Affect, Aesthetics, and the Body: Varieties of Somaesthetics

Filozofski Vestnik, 2007

This paper examines the ten-year history of somaesthetics–describing the field's origins and genealogical roots, explaining its terminology, analyzing its structure, tracing its reception, exploring its most interesting applications, and responding to the most important criticisms that have been directed at it. Somaesthetics, as the paper shows, emerges from the framework of my work in pragmatist aesthetics which sought to revive aesthetics by bringing art closer to life and bridging the presumed divide between the aesthetic and the practical while also advocating an idea of ethics as an art of living. One way to bring more life to aesthetics is to emphasize the role of the living body in art and aesthetic experience. Another strategy of revival is to expand the field of aesthetics to make it more relevant to more people by including practices of somatic stylization and enhanced somatic perception (aisthesis). Somaesthetics, a discipline of both theory and practice, deploys these means of revival, and seems to have had some positive influence. It has been applied by diverse authors in many different fields–from performance art and computer design, to sports, feminist issues of identity, and the use of technological body enhancements in the art of living. The three main branches of somaesthetics are introduced, and the complex structure of the field is used in refuting some of the typical criticisms made against it. Somaesthetics is not a blanket apology for the dangerous excesses of our body culture, but rather a site for the ideological critique of the dominant somatic ideals. Its interest in the body is not a celebration of irrationality or the abandoning of critical reflection.

Esthetica. Tijdschrift voor Kunst en Filosofie, 2011

The discipline of aesthetics that was founded upon his term had for Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) largely been an aisthetics, as recent reconsiderations of Baumgarten's presentation of aesthetics have shown: a theory of aistheta, of things perceived (phenomena) and of sensate thinking. Before the rise of transcendental philosophy and philosophical systems, Baumgarten highlighted the epistemological challenges of singular phenomena-of that which appears to the senses and does so as 'individual object' (individuo) (Baumgarten 2007, 538), always exceeding or escaping our understanding of it by abstraction and conceptualization. A distinct idea of an object can be achieved by the enumeration of its attributes, or its logical truth be found by subsuming its particularity under general categories, but this comes at the cost of a loss, as Baumgarten notes in the first volume of the Aesthetica, in the section entitled The absolute aesthetic striving for truth, which discusses the difference between logical and what Baumgarten calls aestheticological truth (§ §423-612): I believe indeed that it should be completely evident to philosophers that all the specific formal perfection contained in cognition and logical truth had to be bought dearly by a great and significant loss of material perfection. For what else is abstraction than a loss?' (ibidem). The example Baumgarten gives is that of the loss of material substance when carving a marble ball from an irregular marble block. One pays for the beautiful round shape of the ball, its 'higher value' (ibidem), by loosing a significant amount of material. This mutual dependence of the logical transparency of noeta and the obscure intransparency of aisthetaexemplified in the marble block turning marble ball-comes to bear on all levels of Baumgarten's sketch of aesthetics. Logical clarity comes about only by a decline in material richness or at the cost of dissecting the complex, multidimensional, rich impression of the whole. Aware and appreciative of this complexity as another dimension of cognition (cf. Baumgarten 1983, 15; §530), only at the expense of which logical clarity and conceptual distinctness can be achieved, Baumgarten lists, in the prolegomena of the Aesthetica, as one of the tasks of aesthetics to 'enhance the perfection of cognition beyond the limits of the distinctly cognizable' (idem, 13). Aesthetics was to improve what he calls 'beautiful thinking' (idem, 11) as a way to cognize and know phenomena, as a way to arrive at an 1 2

