Kinesiology Review, 2020, 9, 245-253

https://doi.org/10.1123/kr.2020-0019
© 2020 Human Kinetics, Inc. SCHOLARLY ARTICLE

Somaesthetics in Context
Richard Shusterman

After defining somaesthetics and explaining the terms of its definition, this paper distinguishes between somaesthetics and other
somatic disciplines concerned with improving the quality of our movement. The paper then outlines the roots of somaesthetics in
pragmatist philosophy and the philosophical idea of the holistic art of living that combines cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical
concerns. The next section discusses the three branches of somaesthetics and its three dimensions while also mapping their
interrelations. After a section that contextualizes somaesthetics in relation to affect theory and cognitive science and that briefly
notes some of its many interdisciplinary applications, the paper concludes with a discussion of the somaesthetic approach to the
issue of norms and values in somatic experience, inquiry, and practice.

Keywords: art of living, body norms, ethics, philosophy, pragmatism, soma

Somaesthetics is an interdisciplinary research program that
originated in pragmatist philosophy at the very end of the twentieth
century and that has developed into an active academic field with its
own journal (The Journal of Somaesthetics) and book series (Studies
in Somaesthetics) and a number of research hubs in the United
States, Europe, and China (Shusterman, 2018–2019). Somaesthetics
can be briefly defined as the critical study and meliorative cultivation
of the experience and use of the living body (or soma) as the site of
sensory appreciation (aesthesis) and performative and creative self-
fashioning. It involves both discursive theory and embodied practice,
whose aim is to enrich not only our propositional knowledge of the
body but also our lived somatic experience in perception and
performance. Concerned with both “knowing that” and “knowing
how,” somaesthetics aims to improve the meaning, understanding,
efficacy, and beauty of our movements and of the environments to
which our actions contribute and from which they also derive their
energies and significance. With its central concern for the soma’s
essential attribute of movement (which it conceives not only in terms
of locomotion but also in the ever-present, life-sustaining movement
of breathing), somaesthetics has an obvious realm of convergence
with kinesiology, although collaborative research interaction re-
mains insufficiently explored.1
As an interdisciplinary field, somaesthetics is concerned with a
wide diversity of knowledge, discourses, social practices and
institutions, cultural traditions and values, and bodily disciplines
that shape (or could improve) the understanding and cultivation of
the soma’s powers of perception and performance and the quality
of its lived experience. Research in the field has so far concentrated
on the human soma, although there is nothing in the definition of
the field that precludes extending its study to nonhuman somas
(Shusterman, 2011), and there is considerable research in somaes-
thetics relating to somatic interaction with nonliving technological
devices. Human–computer interaction design is indeed one of the
most promising developments of somaesthetics in recent years
(Eriksson et al., 2020; Höök et al., 2015, Höök, Jonsson, Stahl, &
Mercurio, 2016; Höök, 2018; La Delfa, Baytas, Patibanda, Ngari,
& Khot, 2020; Lee, Lim, & Shusterman, 2014). Somaesthetic
interaction design recognizes that the human soma is embedded in
The author (shuster1@fau.edu) is with Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton,
FL, USA.
and extended through technologies and that we need to design the
increasingly pervasive “internet of things” in a way that can ensure
and improve the soma’s continued experiential quality and health.
Somaesthetics is distinct from the particular methods of somatic
practices (both ancient and modern) that are familiar to both profes-
sional movement educators and the general public, such as yoga, taiji
quan, the Alexander technique, the Feldenkrais method, and bioen-
ergetics. Rather than offering a particular set of specific principles and
practical methods, exercises, or therapies that serve a limited (albeit
sometimes broad) range of somatic goals and ideals, somaesthetics
does not propose any special somatic methods of its own. Nor does it
advocate a specific set of final goals or a fixed set of values to ground
the somatic methods it studies (apart from the very general aims of
enhanced cognition and quality of experience), although theorists
working in this field (myself included) may well propose and argue
for their preferred somatic methods and goals. Instead, somaesthetics
principally aims to provide an overarching theoretical structure and a
set of basic and versatile conceptual tools to enable a more fruitful
pursuit, interaction, and integration of the very diverse forms of
somatic disciplines, methods, forms of knowledge, values, and
ideologies with respect to the experience and use of the soma that
individuals in contemporary and past cultures have employed.1 In its
practical workshops, somaesthetics deploys a combination of meth-
ods derived from specific somatic disciplines concerned with body
consciousness, currently mostly those from the Feldenkrais method,
in which I am professionally certified.
