Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics
"Richard Shusterman's collection takes the first philosophical step in the new millennium, going beyond the action theory that emerged in the 1970s and building a historical pyramid from Socrates to his own conception of somaesthetics: a scholarly monument ranging from muscle memory to vital topics in aesthetics, including ars erotica."-Arthur C. Danto, Columbia University"History will remember Richard Shusterman for precipitating the somatic turn that the increasingly embodied discipline of philosophy has taken in our own time. Shusterman's Thinking through the Body is a set of seminal essays in a growing subfield he has termed 'somaesthetics' that requires nothing less than a new understanding of how our thinking and feeling can be enhanced by a cultivated somatic awareness. Calling his readers back to a relatively straightforward and practical account of everyday lived experience, he challenges us to reconceive how it is that an educated body consciousness enables us reflexively to structure, theorize, aestheticize, and indeed 'appreciate' the entire human experience in the fullest sense of this term. By fully acknowledging the sentient and purposive body as an aesthetic medium through which a life is lived deliberately, sensitively, and graciously, we are best able to enchant the ordinary and to inspire the everyday."- Roger T. Ames, University of Hawai'i"In this powerful book, Richard Shusterman reviews and extends his conception of somaesthetics. Bridging analytic and continental philosophical traditions; lived, embodied experience and the cogito; the intellect and the senses; Shusterman moves gracefully from philosopher to practitioner and back again. He shows how philosophy as an embodied art of living can find expression in today's disembodied world, while interpreting and redefining philosophical insights that others have stripped of their somatic implications. Above all, he is hopeful about our bodies - a striking kind of hope, in a Western context of disdain for the 'abnormal,' a radically objectifying visual culture, and environments that serve the physical flourishing of almost no one. Shusterman still believes that a somaesthetic philosophy can speak with and to body practices in the service of a politics of transformation. His creative and diverse essays not only tell but also show us what this might look like."- Cressida J. Heyes, University of Alberta"THE PROJECT OF RICHARD SHUSTERMAN's philosophical work on the body is an ambitious one: to take philosophy "in a pragmatic meliorist direction," as he puts it in Thinking Through the Body, "reviving the ancient idea of philosophy as an embodied way of life rather than a mere discursive field of abstract theory... makes a compelling case for the integration of analytic, pragmatic, and practical somaesthetics.... Shusterman's insights in the realms of philosophy and aesthetics are cogent and interesting, but he doesn't limit himself to the canon. In his essay on muscle memory, he takes more of a therapeutic turn, focusing on how training in somatic awareness can ameliorate the "somaesthetic pathologies of everyday life." In Thinking Through the Body, it is his essays on art and culture that hold out the most promise for somaesthetics.... offers a compelling new lens with which to explore alternate approaches to thinking through embodiment..."-Janet Sarbanes, Los Angeles Review of Books