Wc humanist intcllcctuals too often takc thc body for granted bccause we are so passionately interested in the life of the mind and the creative arts that express our humanity and spiritual longings. But the body is not only an essential dimension of our humanity (expressing all the ambiguities that humanity entails); it is also thc basic mcdium through which wc livc and the fundamental instrurnent for all performance, our tool of tools, a necessity for all our perception, action, and even thought. My project of somaestheticsaimed at improving the understanding and cultivation of thc body as a ccntral sitc of perccption, pcrformancc, and crcativc sclf-expressionis based on that premise. Just as skilled builders need expert knowledge of their media and tools, so we need better somatic knowledge to enhance our understanding and perfonnance in the arts and the humanities; and this includes thc cultivation of what 1 consider (with the likcs of Socratcs, Confucius, and Montaigne), the highest art of all -that of perfecting our humanity and living better lives. We need to cultivate o~~rselves, because true hiumanity is not a mere biological given but an educational achievement in which thc body, mind, and culturc must be thoroughly involvcd.

1999

2020

Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher, currently Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy and English, and Director of the “Center for Body, Mind, and Culture” at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Shusterman is mostly known for his contributions in the field of pragmatist aesthetics and the emerging field of somaesthetics. Among the main topics of his original development of a pragmatist philosophical perspective one can mention experience (and aesthetic experience, in particular), the definition of art, the question of interpretation, the philosophical defense of the value and significance of popular art (in comparison to the frequent devaluation of the latter by many philosophers and intellectuals), the revaluation of the idea of philosophy as an art of living, and finally the strong emphasis of the role of the body in most (or perhaps all) human practices, activities and experiences. This deep concern for embodiment led to ...

Aesthetic Theory Across the Disciplines, 2023

This essay offers non-specialists an overview of the field of aesthetics as seen from the discipline of philosophy. Although it emerged somewhat belatedly, aesthetics is today recognized as one of the five main branches of philosophy, where it is often treated as a synonym for the 'philosophy of art'. However, scholars working in these areas are increasingly inclined to distinguish between these two enterprises. The basis for this distinction is the idea that the philosophy of art is concerned primarily with clarifying the concept of art, while aesthetics also considers questions of taste, judgement, and natural beauty as part of its more general inquiry into the nature of aesthetic experience. Throughout, I trace the rise and fall of aesthetics within the context of modern German philosophy. As such, I am not concerned here with contemporary issues and debates in the field of aesthetics; but with showing how classical German aesthetics gave rise to certain ideas regarding the field of experience specific to art. My aim is to show how the idea for a distinctly aesthetic form of experience was born in the writings of Baumgarten and Kant, before then explaining how this type of experience was assigned political, ethical, and existential signicance by Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. My contention is that this history is important not just for understanding philosophical aesthetics today; but for assessing many of the claims that our culture makes about art, particularly since these claims revolve around the idea that art sustains a singular form of experience, one thought to be separable from cognitive and moral considerations and which may well be replete with political, ethical, and existential significance. While aesthetics is not a theory or foundation for art, it nevertheless empowers art by reframing it as an occasion for this type of experience. For this reason, we might say of aesthetics that it is a discourse which sustains art by attributing to it the capacity to engender a wholly unique form of experience. For

Neuroaesthetics, 2018

Neuroaesthetics is a young enough field that there seems to be no established view of its proper subject matter. Morphologically, the term implies the scientific study of neural aspects of the perception of artworks such as paintings, or elements of artworks such as musical intervals. We are concerned, however, that practitioners of this new field may not be aware of the tremendous ambiguities inherent in the terms "aesthetics" and "art," ones that limit a proper understanding of human art behavior. Connotations of these terms are particularly inappropriate and misleading when considering the experiences, practices, and functions of the arts in preindustrial, folk, aboriginal, or Pleistocene societies, and even in contemporary popular culture. It is only during the last two centuries that the terms "Art" (with an implied capital A, connoting an independent realm of prestigious and revelatory works) and "aesthetics" (as a unique, and even reverential, mode of attention toward such works) have taken on their present elitist meanings and become unavoidably intertwined (Davies, 2006; Shiner, 2001). The word "aesthetic" (from the Greek aiesthesis, having to do with the senses) was first used in 1735 by a German philosopher in a book on poetry (Baumgarten, 1735/1954), and since that time has been employed in two different, but not always distinct, ways. Enlightenment philosophers and their followers gradually developed the now elitist notion of "the aesthetic"-a special form of disinterested knowledge and appreciation-to describe the emotional response elicited by the perception of great works of art (Shiner, 2001). While this meaning of aesthetic has strong historical connections with the arts and with artworks, a second usage has come to refer to any value system having to do with the appreciation of beauty, such as the beauty of nature. In recent decades, for example, some ethologists and evolutionary psychologists have adopted this second, broader notion of aesthetics in a new field, originally called "landscape