Unlike the important ancient and modern somatic training
practices mentioned above (e.g., yoga, taiji quan, the Alexander
technique, the Feldenkrais method), somaesthetics emerged in a
distinctly academic context. It arose out of a twofold need to address
a problem in academic research when the postmodern and affective
turns elevated the body’s importance in the humanities and social
sciences. The impressive abundance of multiple discourses about
the body in such contemporary theory typically lacked two impor-
tant features that somaesthetic aimed to address. First was the
absence of an overarching structuring framework that could inte-
grate the very different discourses of theory into a more produc-
tively coherent or interrelated field. The second feature found
wanting in contemporary academic discourse on embodiment
was a clear pragmatic and fully embodied orientation—something
that people could physically apply to improve themselves through
disciplined methods of somatic practice, something to improve not
245
246 Shusterman
only the quality and depth of their somatic research but also the
quality of their lives as persons. This concern with how the somatic
is integrated into self-cultivation of the whole person reflects
somaesthetics’ philosophical origins, most specifically from prag-
matist philosophy, which has, through its roots in the American
transcendentalist thinking of Emerson, long been committed to the
ethical aims of self-improvement and self-realization (Shusterman,
1999a). But this ethical concern for improving a person’s life
holistically through improved somatic knowledge and mastery
(which also enables greater power to help others) goes back to
the very birth of philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom for “how to
live” that Socrates proposed in Plato’s dialogue the Apology. Before
examining the philosophical roots of somaesthetics more closely, I
will clarify its orientation by elaborating on the terms in its
definition.
Terminology
First, the term “somaesthetics” emerged as a neologism to propose a
new field, the term deriving from combining the terms “soma” and
“aesthetics.” A related term, “somesthetic” or (sometimes in British
spelling) “somaesthetic,” exists in neuroscience to designate what
are described as the somesthetic senses, the more intimate body
senses relating to touch, proprioception, and other forms of inter-
oception such as body heat and pain. Somaesthetics, however, is
concerned with external or distant senses, as well. The notions of
critical study and meliorative cultivation indicate that somaesthetics
is not an entirely descriptive cognitive project. Rather than confin-
ing its project to accurately depicting and explaining how things
in fact are, somaesthetics aims to improve the facts and practices
of somatic experience through critical study and the proposal of
alternative practices and theories. In other words, it explores not
merely what the body is but also what it could be through disci-
plined cultivation guided by better somatic ideas and methods.
Somaesthetics has its focus in the soma, which it understands
as the living, feeling, perceptive, purposive, culturally informed
body, an entity with integrated physical and mental attributes that
could be described as a unified “body–mind” (Dewey, 1981,
p. 217). Philosopher John Dewey (an advocate of the Alexander
technique) sometimes employed this hyphenated term to designate
what he regarded as the essential ontological unity of body and
mind in the human person. But the notion of soma also emphasizes
the cultural and environmental shaping of this living unity. The
soma is a transactional entity absorbing energies and materials from
its environing context and reciprocally discharging energy and
materials in that environment. The soma’s vital movement includes
this transactional motion between the body’s porous envelope and
its physical and social context. The term “soma” (deriving from a
Greek word for body) has the advantage of being free from the
many negative associations of the term “body,” such as the body’s
contrast to mind, its identification with mere physicality, and its
application to dead bodies (i.e., corpses) and to inanimate bodies in
general. If the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty sought to evade
these negative connotations of body by introducing in his later
work the notion of flesh, then that term has its own negative
associations with sin (at least in Christian culture) and also suggests
a narrow focus on only one dimension of the soma—its flesh rather
than its bones, organs, vessels, neural pathways, and so forth.
The term “aesthetics” in somaesthetics requires some expla-
nation, as its meaning is broader than today’s most common
understanding of aesthetics as being focused narrowly on matters
KR Vol. 9, No. 3, 2020
of art and beauty. Instead somaesthetics returns to the original
meaning of the aesthetic as concerned with sensory perception
(aesthesis). Alexander Baumgarten, the eighteenth-century founder
of the field of aesthetics, derived the field’s name from the Greek
word for sense perception: α’ισθησις (aisthesis). Proposing aes-
thetics as a new science of our lower, sensory faculties (as opposed
to the higher faculty of reason), Baumgarten defined its aim as “the
perfection of sensory cognition as such.” We still have traces of this
broadly perceptual notion of aesthetics today in our medical notion
of anesthetics, which remove perception by making us uncon-
scious. Moreover, a broader notion of the aesthetic than the
traditional one preoccupied only with fine art and beauty is
becoming increasingly popular in contemporary aesthetics through
the extension of aesthetic thinking into popular culture, design, and
the general aestheticization of life.
When somaesthetics speaks of “sensory appreciation” it re-
cognizes that our sense perception is always sensorimotor, because
perceiving always involves an active dimension rather than the
mere passive registering of sense impressions on the brain. We turn
our gaze and focus our eyes to see; we cock our ears or turn our
head to hear; we move our hands to touch. The notion of apprecia-
tion is meant to convey the dimension of qualitative affective tone
in our perceptual experience; perceiving is not simply a matter of
what is perceived but also how it feels to perceive it (with pleasure
or displeasure, excitement, surprise, or dread). Some perceptions
are felt with more pleasurable or positive affect than others, but
every perception has some affective quality or tone, although this
quality often goes unnoticed because it is too faint or subtle or
because our attention is focused on other aspects of the perceptual
experience. If somaesthetics’ focus on perception treats the soma as
a sentient subjectivity, the concern of somaesthetics for performa-
tive, creative self-fashioning highlights the fact that one’s soma is
also a physical body that performs actions in the world and that
deploys those actions and the soma’s physical surface to express
and display one’s values (through cosmetics, fashion, etc.). The
soma thus exhibits a complementarity of subjective and objective,
inner and outer.
