The Aesthetics Of Dance

Extract

In considering dance, the arts generally, human movement and physical education from a philosophical point of view, it has increasingly struck me that perhaps the biggest single area of confusion in the theoretical literature on these important aspects of human experience concerns the relationship of body to mind. This is, of course, a very large issue in contemporary philosophy, which I have tried to consider rather more fully in a recent book. But I want now to concentrate on one aspect of that issue, and to suggest that much popular talk and many theories of expression and meaning in the arts, especially dance, are vitiated by an underlying confusion about the emotions generally. In this paper I want to try to show just how a fallacious theory of the emotions creates insuperable difficulties for an understanding of any of the arts. It can, I suggest, be shown that though it is commonly accepted without question, this theory implies a position which few would want to accept, for a consequence would be that the arts, like the emotions in general, could not be intelligibly discussed. And even those who hold this traditional dualist view of the emotions usually contradict that consequence pragmatically, in that they exchange opinions about the arts as freely as anyone else.

As an example, consider the dilemma in which a teacher of dance, imbued with such a theory, would find herself if she were to trace out the consequences of it, though we should remember that the same issue of principle would apply in other art forms and to discussion of expression in other physical activities.