Somaesthetics is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry aimed at promoting and integrating the theoretical, empirical and practical disciplines related to bodily perception, performance and presentation.
[2] Somaesthetics as a research project initially arose from the work of Richard Shusterman during the mid-1990s in response to what he perceived as needed developments within his two principal modes of inquiry: pragmatist aesthetics and philosophy as an embodied art of living.
[5] As proposed, Shusterman’s project of somaesthetics would restore “the soma — the living, sentient, purposive body — as the indispensable medium for all perception".
[3] Such heightening of somatic consciousness would not only enhance artistic appreciation and creation, but increase the perceptual awareness of meanings and feelings that have the potential to elevate everyday experience into an art of living.
• Analytic somaesthetics, as the most theoretically-oriented of the three, “describes the basic nature of bodily perceptions and practices and also of their function in our knowledge and construction of reality”.
• Pragmatic somaesthetics presupposes the analytic dimension and “has a distinctly normative, prescriptive character – by proposing specific methods of somatic improvement and engaging in their comparative critique”.
“Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art,” in Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2003).
“Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind: Somaesthetic Style and Devotional Practice at the Sacro Monte di Varallo.” Open Arts Journal 4 (2015): 111-132.