The missing body of philosophy
Philosophy has analyzed and explained all kind of aspects of the human civilization and life, from the origin of the universe in Ancient Greece to the Objected Oriented Ontology of Graham Harman; we can find Political Philosophy, Ethics, Metaphysics, Ontology, Logic, Aesthetics and many more. Regarding Aesthetics and with respect to the meaning of Beauty, the artistic expression or the identity of Art, philosophers like Aristotle, Kant or Barthes have expressed and explained their thoughts about them. Among their thousands of words of insight, we can find a small, discrete, almost insignificant mention of the nature and importance of Dance. Even if there are theories offered by dancers, scholars, historians, critics related to questions that arise in the philosophical world, and even if there has been an increase of the research since the movements of the 70’s and 80’s, that opened a dialogue on the body and sexual identity of the person[1], Dance remains underrepresented in the field of Aesthetics.
Why dance?
Dance is the corporeal form of art directly related to the expression of the human body; it is an art that derives from the life herself and requires the action and energy of the whole body. It also requires the inner relationship of the dancing subject connected to its environment, space and time[2]. Dance has such a human nature that anybody can feel the necessity at some point in their life to move and express thoughts and emotional conditions in a corporeal way. The simple feeling of movement, whether expressing or not, is a pleasant sensation, which can be individual or intersubjective, involving two or more people at the same time. Another subtle but substantial aspect of dance is the interpretation and conscious presence, and interaction of the corporeal subject with time and space, always through the awareness of the body. That said, Dance is both a struggle as well a research of the body to find a voice to express itself, the human identity, facing the personal reality. Understanding and interiorizing dance means realizing and appreciating the human, the beautiful and playful pulse of life, as well as learning how to connect ourselves with our emotions and personality[3]. says Fraileigh
When I dance I become, I connect with other, the world and myself. When I dance my perception of time and space is different from my everyday experiences. When I dance with each breath I reach out, become a part of a bigger whole. When I dance I feel alive. (Mariel Renz, Germany, 1997)
We find the existence and the creation of dance widely diffused as any other form of art; from the Orchesis of the Ancient Greeks to the contemporary dance inspired by Isadora Duncan and, the most discrete, Loïe Fuller in the Art Nouveau[4]; from the grounded African dances to the minimal psychological Japanese Butoh, we see that this somatic art has accompanied the human person through time and space. Yet still, there is not an equivalent and worth approach to dance in the history of philosophy, and the main reason could be that dance was not perceived as a “fine art”.
The neglect of dance is the result of the logical and theoretical aspect of the philosophical investigation and the two human ways of articulating information, by words and by visual elements. That’s why the classic system of fine arts, defined also by Hegel as the ways of realizing the truth and materializing “the idea”, was constituted of poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, all derived from the basic two: poetry and painting. Dance is not represented in this system because, contrary to what happens with the other intellectual forms, it is not perceived as a branch of knowledge or of symbolic art. Dance appears as belonging to some primitive, pre-lingual and pre-civilization aspect of the humanity, even if there is a completely symbolic and mental aspect of it[5]. This should not overlap the symbolism of dance used by Nietzsche - in particular in The Birth of Tragedy, as part of the Dionysian art of tragedy, and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra - in order to demonstrate the highest mode of human-life relationship (“I would believe only in a god who could dance”[6]): an unstable cyclic dance of Life to which the dancer Zarathustra, who “has his ear in his toes”, is attuned with his somatic will[7].
As an art, dance has been struggling with its own ephemeral nature and lack of permanent elements that can be studied and analyzed, after its realization. Additionally, this aspect is common in the field of theatre, as both are performative arts and their work ends with the finishing of the activity of the subject. This material possibility of all the visual and textual works of art has surely facilitated the observation and contemplation of aesthetic philosophers[8].
Why body?
Body, expression, movement, and awareness are some of the basic elements of dance, which can be combined in various ways to show every time a different expressive work of art. Yet here, there is another component that makes dance so intimate, personal, expressive and natural: dance is intrinsically human. Body is the basic instrument of all human performance, even of thought, and human embodiment is as essential as rationality and language[9].
Even Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher of the body, observes that the human flesh is not an inanimate material object. It is a texture that expresses the unity and continuity between the body and the world, yet allowing diversity and opposition between the within and without the self (“our body is a being of two leaves”[10]). He expands the understanding of the body beyond the physical perception and introduces its chiasm, which could be interpreted as a dancing of the flesh that intertwines the subject and object of human experience, making them both into one whole flesh[11].
The body unites us as humans, embodying culture and entire ideologies, which are materialized in somatic norms and bodily habits, that typically are taken for granted. Our bodies also divide (not in the negative way, separates) us into genders, races, ethnicities, classes, and further into individuals, pluralidad[12]. Humans are used to expressing themselves with logical, visual, verbal and symbolic systems and languages and, since the communication and relationships are nowadays more dependent of the digital and technological developments, the understanding and use of the corporeal, physical language is vanishing.
