Abstract
Abstract Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper, I argue that this tradition fails to recognize the perceptual possibilities of haptic touch, which allows us to experience properties of the objects with which we make bodily contact, including their weight, shape, solidity, elasticity, and smoothness. These features, moreover, may be indicative of how well-suited an object is for its function, and in feeling them we can thus feel the positive aesthetic quality of functional beauty.
Highlights
Which of our sensory modalities are capable of delivering distinctively aesthetic experiences? A traditional answer is to defend the possibility of aesthetic experience for the distal senses of vision and audition while excluding the proximal senses of taste, smell, and touch
Why have commentators tended to exclude the proximal senses from the aesthetic domain? Historically, the reasons are several;4 but we can capture much of the terrain by considering three principal lines of argument
I have argued that it is possible to perceive an object’s functional beauty through the modality of haptic touch, and that this proximal sense ought to be admitted to the aesthetic domain
Summary
Which of our sensory modalities are capable of delivering distinctively aesthetic experiences? A traditional answer is to defend the possibility of aesthetic experience for the distal senses of vision and audition while excluding the proximal senses of taste, smell, and touch. The distal senses have aesthetic credentials, the thinking goes, because they inform us of complex, public objects, in contrast to the private and rudimentary pleasures of mere internal sensation. Dynamic and exploratory activities such as these enable the perception of an array of properties that belong to material objects, such as rigidity, elasticity, weight, balance, solidity, tension, pliability, and smoothness. These are properties that can determine how well an object is formed for its function—including, for example, how well-suited it is for manual manipulation; for wielding, striking, or pulling; for cutting and slicing; for riding upon or driving in; and for performing activities such as throwing, writing, eating, knitting, or running.
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