Richard Marc Shusterman

Philosophy is typically identified with the textual practices of reading and writing and oral dialogue. It has also claimed to be an entire way of life, an art of living dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom and thus to the practices that such pursuit should entail. This chapter probes to what extent philosophy as a practice or art of living requires a literary or more generally textual form. It also considers why it should not confine itself to the limits of discourse. It argues that if philosophy requires more than words, there is a twofold challenge for philosophy as a way of life. It is not enough to compose texts and refine our language with logical and literary skill; we must also take real pains, in practicing philosophy, to give careful composition to our character, behavior, and bearing, and to refine them through harmonizing grace and attractive style.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking Through the Body, Educating for the Humanities:A Plea for SomaestheticsRichard Shusterman (bio)IWhat are the humanities, and how should they be cultivated? With respect to this crucial question, opinions differ as to how widely the humanities should be construed and pursued. Initially connoting the study of Greek and Roman classics, the concept now more generally covers arts and letters, history, and philosophy.1 But does it also include the social sciences, which are often distinguished from the humanities and grouped as a separate academic division with greater pretensions to scientific status? And should our pursuit of humanistic study be concentrated on the traditional methods and topics of high culture that give the humanities an authoritative aura of established nobility, or should it extend to new and funkier forms of interdisciplinary research such as popular culture or race and gender studies?Despite such questions and controversy, it is clear (even from etymology) that the meaning of the humanities essentially relates to our human condition and our efforts to perfect our humanity and its expression. But what, then, does it mean to be human? I cannot pretend here to adequately answer such a complex and difficult question. I will, however, argue that because the body is an essential and valuable dimension of our humanity, it should be recognized as a crucial topic of humanistic study and experiential learning. Though the truth of this thesis should be obvious, it goes sharply against the grain of our traditional understanding of the humanities. One striking example of such antisomatic bias is the very term that German speakers use to designate the humanities, "Geisteswissenschaften," whose literal English translation would be "spiritual (or mental) sciences," as contrasted to the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) that treat physical life, [End Page 1] with which, of course, the body is clearly linked. Hence, given the pervasive physical/spiritual opposition, the body is essentially omitted or marginalized in our conception of humanistic studies.2We humanist intellectuals generally take the body for granted because we are so passionately interested in the life of the mind and the creative arts that express our human spirit. But the body is not only an essential dimension of our humanity, it is also the basic instrument of all human performance, our tool of tools, a necessity for all our perception, action, and even thought. Just as skilled builders need expert knowledge of their tools, so we need better somatic knowledge to improve our understanding and performance in the arts and human sciences and to advance our mastery in the highest art of all—that of perfecting our humanity and living better lives. We need to think more carefully through the body in order to cultivate ourselves and edify our students because true humanity is not a mere genetic given but an educational achievement in which body, mind, and culture must be thoroughly integrated. To pursue this project of somatic inquiry, I have been working on an interdisciplinary field called somaesthetics, whose disciplinary connections extend also beyond the humanities to the biological, cognitive, and health sciences, which I see as valuable allies for humanistic research.3Somaesthetics, roughly defined, concerns the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning. As an ameliorative discipline of both theory and practice, it aims to enrich not only our abstract, discursive knowledge of the body but also our lived somatic experience and performance; it seeks to enhance the meaning, understanding, efficacy, and beauty of our movements and of the environments to which our movements contribute and from which they also draw their energies and significance. Somaesthetics, therefore, involves a wide range of knowledge forms and disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it. Recognizing that body, mind, and culture are deeply codependent, somaesthetics comprises an interdisciplinary research program to integrate their study. Mental life relies on somatic experience and cannot be wholly separated from bodily processes, even if it cannot be wholly reduced to them. We think and feel with our bodies, especially with the body parts that constitute the brain and nervous system. Our bodies are likewise affected by mental life, as when certain thoughts bring a blush to...