Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (review)

Before I explain why Richard Shusterman’s new work, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, is profoundly important, I want to begin with a purely anecdotal report. Long interested in alternative therapies, I have in recent years been surprised to meet a succession of bodywork practitioners who are former academics—all in philosophy. Bodywork is a rubric for a variety of practices that “promote heightened somatic consciousness and body–mind attunement: from yoga and t’ai chi chu’uan to zazen and Alexander Technique,” as Shusterman describes, himself a certified practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method (7). I met these women (and they are all women, a fact inviting investigation) in different places and under varied circumstances, and each had turned away from the discipline now “shrunk from a global art of living into a narrow field of academic discourse,” as a consequence not of careful thought but of feeling (ix). Anxiety, headaches, depression, and in one case, crippling paralysis counted among the somatic signals communicating the need for career change. Ultimately, the body’s urgencies were informed by an impetus toward greater self-care—a virtue not absent from the historical trajectory of philosophy but certainly sidelined by contemporary mainstream “philosophical prejudice against the body” (19).

It is lucky for us that Shusterman has not abandoned academic philosophy but has instead chosen to bring the insights of bodywork practices within the purview of philosophical analysis—not merely to evaluate their merit or efficacy but to show that philosophy bereft of somatic consciousness betrays its own central aims of “knowledge, self-knowledge, right action, happiness, and justice” (19). Whether ideally conceived or biologically reduced, the mind/brain that has become the disembodied heart of philosophy is, in Body Consciousness, pushed out of the vat and into the world. Shusterman’s somaesthetic framework inspires philosophy to vital transformation.

Shusterman first introduced somaesthetics as a concept in Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (1997); in Body Consciousness it is provisionally defined as “the critical meliorative study of one’s experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning” (19). This is no narcissistic enterprise; to know the self is an originary injunction of philosophy. Shusterman’s “systematic philosophical framework through which the different modes of somatic consciousness, somatic cultivation, and somatic understanding can be better integrated and thus more effectively achieved” supports the most fundamental of philosophical questions pertaining to the good life, that is, a life of virtue, meaning, and pleasure (1). Such questions are inextricably bound to body consciousness, for increased somatic awareness leads to greater self-understanding, which “can improve our perception of and engagement with the outside world”: “Any acutely attentive somatic self-consciousness will always be conscious of more than the body itself ” (8).

The somaesthetics framework remedies two features that current philosophical research on the body lacks: a comprehensive “architectonic” integrating the varied discourses on the body into a “more productively systematic field” and “a clear pragmatic orientation” that will provide a way of translating somatic understandings into more meaningful and efficacious practice (22). Integrating discourses is exactly what Shusterman does in the chapters following his introduction to Body Consciousness. Drawing from perspectives as widely ranging as Stoicism, zazen, bioenergetics, art, neuroanatomy, and bodybuilding, Shusterman examines six philosophers whose insights on the soma gain greater acuity through the revelatory light of somaesthetics. Beginning with Michel Foucault, whose “embodied vision of care of the self ” inspired his own, Shusterman in subsequent chapters critically evaluates the contributions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William James, and John Dewey.

Shusterman’s somaesthetics framework owes much to the American pragmatists, especially John Dewey, whose experience with bodywork through the Alexander Method greatly influenced his philosophy, especially his theoretical emphasis on habit. Shusterman sees “the art of somatic reflection and conscious control [as] itself a refined, intelligent habit,” one that emerges...