Dance and Aesthetic Experience

For Plato, Beauty is a self-subsistent Form, and the essence of Aesthetic experience is the contemplation of the Form of Beauty. Hence, the Platonist Aesthetic experience is essentially passive. While Kant's Constructionism is revolutionary regarding the Theory-Practice relation, and the nature of Experience in general, its novelty in his Aesthetics is more modest. For sure, the play of Imagination involved in the experiencing of Art is, in contrast with Plato's notion, dynamic, but Kant's analysis in this area still amounts to no more than a modification of the essential Contemplationist character of the Platonist Aesthetic context. Likewise, Dewey's notion of Aesthetic experience as interactive and reconstructive still accepts the Platonist paradigm of the experiencer as spectator. In contrast, Dance is not only an Artform in its own right, it is also an Aesthetic experience, i. e. of Music. As such, it is plainly exemplary of Constructionist Aesthetics--the experience of Music is embodied in the dancer's physical movements--and, hence, of an Aesthetic theory that is a decisive alternative to Platonism. More generally, Dance demonstrates that the essential experience of Artistic creativity is further creativity.