In its concern for the human body also as object, somaesthetic
departs from the tradition of phenomenology of the body that
(drawing on the distinction between two German words for
“body”) focuses on the body as lived and living subjectivity (or
Leib) rather than on the material body (Körper). Somaesthetics
resists reduction to phenomenology’s Leib Philosophie because its
key concept of soma embraces both Körper and Leib, and its
research extends to the soma’s surface appearances and external
effects, not just its inner feelings and perceptions. The concept of
soma as defining the human condition of physically embodied
subjectivity aims to circumvent familiar metaphysical puzzles of
how the mind and the body are related by seeing the duality
expressed by those concepts as merely a conceptual distinction
of different dimensions of an essentially unified, single (albeit
complex) entity rather than an ontological dualism of two radically
different kinds of things. The soma reflects a naturalist philosophy
that sees mind as an emergent constellation of properties and
dispositions arising from the purposive, expressive activity of a
biological and culturally shaped organism rather than seeing mind
(including reason and spirituality) as a supernatural gift from god.
If somaesthetics inherited this naturalist approach to mind
from pragmatist philosophy, it could also trace the soma’s notion of
essential body–mind unity back to Spinoza, who boldly asserted
“that mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived first
under the attribute of thought, secondly, under the attribute of

[spatial] extension” (Spinoza, 1632–1677/1884, p. 131). That one
and the same thing is what somaesthetics calls the soma. Moreover,
in arguing that the soma is capable of perception and purposive
action, somaesthetics can find support in Spinoza’s argument that
no one has convincingly proved that our bodies are incapable of
such things because no one has succeeded in fixing “the limits to
the powers of the body” (Spinoza, 1632–1677/1884, p. 132). The
somaesthetic idea that our powers of thought depend on the body’s
powers and therefore that we can improve our cognition by
improving our somatic condition similarly finds support in Spino-
za’s affirmation “that the mind is not at all times equally fit for
thinking . . . but according as the body is more or less fitted for . . .
this” (Spinoza, 1632–1677/1884, p. 133).
Genealogy and Philosophical Roots
Somaesthetics emerged in the late 1990s without any reference to
Spinoza but grounded in other influential philosophical sources,
ancient and modern, Western and Asian. It tempered the audacity
of proposing to name a new field by affirming that this was simply
“a new name for some old ways of thinking” (Shusterman, 1999b,
p. 313). Although it drew on many philosophical sources, it was
motivated primarily by two areas of philosophical research: prag-
matist aesthetics and the idea of philosophy as an art of living.
Recognizing that all action requires the body, our tool of tools,
pragmatist aesthetics insisted that artistic creation requires somatic
capabilities of some kind and that creation could be enhanced by
improving those capabilities though somatic training. The appre-
ciation of art also requires somatic means; we need to appreciate
artworks through sensory perception of some kind, our bodily
senses, and our emotions, which have bodily roots and manifesta-
tions. This suggests that improved somaesthetic sensitivity and
awareness could improve the quality of our aesthetic appreciation.
Hence, somaesthetics could serve aesthetic experience in both
creation and appreciation of art and design. The late twentieth
century saw a revived interest in the original idea of philosophy
advocated and practiced by Socrates and many other ancient
philosophers: philosophy as an art of living rather than a purely
discursive, theoretical academic subject (Foucault, 1978; Hadot,
1995; Shusterman, 1997). Such philosophy was devoted to the
quest for wisdom to live a good life that was both ethically and
aesthetically admirable, embodying the Greek ideal of kalon kai
agathon (“the beautiful and good”), a pursuit that is not restricted to
professional philosophers but open to and recommended for all
individuals and for the benefit of society as a whole. As the medium
of the art of living is life itself, so the necessary medium and
instrument of life is the soma. Somaesthetics therefore emerged to
promote the quality and enrichment of the art of living by enhanc-
ing the mastery of its medium and instrument. This grounding in
aesthetic experience and the idea of an ethical-aesthetic art of living
gave somaesthetics its meliorative perspective and its concern with
first-person and holistic methodological perspectives, subjective
experience, and concern for grace and pleasure in movement.
Structuring the Somaesthetic Field:
Branches and Dimensions
Somaesthetics has three distinct but interrelated branches and three
key dimensions (see Figure 1). The first, analytic somaesthetics, is
an essentially descriptive and theoretical enterprise devoted to
explaining the nature of our bodily perceptions and practices
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Somaesthetics 247
and their function in our knowledge and construction of the world.
Besides matters of physiology, psychology, and the traditional
philosophical topics of ontology and epistemology that relate to the
mind–body issue and the role of somatic factors in consciousness
and action, analytic somaesthetics also includes genealogical,
sociological, and cultural analyses of embodiment. These include
studies of the body’s role in sustaining social and political power.
Such studies, most famously advanced by Simone de Beauvoir,
Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, show how the body is
both shaped by power and employed as an instrument to maintain
it—how bodily norms of health, skill, and beauty, and even our
categories of sex and gender, are constructed to reflect and sustain
social forces.
