Leon Krings - Panel 32 ENOJP Brussels
Channel: European Network of Japanese Philosophy
Date: 2017-08-23

"Philosophical Life as Somaesthetic Practice: kata in the Japanese Arts of the Body" Leon Krings - Universität Hildesheim, Germany

Only fairly recently in the history of Western Philosophy has the body become a central topic for philosophers to ponder over. This trend started with thinkers like Schopenhauer who identified the fundamental principle of his thought, the Will, with concrete bodily acts, or Nietzsche who designated the body as the “big self ” in contrast to the “small self ” of the conscious subject. Today, mainly neurophysiologic and phenomenological approaches determine our philosophical understanding of the body. Since antiquity the East Asian traditions have emphasized the role of the body for human life. Especially in some schools of Buddhism and Daoism – and under their influence, also of Neo-Confucianism – our bodily way of being-in-the-world as well as practices of somaesthetic self-care and meditative self-cultivation are a central concern. Mainly under the influence of Zen-Buddhism, a variety of “Ways” (jap. 道 dō / michi) of somaesthetic practice have developed in Japan. Many of these ways of self-cultivation present the practitioner with a set of basic forms of bodily movement or posture called kata (型or 形). The kata are fundamental bodily patterns of the respective “art” or “way” which have to be repeatedly embodied and provide a concrete starting ground for a reflective self-structuring and self-emptying of the human subject as something which both is the body as well as transcends it, as can be seen in Zen master Dōgen’s famous phrase “dropping of body and mind” or Nishida Kitarō’s concept of “historical body.” Using the concept of kata as a mediator between theory and practice as well as between body and mind, I will connect accounts of our being-in-the-world from Zen-Buddhism and modern Japanese Philosophy to phenomenological analyses of the lived body (Leib) in contrast to the body-as-object (Körper) and sensorimotor accounts of the role of proprioception, interoception and embodiment for our perception and structuring of ourselves and our world. 

This talk took place at the Second annual conference of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy [ENOJP] 7–10 December 2016, Université libre de Bruxelles [ULB].

For more informations:
http://enojp.org/
http://chisokudopublications.com/

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