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I.
"Beauty is a great recommendation," wrote Montaigne, "and there is no man so barbarous
and sturdy as not to be somewhat struck by its charm. The body has a great part in our
being, it holds a high rank in it; so its structure and composition are well worth
consideration." The focus of Montaigne's somatic interest here is obviously not the body's
physiological components but its aesthetic functioning, its potential for beauty.
This aesthetic potential, I have elsewhere argued, is at least twofold: As an object
grasped by our external senses, the body (of another or even one's own) can provide
beautiful sensory perceptions or (in Kant's famous terminology) "representations." But there
is also the beautiful experience of one's own body from within--the endorphin-enhanced
glow of high-level cardiovascular functioning, the slow savoring awareness of improved,
deeper breathing, the tingling thrill of feeling into new parts of one's spine. If this appeal to
the proprioceptive beauty of personal somatic experience seems strangely idiosyncratic or
weirdly "New Age," consider the 1884 remark of Jean-Marie Guyau, the once renowned
author of Les problèmes de l'esthétique contemporaine: "To breathe deeply, sensing how
one's blood is purified through its contact with the air and how one's whole circulatory
system takes on new activity and strength, this is truly an almost intoxicating delight whose
aesthetic value can hardly be denied."
Rather than denying it, my aim in this paper is to affirm Montaigne's and Guyau's
aesthetic attention to the body but also to render it more systematic. In exploring the body's
crucial and complex role in aesthetic experience, I previously proposed the idea of a body-
centered discipline that I called "somaesthetics." Timidly tentative, my proposal remained
very vague. Suggesting somaesthetics as a possibility worth exploring, I dared not presume
to define it by proposing a systematic account of what topics, concepts, aims, and practices it
would comprise. After almost three millennia of philosophy, to propose a new philosophical
discipline might seem a reckless act of arrogance; to suggest one centered on the body could
only add absurdity to hubris. At the risk of further ridicule, I now wish to outline the basic
aims and elements of somaesthetics and to explain how it could promote some of
philosophy's most crucial concerns. The purpose is to show its potential utility, not its
radical novelty. If somaesthetics is radical, it is only in the sense of returning to some of the
deepest roots of aesthetics and philosophy.
To show how somaesthetics is firmly grounded in aesthetic tradition, I begin by
examining the philosophical text that founded modern aesthetics, Alexander Baumgarten's
Aesthetica (1750/1758). Baumgarten's original aesthetic project will be seen to have far
greater scope and practical import than what we recognize as aesthetics today, implying an
entire program of philosophical self-perfection in the art of living. I then outline the
discipline of somaesthetics, showing how it shares the same enlarged scope, multiple
dimensions, and practical element that Baumgarten urged, while also promoting precisely
those aims that philosophy traditionally defines as central to its own project: aims such as
knowledge, virtue, and the good life. But in pursuing Baumgarten's broad vision of
aesthetics and its practical, perfectionist ideal, somaesthetics goes even further by also
embracing a crucial feature that Baumgarten unfortunately omitted from his aesthetic
program--cultivation of the body. Modern philosophy too often displays the same sad
somatic neglect. I conclude, however, by considering two contemporary philosophers, John
Dewey and Michel Foucault, who differently exemplify my idea of somaesthetics, though
without properly thematizing or articulating this field as such. The paper closes by raising
an important theoretical issue that somaesthetics must face: the possibility of assessing
individual body tastes and practices in terms of more general somatic values or norms.
II.
When Alexander Baumgarten coined the term "aesthetics" to ground a formal philosophical
discipline, his aims for that discipline went far beyond the focus of what now defines
philosophical aesthetics: the theory of fine art and natural beauty. Deriving its name from
the Greek "aisthesis" (sensory perception), Baumgarten intended his new philosophical
science to comprise a general theory of sensory knowledge. Such an aesthetics was meant to
complement logic, the two together designed to provide a comprehensive theory of
knowledge he termed "Gnoseology."
Though following his Leibnizian teacher Christian Wolff in calling such sensory
perception a "lower faculty," Baumgarten's aim was not to denounce its inferiority. Instead
Aesthetica argues for the cognitive value of sensory perception, celebrating its rich potential
not only for better thinking but for better living. In the book's "Prolegomena," Baumgarten
asserts that aesthetic study will promote greater knowledge in several different ways: by
supplying better sensory perception as "good material for science" to work with; by
presenting its own special sort of sensory perception as a "suitable" object of science; by
therefore "advancing science beyond the limits of treating only clear [i.e., logical]
perception"; and by providing "good foundations for all contemplative activity and the
liberal arts." Finally, the improvement of sensory perception through aesthetic study will
"give an individual, ceteris paribus, an advantage over others" not just in thought but "in the
practical action of common life" (§3).
The wide-ranging utility that Baumgarten claims for aesthetics is implicit in his initial
definition of the discipline: "Aesthetics (as the theory of the liberal arts, science of lower
cognition, the art of beautiful thinking, and art of analogical thought) is the science of
sensory cognition" (§1). This vaster scope of all sensory perception allows Baumgarten to
distinguish aesthetics from the already established scientific disciplines of poetics and
rhetoric. Like these disciplines (and like its austere "sister," logic), aesthetics is not merely a
theoretical enterprise, but also a normative practice--a discipline that implies practical
exercise or training that is aimed at achieving useful ends. "The end of aesthetics," writes
Baumgarten, "is the perfection of sensory cognition as such, this implying beauty," while the
contrasting "imperfection" (identified as "deformity") is to be avoided (§14).
Aesthetics as a systematic discipline of perfecting sensory cognition ("artificialis
aesthetices") is both distinguished from and built upon what Baumgarten calls "natural
aesthetics" ("aesthetica naturalis"), which he defines as the innate workings of our sensory
cognitive faculties and their natural development through nonsystematic learning and
exercise. The aesthetic goal of systematically perfecting our sensory perception requires, of
course, the crucial natural gifts of our lower (i.e., sense-related) cognitive faculties.
Baumgarten insists especially on "keenness of sensation," "imaginative capacity,"
"penetrating insight," "good memory," "poetic disposition," "good taste," "foresight," and
"expressive talent." But all of these, he argues, must be governed by "the higher faculties of
understanding and reason" ("facultates cognoscitivae superiores ... intellectus et ratio," §§30-
38).
The perfectionist project of aesthetics must, however, go beyond all these (high and
low) naturally developed faculties. It further requires a systematic program of instruction
that includes two branches. The first (askesis or exercitatio aesthetica) is a program of
practical exercise or training. Here, through repetitive drill of certain kinds of actions, one
learns to instill harmony of mind with respect to a given theme or thought (§47).
Contrasting such aesthetic drill to the mechanical drill of soldiers, Baumgarten defines it as
including also the systematic practicing of improvisation and even the playing of games, as
well as exercises in the more erudite arts (§§52, 55, 58).