In contrast to analytic somaesthetics, whose logic is descrip-
tive, pragmatic somaesthetics has a distinctly normative character
by proposing specific methods of somatic improvement and engag-
ing in their comparative critique. Such critique not only relates to
the efficacy of the proposed pragmatic methods to realize their
somaesthetic goals but also includes critique of the norms or values
implied in those goals. Methods of cosmetic surgery to enlarge
women’s breasts or diets aimed at an aesthetic of anorexic thinness
may be effective in themselves but serve questionable, unhealthy,
sexist aims that reflect misguided values. If somaesthetics aims at
somatic improvement, it includes an open debate about what
constitutes genuine, worthwhile improvement, and this involves
a debate about fundamental values both personal and societal.
Because the viability of any proposed method will depend on
certain facts about the body (whether ontological, physiological, or
social), this pragmatic dimension will always presuppose the
analytic dimension. However, the pragmatic goes beyond the limits
of the descriptive analytic dimension, not only by critically evalu-
ating the facts that analytic describes, explains, and theorizes but
also by meliorative efforts to change some of those facts by
remaking the body and society.
Over the course of history, a vast variety of pragmatic methods
have been designed to improve our experience and use of our
bodies: various diets, forms of grooming and decoration (including
body painting, piercing, and scarification, as well as more familiar
modes of cosmetic and fashion somatic adornment), dance, yoga,
massage, aerobics, bodybuilding, calisthenics, martial and erotic
arts, and modern psychosomatic disciplines like the Alexander
technique and Feldenkrais method. We can classify these diverse
methodologies in different ways. For instance, we can distinguish
between essentially holistic practices and more atomistic ones.
While the latter focus on individual body parts or surfaces—styling
the hair, painting the nails, tanning the skin, shortening the nose or
enlarging the breasts through surgery—the former practices are
emphatically oriented toward the whole body, indeed the entire
person, as an integrated whole. Hatha yoga, taiji, the Alexander
technique, and the Feldenkrais method, for example, comprise
systems of integrated somatic postures and movements to develop
the harmonious functioning and energy of the body as a unified
whole. Penetrating beneath skin surfaces and muscle fiber to
realign our bones and better organize the neural pathways through
which we move, feel, and think, these practices insist that improved
somatic harmony is both a contributory instrument and a beneficial
by-product of heightened mental awareness and psychic balance.
Such disciplines refuse to divide body from mind in seeking the
enlightened betterment of the unified soma of the whole person.
Somatic practices can also be classified in terms of being
directed primarily at the individual practitioner herself or instead
primarily at others. A massage therapist or a surgeon standardly
248 Shusterman
Figure 1 — Diagram of the field of somaesthetics. Reprinted from “Fits of Fashion: The Somaesthetics of Style,” by R. Shusterman. In Philosophical
Perspectives on Fashion (pp. 91–106). M. Stefano and G. Matteucci (Eds.), 2017, London: Bloomsbury.
works on others, but in doing yoga or taiji, one is working more on
one’s own body. The distinction between self-directed and other-
directed somatic practices cannot be rigidly exclusive because many
practices are both. Applying cosmetic makeup is frequently done to
oneself and to others, and erotic arts display a simultaneous interest
in both one’s own experiential pleasures and one’s partners’ by
maneuvering the bodies of both self and other (Shusterman, 2020).
Moreover, just as self-directed disciplines (like dieting or bodybuild-
ing) often seem motivated by a desire to please others, so other-
directed practices like massage may have their own self-oriented
pleasures.
Despite these complexities (which stem in part from the deep
interdependence of self and other), the distinction between self-
directed and other-directed body disciplines is useful for resisting
the common prejudice that focusing on bodily experience implies
retreating from social engagement into a private realm of selfish
narcissism. My work as a Feldenkrais practitioner has taught me
how important it is to pay careful attention to one’s own somatic
state in order to pay proper attention to one’s client. When I give a
Feldenkrais lesson of functional integration, I have to be aware of
my own body positioning and breathing, the tension in my hands
and other body parts, and the quality of contact my feet have with
the floor in order to be in the best somatic condition (physically and
psychologically comfortable, relaxed, focused, and attentively
aware) to correctly gauge the client’s, or student’s, body tension
and ease of movement. (The Feldenkrais method prefers to see its
work on an educational rather than commercial or medical model,
so one works on “students” rather than “clients” or “patients.”)
I need to make myself somatically comfortable during the lesson
so as not to be distracted by my own body tensions and to
communicate the right message to the student. Otherwise, I will
be transmitting my feelings of somatic tension and unease to the
KR Vol. 9, No. 3, 2020
student through my manner of touching and breathing. And because
one often fails to realize when and why one is in a mild state of
somatic discomfort, an important dimension of Feldenkrais training
is devoted to teaching one how to discern one’s own states (and
degrees) of discomfort and to distinguish their causes.
