Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (review)
- Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics
Richard Shusterman's book Body Consciousness, which appeared in 2008 (preceded by the French edition), is a successive and successful step in [End Page 713] the direction the author engaged in with the publication of Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art in 1992. This direction can be characterized briefly as closely connected with the American pragmatism that Shusterman assimilated, thanks to Rorty, albeit often in a polemic relation to him. It is the direction taken by a contemporary aesthetician in search of a new formula for a discipline that in its modern form, as a philosophy of art, has fallen into a state of exhaustion. It is also the direction taken by a philosopher and aesthetician who is seriously interested, not only in cognizing the world, but also in its melioration. All three aspects of Shusterman's activity intertwine, and the pragmatist idea of experience gives it consistency.
In the second edition of Pragmatist Aesthetics (1993) Shusterman had included an additional chapter, entitled "Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal." Since that time the concept of somaesthetics has been developed in Shusterman's subsequent works and now functions around the world as an emblem of his intellectual activity. His aesthetics is not a proposal for just a new field of research related to the idea of aisthesis, but is a proposal also for a new style of philosophizing.
In Body Consciousness, as in preceding works, Shusterman again patiently explains what somaesthetics is, which suggests that he has his doubts whether readers really recognize his aims. Shusterman, expecting possible resistance to his ideas, seeks to anticipate reader objections, especially because his proposal of somaesthetics as a new philosophical domain (although of interdisciplinary character) is a challenge to ways of thinking rooted in the European tradition.
At the center of the somaesthetic reflections is an embodied person who is immersed in a biological, social, and cultural environment, a subject of perceptions and feelings registered by the external and internal senses. This approach forces Shusterman to face:
1. The dominant idealistic tradition that deliberately ignores questions of the body and the senses. When addressing the idealists, Shusterman talks not so much about absence of the body, but rather about its negative presence, something he perceives especially in the line of Platonism, Christianity, and Cartesianism, and he explicitly declares the need to change the status quo.
2. The philosophical thinking about somatic problems that developed in the first half of the 20th century, though not in the forefront position. This approach has had a significant role, but when studied from the somaesthetic point of view it reveals its limits and inconsistencies.
3. The widespread fashion today of shaping our bodies, and other ways of beautifying them fueled by the cosmetics market, which can lead to accusations against the somaesthetic thinker of commercializing philosophy on the one hand, and of narcissism on the other. [End Page 714]
4. The objection of anachronistic treatment of issues of the body at a time when the technology of new electronic media is introducing us to a world of bionic and virtual bodies.
The problems indicated in the first two points are of a basic nature and Shusterman discusses them extensively in the book. In my opinion, the third issue simply misses the point because Shusterman's ideas of cultivation and taking care of our bodies aim at therapy and improvement in the sphere of theoretical cognition and in the practice of human life, and this has nothing to do with today's rush to the aesthetization of our bodies, which is understood superficially as improving external looks according to the patterns offered by glossy magazines. When Shusterman speaks of the cultivation of the body, he understands the body as an aspect of the body-mind unity and the idea of beauty in its broader aesthetic and ethical dimension. It is for this reason that the author reacted so sharply to the painting the publishers placed on the cover of his book—evidently for commercial reasons—because it presented a woman...