The second part of aesthetic instruction is distinctively theoretical. To this theoretical
study (which Baumgarten calls mathesis and disciplina aesthetica) belong all the fine forms
of knowledge (pulchra eruditio), whose "most important parts are the sciences of God, of the
universe, and of man," especially those sciences of man dealing with "his moral stature,
history, not excluding myth, ancient cultures and displays of his signifying genius" (§§62-
64). But the theoretical discipline of aesthetics must also include a general "theory of the
form of beautiful cognition" ("theoria de forma pulchrae cognitionis") to complement the
already established rules and theories in the specific aesthetic disciplines of oratory, poetry,
music, etc. (§§68, 69).
The major aims, concepts, and structural components of Baumgarten's founding project
of aesthetics deserve far more detailed attention than this brief account provides. (If it is
shocking how little today's aestheticians know Baumgarten's work, it seems even more
scandalous that his Aesthetica is still not translated into English). My skeletal sketch of
Baugmarten's aesthetics should nonetheless suffice both to suggest its pragmatic potential
and to highlight a theme that is astoundingly absent, yet logically required, from his project:
cultivation of the body.
Baumgarten defines aesthetics as the science of sensory cognition and as aimed at its
perfection. But the senses surely belong to the body and are deeply influenced by its
condition. Our sensory perception thus depends on how the body feels and functions, what it
desires, does, and suffers. Yet Baumgarten refuses to include the study and perfection of the
body within his aesthetic program. Of the many fields of knowledge therein embraced, from
theology to ancient myth, there is no mention of anything like physiology or physiognomy.
Of the wide range of aesthetic exercises Baumgarten envisages, no distinctively bodily
exercise is recommended. On the contrary, he seems keen to discourage vigorous body
training, explicitly denouncing what he calls "fierce athletics" ("ferociae athleticae"), which
he puts on a par with other presumed somatic evils like "lust," "licentiousness," and "orgies"
(§50).
This neglect of bodily training and theory for aesthetics appears even more shocking
when we realize that Baumgarten essentially identifies the body with the lower faculties of
sense, precisely those faculties whose cognition forms the very object of aesthetics. "The
lower faculties, the flesh" ("facultates inferiores, caro"), he writes in paragraph 10, should
not be "stirred up" in their corrupt state but rather controlled, improved, and properly
directed through aesthetic training. To designate the body by the sinfully charged term
"flesh" shows Baumgarten's theological distaste for the somatic; and the Latin connotations
of caro (as opposed to the more standard carnis) are especially negative.
Such clues suggest a religious motive for Baumgarten's exclusion of the body from his
aesthetic project of sensory science. More specific philosophical reasons can also be
surmised. In the rationalist tradition that Baumgarten inherited from Descartes through
Leibniz to Wolff, the body was regarded as a mere machine. It could therefore never truly
be a site of sentience or sensory perception, let alone knowledge. On the other hand, these
philosophies that sharply divide the body from the perceiving mind were themselves
largely inspired by religious doctrines that denigrated the body to save and celebrate the
immaterial soul.
Whatever Baumgarten's precise reasons for neglecting the body in aesthetics, they do
not justify its continued neglect. Very interesting genealogical inquiries could be directed to
tracing this persistent tradition of somaesthetic neglect and to explaining why the scope of
post-Baumgartenian aesthetics was reduced from the vast field of sensory cognition to the
narrow compass of beauty and fine art. We might further inquire why the initial pragmatic
and meliorative aspect of aesthetics (i.e., its Baumgartenian definition as a discipline for
perfecting perception and thus action) has likewise disappeared. How, in other words, has
aesthetics, like philosophy itself, shrunk from a noble art of living into a minor, specialized,
university discipline?
Intriguing as these inquiries are, my prime goals here are reconstructive rather than
historical:1) to revive Baumgarten's idea of aesthetics as a life-improving cognitive
discipline that extends far beyond questions of beauty and fine arts and that involves both
theory and practical exercise;2) to end the neglect of the body that Baumgarten disastrously
introduced into aesthetics (a neglect intensified by the great idealist tradition in nineteenth-
century aesthetics); and3) to propose an enlarged, somatically centered field, somaesthetics,
that can contribute significantly to many crucial philosophical concerns, thus enabling
philosophy to more successfully redeem its original role as an art of living.
III.
Somaesthetics can be provisionally defined as the critical, meliorative study of the
experience and use of one's body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and
creative self-fashioning. It is therefore also devoted to the knowledge, discourses, practices,
and bodily disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it. If we put aside
traditional philosophical prejudice against the body and instead simply recall philosophy's
central aims of knowledge, self-knowledge, right action, and its quest for the good life, then
the philosophical value of somaesthetics should become clear in several ways.i. Since
knowledge is largely based on sensory perception whose reliability often proves
questionable, philosophy has always been concerned with the critique of the senses,
exposing their limits and avoiding their misguidance by subjecting them to discursive
reason. Philosophy's work here (at least in Western modernity) has been confined to the
sort of second-order critical analysis of sensory propositions that constitutes traditional
epistemology. The complementary route offered by somaesthetics is instead to correct the
actual functional performance of our senses by an improved direction of one's body, since
the senses belong to and are conditioned by the soma.
This somaesthetic strategy has ancient philosophical roots. Socrates himself affirmed
the crucial role of somatic care, and "took care to exercise his body and kept it in good
condition" by regular dance training and simple living. "The body," he declared, "is valuable
for all human activities, and in all its uses it is very important that it should be as fit as
possible. Even in the act of thinking, which is supposed to require least assistance from the
body, everyone knows that serious mistakes often happen through physical ill-health."
Socrates was far from heterodox here. Many ancient Greek philosophers likewise
advocated somatic training for the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. Aristippus, founder of the
Cyrenaic school, insisted "that bodily training contributes to the acquisition of virtue," since
fit bodies provide sharper perceptions and more discipline and versatility for adapting
oneself in thought, attitude, and action. Zeno, founder of Stoicism, likewise urged regular
bodily exercise, claiming that "proper care of health and one's organs of sense" are
"unconditional duties." Cynicism's founder was even more outspoken in advocating bodily
training as essential for the sensory knowledge and discipline that wisdom and the good life
demanded. Practicing the somatic discipline he preached, Diogenes experimented with a
variety of body practices to test and toughen himself: from eating raw food and walking
barefoot in the snow to masturbating in public and accepting the blows of drunken revelers.
Recognition of somatic training as an essential means toward philosophical
enlightenment lies at the heart of Asian practices of Hatha Yoga, Zen meditation, and T'ai chi
ch'uan. As Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yusuo insists, the concept of "personal cultivation" or
shugyo is presupposed in Eastern thought as "the philosophical foundation." Such shugyo
training has an essential bodily component, since "true knowledge cannot be obtained
simply by means of theoretical thinking," but only "through 'bodily recognition or
realization' (tainin or taitoku)." Like these ancient Asian practices, contemporary Western
body disciplines such as the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, and
Bioenergetics seek to improve the acuity, health, and control of our senses by cultivating
heightened attention to and mastery of their somatic functioning, while also freeing us from
bodily habits and defects that impair sensory performance. From this somaesthetic
philosophical perspective, knowledge of the world is improved not by denying our bodily
senses but by perfecting them.ii. If self-knowledge (rather than mere knowledge of worldly
facts) is philosophy's prime cognitive aim, then knowledge of one's bodily dimension must
not be ignored. Concerned not simply with the body's external form or representation but
also with its lived experience, somaesthetics works at improving awareness of our bodily
states and feelings, thus providing greater insight into both our passing moods and lasting
attitudes. It can therefore reveal and improve somatic malfunctionings that normally go
undetected even though they impair our well-being and performance.
