- Dance's Mind-Body Problem
In section 621 of the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein considers the following: 'when "I raise my arm",' he notes, 'my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?' (Wittgenstein 1958, 161). A dancer might have a number of answers here, as might a viewer of dance performance. Generally, the dancer's gesture of raising her arm is not just movement, but an intended action: it is not mere reflex or nervous tick but consciously willed and controlled; it is governed by a decision to move on the part of the dancer and in some cases also by a decision on the part of the choreographer that this action be performed. These purposes shape the quality and significance of the movement as well as causing it to happen. So if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm, I am left with these intentions.1 A dancer might want to add that the remainder also includes her phenomenal experience of the movement: the sensation of the muscles tightening in the shoulder as the arm lifts, the feelingof tension between the arm reaching up and the legs rooted in the ground, the sense that the surrounding air offers resistance to the gesture. There is a whole complex of kinaesthetic sensations associated with the action of raising her arm, and the dancer aware of her performance is very conscious of these sensations: they contribute to the richness of her experience and, arguably, to the particular quality of the action as perceived by the audience. They too make the gesture of raising one's arm more than just a movement of the arm upwards.
Of course, Wittgenstein is not suggesting that it is actually possible to isolate intention and phenomenal awareness from physical movement. His question is an analytic one designed to elucidate the character of a human action as opposed to a mere physical occurrence. In the process, it highlights issues key to contemporary debates in analytic philosophy about the mind-body problem and thus offers a route in to the core topics of this article. The dancer's hypothetical answer to Wittgenstein's question suggests that dance centrally involves (or seems to involve) ideas and intentions causing or being embodied in physical movement; it points also to how dance's value depends (or seems to depend) partly on the phenomenal experiences of dancers, choreographers and viewers. Yet what are ideas, intentions and phenomenal experience, what kind of reality do they have, and how do they relate to the world of physical and physiological fact? These aspects of the mind-body problem – the issues of mental causation and [End Page 87] phenomenal consciousness – have received renewed attention in recent analytic philosophy of mind, as materialist and physicalist views have grown in popularity. If mental causation and phenomenal consciousness are indeed fundamental to dance, debates about these issues in general have implications for, and potential to illuminate, our art form, as this article will seek to show.2
The relevance of the mind-body problem to dance is sometimes obscured by mistaken assumptions about the nature of that problem and the way it is currently being tackled by analytic philosophy. Within dance circles, there is a tendency to think that even to refer to the mind-body relation as a 'problem' is to get off on the wrong foot by assuming that mind and body are separate entities. The term 'Cartesian dualism' is frequently invoked, often applied pejoratively, and the philosophical position it denotes assumed to be antithetical to dance's essence. What we should do, according to some, is to focus on the integration of mind and body central to the dancer's lived experience or evident in dance works.3 The 'problem', in this view, is one created by philosophers labouring fruitlessly under Cartesian illusions; it dissolves when we adjust our thinking to the terms and experiences of a long-neglected and undervalued art form.
There are two key difficulties with this received view of...