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The Relationship between Shusterman's "Somaesthetics" and Baumgarten's "Aesthetics" and its Implications for Contemporary Aesthetics
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Shahab Pazouki *   , Ali Taqavi |
| Advanced Research Institute of Arts |
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Abstract: (364 Views) |
Somaesthetics, as an emerging and at the same time retrospective movement, has been proposed by Richard Shusterman in the field of contemporary aesthetics. This project is formulated in a pragmatic context and inspired by the idea of "philosophy as the art of living" and some Eastern embodied traditions and modern Western psychosomatic treatment methods. Somaesthetics is defined as the critical study and meliorative cultivation of the experience and use of the living body (soma) as the site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis), and its purpose is based on enriching propositional knowledge of the body and the lived somatic experience in the process of perception. The critical position of somaesthetics is, first of all, towards the dualism of mind-body arising from the western metaphysical thought and then towards the tradition of western aesthetics. After about two hundred and fifty years, Shusterman brought Baumgarten's aesthetics to the philosophical scene and presented it in a different discursive context. Schusterman's pragmatist reading of Baumgarten's aesthetics has opened a new perspective in the contemporary aesthetic space. This article was written with the aim of investigating the relationship between Schusterman's somaesthetics and Baumgarten's aesthetics and analyzing the consequences of this movement for contemporary aesthetics. By legitimizing the body and emphasizing the neglected role of sensory perception, somaesthetics has placed itself in an alternative and complementary position to Baumgarten's incomplete aesthetics. Shusterman considers somaesthetics to be the end of the neglect of the body. Influenced by the rationalism of the Enlightenment era, Baumgarten denied the body, and the neglect of the body was reinforced in the aesthetics of the 19th century through the idealist tradition. By taking a clear stance on the importance of the soma, somaesthetics has made a special impact on contemporary aesthetics. Somaesthetics has been able to revive the fundamental concept of aesthetics; expand the field of aesthetics beyond Hegel's philosophy of fine arts; realize the link between the aesthetic and the practical; expand the somatic perception turn to other fields of knowledge; and formalize a kind of aesthetic activism in theoretical-philosophical aesthetics. |
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| Keywords: Sensory perception, Baumgarten, aesthetics, somaesthetics, Soma, Shusterman |
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Full-Text [PDF 717 kb]
(142 Downloads)
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Type of Study: Research |
Subject:
Special
Received: 2024/11/10 | Accepted: 2025/02/15
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