Dance's Mind-Body Problem

In section 621 of the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein considers the following: 'when 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 feeling of 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