.
6. Francis Hutchenson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, ed. Peter Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 47.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
8. See, for example, Carolyn Korsmeyer's delightful book, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 1999)
9. and Dominic McIver Lopes's interesting work on the aesthetics of touch, "Vision, Touch and the Value of Pictures," The British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 87-97.
10. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), vol. I, q. 27.
11. Bernard Bosanquet, Lectures on Aesthetic Experience (London: McMillan & Co., 1968), p. 4.
12. For a discussion of this line of thought and a compelling argument against it, see Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste.
13. Sacks defines proprioception as such in the forward to Jonathan Cole, Pride and the Daily Marathon (MIT Press, 1995), p. x, which chronicles the amazing life of an individual with complete loss of proprioception and touch.
14. See also Wittgenstein's distinction between the body as "object" and the body as "subject." Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958).
15. A dancer's auditory sense may also inform his or her proprioceptive judgments: a movement that feels, say, humorous might do so in part because it represents a rhythm that sounds humorous. Interesting thoughts on how the dependency also goes the other way can be found in Charles Rosen, Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 2002).
16. In Nietzsche's words, "our Aesthetics have hitherto... only formulated the experiences of what is beautiful, from the point of view of the receivers in art. In the whole of philosophy hitherto the artist has been lacking." See Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, vol. II, trans. Levy (London: Foulis, 1910), p. 265.
17. See M. A. Umilta, E. Kohler, V. Gallese, L. Fogassi, L. Fadiga, C. Keysers, and G. Rizzolatti, "I Know What You Are Doing: A Neurophysiological Study," Neuron 31 (2001): 155-165.
18. See V. Gallese, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, and G. Rizzolatti, "Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex," Brain 118 (1996): 593-609.
19. L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, G. Pavesi, and G. Rizzolatti, "Motor Facilitation During Action Observation," Journal of Neurophysiology 73 (1995): 2608-2611.
20. J. Frede, "The Mental Representation of Movement When Static Stimuli Are Viewed," Perception and Psychophysics 33 (1983): 575-581.
21. P. Viviani and N. Stucchi, "The Effect of Movement Velocity on Form Perception: Geometric Illusions in Dynamic Displays," Perception and Psychophysics 46 (1989): 266-274.
22. There is also a large body of rich philosophical and psychological work on how visual information is (or at least sometimes is) information about what action to perform. See, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962);
23. James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986);
24. Alva Noë, Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004);
25. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (MIT Press, 1997).
26. Another related paper is John R. Skoyles, "Motor Perception and Anatomical Realism in Classical Greek Art," Medical Hypotheses 51 (1998): 69-70, in which it is argued that the mirror neuron system may be relevant to understanding the aesthetic value of classical Greek art.
27. It would be interesting to investigate whether people who have been diagnosed with a degraded sense of proprioception appreciate dance. Anecdotally, I know one individual who has been so diagnosed and he does claim to have absolutely no appreciation of dance. Oliver Sacks, in his essay "The Disembodied Lady," concerning a woman who has suffered complete loss of proprioception, mentions that before her illness, she had a great appreciation of dance, which seems to imply that afterward she no longer did. See Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Harper and Row, 1985). To be sure, this implication may not have been intended, and even if it was, there could be various reasons for why she no longer appreciated dance. Any evidence for a correlation between degraded proprioception and a lack of appreciation of dance would need to be interpreted carefully.
28. See Paul Bach-y-Rita, Brain Mechanisms in Sensory Substitution (New York: Academy Press, 1972).
29. For other thoughts on this relatively unexplored area of aesthetics, see Richard Shusterman's "Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999): 299-313. My work here can be seen as part of this discipline. For comments on various earlier drafts of this work I am grateful to, in addition to those already mentioned in the endnotes, Rachel Zuckert, Susan Feagin, Graham Parsons, Joel Hamkins, and a JAAC anonymous referee, as well as numerous other people, including audience members at the Georgia State University Philosophy Colloquium, the CUNY Cognitive Science Colloquium, and The College of Staten Island PEP Talk Series. Writing this article was greatly facilitated by an NEH Research Fellowship (2004-2005), summer research support from Georgia State University, and a PSC-CUNY grant.