Somatic style

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 69, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 147-159

  Shusterman, Richard ^a  

^a FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79953883131     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6245.2011.01457.x     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. A preliminary version of this essay was presented as a plenary lecture at the Eighteenth International Aesthetics Congress in Beijing, August 10, 2010. I thank Professors Peng Feng andGao Jianping for the invitation to speak there and also thank the audience for their enthusiastic reception of somaesthetics.
2. For the Emerson quotation, see Ralph Waldo Emerson (journal entry from 1832), published in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume IV, 1832-1834, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson (New York: Belknap, 1964), p. 433.
3. Henry David Thoreau, "Thomas Carlyle and His Works," in The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau (Radford, VA:Wilder 2008), pp. 80-102, at p. 88.
4. Style is, of course, central to the project of somaesthetics, whose initial definition as "the crucial, meliorative study of the experience and use of one's body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning" could also have been formulated in terms of "creative self-stylization." For that initial definition, see Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999): 299-313, at p. 302.
5. The most comprehensive account of my views on somaesthetics can be found in my Body Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
6. For a bibliography on somaesthetics with articles and books by other authors, see http://www.fau.edu/ humanitieschair/Somaesthetics-Bibliography Others.php.
7. James occasionally makes this point in his correspondence. See, for example, his letter to Bergson of May 13, 1905, where he requests to meet the French philosopher, explaining that to "see [Bergson] face to face" could give him "a little better understanding of some of the points in [Bergson's] philosophy," even if they did not spend the time of theirmeeting discussing these points. James adds, "I think it must always be good for two philosophers who are near each other to come into personal contact.
8. They will understand each other better, even if they should only gossip away their hour." I quote from the letter as reproduced in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), vol. 1, p. 613. James first met Bergson shortly thereafter on May 28, 1905.
9. See, respectively, Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Biography (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 199, 201;
10. G. Spater and I. Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1972), p. 32;
11. Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872-1914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 90.
12. Consider also the direct written testimony of Leonard Woolfe, who regarded Moore as "the only great man" he ever met: "When I first knew him, his face was amazingly beautiful, almost ethereal, and, as Bertrand Russell has said, 'he had, what he retained throughout his life, an extraordinarily lovable smile.' But he resembled Socrates in possessing a profound simplicity, a simplicity which Tolstoy and some otherRussian writers consider to produce the finest human beings. . . . It showed itself perhaps in such simple, unrestrained, passionate gestures as when, if told something particularly astonishing or confronted by some absurd statement at the crisis of an argument, his eyes would open wide, his eyebrows shoot up, and his tongue shoot out of his mouth. And Bertrand Russell has described the pleasure with which one used to watch Moore trying unsuccessfully to light his pipe when he was arguing an important point.He would light a match, hold it over the bowl of his pipe until it burnt his fingers and he had to throw it away, and go on doing this-talking the whole time or listening intently to the other man's argument-until the whole box of matches was exhausted." Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), pp. 144, 151.
13. Another Cambridge admirer, the famous Nobel Prize economist John Maynard Keynes, explains how Moore used his somatic style to win his arguments, where "victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method-greeting one's remarks with a gasp of incredulity. Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth wide open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that his hair shook. Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible." J. M. Keynes, "My Early Beliefs," in Essays and Sketches in Biography (New York: Meridian, 1956), 239-256, at pp. 243-244.
14. Leonard Woolf confirms this use of somatic style through forceful yet appealing gesture: "When Moore said: 'I simply don't understand what he means,' the emphasis on the 'simply' and the 'what' and the shake of his head over each word gave one a glimpse of the passionate distress which muddled thinking aroused in him."Woolf, Sowing, p. 149.
15. Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1958 [1985]), pp. 23-24.
16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), Part II, p. 178;
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (in German Vermischte Bemerkungen), trans. PeterWinch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 78.
18. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings, in Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esquire. With Memoirs of His Life and Writings, Composed by Himself: Illustrated from His Letters, with Occasional Notes and Narrative by John Lord Sheffield (Basel, Switzerland: J. J. Tourneisen, 1796), vol. 1, p. 19.
19. I quote from the Confucian Analects 2:4 and 8:4, using the translation of Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine, 1998).
20. Mencius 7A21. I use the translation of W. A. C. H. Dobson, Mencius (University of Toronto Press, 1963), p. 181.
21. Phillip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son: On the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (New York: Tudor, 1937), p. 245.
22. Blaise Pascal, Penśees, Section 1:29, "Thoughts on Mind and on Style," in Penśees and The Provincial Letters, trans.W. F. Trotter and ThomasMcCrie (NewYork: Modern Library, 1941), p. 11.
23. Anjelica Houston (as told to ChristineMulke), "1001 Nights," NewYorkTimes, Style Magazine,Women's Fashion Summer 2010, Sunday April 25, p. 58.
24. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Edward Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 2001), pp. 739-740, where we earlier learn that when Genji met "the Akashi lady. He was greeted by the perfume from within her blinds, a delicate mixture that told of the most refined tastes" (p. 412).
25. For more details on these points, see A. N. Meltzoff andM. K.Moore, "Imitation of Facial andManualGestures by HumanNeonates," Science: New Series 198 (1977): 75-78;
26. "Imitation, Memory, and the Representation of Persons," Infant Behavior and Development 17 (1994): 83-99;
27. Barbara Montero, "Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2006): 230-242;
28. and Richard Shusterman, "Body Consciousness and Performance: Somaesthetics East and West," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009): 133-145;
29. "Le corps en acte et en conscience," in Philosphie du corps: Experiences, interactions et ecologie corporelle, ed. B. Andrieu (Paris: Vrin, 2010), pp. 349-372.
30. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 3.
31. H. L. Mencken, "Literature and the Schoolm'am," Prejudices: Fifth Series (New York: Octagon, 1977), p. 197.
32. Katherine Anne Porter, interview with Barbara Thompson, 1963, repr. inWomen Writers atWork: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Modern Library, 1998), p. 53.
33. For more detailed discussion of these matters, see my Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 93-94;
34. and Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 37-42.
35. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Of Higher Laws," in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), p. 209.
36. Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," Walden, p. 87.
37. Thoreau, Walden, pp. 208-209.