Consider two examples. We rarely notice our breathing, but its rhythm and depth
provide rapid, reliable evidence of our emotional state. Consciousness of breathing can
therefore make us aware that we are angry, tense, or anxious when we might otherwise
remain unaware of these feelings and thus vulnerable to their misdirection. Similarly, a
chronic muscular contraction that not only constrains movement but results in tension and
pain may nonetheless go unnoticed because it has become habitual. As unnoticed, this
chronic contraction cannot be relieved, nor can its resultant disability and discomfort. Yet
once such somatic functioning is brought to clear attention, there is a chance to modify it
and avoid its unhealthy consequences, which include not only pain but a dulling of the
senses, a diminution of aesthetic sensitivity and pleasure.iii. A third central aim of
philosophy is virtue and right action, for which we need knowledge and self-knowledge, but
also effective will. Since action is only achieved through the body, our power of volition--the
ability to act as we will to act--depends on somatic efficacy. Through somaesthetics'
exploration and discipline of our bodily experience, we can gain a practical, "hands-on"
grasp of the actual workings of effective volition--a better mastery of the will's concrete
application in behavior. Knowing and desiring the right action will not avail if we cannot will
our bodies to perform it; and our surprising inability to perform the most simple bodily
tasks is matched only by our astounding blindness to this inability, these failures resulting
from inadequate somaesthetic awareness.
Just think of the struggling golfer who tries to keep his head down and his eyes on the
ball and who is completely convinced that he is doing so, even though he in fact miserably
fails to. His conscious will is unsuccessful because deeply ingrained somatic habits override
it; and he does not even notice this failure because his habitual sense perception is so
inadequate and distorted that it feels as if the action intended is indeed performed as
willed. In too much of our action we are like the "head-lifting" golfer whose will, however
strong, still remains impotent, since it lacks the somatic sensibility--the corporeal aisthesis--
to make it effective. Such somatic misperception and weakening of the will stunts our
efforts at virtue; hence, virtue itself demands somatic self-perfection.
Today's proponents of such reasoning are body therapists outside the current bounds
of legitimized philosophy, but their argument has ancient philosophical credentials. Diogenes
the Cynic was not alone in employing it to advocate rigorous body training as "that whereby,
with constant exercise, perceptions are formed such as secure freedom of movement for
virtuous deeds." iv. Pursuit of virtue and self-mastery is traditionally integrated into ethics'
quest for better living. If philosophy is concerned with the pursuit of happiness, then
somaesthetics' concern with the body as the locus and medium of our pleasures clearly
deserves more philosophical attention. Even the joys and stimulations of so-called pure
thought are (for us embodied humans) influenced by somatic conditioning and require
muscular contraction. They can therefore be intensified or better savored through improved
somatic awareness and discipline. A very sad curiosity of recent philosophy is that so much
inquiry has been devoted to the ontology and epistemology of pain, so little to its
psychosomatic management, to its mastery and transformation into tranquillity or pleasure.
v. These four neglected points do not exhaust the ways that somatics is central to
philosophy. Michel Foucault's seminal vision of the body as a docile, malleable site for
inscribing social power reveals the crucial role somatics can play for political philosophy. It
offers a way of understanding how complex hierarchies of power can be widely exercised
and reproduced without any need to make them explicit in laws or to officially enforce
them. Entire ideologies of domination can thus be covertly materialized and preserved by
encoding them in somatic norms that, as bodily habits, typically get taken for granted and
therefore escape critical consciousness. For example, the presumptions that "proper" women
speak softly, stay slim, eat dainty foods, sit with their legs close together, assume the
passive role or lower position in (heterosexual) copulation are embodied norms that sustain
women's social disempowerment while granting them full official liberty.
However, if oppressive power relations can impose onerous identities that get encoded
and sustained in our bodies, these oppressive relations can themselves be challenged by
alternative somatic practices. Fruitfully embraced by recent feminist and queer body
theorists, this Foucauldian message has long been part of the program of body therapists
like F. M. Alexander, Wilhelm Reich, and Moshe Feldenkrais.vi. Beyond the essential
epistemological, ethical, and socio-political issues already mentioned, the body plays a
crucial role in ontology. Just as Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty show its ontological centrality
as the focal point from which our world and reciprocally ourselves are constructively
projected, so analytic philosophy examines the body as a criterion for personal identity and
as the ontological ground (through its central nervous system) for explaining mental states.
vii. Finally, outside the legitimized realm of academic philosophy, somatic therapists like
Reich, Alexander, and Feldenkrais affirm deep reciprocal influences between one's body and
one's psychological development. Somatic malfunctioning is explained as both a product and
a reinforcing cause of personality problems, which themselves may require body work for
their proper remedy. Similar claims are made by yogis and Zen masters, but also by
bodybuilders and martial arts practitioners. In these diverse disciplines, somatic training
forms the heart of ethics' care of the self, a prerequisite to mental well-being and
psychological self-mastery.
These seven points may remind us that there is already an abundance of discourse on
the body in contemporary theory. But such body talk tends to lack two important features.
First, it needs a structuring overview or architectonic to integrate its very different,
seemingly incommensurable, discourses into a more productively systematic field. It would
be useful to have a comprehensive framework that could connect the discourse of biopolitics
with the therapies of Bioenergetics and might even link analytic philosophy's ontological
doctrines of psychosomatic supervenience to bodybuilding's principles of supersets. The
second thing lacking in most current philosophical body talk is a clear pragmatic
orientation--something that the individual can directly translate into a discipline of
improved somatic practice. Both these deficiencies can be remedied by the proposed field of
somaesthetics, a discipline of theory and practice.
IV.
Somaesthetics has three fundamental dimensions.i. Analytic somaesthetics describes the
basic nature of bodily perceptions and practices and also of their function in our knowledge
and construction of reality. This theoretical dimension involves traditional ontological and
epistemological issues of the body, but also includes the sort of sociopolitical inquiries
Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have made central: how the body is both shaped by power
and employed as an instrument to maintain it, how bodily norms of health, skill, and
beauty, and even the most basic categories of sex and gender, are constructed to reflect and
sustain social forces.
Foucault's approach to these somatic issues was typically genealogical, portraying the
historical emergence of various body doctrines, norms, and practices. Bourdieu's work
extends this descriptive approach with a sociologically detailed synchronic analysis of the
social constitution and deployment of body norms, which can be further complemented by
comparative analyses that contrast the body views and practices of two or more synchronic
cultures. The value of such historical-social analysis does not preclude a place for
somaesthetic analytics of a more universalist bent, like the kind found in Merleau-Ponty
and in the standard ontological theories of the mind-body relationship: dualism,
epiphenomenalism, eliminative materialism, functionalism, emergentism, and their
respective subvarieties.ii. In contrast to analytic somaesthetics, whose logic (whether
genealogical or ontological) is descriptive, pragmatic somaesthetics has a distinctly
normative, prescriptive character--by proposing specific methods of somatic improvement
and engaging in their comparative critique. Since the viability of any proposed method will
depend on certain facts about the body (whether ontological, physiological, or social), this
pragmatic dimension will always presuppose the analytic dimension. But it transcends mere
analysis not simply by evaluating the facts that analysis describes, but by proposing various
methods to improve certain facts by remaking the body and society.
