Building on pragmatic insights and ancient philosophical traditions from both the East and the West, somaesthetics advocates somatic training as a worthy dimension of philosophical cultivation and expression. Third, to effect such improvements, it also includes practical exercises of somatic training rather than mere philosophical discourse. Second, somaesthetics is interested not merely in describing our culturally shaped forms of somatic consciousness and modes of somatic practice but also in improving them. Rather than the phenomenological quest to reveal an alleged primordial, foundational, and universal embodied consciousness that is “unchanging, given once and for all,” and “known by all men” in all cultures and times (Merleau-Ponty), somaesthetics recognizes that somatic consciousness is always shaped by culture and thus admits of different forms with different cultures (or with different subject positions within the same culture). This ancient pragmatic idea of philosophy as a way of life or art of living is a second root of the somaesthetic project, with its integration of theory and practice. Not only art’s creation and appreciation would be enhanced through this heightening of consciousness, but also the attractive shaping of our lives as an art of living could be enriched by greater perceptual awareness of aesthetic meanings, feelings, and potentials in our everyday conduct of life. If experiences of art and beauty are distinctive for the powerfully gratifying ways they absorb our attention, unify our consciousness, and engage our emotions, then increasing our powers of awareness, focus, and feeling through better mastery of their somatic source could render more of our experience similarly rewarding in such ways. Building on the pragmatist insistence on the body’s central role in artistic creation and appreciation, somaesthetics highlights and explores the soma - the living, sentient, purposive body - as the indispensable medium for all perception. If pragmatist aesthetics rejects the traditional aesthetic attitude of distanced, disinterested contemplation by advocating an aesthetics of active, creative engagement, then it also should recognize that all action (artistic, practical, or political) requires the body, our tool of tools. Somaesthetics emerged in the mid-1990s from two principal themes of research: pragmatist aesthetics and philosophy as an embodied art of living. Somaesthetics addresses both these deficiencies. The second feature lacking in most academic discourse on embodiment is a clear pragmatic orientation - something that the individual can clearly employ or apply to his or her life in terms of disciplines of improved somatic practice. First, a structuring framework that could integrate their very different discourses into a more productively coherent or interrelated field. The impressive abundance of multiple discourses about the body in contemporary theory typically lacks two important features. Rather it aims to provide an overarching theoretical structure and a set of basic and versatile conceptual tools to enable a more fruitful interaction and integration of the very diverse forms of somatic knowledge currently being practiced and pursued.
Baumgarten aesthetics body professional#
It is not limited to one theoretical field, academic or professional vocabulary, cultural ideology, or particular set of bodily disciplines. Somaesthetics is therefore concerned with a wide diversity of knowledge, forms, discourses, social practices and institutions, cultural traditions and values, and bodily disciplines that structure (or could improve) such somatic understanding and cultivation, and it is therefore an interdisciplinary project, in which theory and practice are closely connected and reciprocally nourish each other. An ameliorative discipline of both theory and practice, somaesthetics seeks to enrich not only our discursive knowledge of the body but also our lived somatic experience and performance it aims to improve the meaning, understanding, efficacy, and beauty of our movements and of the environments to which our actions contribute and from which they also derive their energies and significance. Somaesthetics is an interdisciplinary research project devoted to the critical study and meliorative cultivation of the experience and use of the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-stylization.
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