Abstract
In the pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey, I regard experience as a central concept of philosophy and affirm the body as an organizing core of experience. So in developing a pragmatist aesthetics and a theory of philosophy as an art of living, I proposed a more constructive and systematic philosophical approach to the body which I call “somaesthetics” and which I conceive as a discipline of theory and practice . Somaesthetics is deeply concerned with important educational aims and may offer some interesting new perspectives and techniques with respect to learning. But it also presents some particular problems with respect to its teaching in the standard university curriculum. In this paper, after briefly outlining the aims and structure of somaesthetics, I examine its educational potential and problems, considering both historical sources and the contemporary situation.
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Notes
introduced somaesthetics very briefly in Vor der Interpretation (Wien: Passagen, 1996), but explain it in greater detail in Practicing philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997), Pragmatist aesthetics, 2nd edition (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), and Performing live (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). For critical discussion of somaesthetics, see the symposium on Pragmatist Aesthetics in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 16:1(2002) with papers by Paul Taylor, Thomas Leddy, Antonia Soulez , and my reply to them; see also the papers on somaesthetics and Performing Live in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, 36:4 (2002), with papers by Martin Jay, Gustavo Guerra, Kathleen Higgins, Casey Haskins, and myself Besides these critics, I wish to thank my Feldenkrais trainers, especially Yvan Joly, for helpful insights on somatic education. My four-year training program to become a certified Feldenkrais Practitioner (1998–2002) and my subsequent work as a practitioner have provided an important part of the experiential background for some of the views I formulate in this paper.
For details see, Pragmatist Aesthetics, ch. 10.
Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates (London: Penguin, 1970), 172
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the eminent philosophers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 71.
See Wilhelm Reich, The function of the orgasm (New York: Noonday, 1973), Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), and Pierre Bourdieu, The logic of practice (Stanford University Press. 1990), ch.4.
Judith Butler has adapted some of Foucault’s insights to advocate tranfigurative somatic performances of gender parody (such as drag and cross-dressing) for purposes of feminist emancipation. Iris Marion Young has also argued for the somatic dimension of woman’s liberation by drawing on ideas from Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. All these approaches fail to see the full spectrum of possibilities that somaesthetics encompasses, and they seem especially blind to the value and uses of experiential somaesthetics and its heightening of explicit, reflective body awareness. For a detailed discussion of these points, see Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and the second sex: A pragmatist reading of a feminist classic,” Hypatia 18:4 (2003); and “The silent, limping body of philosophy,” in T. Carman and M. Hansen, The Cambridge companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
See Arnold Schwarzenegger, Encyclopedia of modern body building (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985) 82,115.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (New York: Basic Books. 1979). 54. 118.125.
Immanuel Kant, Reflexionen zur Kritische Philosophie (Hgr.), Beno Erdman 9tuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1992, paras. 7, 19 (pp. 68–9). Kant later critically remarks that “man is usually full of sensations when he is empty of thought” para. 106 (p. 117).
Kant had personal reasons for rejecting attention to somantic sensations. By his own confession, Kant sometimes suffered from huypochondria, so that heightened attention to inner somatic sensations seemed apt to result in “morbid feelings” of anxiety. See his book The contest of the Faculties (Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1992), 187–189.
I develop this point with much more detail and argument in Richard Shusterman, “Wittgenstein on bodily feelings: Explanation and melioration in philosophy of mind, art, and politics,” in Cressida Heyes, The Grammar of politics: Wittgenstein and political philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
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Shusterman, R. (2004). Somaesthetics and Education: Exploring the Terrain. In: Bresler, L. (eds) Knowing Bodies, Moving Minds. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2023-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2023-0_4
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