Over the long course of human history, a vast variety of pragmatic disciplines have
been recommended to improve our experience and use of the body: diverse diets, body
piercing and scarification, forms of dance and martial arts, yoga, massage, aerobics,
bodybuilding, various erotic arts (including consensual sadomasochism), and such modern
psychosomatic therapies as the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, Bioenergetics,
Rolfing, etc.
These diverse methodologies of practice can be roughly classified in terms of
representational and experiential forms. Representational somaesthetics emphasizes the
body's external appearance, while experiential disciplines prefer to focus on the aesthetic
quality of its "inner" experience. Such experiential methods aim to make us "feel better" in
both senses of this ambiguous phrase (which reflects the ambiguity of the very notion of
aesthetics): to make the quality of our experience more satisfyingly rich, but also to make
our awareness of somatic experience more acute and perceptive. Cosmetic practices (from
make-up and hair-styling to plastic surgery) exemplify the representational side of
somaesthetics, while practices like yoga, zazen meditation, or Feldenkrais's "Awareness
Through Movement" are paradigmatic of the experiential mode in its senses of both
heightened quality and perceptual acuity.
Some popular body practices (like aerobics) do not fall exclusively into either
category. But the representational/experiential distinction remains useful, particularly for
refuting certain arguments that would condemn somaesthetics as intrinsically superficial
and devoid of the spiritual. Horkheimer and Adorno's famous critique of somatics provides a
good example of such arguments.
Any attempt "to bring about a renaissance of the body" must fail, they claim, because
it implicitly reinforces our culture's "distinction ... between the body and the spirit." As an
object of care, the body will be representationally exteriorized as a mere physical thing
("the dead thing, the 'corpus'") in contrast to the inner living spirit. Attention to the body is
thus always alienated attention to an external representation outside one's spiritual self.
Moreover, as external representation, it is inescapably dominated and deployed by society's
corrupt masters of the image--advertising and propaganda.The idolizing of the vital
phenomena from the "blond beast" to the South Sea islanders inevitably leads to the "sarong
film" and the advertising posters for vitamin pills and skin creams which simply stand for
the immanent aim of publicity: the new, great, beautiful, and noble type of man--the
Führer and his storm troopers.
Enthusiasts of bodily beauty and bodily training are not merely superficial; they are
more sinisterly linked to fascist exterminators, who treat the human body as a mere
"physical substance," a malleable mechanical tool whose parts must be shaped and
sharpened to make it more effectively serve whatever power controls it. By such Nazi logic,
if bodies are no longer in good repair, they should be melted down into soap or converted
into some other useful thing like a lamp shade.Those who extolled the body above all else,
the gymnasts and scouts, always had the closest affinity with killing. ... They see the body as
a moving mechanism, with joints as its components and flesh to cushion the skeleton. They
use the body and its parts as though they were already separated from it. ... They measure
others, without realizing it, with the gaze of a coffin maker [and so call them] tall, short, fat
or heavy. ... Language keeps pace with them. It has transformed a walk into motion and a
meal into calories.
Formulated more than fifty years ago, Horkheimer and Adorno's critique remains a
powerful summary of today's major indictments against aesthetics of the body. By
promoting seductive images of bodily beauty and excellence, somaesthetics stands accused
as a tool of capitalist advertising and political repression. It alienates, reifies, and fragments
the body, treating it as an external means and mechanism that is anatomized into separate
areas of intensive labor for ostentatious measurable results and the sale of countless
commodities marketed to achieve them. Hence we find our preoccupation with body
measurements and with specialized "fitness" classes devoted to "abs," thighs, butts, and so
forth; hence the billion-dollar cosmetics industry with its specialized products for different
body parts. A somatic aesthetics, the argument continues, must therefore undermine
individuality and freedom by urging conformity to standardized bodily measures and
models as optimally instrumental or attractive. These models, moreover, reflect and
reinforce oppressive social hierarchies (as, for example, the North American ideal of tall,
lean, blond, blue-eyed bodies obviously serves the privilege of its dominant ethnic groups).
Potent as such indictments may be, they all depend on construing somaesthetics as a
theory that reduces the body to an external object--a mechanical instrument of atomized
parts, measurable surfaces, and standardized norms of beauty. They ignore the body's
subject-role as the living locus of beautiful, personal experience. But somaesthetics, in its
experiential dimension, clearly refuses to exteriorize the body as an alienated thing distinct
from the active spirit of human experience. Nor does it necessarily impose a fixed set of
standardized norms of external measurement (e.g., optimal pulse) to assess good
somaesthetic experience.
The blindness of culture critics to the somatics of experience is understandable and
still widespread. For the somaesthetics of representation remains far more salient and
dominant in our culture, a culture largely built on the division of body from spirit, and
economically driven by the capitalism of conspicuous consumption that is fueled by the
marketing of body images. But precisely for this reason, the field of somaesthetics, with its
essential experiential dimension, needs more careful, reconstructive attention from
philosophers.
The representational/experiential distinction is thus useful in defending somaesthetics
from charges that neglect its interior, experienced depth. But the distinction must not be
taken as rigidly exclusive. For there is an inevitable complementarity of representations and
experience, of outer and inner. As commercial advertising rightly reminds us, how we look
influences how we feel; but also vice versa. Practices like dieting or bodybuilding that are
initially pursued for purposes of attractive representation often end up generating special
feelings that are then sought for their own sake. The dieter becomes an anorexic craving
the inner feel of hunger; the bodybuilder becomes an addict of the experiential surge of "the
pump."
Conversely, somatic methods aimed at inner experience often employ representational
means as cues to effect the body posture necessary for inducing the desired experience:
whether by consulting one's image in a mirror, focusing one's gaze on a body part like the
tip of the nose or the navel, or simply visualizing a body form in one's imagination. But, by
the same token, a representational practice like bodybuilding also utilizes acute awareness
of experiential clues (e.g., of optimal fatigue, body alignment, and full muscle extension) to
serve its sculptural ends of external form.
If the representational/experiential distinction is not logically exclusive, neither does
it seem entirely exhaustive. A third category of performative somaesthetics might be
introduced for disciplines devoted primarily to bodily strength or health; perhaps, for
example, to disciplines like the martial arts, athletics, gymnastics, and weightlifting (which
needs to be distinguished from bodybuilding). However, to the extent that such
performance-oriented practices aim either at the external exhibition of one's strength and
health or alternatively at one's inner feelings of those powers, we might assimilate them
into either the dominantly representational or experiential mode.