Clearer awareness of one’s somatic reactions can also improve
one’s behavior toward others in much wider social and political
contexts than one’s treatment clinic. Much ethnic and racial
hostility is not the product of logical thought but of deep prejudices
that are somatically expressed or embodied in vague but disagree-
able feelings that typically lie beneath the level of explicit con-
sciousness. Such prejudices and feelings thus resist correction by
mere discursive arguments for tolerance, which can be accepted on
the rational level without changing the visceral grip of the preju-
dice. We often deny that we have such prejudices because we do
not realize that we feel them, and the first step to controlling or
expunging them is to develop the somatic awareness to recognize
them in ourselves. Somatic disciplines can further be classified
in terms of whether their major orientation is toward external
appearance or inner experience. This classification relates to two
major dimensions of somaesthetics: the representational and the
experiential.
Before considering these dimensions of somaesthetics, how-
ever, I should note the field’s third branch: practical somaesthetics.
We need to distinguish the pragmatic methods from their actual,
fully embodied practice. There is a crucial difference between
reading or writing about yoga and actually doing yoga. Thus, aside
from the analytic and pragmatic branches of somaesthetics, there is
a third branch—practical somaesthetics—that involves actually
engaging in programs of disciplined, reflective, corporeal practice
aimed at somatic self-improvement. This dimension of not just
saying but also physically doing has long been neglected in

academic work on the body in the humanities, but disciplined
somatic practice was often significant for the ancient idea of the
philosophical life, and it is essential to somaesthetics’ aim of
integrating both theory and practice. I therefore teach workshops
in practical somaesthetics to convey this practical dimension in a
more embodied way than mere verbal insistence.
Somaesthetics involves three key dimensions of bodily being
that are treated by all of the three branches. These dimensions,
like the branches, exhibit some overlap. Representational somaes-
thetics emphasizes the body’s external appearance or sensory
representation. This is not only a visual matter of an attractive
figure, manner of gesture, or gait but extends to other external
senses: an attractive aroma, a pleasing voice or laugh, an agree-
ably gentle touch. Experiential somaesthetics concentrates more
on the quality of “inner” experience. Experiential somaesthetic
methods aim to make us “feel better” in both senses of this
ambiguous phrase (which reflects two essential aims of somaes-
thetics): to make the quality of one’s somatic experience more
aesthetically rich and pleasing and to make one’s awareness of
that experience more acutely perceptive and insightfully enlight-
ening. Cosmetic practices (from makeup and hair styling to plastic
surgery) exemplify the representational side of somaesthetics,
while practices like yoga, zazen meditation, or Feldenkrais’s
“Awareness Through Movement” lessons are paradigmatic of
the experiential mode in its senses of both heightened quality and
perceptual acuity. The representational/experiential distinction
with its notion that bodily beauty can be an inner feeling rather
than an outer look is very useful for countering familiar arguments
of cultural critics who condemn any concern for the body as
intrinsically superficial and devoid of the spiritual and who
especially denounce aesthetic interest in the body as promoting
society’s oppressive domination by stereotypes of youthful
beauty that serve the advertising industry’s goal of making us
dissatisfied with our bodily appearance so that we will uncritically
buy their products that promise a path to achieving such conven-
tional, external beauty ideals. By distinguishing the realm of
experiential somaesthetics from that of external representations,
somaesthetics can refute or soften this critique.
However, the representational/experiential distinction should
not be seen as a rigidly exclusive dichotomy. There is an inevitable
complementarity of external appearance and internal experience, of
outer and inner. As commercial advertising rightly reminds us, how
we look influences how we feel, and vice versa. Practices like
dieting or bodybuilding that are initially pursued for purposes of
attractive representation often end up generating special feelings
that are then sought for their own sake. The dieter becomes an
anorexic craving the inner feel of hunger; the bodybuilder becomes
an addict of the experiential surge of “the pump.” Conversely,
somatic methods aimed at inner experience sometimes use repre-
sentational means as cues to achieve the body posture necessary for
inducing the desired inner experience: focusing one’s gaze on a
mirror to achieve the body alignment needed to attain the desired
inner feeling; focusing on a body part like the tip of the nose to
focus one’s meditating consciousness away from surrounding
external distractions and inner mind wandering. However, by
the same token, a dominantly representational practice like body-
building uses acute awareness of experiential clues (e.g., of optimal
fatigue, body alignment, and full muscle extension) to serve its
sculptural ends of external form. One needs the ability to feel the
difference between the pain that builds muscle from the pain that
indicates injury, to distinguish full muscle extension from insuffi-
cient extension or overextension.
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Somaesthetics 249
If the representational/experiential distinction is not logically
exclusive, neither does it seem entirely exhaustive. A third,
distinguishable but overlapping dimension of somaesthetics is
the performative. Here the focus is not so much on how one
(representationally) looks or (experientially) feels but rather on
how well one performs certain somatic skills or tasks. Varieties of
athletics and performing arts are paradigmatic of this dimension,
although in some of these sports and arts representational factors
also serve as criteria for successful performance, while experiential
satisfactions and skills of discernment (of one’s level of energy
and movement mechanics) can fuel performative success. None-
theless, we can distinguish between enjoying a tennis stroke that
looks beautiful, the inner satisfying feeling of a strong stroke, and
whether the stroke has the performative success of clearing the net
and landing in the right place with the right speed and spin.