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard Shusterman T. S. ELIOT ON READING: PLEASURE, GAMES, AND WISDOM Eliot frequently speaks of poetry as essentially a game or amusement whose first and foremost function is to give pleasure. "The poet," says Eliot, "would like to be something of a popular entertainer... would like to convey die pleasures ofpoetry.... As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career but a mug's game" (TUPTUC, p. 154). ' Surely much ofthe point and appeal ofthese remarks is their deflationary contrast to the overlofty claims made for poetry since romanticism, claims which continue to be heard in Arnold's ideas of poetry as criticism of life and surrogate of religion and which extend to modernism with Richards's claim that "poetry is capable of saving us." In mordant debunking of the poet's putative status as world legislator, prophet, and savior, Eliot says he would be pleased to secure for the poet "a part to play in society as worthy as that of the music hall comedian." But Eliot's idea of poetry as an amusement or game is much more than an ironic rhetorical ploy against romantic attitudes. It contains a positive and complex view of what poetry is and how it satisfies. Eliot wants to remind us of "that simple truth that literature is primarily literature, a means of refined and intellectual pleasure."2 However, he also realizes that this truth is really not all that simple to understand or elucidate properly; for it does not mean (though it might seem to suggest ) that literature is a mere means to obtain some external end of pleasure. Nor does it mean that in aiming essentially at pleasure, literature is confined to satisfying our sensual or emotional faculties, and is 2 Philosophy and Literature therefore not significandy connected with improving thought or communicating wisdom, for the pleasure is described as intellectual pleasure. Because of the likely misunderstandings that it is apt to provoke, Eliot's claim that literature is a refined game, that "poetry is a superior amusement," is not confidendy offered as an adequately "true definition, but because if you call it something else, you are likely to call it something still more false" (SW, p. ix). But what substance or value is there in Eliot's preferred view? The idea of poetry as a superior game or amusement is developed in many ways throughout the Eliot critical corpus. We cannot consider them all, but the first we should consider concerns the character of pleasure or enjoyment derived from poetry. If poetry is a refined game, and since games are activities, the pleasure (enjoyment) of poetry would be that ofan activity rather than that ofa pleasant sensation. Eliot's idea of poetic pleasure is thus fundamentally Aristotelian.3 Such pleasure is not a separate sensation or pleasant feeling external to and identifiable apart from the game played, but rather represents the attendant zest or satisfaction with which the game is played or the activity pursued. For Aristotle, "pleasure completes the activity" by the dual and reciprocal action of making it more rewarding and thus promoting it. Our pleasure intensifies our interest in the activity which makes us better pursue it, while displeasure conversely impedes it, as does submitting to the alien pleasures from other activities. If the pleasures of different activities can conflict and impede their respective activities, then these pleasures must be distinguishable and are so in terms of the activities to which they attend. Our enjoyment of an activity thus logically depends on the constitutive structure of that activity and is inseparable from it. We therefore distinguish the pleasures of different games by the different game-activities to which they are bound. One may enjoy tennis, cricket, and football and perhaps feel similar pleasurable sensations from each. But the enjoyment of each game is clearly distinguishable and understood not in terms of these sensations but in terms of the different activities which constitute the formal object or ground of that pleasure. Different games or, more generally, different activities are differendy enjoyable, and each has what Aristotle calls its own "proper pleasure." One could not get the pleasure of playing tennis from playing...

