The Body as Background: Pragmatism and Somaesthetics

Abstract

The notion of the background has progressively moved into the foreground of philosophical discussion. Over the past century, philosophers have increasingly recognized that the mental life of which we are conscious and through which we act to realize our intention cannot adequately function without relying on a background of which we are not properly conscious but which guides and structures our conscious thought and action. The body has also been largely neglected, misinterpreted, and negatively valued by the dominantly idealistic tradition of Western philosophy, but it too has also increasingly moved to the foreground of philosophical theory, and has indeed constituted my principal axis of research for the last decade. But because the term ‘body’ is too often contrasted with mind and used to designate insentient, lifeless things, while the term ‘flesh’ (used by Maurice Merleau-Ponty) has such negative associations in Christian culture and moreover focuses merely on the fleshly part of the body, I have chosen the term soma to designate the living, sensing, dynamic, perceptive body that lies at the heart of my research project of somaesthetics.¹