Affective Cognitive Context
and Interdisciplinary Applications
We have discussed somaesthetics’ connection to contemporary
pragmatist philosophy and ancient philosophy’s idea of the philo-
sophical life as a critical, disciplined art of living; we have also
mentioned its inspiration from ancient Asian and modern Western
disciplines of enhanced body consciousness, such as the Alexander
technique and the Feldenkrais method. We now should note some
points of convergence with a growing current in the interdisciplin-
ary field of cognitive science. This approach centers around the 4E
model of cognition and mind: mental life is embodied, enactive
(rather than mere passive recording), extended (beyond the individ-
ual brain and nervous system into various devices and databases),
and embedded (in wider networks and webs of knowledge and
social institutions). To these four aspects of knowing, somaesthetics
insists on adding two other essential features of cognition: the
affective and the aesthetic. By substituting the synonym “emotive”
for “affective” and using the simplified American spelling of
“esthetic,” we could regard somaesthetics as proposing a 6E theory
of mental life. Somaesthetics believes that the study of mind and
movement would benefit by including first-person testimony in its
scientific inquiries, integrating data from third-person observation
of behavior with first-person data on subjective experience. If
the value of first-person testimony depends on its accuracy and
clarity, somaesthetics can help by cultivating the skills of self-
observation of subjective affect, including feelings involved in
one’s movements.
Affect seems especially relevant to the study of movement
because it is the trigger of action and because actions always
involve some form of movement. Traditional action theory gener-
ally assumed that action results from a thoughtful decision to do
something, but thought is in fact a deterrent of action. Reflection
inhibits action by intervening with a pause of thoughtful delibera-
tion. Feeling is what drives action, whether the unthinking feeling
of impulse or the accumulated feeling that increasingly pervades a
thought process. Affect is also the crucial engine of thought, as
pragmatist philosophers long ago recognized and today’s neuro-
science confirms. Mood shapes our thinking; it colors our attitude
and sensibility, giving current experience its basic tonality. Affect
structures our thought by defining its limits, foci, and direction in
terms of felt affinity with its dominant mood; this unifying affect
helps create the unity of consciousness.
What guides the direction of our association of ideas in the
stream of consciousness (a metaphor that William James made
250 Shusterman
famous by contrasting it to the more mechanical, discrete images of
a train or chain of thought)? What keeps our thought going along
the desired route and sustains our focus on the chosen topic and its
purpose? For James it is a background felt quality, “a mood of
interest” with “a felt fringe of relations,” and
However vague the mood, it will still act in the same way,
throwing a mantle of felt affinity over such representations,
entering the mind, as suit it, and tingeing with the feeling of
tediousness or discord all those with which it has no concern.”
(James, 1983, p. 250)
The mood welcomes ideas that harmonize with its tone and felt
tendency, that give a “sense of furtherance” of its interest or
concern, while it resists ideas that instead bring “discord” or
“hindrance of the topic,” that are uncongenial to the mood’s “fringe
of felt affinity.” The most influential aspect of these fringes in
structuring thought is not cognitive but, rather, affective and
aesthetic, “the mere feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or
wrong direction” (James, 1983, pp. 250–251). James, presciently,
further argues that feeling, as the engine of thought, provides the
necessary energy and focus for rational reasoning.
If focalization of brain activity is the fundamental fact of
reasonable thought, we see why intense interest or concen-
trated passion makes us think so much more truly and pro-
foundly. . . . When not “focalized,” we are scatter-brained; but
when thoroughly impassioned, we never wander from the
point. None but congruous and relevant images arise.” (James,
1983, pp. 989–990)
Contemporary neuroscience confirms this view. Since there is
no “Cartesian theater” where all brain input meets together for
simultaneous processing, human thinking works “by synchroniz-
ing sets of neural activity in separate brain regions” through “time
binding” of images in different places “within approximately the
same window of time.” But this requires “maintaining focused
activity at different [brain] sites for as long as necessary for
meaningful combinations to be made and for reasoning and deci-
sion making to take place” (Damasio, 1995, pp. 94–96). The
affective energy of our emotions, feelings, and moods that involves
an essential bodily dimension not only serves “as a booster for
continued working memory and attention” but also facilitates
“deliberation by highlighting some options” while eliminating
others in terms of their fit with our background mood and its sense
of direction as expressed in vaguely felt bodily feelings or “somatic
markers” (Damasio, 1995, p. 174, p. 198). As Damasio argues,
pure rationalist cold-bloodedness (as in the affect-deficient cold-
bloodedness of his brain-damaged patients) would make the
“mental landscape” of working memory not only “hopelessly
flat” but also “too shifty and unsustained for the time required . . .
of the reasoning process,” so we would “lose track” or direction and
fail to achieve an effective rational result (Damasio, 1995, p. 51,
pp. 172–173).
Recognizing the essentially embodied nature of affect, so-
maesthetics explores its role in perception, presentation, and
performance in order to use that enhanced knowledge to improve
our mental life and our conduct. The somaesthetic argument is that
if affect helps shape our actions, including those actions that serve
the acquisition of knowledge, then an enhanced awareness of our
affect can provide us better understanding of our actions that in turn
can be used to improve our conduct and our pursuit of knowledge.
