Somaesthetics and the revival of aesthetics

Filozofski Vestnik

Volumn 28, Issue 2, 2007, Pages

  Shusterman, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Body; Cultural critique; Feldenkrais method; Mind; Nondiscursive experience; Pragmatism; Somaesthetics

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049483568     PISSN: 03534510     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. That was in my Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997)
2. For further elaboration of somaesthetics, see my Performing Live (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), ch. 7-8
3. "Somaesthetics and The Second Sex", Hypatia 18 (2003), pp. 106-136
4. "Thinking Through the Body, Educating for the Humanities: A Plea for Somaesthetics," Journal of Aesthetic Education 40:1 (2006), pp. 1-21
5. For critical discussions, see the essays of Gustavo Guerra, Kathleen Higgins, Casey Haskins, and my response in Journal of Aesthetic Education 36:4 (2002), pp. 55-115
6. nd edition (which contains a chapter on somaesthetics); the symposium, which includes my response, is published in Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16:1 (2002), pp. 1-38
7. See, for instance, Ken Tupper, "Entheogens and Education," Journal of Drug Education and Awareness 1:2 (2003), pp. 145-161
8. Tom Leddy, http://www.aesthetics-online.org/ideas/leddy.html; Titti Kallio, "Why we choose the more attractive looking objects: somatic markers and somaesthetics in user experience," in Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, pp. 142-143
9. Electronic Edition (ACM DL) BibTeX; Stephen J. Smith and Rebecca J. Lloyd, "Promoting Vitality in Health and Physical Education," Qualitative Health Research 16:2 (2006), pp. 249-267
10. Martin Jay, "Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art," Journal of Aesthetic Education 36:4 (2002), pp. 55-69
11. P. Arnold, "Somaesthetics, Education, and the Art of Dance," Journal of Aesthetic Education 39 (2005), pp. 48-64
12. Bryan Turner, "Introduction - Bodily Performance: On Aura and Reproducibility," Body and Society 11:4 (2005), pp. 1-17
13. E. Mullis, "Performative Somaesthetics," Journal of Aesthetic Education 40:4 (2006), pp. 104-117
14. Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), p. 112
15. Jerold J. Abrams, "Pragmatism, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Bioethics: Shusterman, Rorty, Foucault," Human Studies 27 (2004), pp. 241-258. The German philosopher Dieter Thomä in reviewing the German translation of Practicing Philosophy (Philosophie als Lebenspraxis) in the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung (20.7.2002) also urges that somaesthetics should consider more closely the new scientific domains of genetic technology and cosmetic surgery
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), par. 408
17. Shusterman, Performing Live, pp. 142, 156
18. I already made this point in Practicing Philosophy, giving somaesthetics "the role of critically examining such body practices and their attendant ideologies to see what sense they make, what good or harm they do, and whether they could profit from a better formulation of aims and methods" (p. 176)
19. Richard Rorty, "Response to Richard Shusterman" in Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (eds.), Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues (Oxford: Polity Press, 2001), p. 156
20. See, for example, "Sanfter atmen" in Süddeutsche Zeitung (9/10 Februar, 2002), a review of Philosophie als Lebenspraxis
21. On the other hand, the distinguished German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Gernot Böhme, chides that same book for being too tolerant of Foucault's excesses in "Somästhetik - sanft oder mit Gewalt?," Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Heft 5 (2002)
22. For my somaesthetic approach to eroticism, see "Asian Ars Erotica and the Question of Aesthetics", JAAC 65:1 (2007)
23. This unfortunate misconception of somaesthetics as advocating blind, mute experience with no conceptual or intellectual content is evident in an article published in a much earlier international issue of Filozofski vestnik, connected with a prior International Congress of Aesthetics. See Simo Säätellä, "Between Intellectualism and 'Somaesthetics, '" Filozofski vestnik 20: 2 (1999), XIV ICA Supplement, pp. 151-161. The article was written before my 1999 JAAC article appeared outlining the project of somaesthetics, so the misconstrual was perhaps an understandable error (by a good philosopher), even if there was already enough in Practicing Philosophy to show how erroneous it was. I hope the myth of somaesthetics as a philosophy of nonthinking has now been finally laid to rest