The Good Life, The Examined Life, and the Embodied Life The good life and the examined life have long been advocated as key philosophical goals, and they have often been closely linked together. My paper critically examines this linkage by considering arguments both for and against the value of self-examination for achieving the good life. Because somatic self-examination has been viewed as especially problematic for the philosophical project of achieving the good life, this form of self-examination will be given special attention in the paper, and its discussion will be situated within the larger issue of the extent to which the embodied life is central to the good life.

In responding to five symposium articles that discuss my book Thinking through the Body and my theories of somaesthetics and pragmatism, this essay elaborates two central methodological orientations that guide my philosophical research. The first is transactional experiential inquiry in which inquiry can develop new directions, aims, methods, and standards through the dynamic experiences acquired in the course of the inquiry’s pursuit and in which its transactional experiences involve research that transcends familiar disciplinary limits and conventions. The second principle involves mitigating problematic dualisms by a strategy of inclusive disjunction. I deploy these principles in replying to the five commentaries. Besides clarifying issues in somaesthetics, my reply focuses on such topics as everyday aesthetics, eroticism, architecture, dance, Chinese philosophy, meliorism, and pragmatism.

After tracing some of the different interpretations of the Körper/Leib distinction in German phenomenology and philosophical anthropology, this paper compares these philosophical accounts of embodiment to the pragmatist approach of somaesthetics and its core concept of soma. Helmuth Plessner′s theory of embodiment gets particular attention because of its similarities to somaesthetics in terms of their shared emphasis on 1) the value of functional phasing between immanent spontaneity of simply living one′s body and more critically distanced somatic reflection, 2) the way somatic consciousness is essentially shaped by the roles one plays in a social world, and thus 3) on the variety of culturally styled bodies and forms of consciousness. The paper concludes with a discussion of the soma′s ontological status.

Abstract: This article explains the pragmatist project of somaesthetics in five different ways. First, it clarifies the notion of soma as encompassing both subjective intentionality and material objectivity in the world. Second, it highlights the social dimensions of somaesthetics, building on the basic insight that the soma is always shaped by the social and physical environments in which it is nested. Third, it examines the similarities and differences between somaesthetics and the Merleau-Ponty tradition of somatic phenomenology, while answering some of the critical questions phenomenologists raise about the pragmatic value of reflective body consciousness. Fourth, in exploring the uses of reflective body consciousness, the article examines the continuity of learning over different levels and the different forms of evidence that can be used for empirical testing of the value of somatic reflection. It concludes with an overview of some of the main directions of future somaesthetic research

First coined in modernity, the aesthetic is a vague, polysemic and contested concept whose complexities arise from the variety of the ways it has been defined in the history of its theorization, but also in its formative prehistory in theories of art and beauty that preceded its modern coinage. After noting key points of that prehistory, the article traces three major modern tendencies in construing the aesthetic: as a special mode of sensory perception or experience that is relevant to life in general; as a special faculty or exercise of taste focused on judgments of beauty and related qualities such as the sublime; and as a theory (or essential quality) of fine art. The idea of aesthetic disinterestedness is critically examined, and contrasts between the concept of art in Western modernity and in pre-modern and Asian culture are also considered.

This article (originally published in the English version of my book Body Consciousness) critically examines the value of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy for the project of somaesthetics. In contrast to most philosophers who view embodied experience as a universal given that is essentially the same for all human subjects, Beauvoir highlights how somatic subjectivities distinctively differ through different subject positions determined by the subject’s social roles and status. Her detailed exploration of the somatic subjectivities of women and the elderly (which are shaped by forms of social subjugation) constitutes the focus of my study. I show how Beauvoir fails to recognize the extent to which somatic training can address some of the problems of subjugated somatic subjectivities and can thus help contribute to wider sodcial efforts for greater freedom.

After briefly noting key contemporary critiques of aesthetic experience, this article revisits its original account in Plato’s theory of aesthetic experience as the madness of divine possession and then Aristotle’s response of defending art’s rationality as poiesis, which largely dominates the ensuing aesthetic tradition. I subsequently explore how the mysterious notion of possession continues to surface in important modern accounts of aesthetic experience (e. g. in Theodor W. Adorno, T. S. Eliot, John Dewey) and explain how the supernatural idea of possession could find a naturalistic explanation that integrates the concepts of artworld, habitus and atmosphere. The article then exemplifies this naturalistic explanation through an analysis of the possession experience pertaining to performance art as documented in The Adventures of the Man in Gold.

In the ancient legend of Cupid and Psyche, Venus was jealous of Psyche’s beauty and plotted to punish her by binding her through love to a hideous creature that would appear once Cupid scratched Psyche with his arrow of desire while she slept, so that she would fall in love with the next thing she saw upon awakening. But when Cupid saw her beauty, he was so overwhelmed that he accidentally wounded himself with his own arrow and thus fell deeply in love with her. The tale then describes how Venus unsuccessfully tried to keep Cupid and Psyche apart, which makes a nice allegory for the difficulty of separating the soul from desire. Though this mission may seem as undesirable as it is unlikely to achieve, we should ..