Moreover, because affect is essentially embodied, it follows that a
KR Vol. 9, No. 3, 2020
heightened, cultivated somaesthetic consciousness—one more
clearly aware of our bodily feelings—could provide reliable evi-
dence of affect that we might not otherwise properly notice, even if
we were in the very grip of it. For example, we rarely notice our
breathing, but its rhythm and depth provide rapid, reliable evidence
of our emotional state. Consciousness of breathing can make us
aware that we are angry or anxious when we might otherwise
remain unaware of these feelings and thus vulnerable to their
misdirection in hasty conclusions, nervously erratic movements,
and misguided action. Similarly, if we have a somaesthetically
cultivated sense of proprioception and kinesthesis, we can recog-
nize that our body posture, tonus, or quality of movement expresses
an attitude and subtle feeling of aggressive tenseness that we
might not otherwise notice and would wish to conceal from our
interlocutors.
If improved somatic sensibility helpfully augments our emo-
tional knowledge, then it can likewise improve the conduct that
emotion shapes. The somaesthetically trained individual who re-
cognizes her nervousness from her rapid, shallow respiration can
help collect herself by altering her current breathing pattern to a
calmer style that expresses and thus also induces tranquility. The
result may be a steadier hand in action or a more judicious process of
thinking or speaking. Similarly, somaesthetic mastery, by enabling
an individual to relax undesirable postural tensions or smooth
disagreeable forms of movement, can also correct the undesirable
affects they express and therefore avoid the unwelcome conduct that
such affect would tend to induce. As affect and action are so closely
linked, we can modify affect by altering our action, even if that
altering action may itself require an affective impulse to trigger it—
for instance, an impulse of desire to escape one’s currently dominant
mournful mood by trying to sing a happy song. This reciprocal
causal connection between affect and action need not signal a
deterministic vicious circle, because our affective consciousness
is not monolithic, and somaesthetic sensitivity can help us discern
strands of feeling or elements of desire that lie outside our current
affective focus or prevailing mood and that could alter that mood if
we bring our attentive, active focus toward those currently more
marginal affective aspects.
We should note a distinctively aesthetic dimension of affect
that serves the somaesthetic quest for improved experience and
movement of action. We can use our felt aesthetic sense of beauty,
harmony, grace, and pleasure to assess the quality of our move-
ments, and thus the efficiency or efficacy of actions performed
through those movements. Biomechanically efficient (and ethically
unconflicted) movements typically feel good—graceful, unified,
easy, and harmonious rather than jerky, hesitant, effortful, and
disjointed. We have a pleasurable aesthetic sense of ease and grace
when our movements are very smooth, fluid, and agile, just as we
feel a certain uneasy, awkward feeling when we have performed a
movement very clumsily or ineptly. Part of the pleasure in watch-
ing dance, figure skating, diving, and other aesthetic athletic
activities is that we empathetically experience (allegedly though
mirror-neuron networks) something like the proprioceptive plea-
sure of performing these aesthetically demanding yet elegantly
performed movements.
People who have acquired enhanced somaesthetic awareness
can be more perceptive and subtly discriminating in their judg-
ments of grace and awkwardness in movement. Even in a generally
graceful arc of movement they can (perhaps empathetically) notice
the particular points where its smooth fluidity is slightly flawed
through some jerkiness, hesitation, trembling, or forced effort
(sometimes noticeable by its effect on our respiration, such as a

momentary holding of one’s breath because of effort). Once we
discern the points where a movement is awkwardly performed, we
can more effectively work on smoothing those rough edges to
render the movement both more aesthetically enjoyable and more
kinetically efficient. Cultivated somaesthetic awareness, moreover,
enables us to try out the feel of different ways of performing the
same action (e.g., deploying slightly different postures or initiating
the movement from different body parts, such as reaching for an
object by first shifting the pelvis rather than first extending the arm)
and then feeling which of these perhaps slightly different ways of
performing the movement feels and works best.
Because of its philosophical roots and concern with the
aesthetic, somaesthetics has found its most frequent application
in philosophy and the arts, especially dance, theater, and the visual
arts (Arnold, 2005; Dhillon, 2015; Gallagher, 2011; Leddy, 2015;
Maus, 2010; Mullis, 2013; Shusterman, 2012, 2016; Tedesco,
2012; Terry-Fritsch, 2020; Voparil & Giordano, 2015; Zamir,
2018). It also has been repeatedly used in political theory, gender
studies, and education theory, including health and physical edu-
cation (Bae, 2020; Doddington, 2014; Fitz-Gibbon, 2012; Granger,
2010; Jay, 2002; Jolles, 2012; Shusterman, 2014; Surbaugh, 2010).
It has had little impact in the natural and technological sciences,
apart from its increasingly fruitful integration into interactive
technological design as expressed not only in theoretical texts
but also in practical workshops and prototypes (Höök et al., 2015,
2016; Höök, 2018; Lee et al., 2014; Schiphorst, 2009). Some of the
most recent somaesthetic interaction design focuses on interactive
movement with drones (Eriksson et al., 2020; La Delfa et al., 2020).
