Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics Book

A long admirer of Merleau-Ponty, I was impressed by Shusterman's critique of his dismissal of reflective body consciousness. Since time didn't permit me to study more than the first third of the book, I'm looking forward to returning to it - it proved to be an excellent read so far!

"Contemporary culture undeniably lavishes enormous and, in some way, excessive attention to the body. But it is not the sort of attention that this book is most keen to advance." Engaging with six important 20th century philosophers (Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, James and Dewey), Shusterman seeks to explore the perspectives that continue to shape today's conception of the body.

The first chapter introduces the field of somaesthetics through the study of Foucault's distinctive and influential somatic philosophy - "Foucault is an exemplary but problematic pioneer in a field I call somaesthetics, a discipline that puts the body's experience and artful refashioning back into the heart of philosophy as an art of living. A long dominant Platonist tradition, intensified by recent centuries of Cartesianism and idealism, has blinded us to a crucial fact that was evident to much ancient and non-Western thought: since we live, think, and act through our bodies, their study, care, and improvement should be at the core of philosophy." Somaesthetics can be 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.

"Foucault argues that self-fashioning is not only a matter of externally stylizing oneself through one's bodily appearance but of transfiguring one's inner sense of self (and thereby one's attitude, character, or ethos) through transformative experiences." Foucault showed how "docile bodies" were systematically yet subtly, secretly shaped by seemingly innocent body disciplines and regimes of biopower so as to advance oppressive sociopolitical agendas and insitutions - yet Foucault also emerges as the pragmatic methodoligist who proposes alternative body practices to overcome the repressive ideologies covertly entrenched in our docile bodies. So, in other words, the crucial premise seems to be that the institutions and technologies are governing our lives through regimes of biopower inculcate habits of body and mind that aim to keep us in submission. Shusterman's critique of Foucault's pragmatic somaesthetics aims to "redeem its appreciation of somatic pleasure by refining its hedonism to transcend his limiting fixations on sexuality, transgression, and sensational intensity."

The next two chapters trace the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir, who form a significant part of the French philosophical background from which Foucault's somatic thinking emerged. Recognizing Merleau-Ponty's immense contribution to the discussion of body in philosophy, Shusterman questions his deeply rooted opposition to any idea relating to representationalism. "Merleau-Ponty creates a polarization of 'lived experience' versus abstract 'representations' that neglects the deployment of a fruitful third option - what could be called 'lived somaesthetic reflection', that is, concrete but representational and reflective body consciousness." Another misleading polarity is introduced by Merleau-Ponty when studying 'normal' behavior on the one hand and abnormally incapacitated patients who exhibit pathological dysfunction (usually stemming from serious neurological injury or grave psychological trauma) on the other. Thorough his writing, Merleau-Ponty seems to imply "that if we are not pathologically impaired like /…/ neurologically damaged individuals, then our unreflective body sense (or motor schema) is fully accurate and miraculously functional." With that, the fact - how fully functional people suffer from various incapacities and malfunctions that are mild in nature but still impair performance - is obscured.

"Disciplines of somatic education deploy exercises of representational awareness to treat /.../ problems of misperception and misuse of our bodies in the spontaneous and habitual behavior that Merleau-Ponty identifies as primal and celebrates as miraculously flawless in normal performance." In somatic education, representational explanations (which Merleau-Ponty condemned for generating "the dualism of consciousness and body" while blinding us to the unity of primordial perception) - even if they do not adequately explain our primordial perception, can still be useful for other purposes, such as improving our habits.