Another useful way of classifying somaesthetic practices may be in terms of whether
they are directed primarily at the individual practitioner herself or instead primarily at
others. A masseuse or a surgeon, for example, standardly works on others, but in doing T'ai
chi chu'an or cross-country training one is working more on one's own body. Clearly the
distinction between self-directed and other-directed somaesthetics cannot be rigid, since
many practices belong to both. As cosmetic practices of "make up" can be performed on
oneself or on others, so in sexual practices one typically seeks both one's own experiential
pleasures and one's partner's by maneuvering the bodies of both self and other. Moreover,
even self-directed somaesthetic work often seems motivated by the desire to please others,
while other-directed practices (like massage) can have its own self-oriented pleasures. But
despite its vagueness (partly due to the interdependence of the very concepts of self and
other), the distinction between self-directed and other-directed somaesthetics can at least
be useful in combating the common prejudice that to focus attention on the body implies a
selfish retreat from the social. iii. However we classify the different methodologies of
pragmatic somaesthetics, they need to be distinguished from their actual practice. I call this
third dimension practical somaesthetics. It is not a matter of producing theories or texts, not
even texts that offer pragmatic methods of somatic care. It is instead all about actually
practicing such care through intelligently disciplined body work aimed at somatic self-
improvement (whether in a representational, experiential, or performative mode).
Concerned not with saying but with doing, this practical dimension is the most neglected by
academic body philosophers, whose commitment to the discursive logos typically ends in
textualizing the body. For practical somaesthetics, the less said the better, if this means the
more work actually done. But, unfortunately, it usually means that actual body work simply
gets left altogether out of philosophical practice. Unfortunately, in philosophy, what goes
without saying typically goes without doing, so the concrete activity of body work must be
emphatically named as the crucial practical dimension of somaesthetics conceived as a
comprehensive philosophical discipline concerned with self-knowledge and self-care.
V.
Having explained what somaesthetics means by outlining its three main dimensions and its
representational and experiential modes, I turn to issues raised by the rest of this paper's
title. If somaesthetics is introduced as "a disciplinary proposal," what sort of discipline
could it be? How would it, or should it, relate to the traditional disciplines of aesthetics and
philosophy?
The first question is more easily answered. In proposing somaesthetics as a discipline,
this paper deliberately plays on discipline's double meaning: as a branch of learning or
instruction and as a corporal form of training or exercise. Clearly, the analytic dimension of
somaesthetics could contain systematic bodies of knowledge, for example, historical and
anthropological studies of body norms, ideals, and practices, or psychological and ontological
theories of mind-body relations, etc. These various forms of knowledge, which can
illuminate the body's use as a site of beauty, are typically lodged on very different and
often nonintersecting disciplinary branches. Part of the point of proposing somaesthetics as
a discipline is to constitute a disciplinary branch that structurally links and can fruitfully
unify the many body-related studies that are presently pursued in unconnected inquiries
and seemingly incommensurable disciplinary frames.
The same argument can be made with respect to what I call pragmatic somaesthetics.
From diet books to yoga manuals, from "make-over" and exercise videos to handbooks of
bodybuilding and guides to psychosomatic therapies, we find a confusingly vast array of
theories for improving the use, health, and experience of our bodies. Linking them together
under the disciplinary rubric of somaesthetics can help us bring a more productive order to
this confusing profusion by encouraging the search for basic common principles and
differentiating criteria in terms of which these diverse practices can be classified and
related. In contrast, the kind of activity I identify as practical somaesthetics captures the
second sense of disciplinarity--its pursuit as not mere theory but as actual corporal training
or practice.
Where, then, can this threefold, double-jointed discipline of somaesthetics find a place
in the wider disciplinary matrix of knowledge? Could it find a comfortable nest in an
already established branch of learning or must it struggle to form its own special limb to
climb out on? Its name implies that somaesthetics might best be nested as a subdiscipline
within the already well-established discipline of aesthetics, which, in turn, would be
expanded and somewhat transformed by the inclusion of somaesthetics.
To make this option more convincing, I began by showing how somaesthetics, though
omitted from Baumgarten's founding program of modern aesthetics, seems necessary for its
full success. In any case, long before Baumgarten's aesthetics, the appreciation of bodily
beauty and sensory acuity was central to the concerns we now call aesthetic, not only
among the Greeks and Romans but also in Asian philosophical traditions. This attitude still
survives in Western modernity, though it has been largely eclipsed by our dominant idealist
aesthetic tradition. Consider David Hume (a contemporary of Baumgarten) and Friedrich
Nietzsche. With his normative notion of "the perfection of every sense," Hume's insistence on
practice as a method for sharpening the sensory appreciation required by good critics points
surely in the direction of somaesthetics. So does Nietzsche's celebration of the body with his
advocacy of "an ever-greater spiritualization and multiplication of the senses" to realize the
body's aesthetic potential for life-enhancing value. Such examples also show that, given the
multiplicity of the body's aesthetic uses and pleasures, there is no reason to exclude our tiny
eye muscles or invisible taste buds from the domain of somaesthetic exercise, which must
not be confined to the brute image of building bulk for bulging biceps.
Somaesthetics, then, seems easiest to construe as a subdiscipline of aesthetics, a
counterpart of already established subdisciplines like "musical aesthetics," "visual
aesthetics," or "environmental aesthetics," though one more centered on the body. But
this idea could raise two objections.. First, while the other subdisciplines seem defined by a
specific artistic genre or a special category of aesthetic objects (e.g., natural and constructed
environments), somaesthetics seems to cut across the whole range of aesthetic genres. This
is because it treats the body not only as an object of aesthetic value and creation but also as
a crucial sensory medium for enhancing our dealings with all other aesthetic objects and
also with matters not standardly aesthetic. We can easily see, for example, how
somaesthetics' improvement of sensory acuity, muscular movement, and experiential
awareness could fruitfully contribute to the understanding and practice of traditional arts
like music, painting, and dance (a somaesthetic art par excellence), and how it could also
enhance our appreciation of the natural and constructed environments that we navigate and
inhabit. Moreover, by addressing enterprises not typically taken as aesthetic--not only
martial arts, sports, meditative practices, and psychosomatic therapies, but the core
philosophical tasks of self-knowledge and self-mastery, somaesthetics threatens to burst the
bounds of a narrowly aesthetic discipline.
There is a blunt reply to this first objection: So much the worse for narrow definitions
of aesthetics! As an open, essentially contested concept, aesthetics can absorb new topics
and practices. Moreover, some of these "imported" topics are not really new to the field of
aesthetics. Far older and grander than the recent interest in sports aesthetics, there looms
an illustrious tradition of exploring aesthetics as a key to ethics and the art of living, a
tradition powerfully exemplified in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and
in the writings of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the later Foucault.
A second objection to subsuming somaesthetics as a branch of aesthetics might go as
follows: If aesthetics is a subdiscipline of philosophy and somaesthetics purports to be a
subdiscipline of aesthetics, then by the transitivity of subsumption, somaesthetics should
also be a subdiscipline (or a sub-subdiscipline) of philosophy. But though it clearly contains
philosophy, somaesthetics seems to include too much other stuff to be contained as a
philosophical subdiscipline. It claims to address not only anthropological, sociological, and
historical research on the body, but also physiological and psychological research.