Questions of Values and Norms
As a critical meliorative project, somaesthetics aims to improve our
somatic experience and performance. But the notion of improvement
implies some notion of norms or evaluative standards concerning
what is better or worse, even if these norms or values are typically
vague or implicitly taken for granted. The somatic norms and values
inherent in the vast range of pragmatic somaesthetics’ meliorative
disciplines are too numerous, diverse, and conflicting to allow the
formulation of a complete consistent set of somaesthetic norms. These
pragmatic disciplines of improvement are essentially defined by
norms of somatic action that are formulated as explicit methods or
techniques to serve the specific disciplines’ aims of somatic improve-
ment that in turn reflect different values and purposes: strength,
beauty, health, sexual prowess, various motor skills, ascetic austerity
in service to God, and so on (Shusterman, 2018).
Moreover, as these meliorative somatic disciplines are always
developed in a sociohistorical context and must in some way be
comprehensible or suitable to that context (even if they oppose some
of the context’s existing values), so the norms and values of the
environing society will in some manner shape the norms and
methods of these somatic disciplines. This is inevitable because
the directions of improvement and the acceptable methods for
achieving such improvement must be somehow expressive of or
compatible with some of the society’s existing values and behav-
ioral norms. As societies change over time, the norms of somaes-
thetic practices will also tend to change, adapting themselves to the
new environing social norms. Yoga practice in contemporary
Western societies is not at all what it was like in ancient India.
The defining text of yoga as a somatic practice, the Hatha Yoga
Pradipika (composed by Svatmarama in the fifteenth century),
determines in its chapter on “Prerequisites” for proper yoga practice
that the training space should be “well plastered with cow-dung”
KR Vol. 9, No. 3, 2020
Somaesthetics 251
(Svatmarama, 1400s/2014, p. 3). This is obviously not the norma-
tive ideal for yoga studios in Paris, Santa Monica, or Boca Raton.
Such diversity of disciplines with their different norms and
values can lead to misunderstandings about somaesthetics. Rather
than a unified doctrine advocating a specific set of bodily dis-
ciplines to improve the soma and society, somaesthetics is a field of
inquiry embracing the study of many different somatic practices
whose methods and underlying values are often mutually incon-
sistent. To affirm somaesthetics as a field of inquiry and to study
some of its pragmatic disciplines does not therefore mean that one
is necessarily endorsing the norms and values of the particular
disciplines one chooses to analyze. One can study somatic dis-
ciplines whose norms seem problematic or even unacceptable. This
distinction between inquiry and normative endorsement is not
limited to somaesthetics. To study philosophy with dedication
and passion does not mean endorsing all or even any of the
philosophies one studies; similarly, scholars of theology need
not believe in God or in the truth of any religion, yet they can
still be devoted students of religious faiths.
Because there are so many different somaesthetic disciplines
serving different and sometimes conflicting human purposes, which
often change with changing circumstances and contexts, it is
impossible to formulate a determinate and fixed set of norms for
somaesthetics. Moreover, even with respect to a particular disci-
pline in a specific society and given time, there can be divergent
norms or values governing the methods of practice. I learned, for
example, from my zazen training in the Soto school of Zen in
contemporary Japan that there were some teachers who insisted on
the representational norms of proper posture in the full lotus
position, while other equally distinguished teachers did not care
much about these postural norms (regarding them as merely
instrumental externals) but focused instead on experiential norms
of full mental alertness and concentration.
Furthermore, as different people have different kinds of bodies
(with respect not only to age and sex but also to size, shape,
strength, metabolism, general heath, etc.) and as these different
people may, moreover, be in very different social situations, so
their particular somatic needs and aims will inevitably vary, and we
should consequently recognize variant norms of practice to meet
those different needs and aims. The practice of a somaesthetic
discipline can, for example, lead to transformative experiences that
challenge the existing norms that govern one’s behavior, including
some of the norms of the very somaesthetic discipline that engen-
dered the transformative experience. One of the key motivations of
early somaesthetic inquiry and its intensified focus on the value of
experiential somaesthetics through the beauty and pleasures of
inner somatic feelings was to challenge and displace our society’s
oppressive obsession with external body norms of idealized stereo-
types of youthful beauty and strength. Because inner somatic
experience is usually assumed to be personal and subjective, it
has not been so heavily dominated by social norms and thus can
provide a realm of greater freedom for realizing forms of somatic
beauty and pleasures. But this inward experiential turn, though
therapeutically liberating, does not entirely free us from the
pressure of social norms. Even in the realm of inner feelings of
harmony, energy, pleasure, and mood, we inevitably find judg-
ments or standards of better and worse that are often socially
prescribed as norms that we are expected (and even urged) to
realize. In the sexual domain, for example, orgasm is the socially
authorized norm of pleasure—and it may be an oppressive and
debilitating norm for many people. Norms are inevitable and useful
in structuring experience and conduct; they are implicit in even our
252 Shusterman

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