Chapter 8 - Somaesthetics: Body Consciousness and Nonviolence

Summary

Introduction

Bodies matter. This has not been obvious in the history of philosophy (particularly in the Platonic, the neo-Platonic, Christian, and rationalist traditions), where the body has been considered at best an awkward irrelevance and at worst the enemy of the mind and spirit. Historically, where the body has been appreciated positively it has been idealized as the Nude, mostly female body or else the Athlete, mostly male body. Such bodies bear little resemblance to the real bodies of those who admire their perfection. These idealized bodies are the exception to the general view that the bodies of humans are the low and mean. Embodiment is, after all, that which humans share with nonhuman animals. It is that, therefore, of which humans are to be ashamed. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” the early Christian theologian Paul asked in the agony of embodied existence. It is the irony of contemporary society, where nakedness is everywhere, but ought nowhere to be seen, that even the idealized semi-naked statue of the Spirit of Justice had to be covered when John Ashcroft was U.S. Attorney General (Associated Press). Even the once admired ideal body is now also that of which we ought to be ashamed.

The alienated, objectified body is fair game for mistreatment and fair game for violation. In modern Western thinking, the body is merely an instrument of the self. The body is not the self. “I” have “a body.” “I” own “my body,” as I own other things, such as my car, my house or my computer. This “thing” may often get in the way of true self-development, for it is the life of the mind or the spirit that needs to be developed to perfection. If the self—the subject—is the mind, then what happens to the body does not happen to subjects but only to objects. In the rationalist tradition (Descartes, Spinoza, and others), the body is considered merely as a machine and, therefore, could never be a site of sensory perception or knowledge. Perception is of the mind only (see, Shusterman, Somaesthetics). If the body is alien, if the body is the problem, and if the body is “lower,” then it is less important what happens to the body than what happens to the mind.