Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Bodyand Everyday Aesthetics

2020

Although the first ‘pragmatist aesthetics’ was devised by John Dewey in his Art as Experience (1934), Richard Shusterman has been the only scholar to use the notion of “pragmatist aesthetics” in his Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992). In this paper, I show that Dewey already refuses the gap between the practices of the ‘artworld’ and that of everyday life. In Art as Experience, he criticizes the ‘museum conception’ of art to argue that some aesthetic experiences in our daily life have the same essential structure as the experience of art. While Rorty has revised Dewey’s basic premises, Shusterman has rather restated them. Since the end of the 1980s, he has started developing his own philosophical project, named ‘somaesthetics’. Shusterman’s somaesthetics does not simply incorporate many Deweyan views, but also develops them further. Accepting a Deweyan framework, Shusterman rejects the sharp dualism of the so-called “lower and higher levels of art”. What is more, he considers philosophy a...

2020

, 1 represented a very interesting, although quite "classical, " contribution in somaesthetics. By this I mean it is a "classical" contribution to a "non-classical" and somehow "unconventional" (in a positive sense of these terms, of course) branch of contemporary aesthetics par excellence such as somaesthetics, about which Shusterman had written in Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992¹; 2000²) that it is "best situated within an expanded discipline of aesthetics" capable of giving "more systematic attention to the body's crucial roles in aesthetic perception and experience, including the aesthetic dimensions of body therapies, sports, martial arts, cosmetics, etc., that remain marginalized in academic aesthetic theory" (p. 283). Therefore, "to incorporate somaesthetics' practical dimension, the field of aesthetics must also expand its notion of disciplinary attention to actual, hands-on training in specific body practices that aim at somaesthetic improvement, " and while "[i]nclusion of such body work may make aesthetics more difficult to teach or practice in the standard university classroom, … it certainly [can] make the field more exciting and absorbing, as it comes to engage more of our embodied selves" (p. 283). With its 12 chapters articulated in 3 parts dedicated to "Embodiment in Philosophy and Aesthetic Experience, " "Somaesthetic Approaches to the Fine Arts" and "Somaesthetics in the Photographic Arts and the Art of Living, " Aesthetic Experience and Somaesthetics connected back to the question of aesthetic experience that has always played an important role in Shusterman's thought-at least since Pragmatist Aesthetics and his seminal paper "The End of Aesthetic Experience" (1997). In that first volume, Shusterman expanded aesthetic experience in the direction of somaesthetic investigations of various aesthetic questions and topics, with connections to thinkers from the present and the past. Now, in comparison to the very interesting but, as I said, somewhat more "classical" first book in the series "Studies in Somaesthetics, " Bodies in the Streets: The Somaesthetics of City Life, represents a more original and stimulating work, offering a significant contribution in imposing

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2022

Richard SHUSTERMAN-Yes, my philosophical stance is naturalistic, not only in aesthetics and somaesthetics, but also in philosophy of mind and culture. In Pragmatist Aesthetics, I defended Dewey's aesthetic naturalism, while in Body

Estetika. The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, L (New Series VI), 2013, No.1, 3-26, 2013

This article addresses two controversial open questions in philosophical aesthetics: the nature and value of the aesthetic and of aesthetic experience when approached from the standpoint of ‘aesthetics of everyday life’ (AEL). Contrasting ‘strong’ AEL accounts that consider them radically different from those in the sphere of art, I claim that extending the realm and scope of aesthetics towards everyday life does not necessarily dispense with the concepts of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience as shaped in relation to the arts. Drawing on ‘weak’ formulations of AEL and on theories that call attention to concepts of art different from modern ones, I defend a normative but open model of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience pertaining to both art and everyday life. This more integrative theoretical framework needs to include clear and consistent views of the aesthetic as well as of the self, intersubjectivity, and everyday life.

Pragmatism Today, 2023

Somaesthetics is a central feature of Richard Shusterman’s pragmatist, naturalist philosophy. Initially, Shusterman imagined it as “a branch of philosophical aesthetics” (cf. Pragmatist Aesthetics, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, second edition, p. 279-280), and he intentionally did not deal with topics such as food and sexuality. In the second decade of the third millennium, somaesthetics became an international movement and “an interdisciplinary field of inquiry” (cf. J.J. Abrams (ed.), Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: From Hip Hop Philosophy to Politics and Performance Art, Brill, 2022, p. 247), and in recent years Shusterman has repeatedly discussed the somaesthetics of food and eroticism, including his monumental Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge University Press, 2021). This interview focuses on the topic of sexuality.