Moreover, through its practical dimension, somaesthetics even engages in bodily practices
that seem foreign, if not inimical, to the tradition of philosophy: martial arts, fashion,
cosmetics, bodybuilding, dieting, etc. If philosophy is defined as theory, then does not
somaesthetics' crucial practical dimension bar its entry as a philosophical subdiscipline?
To such objections I see two possible responses. One is to argue for a wider conception
of philosophy. Such a conception not only admits the valuable role of historical,
anthropological, sociological, and other empirical science for philosophical research but
further insists on philosophy as more than mere theory, recalling the ancient idea of
philosophy as an embodied practice, a way of life. The ideal of philosophy as informed by
all the pertinent sciences and directed toward the improved conduct of life may seem alien
to our academic training and professional self-image as specialists of conceptual analysis.
Its full achievement may be beyond our powers, and it surely seems impossible to realize
through ordinary classroom instruction. Just imagine what would happen to the philosophy
professor who asked his seminar in somaesthetics to study Wilhelm Reich's body therapy by
lying down in class and practicing the Reichian orgasm reflex. Would asking students to lift
weights or perform yoga postures and breathing exercises be much easier? Even asking
them to dance or sing or keep a special diet would seem a shock to today's academic
philosophical posture of pure theory. But ancient philosophical schools, like later religious
orders (and military academies), have often been very different in this regard, applying the
institutional discipline of instructing disciples in a far more holistic sense. For all the
difficulties it presents for conventional academia, this ideal remains a venerable and
appealing model of philosophy, into which somaesthetics could nicely fit as a subdiscipline.
There is, of course, another way to admit the very wide range of somaesthetic inquiry
and also embrace its concrete performance of bodily practice, while still keeping this
discipline as a subdiscipline of aesthetics. We can simply regard aesthetics as much more
than a subdiscipline of philosophy. Such a broad conception of aesthetics that transcends
philosophy by more closely engaging the human and natural sciences was in fact advocated
by some influential aestheticians of the mid-twetieth century, like Max Dessoir and Thomas
Munro. Arguing repeatedly against philosophy's constraining stranglehold on aesthetics,
they sought to create aesthetics as an interdisciplinary field that would be independent of
philosophy, a discipline with its own special journals and "distinct departments." By further
broadening this idea, we could construe aesthetics as a discipline that, besides its theoretical
pursuits, also involves instruction in the performance (not merely the appreciation) of arts
and other aesthetic practices. If it is foreign to most philosophy departments, this broad
conception of aesthetic discipline is familiarly at work in other academies--of music, art,
dance, and cooking.
Of these two options for nesting somaesthetics in aesthetics, which should be favored?
As a professional philosopher keen to promote broad and practical conceptions of his
discipline, I would prefer absorbing the swell of somaesthetics within the philosophical fold,
thus enhancing the discipline of philosophy. One might also worry whether aesthetics as an
autonomous discipline independent of philosophy is institutionally sturdy enough to bear
the challenge of digesting somaesthetics.
Nevertheless, I am content to leave these precise questions of affiliation provisionally
open, for at least three reasons. As a new, still schematic proposal, somaesthetics should not
yet let its disciplinary bonds be tied too tightly. It should be allowed enough freedom to
grow in the directions (and under the larger disciplines) that prove most fruitful for its
progress. Secondly, in order to develop, somaesthetics must be the collaborative work of a
community of thinkers and practitioners, not the pronouncement of an individual voice.
That community, not this individual, will best define its precise disciplinary home and
limits. The third reason why I readily leave open such detailed questions of affiliation and
demarcation is that there are far more pressing, if not more interesting, issues to pursue in
the field of somaesthetics than the drawing of its precise boundaries.
VI.
Some of these important issues can be introduced by contrasting two twentieth-century
philosophers, John Dewey and Michel Foucault, who are exemplary for working in all three
dimensions of somaesthetics. Prompted by Darwin and James, Dewey developed a naturalist
"emergent" account of what he called "body-mind." But this ontological theory was likewise
guided by his study of the pragmatic "body-mind" methodology of the Alexander Technique,
to which Dewey devoted several celebratory essays. And Dewey's commitment to body-
mind unity was perhaps most inspired by his concrete practical exercises in the Alexander
Technique, in which he exercised himself for more than twenty years and to which (at the
age of almost ninety) he attributed his good health and longevity.
Foucault's avid pursuit of somaesthetics in all its three major branches is no less
remarkable than Dewey's, though radically different. The analytic genealogist, who showed
how "docile bodies" were systematically shaped by seemingly innocent body-disciplines to
advance certain socio-political agendas, emerges also as the pragmatic methodologist
proposing alternative body practices to overcome the repressive ideologies entrenched in
our docile bodies. Foremost among these alternatives were practices of consensual
sadomasochism, whose experiences, he argued, challenged not only the hierarchy of the
head but the privileging of genital sexuality, which in turn privileged heterosexuality.
Foucault also repeatedly advocated strong "drugs which can produce very intense
pleasures," insisting that they "must become a part of our culture." Bravely practicing the
somaesthetics he preached, Foucault tested his favored methodologies by experimenting on
his own flesh and with other live bodies, most notably through strong drugs and gay
sadomasochism.
In Practicing Philosophy I probe the limits of Foucault's favored methods while
affirming somaesthetic alternatives that he neglects and I prefer to practice. But one can
hardly deny the value of drugs and consensual sadomasochism for the precise projects of
somaesthetics that Foucault was personally most concerned with, projects of radical
innovation, gay liberation, and his own problematic quest for pleasure. Indeed, "different
strokes for different folks" affirms a vernacular wisdom apt for more than S/M's disciples.
To some extent, must not this pluralism be a maxim not only for somaesthetics but for
the whole idea of philosophy as a way of life, a disciplined aesthetic practice whose greatest
artwork is our self? If Emerson and Nietzsche are right that each self is essentially unique
(the unrepeatable product of myriad contingencies), should not each self require its own
special philosophy and body practice? "Every man," says Thoreau, "is the builder of a
temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get
off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our
own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins to refine a man's features, any
meanness or sensuality to imbrute them."
But, on the other hand, do not our embodied selves share significant commonalties of
biological make-up and societal conditioning that would allow some interesting
generalizations about the values and risks of different somatic methods? How could
philosophy or science (or even practical life) be possible without such generalization?
Somaesthetics must reconcile the claims of bodily difference and freedom of taste with
the contrasting claims of objective bodily norms and bodily needs that straddle the much
contested nature/culture distinction. If it can appeal to no fixed definition of bodily beauty
or pleasure, somaesthetics must nonetheless grapple with justifying judgments that certain
somatic forms, functions, and experience can be better or worse than others. These are
thorny problems, but they should not strike us aestheticians as very peculiar. For they
essentially embody the familiar theoretical tensions between aesthetic subjectivity and
normative standards, between individual taste and sensus communis, that form the heart of
modern aesthetics since Hume and Kant. Here again, somaesthetics remains firmly rooted in
the problematics of traditional aesthetic theory.