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-62) is best known for his use of the name ‘aesthetics’ to designate a field of study that has remained an important part of philosophy ever since. Integral to Baumgartian aesthetics is the idea of beauty, and the term appears frequently in the Aesthetica from the opening paragraph onwards. Defined as the ‘science of sensible cognition’, aesthetics involves among other things the ‘art of thinking beautifully’. But what does it mean to think beautifully? The position I adopt in this paper is that the relation of beauty to thought lies at the core of Baumgarten’s project, and that the elucidation of what is at stake here is crucial to any assessment of the ongoing relevance of his work. Some would argue that Kant’s third Critique has rendered any rationalist explanation of taste obsolete, and the prevalence of this view no doubt accounts for the fact that the Aesthetica remains untranslated into English. Others have sought to question subjectivity as the absolute ground of aesthetic judgement and see the reexamination of the pre-Kantian corpus as a potential corrective. I’ll be drawing on the early stages of a translation of the Aesthetica that I am currently undertaking to show that ‘thinking beautifully’ for Baumgarten involves subjective as well as objective processes and that Kant’s dismissal of his ‘futile’ attempt to provide a rational explanation of the basis of taste is overly harsh.

There is no doubt it is necessary to search for the origins and proto forms of the most matters of facts with which the modern age man comes daily into contact in the prehistory (the longest period of human history). The origin cult function of the dance, but also of prehistory figural artworks or music is well known and generally accepted. On the other hand, it is permissible that there was initially high rate of importance of mythological ideas in the creating process of objects and their worshipping required the whole person. Prehistoric man participated on the cult by all of his senses and thus it is possible to speak at this time about complex aesthetic experience, exactly as it is requested by somaesthetic formulated by R. Shusterman. Therefore, it is necessary to focus attention in this direction also in the question of physicality and in the importance of complex (and also by mentioning his contact aspect) aesthetic experience. The subject matter of the paper is the effort to refer on native character and originality of complex aesthetic perception, which offers a full aesthetic experience to engage all of the senses, not excluding the touch (often promoted by Z. Kalnicka) and provides aesthetic conditions to a person in all its entirely. It is possible that reviewing and hypothetical establishment of conclusions how could the interaction and participation of prehistoric man in the cult, ceremony and making of artworks in the form as it was already known function, offers some answers and even alternatives of experience for present recipient too. Keywords: aesthetic perception, aesthetic reception, complex reception, touch, original form of aesthetic experience.

2019

John Dewey puts aesthetic experience at the center of his reflection on art and beauty, reconsidering it dynamically. Nowadays, this view opened the path to somaesthetics, a term coined by Richard Shusterman, and aesthetic anthropology. Here, it is argued that the contribution of pragmatist aesthetics could be further developed by exploring its analogies with techno-aesthetics, a paradigm proposed by French philosopher Gilbert Simondon in the early 1980s. Art occupies accordingly a special place within the different forms of aesthetic experience, being considered as a way of experimenting the impact of new technologies in the human experience. It is a process by which technologies create 'devices' for experimenting perception and reflection: namely, ways of reconstructing the nature of the human mind in-between body and technology, and by means of their interaction. Cinema reconsidered after Dewey's fellow George H. Mead, offers an exemplary case as both artistic and tec...