The body, which Philosophy has mentioned and acclaimed many times in either in a positive, but more commonly in a negative way, has become a lost and undefined element of the human condition. The major lack in current philosophical body talk is a clear pragmatic orientation, which could translate into an improved somatic practice all the rational theory[13]. It’s possible to observe this fact in the direction that the human norm is going: the flexibility, fluid, unlimited personality, identity, nationality, psychology and sexuality of the individual. The struggle that began in the 70s-80s with the LGBTQ movement with names like Lauretis, Butler or Sedwick, facing the identity and sexual limitations, has influenced people’s today perception of the body and the self. It is still visible through its (suddenly, sadly) negative consequences on the current generations, lost in their singularity, individuality as well as lack of body awareness and self-knowledge. (I’m in that generation and I could even talk for myself)
Following the same patterns, even Philosophy as discipline has lost her own “body”. After having explained, analyzed, criticized and published all kind of articles, theories and ideas around human identity, gender, body or sexuality, she has never approached the body per se, leaving behind those hundreds of interpretations around the influences, agents, and factors - social, political or psychological - that generate and modify it. By facing the body theoretically, Philosophy still underestimates the somatic aspect of life and humanity because she continues to persist on the logical, mental observation and explanation of the body, forgetting the importance of humanity and physicality. Even if know that one of the qualities that differentiates the human being from the rest of the creatures is the logic and the perception of the self, it doesn’t mean that humans are not corporeal, and this spectacular mind that they own is linked as well as depends on its body.
Shusterman (a good example, proposal, interesting idea) has clearly expressed his criticism towards the neglect of the somatic part of humanity. Facing this problem, he proposes the interdiscipline (which is an contemporary approach, openness and richer) of Somaesthetics, aiming to improve and enrich Humanities and Philosophy: “Somaesthetics, roughly defined, concerns the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetics appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning.”[14]. He recalls the ancient Greek and Eastern Asian tradition of embodied philosophical practice and proposes a “comparative study of methods”, called pragmatic somaesthetics, with diverse pragmatic disciplines (like decoration, modern psychosomatic disciplines or aerobics). With somaesthetic knowledge we can improve the knowledge of the world and perfect our humanity and our lives[15].
This situation could change and evolve into a more mature attitude if Dance would be allowed to teach, transmit, and present its knowledge and awareness. Dance helps humans to understand the body beyond the skin because when someone dances, he creates his own body and engenders his own forms, from a nucleus of freedom. Through dance a person enters into a dialogue with herself, probing possibilities, extending what comes naturally, with effort or waiting. With dance the self-conscious merleaupontian flesh, is able to interact and expand the subjective self to the without world and to experience the flesh from the objective “other side”. Dance shapes the self of a moving message that returns to the subject but as enriched, shaped and evolved[16].
Conclusion
Philosophers are usually concentrated on only the small areas learned at school, which are easier to study with the available techniques and material. Philosophy, therefore, doesn’t seem to be interested in the pure ontology of the body, independently from other non-corporeal interpretations, nor the value of Dance, even if the topic has achieve a larger audience[17]. The body clearly symbolizes all human limitations of mortality and frailty, reminding the weakness and error to Modern humanistic philosophers. That’s why, wanting to transcend this “humanity”, they focus on the mind and marginalize the body[18]. People need a human, somatic, aware Philosophy, and Dance is the field where these aspects can be found. Technology, digital world, theoretical knowledge, and economy are today the factors for the configuration of the human self. There is no body, and instead of focusing on it, we are still looking for definitions on it. People don’t know their own body, humans are no-bodies anymore and Philosophy (as the activity that has followed all the changes of the human reality) is guided to that direction too. It should stop looking from the distance of “superiority” of the logic and influence humans on finding their lost bodies.
“Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?,”
References
[1] Aili Bresnahan, "The Philosophy of Dance", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition).
[2] Paul Valéry, Η φιλοσοφία του χορού, trans. Π. Σ. Παπαδόπουλος (Αθήνα: Principia, 2013).
[3] Sondra Fraleigh, Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), p. 2.
[4] Natalie Lemle, “Pioneering Dancer Loïe Fuller Brought Art Nouveau to Life”, Artsy, Dec 11, 2017, Art.
[5] Francis Sparhott, “The missing art of dance”, Dance Chronicle, Volume 6(2), 1983, pp.167-70, and Aili Bresnahan, id.
[6] Φρίδριχ Νίτσε, Έτσι μίλησε ο Ζαρατούστρα, trans. Ζήσης Σαρίκας (Πανοπτικόν, 2010), p. 62.
[7] Michael A. Metcalfe, A Dancer’s Virtue: Human Life in Light of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, CONCEPT, Vol. 28 (Nov. 2004), pp. 1, 2, 8-10; Φρίδριχ Νίτσε, id., p.329-331
[8] Margaret H’ Doubler, Dance: A Creative Art Experience, Madison (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), p. 2.
[9] Richard Shusterman, “Thinking Throught the Body Educating for the Humanities: A Plea for Somaesthetics”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 40, No.1, Spring 2006”, pp. 2 and 4.
[10] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 137.
[11] Sam Gill, Dancing, Culture, Religion, (UK: Lexington Books, 2012), pp. 2 and 4; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, id., pp. 137-138
[12] Richard Shusterman, “Thinking Throught the Body, Educating for the Humanities: A Plea for Somaesthetics, id., pp. 3,4; and Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 3. (Summer, 1999), p. 303.
[13] Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal”, id. p. 304.
[14] Richard Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body”, id. p. 2.
[15] Id. p. 14; and Richard Shusterman “Somaesthetics”: id. p. 302
[16] Sondra Fraleigh, id., p. 28-9, 50.
[17] Sparshott, “On the question: “Why do philosophers neglect the Aesthetics of the Dance?”, Dance Research Journal 15(1), 1982, p. 21.
[18] Richard Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body”, id., p. 8.