But there are also more practical (and more existentially pressing) questions of
somaesthetics that deserve more attention from aesthetic philosophers. In the postmodern
pluralist confusion of our culture, we are steeped in the ideology of lifestyles and saturated
with a bewildering variety to choose from. How, then, should we shape and care for our
embodied selves? With hallucinogenic drugs or vegetarian diet, with shaved heads or
dreadlocks, with prick rings and leather masks or with steroids and silicone implants,
through piercing or aerobics or through yogic exercises of pranayama? Are there useful
criteria for choosing between the very different somaesthetic programs on offer? Are there
any good ways of combining them? Why do those philosophically rich and critically
reflective somaesthetic disciplines that are central to Asian philosophy remain so foreign to
our Western philosophical work?
These questions suggest only a minute fraction of the issues pointedly collected and
posed by somaesthetics as a disciplinary proposal. If such issues still lack systematic
treatment but are implied in Baumgarten's original "mission statement" of aesthetics, if they
are likewise implied by the classic idea of philosophy as an embodied way of life, then
somaesthetics deserves to be named and pursued as a branch of philosophical inquiry. The
precise place it will eventually take in the much wider field of philosophy is not something
we can guarantee at its initial proposal. For such issues depend not only on the dominant
directions that future somaesthetic inquiries will take, but also on the changing, essentially
contested field of philosophy itself, with its equally changing and contested subdisciplines.
Initially, however, somaesthetics seems most modestly and securely situated within
an expanded discipline of aesthetics. Such an enlarged aesthetics would give more
systematic attention to the body's crucial roles in aesthetic perception and experience,
including the aesthetic dimensions of body therapies, sports, martial arts, cosmetics, etc.,
that remain marginalized in academic aesthetic theory. But to incorporate somaesthetics'
practical dimension, the field of aesthetics must also expand its notion of disciplinary
attention to actual, hands-on training in specific body practices that aim at somaesthetic
improvement. Inclusion of such body work may make aesthetics more difficult to teach or
practice in the standard university classroom, but it certainly could make the field more
exciting and absorbing, as it comes to engage more of our embodied selves.
Once notoriously condemned for its lifeless "dreariness" of woolly idealism, aesthetics
can achieve a robust, full-blooded vitality by affirming its necessary but neglected link to
the living soma. Somaesthetics affirms this link, not simply by its program (still so
schematic and provisional), but even by its very name.
RICHARD SHUSTERMAN
Department of Philosophy
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
INTERNET: shusrich@astro.ocis.temple.edu
. Michel de Montaigne, "Of Presumption," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne
(Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 484.
. See Richard Shusterman, "Die Sorge um den Körper in der heutigen Kultur," in
Philosophische Ansichte der Kultur der Moderne, ed. Andreas Kuhlmann (Frankfurt: Fischer,
1994), pp. 241-277.
. J. M. Guyau, Les problèmes de l'esthétique contemporaine (1884), 11th ed. (Paris:
Alcan, 1925), pp. 20-21; cf. the book's English translation: Problems of Contemporary
Aesthetics (Los Angeles: DeVorss, 1947), p. 23.
. See Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical
Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 127-129, 166-177, the first English text where I
employ the term "somaesthetics." The term was introduced in Vor der Interpretation
(Vienna: Passagen, 1996), p. 132, which is a revised German translation of my Sous
l'interprétation (Paris: L'éclat, 1994). See also my "Somaesthetics and the Body/Media
Issue," Body and Society 3 (1997): 33-49. The somatic was also central to the aesthetics I
earlier developed in Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell,
1992), pp. 6-7, 52-53, 258-261.
. The idea of somaesthetics has already been ridiculed in the German press.
Reviewing Vor der Interpretation in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (28
November, 1996, p. 10), the reviewer distortively lampooned somaesthetics' notion of an
embodied philosophical discipline as "something like whipping oneself while reading Kant,
mountain-climbing while reading Nietzsche, and doing breathing exercises while reading
Heidegger." This sort of exercising while reading was, of course, nothing like what I
described or meant by somaesthetics.
. Baumgarten first used the term in section 116 of his 1735 doctoral thesis,
Meditiationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poëma pertintibus. After giving a course of
lectures on aesthetics in 1742 and 1749 at the University of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, he
published a long treatise (in Latin) entitled Aesthetica in 1750, complemented in 1758 by a
shorter second part. My citations from Baumgarten are from the bilingual (Latin-German)
abridged edition of this work, Alexander Baumgarten, Theoretische Ästhetik: Die
grundlengenden Abschnitte aus der "Aesthetica" (1750/58), trans. H. R. Schweizer
(Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988). The English translations are mine. Subsequent references
will be noted parenthetically in my text.
. There exists, however, an English translation of Baumgarten's doctoral thesis and
first book, cited above. Translated and edited by Karl Aschenbrenner and W. B. Hoelther, it
bears the English title Reflections on Poetry (University of California Press, 1954).
. "Caro" is often used in negative contrast to the soul, as in Seneca's famous remark:
"In hoc obnoxio domicilio animus liber habitat. Numquam me caro ista compellet ad metum,
numquam ad indignam bono simulationem" ("In this noxious dwelling, the soul lives free.
Never shall my flesh drive me to feel fear, or to assume any pretence that is unworthy of a
good man"), Seneca's Epistles, 65:22. "Caro" is also used in a conventional Latin phrase used
to designate someone with contempt--"caro putida" (rotten or putrid flesh). See Harper's
Latin Dictionary (New York: Harper, 1907), p. 294.
. Baumgarten originally came from a Pietist background and was, of course, aware of
the great risks that early Enlightenment philosophers still faced if they theorized in ways
that conflicted with Church doctrine. His philosophical hero, Christian Wolff, was exiled from
Halle (where Baumgarten studied and later taught), because his doctrines incensed the
religious leaders there. Texts by Spinoza and his followers, with their heterodox views on
God and mind-body unity, were also frequently burned at that time. In short, the
dominantly religious ideological context into which Baumgarten had to introduce aesthetics
would have been very intolerant of philosophies that emphasized the body.
. In the "Introduction" to Practicing Philosophy, I offer some tentative hypotheses
concerning the historical reasons for philosophy's retreat from a full-bodied art of living
into a mere academic discipline of theory. The explanations I offer build largely on the work
of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, but the bulk of my efforts are devoted to exploring
contemporary possibilities and models for practicing philosophy as an embodied art of
living.
. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Harvard University Press,
1991), vol. 1, pp. 153, 163; Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates (London: Penguin, 1990), p.
172.
. Of Diogenes the Cynic it is said: "He would adduce indisputable evidence to show how
easily from gymnastic training we arrive at virtue." Even the pre-Socratic Cleobulus, a sage
"distinguished for strength and beauty, and initiated in Egyptian philosophy," "advised
people to practice bodily exercise" in their pursuit of wisdom. The citations in this
paragraph come from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 91, 95, 153, 221; vol. 2, pp. 71, 215.
. Yasuo Yuasa, The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory (SUNY Press, 1987), p.
