Richard Shusterman - Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

Monks, one thing, if practiced and made much of, conduces to great thrill, great profit, great security after the toil, to mindfulness and self-possession, to the winning of knowledge and insight, to pleasant living in this very life, to the realization of the fruit of release by knowledge. What is that one thing? It is mindfulness centered on body.

The Buddha, Anguttara Nikya

Besides, it is a shame to let yourself grow old through neglect before seeing how you can develop the maximum beauty and strength of body; and you cant have this experience if you are negligent, because these things dont normally happen by themselves.

Socrates, from Xenophons Memoirs of Socrates

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, overstimulation, and stress. We are further plagued by a growing variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can help relieve these problems and enhance ones knowledge, performance, and pleasure. If body consciousness is a topic unlikely to comfort conventional philosophical tastes, this is not because philosophy has always ignored the body, as too many somatic advocates are fond of complaining. The body in fact exerts a very powerful (though generally negative) presence in philosophys persistent privileging of mind and spirit. Its dominantly negative image as a prison, distraction, source of error and corruption is both reflected and reinforced by the idealistic bias and disregard for somatic cultivation that Western philosophers generally display.

We must not forget, however, that philosophy in ancient times was practiced as a distinctly embodied way of life in which somatic disciplines frequently formed an important part, even if such disciplines sometimes assumed a more body-punishing character in philosophies where mind and soul were thought to achieve more freedom and power through severe somatic asceticism. Plotinus, for example (according to his admiring biographer Porphyry), was so ashamed of being in the body and so keen to transcend it that he not only drastically limited his diet but even abstained from the use of the bath. Today, when philosophy has shrunk from a global art of living into a narrow field of academic discourse, the body retains a strong presence as a theoretical (and sometimes potently political) abstraction. However, the idea of using its cultivation for heightened consciousness and philosophical insight would probably strike most professional philosophers as an embarrassing aberration. I hope to change this prejudice.

Unlike philosophers, artists have generally devoted a very adoring, revering attention to the body. Realizing how powerfully and precisely our mental life is displayed through bodily expression, they have shown how the most subtle nuances of belief, desire, and feeling are reflected in the postural and gestural attitudes of our figures and facial countenance. However, in their idolizing love of the human body, artists have usually preferred to portray it as the attractive object of another persons consciousness rather than the radiating expression of the somatic subjects own probing consciousness of embodied self.Women, particularly young vulnerable women, are the frequent subjects of such objectification, portrayed as lusciously sensuous and obligingly passive flesh for the viewers devouring delectation. The artistic yearning to glorify the bodys beauty as desired object often results, moreover, in stylistic exaggerations that propagate deceptive images of bodily ease and grace.

Such problems can be detected in the illustration that adorns the cover of this book, the famous Valpinon Bather (1808) of Ingres, one of his series of acclaimed Turkish bath and harem paintings portraying naked odalisques (female slaves or concubines of the harem). The young woman here, passively posed on a luxuriously bedded and curtained interior, is fresh and naked from her bath and thus ready for her required sexual service. She presents a deliciously lovely and luminous backside of flesh. But in her static pose, with her head turned away in darker shadow and her gaze and facial expression invisible, we get no sense of her having any active, thoughtful consciousness at all. She even seems unconscious of the close presence of the implied viewer, who sees her in almost total nakedness, apart from the turban on her bound hair and the sheet wrapped around her arm both more suggestive of her bondage than of protective covering. Ingres, moreover, intensifies the womans visual beauty and erotic charge by putting her in a postural constellation of legs, spine, and head that highlights her figures graceful long limbs and curving lines but that in fact is anatomically far from a posture conducive to comfort, let alone effective action. What a shock to learn that the marketing department had selected this beautiful but painfully misleading image for the cover of my book on body consciousness! As a critic of media cultures deceptive objectifications of the body, but also as a Feldenkrais practitioner sensitive to the strain and suffering of the spine, I voiced my objections but was decisively told that the vast majority of my potential readers would only be attracted to the beauty of the Ingres and never notice its unsightly social and somatic import. If that indeed is true, then this books arguments are all the more needed to open their eyes to other forms and beauties of body consciousness. Do not judge this book by its cover.