Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics

Description

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life.

Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Educated at Jerusalem and Oxford, he is internationally known for his contributions to philosophy and his pioneering work in somaesthetics, a field of theory and practice devoted to thinking through the body. A recipient of senior Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, Dr Shusterman has held academic positions in Paris, Berlin, and Hiroshima, and is the author of several books, most recently Surface and Depth and Performing Live. His Pragmatist Aesthetics has been published in thirteen languages.

'In this beautifully written book, Shusterman articulates his unique conception of somaesthetics, in which reflective bodily awareness is presented as a means for self-cultivation...deeply insightful and highly original...a compelling and highly nuanced account of what bodily consciousness is, how it is possible, and how it can contribute to individual and communal flourishing.' Mark Johnson, Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon 'Ever since Plato disdained the base materiality of the body in favor of the purity of ideal forms, Western philosophy has struggled to incorporate the corporeal. A number of 20th-century figures, among them Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein and Foucault, resisted the tradition to raise fundamental questions about the somatic moment in all thought. Carefully reconstructing their arguments and drawing on his own experience as a leading Pragmatist philosopher and trained body therapist, Richard Shusterman makes a compelling case for the centrality of somaesthetics in both the theories and practices of our age.' Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley 'Shusterman's pragmatist philosophy, like William James's a century earlier, succeeds in connecting diversities of experiences while maintaining their differences in a dynamic and fertile tension...Against a society that glorifies certain models of good looks, against the conformism of advertised images ... Shusterman seeks to liberate the notion of self-use from its dominant competitive context ...' David Zerbib, Le Monde 'This welcome book is the crowning achievement of Richard Shusterman's work in somaesthetics, demonstrating how the body can be a site of increased knowledge, sharpened perception, and practical discipline that improves lived experience. Critically engaging somatic philosophers such as Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, James and Dewey, Body Consciousness is a must-read for those who don't want merely to learn more about human embodiment, but also to change it.' Shannon Sullivan, Head, Professor of Philosophy, Women's Studies, and African and African American Studies, Penn State University 'Another book on the body, but not a book like the others...Richard Shusterman inaugurates, in his latest book, a new and special turning point...[he] does not focus on the body's most sensationalist exploitations ... but, on the contrary, on the active body in all its humanity and individuality.' Barbara Formis, Art Press