25. In Yuasa's later book, The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy (SUNY Press, 1993), the
term shugyo is translated as "self-cultivation." Derived from combining the two Chinese
characters that respectively stand for "mastery" and "practice," shugyo literally means to
"master a practice," but the idea that this requires self-cultivation and self-mastery is
implicit and essential.
. Having given a detailed philosophical analysis of these practices in "Die Sorge um
den Körper in der heutigen Kultur," I offer here only a small sample of important primary
sources. F. M. Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (New York: Dutton,
1924), and The Use of the Self (New York: Dutton, 1932); Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness
Through Movement (New York: Harper Collins, 1977), and The Potent Self (New York:
Harper Collins, 1992); and Alexander Lowen, Bioenergetics (New York: Penguin, 1975).
. Diogenes Laertius, vol. 1, p. 71; cf. vol. 1, p. 221; vol. 2, p. 119.
. Pleasure, of course, does not exhaust the valuable feelings that somaesthetics, like
aesthetics, should examine and achieve. But in challenging pleasure's monopoly of all value,
we should not trivialize pleasure's worth and minimize its depth and range of varieties. For
a debate on this issue, see Alexander Nehamas, "Richard Shusterman on Pleasure and
Aesthetic Experience" (and my response) in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56
(1998): 49-53.
. See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968);
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962); and
Owen Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, 2nd. ed. (MIT Press, 1991).
. While supervenience is a concept familiar to readers of this journal, that of supersets
may require an explanation: "Supersets are two [or more bodybuilding] exercises performed
in a row without stopping." For more details, see Arnold Schwarzenegger, Encyclopedia of
Modern Bodybuilding (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 161.
. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979);
The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980); vol. 2, The Use
of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1986); and vol. 3, The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage,
1988); and Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford University Press, 1990), and "La
Connaissance par Corps" in Meditations Pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, 1997).
. I am not, of course, claiming that disciplines like yoga and zazen (or those of
Feldenkrais and Alexander) are pursued entirely or primarily for their aesthetic
experiences. But they do in fact underline their aesthetic dimensions and benefits. See, for
example, the ancient Hatha Yoga Pradipika by Svatmarama Swami, trans. Pancham Sinh
(Allabad, India, 1915), which speaks of how "a yogi's body becomes divine, glowing, healthy,
and emits a divine smell," so that he or she "becomes next to the God of Love in beauty" (pp.
23, 57). See also Dogen's "Principles of Seated Meditation" in Carl Bielefeldt, Dogen's Manuals
of Zen Meditation (University of California Press, 1988). For Feldenkrais and Alexander, see
the references in note 14.
. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York:
Continuum, 1986), pp. 232, 233.
. Ibid., pp. 233-234.
. Ibid., p. 234.
. Ibid., p. 235.
. This is not to say that experiential somaesthetics can present no norms or ideals: the
famed "runner's high" and bodybuilder's "pump" could be seen as posing standards of
experiential success.
. Shannon Sullivan makes interesting use of this distinction in applying my concept of
somaesthetics to integrate Nietzschean views of embodiment with feminist concerns and
with what she regards as the more dominantly other-directed orientation of female body
practices. See her inaugural lecture at Pennsylvania State University (October 1998),
"Nietzsche's Somaesthetics: A Discipline for Women?" as yet unpublished.
. For a helpful account of how classical Indian aesthetics emphasizes the body and its
sensuous pleasures, see Rekha Jhanji, The Sensuous in Art: Reflections on Indian Aesthetics
(Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989), a book that refutes the very transcendental-religious
image of Indian aesthetics that has been so influential through the work of Ananda
Coomaraswamy.
. See David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays Moral Political, and Literary,
ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), p. 236. For a recent study of Hume's
essay that greatly illuminates this point of perceptual acuity, see James R. Shelley, "Hume
and the Nature of Taste," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 29-38, the
1997 John Fisher Memorial Prize Essay. The Nietzsche citation is from The Will to Power
(New York: Vintage, 1968), section 820, p. 434. Merleau-Ponty is another important
philosopher who insists on the body's role in aesthetic perception and artistic creation. See
his account of painting in "Eye and Mind," in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of
Perception (Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 159-190.
. A useful introductory group of articles and bibliography for the aesthetics of sport
can be found in Sport and the Body: A Philosophical Symposium, 2nd ed., eds. E. W. Gerber
and W. J. Morgan (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1979). For a fine genealogical study of
philosophy's tradition as an art of living in Socrates, Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and
Foucault, see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living (University of California Press, 1998). It
is also worth mentioning the recent work of Wolfgang Welsch, which advocates, through the
concept of aisthesis, a very broad notion of aesthetics that is not primarily centered on art.
See, for example, "Aesthetics Beyond Aesthetics" in his Undoing Aesthetics (London: Sage,
1997), pp. 78-102.
. It would, of course, be a philosophical subdiscipline on a different level from that of
the philosophical subdiscipline of aesthetics which subsumes it; somaesthetics could thus
perhaps more precisely be designated as a sub-subdiscipline of philosophy. I would like to
thank an anonymous referee of the JAAC whose critical comments on an earlier draft of my
essay were very helpful on several points, but especially in prompting me to consider more
carefully the question of disciplinary affiliation discussed in section V. 31. For further
critique of the argument that philosophy usefully treat somatic experiences because it is
confined, by its disciplinary definition, to the linguistic realm, see Practicing Philosophy,
chap. 6.
. See Thomas Munro, "Aesthetics and Philosophy in American Colleges," The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 4 (1946): 185-187; and further his "Society and Solitude in
Aesthetics," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 3 (1945): 33-42, and "Aesthetics as
Science: Its Development in America," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9 (1951):
161-207. The JAAC (and its earlier international models, which pursued aesthetics outside
narrowly philosophical perspectives) played an important role in Munro's quest for the
autonomy of aesthetics from philosophy. For a fuller explanation of Munro's strategies of
deploying this journal to erect aesthetics as an independent field and to ensconce America
as its prime locus, see Lydia Goehr, "The Institutionalization of a Discipline: A Retrospective
of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the American Society for Aesthetics,
1939-1992," and Richard Shusterman, "Aesthetics Between Nationalism and
Internationalism," both in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 99-121
and 157-167, respectively.
. For more details on Dewey's somatic theories and practices and his relationship to
Alexander, see my Practicing Philosophy, chaps. 1, 6.
. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 384; cf. p. 378.
. See Practicing Philosophy, chap. 1, and also Richard Shusterman, "The Self as a Work
of Art," The Nation, June 30, 1997, pp. 25-28.
. For more details on this theme in Emerson and Nietzsche, see Richard Shusterman,
"Styles et styles de vie: originalite, authenticite, et de doublement du moi," Litterature 105
(1997): 102-109.
. Henry David Thoreau, Walden in The Portable Thoreau (New York: Viking, 1969), p.
468.
. New names have their efficacy for reorganizing and thus reanimating old insights, as
William James shrewdly recognized in defining pragmatism as "a new name for some old
ways of thinking," a definition that aptly fits my notion of somaesthetics. 2425