Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one’s knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life.

• Explains and develops the field of somaesthetics by elaborating an analysis of bodily awareness • Integrates the disciplines of philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, social theory, gender studies, and aesthetics • Connects the theoretical issues of somatic awareness to contemporary cultural problems of ageing, sexism, and anhedonia: the inability to experience pleasure

Introduction; 1. Somaesthetics and care of the self: the case of Foucault; 2. The silent, limping body of philosophy: somatic attention deficit in Merleau-Ponty; 3. Somatic subjectivities and somatic subjugation: Beauvoir on gender and ageing; 4. Wittgenstein\'s somaesthetics: explanation and melioration in philosophy of mind, art, and politics; 5. Deeper into the storm center: the somatic philosophy of William James; 6. Redeeming somatic reflection: John Dewey’s philosophy of body-mind.