Foucault Studies, 2021

Love and sex are central notions in all reflection on humanity. And for obvious reasons, too. These notions defy any simple definition because they connote and reference an almost innumerable multitude of things. Moreover, these notions are highly amenable to social factors and have always been enmeshed in plentiful limitations, prohibitions, and precepts. Consequently, when pondering them, thinkers inevitably find themselves speaking from particular political and cultural discourses and cannot possibly retain a neutral distance to their object of research. Another noteworthy thing is that all considerations of sexual life provoke questions about modernity and postmodernity in this respect. The profound changes that have swept across this sphere of human life over the last 150 years prompt historical-or, to use Michel Foucault's term, genealogical-research aimed at establishing what factors made them possible or, even, what brought them about. In his Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love, Richard Shusterman addresses an extremely fraught and intricate theme which requires not only a thorough knowledge of the issue itself but also a proficient scrutiny of all the related factors mentioned above. In focusing on the art of love, Shusterman inexorably had to confront, on the one hand, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking The History of Sexuality and, on the other, the vast tradition of psychoanalytical writings on sexuality with their fundamental premise of repression, that is, of the problem being expunged from the consciousness of individuals. In this paper, I argue that Shusterman's perspective on ars erotica represents an original alternative to these two towering frameworks. Shusterman's immense erudition in his explorations of the discourse on eroticism in various cultures is strictly subordinated to his theoretical design, which stems from his conception of somaesthetics.

Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol.4, edited by Fabian Dorsch & Dan-Eugen Ratiu, 2012, pp. 385-411,, 2012

This article addresses controversial issues in philosophical aesthetics that are still open problems: the nature and value of the aesthetic and the aesthetic experience when approached from the standpoint of ‘aesthetics of everyday life’ (AEL). Contrasting ‘strong’ AEL approaches that consider them radically different from those in the sphere of the arts, I claim that extending the realm and scope of aesthetic(s) towards everyday life does not necessarily dismiss concepts of the aesthetic and the aesthetic experience as relentlessly shaped in relation to the arts. Drawing on ‘weak’ formulations of AEL and on theories that call attention to the new regime of contemporary art practices and experiences after the postmodern turn, I sustain this claim through the arguments of the normative aspect of the aesthetic, the changing and fluid nature of both the arts and everyday life, and their intermingling and hybridization in the continuous flux of experiences.

2003

remarks on the occasion of his "conversion" to pragmatist aesthetics during an aesthetics seminar he taught in the Spring of 1988 to graduate students in philosophy and dance: "I had originally intended to use Dewey primarily as a foil to what I then regarded as the far superior aesthetic theory of [Theodor] Adorno (which I still greatly admire). But by the end of the semester, having scrutinized the different arguments in class and tested some issues on the dance floor, I could not help but trade Adorno's austere, gloomy, and haughtily elitist Marxism for Dewey's more earthy, upbeat, and democratic pragmatism" (p. xvii).

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2004

Experiencing the Everyday, Edited by Carsten Friberg and Raine Vasquez, NSU Press/Aarhus University Press, Copenhagen, 2017

This chapter aims at fostering a novel conceptual framework to address the issue of experiencing the everyday, with a focus on our aesthetic preferences and choices in daily life and their practical implications. Given the persistent weaknesses in the theoretical foundation of the sub-discipline called Everyday Aesthetics (hereafter, EA), a philosophical reflection is crucial for such endeavor. I propose an approach in line with practical philosophy, that is, by starting with a reflective examination of questions and assumptions that are prior to any possible application. In the first part I critically review the recent everyday aesthetics literature, arguing: 1) that the attempts for a better theoretical grounding still are impeded by shortcomings rooted in inappropriate conceptualizations of its key-targets, the everyday, the aesthetic experience, and the experiencing self; and 2) that it is possible to improve the analytical framework for approaching everyday aesthetic life by clarifying EA’s underpinning assumptions and open questions, such as the problems of the unity of the self and the continuity of experience. My contention is that such an improved framework can be provided by conceiving of EA as a practical aesthetics in the tradition of practical philosophy. This claim is then supported in the second part by means of concepts and arguments held by this tradition, especially its version revisited by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his philosophical hermeneutics, followed in the third part by some insights on the characteristics of experience, life, and life-world provided by a sociological phenomenology (Georg Simmel, Alfred Schutz). In the concluding part I briefly illustrate how such a practical account provides new ways of conceptualizing in this research area, in particular the study of everyday life decisions and actions prompted by our aesthetic preferences and taste.