Richard Shusterman is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 pragmatist

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...

 philosopher

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, currently the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University

Florida Atlantic University

Florida Atlantic University, also referred to as FAU or Florida Atlantic, is a public, coeducational, research university located in , United States. The university has six satellite campuses located in the Florida cities of Dania Beach, Davie, Fort Lauderdale, Jupiter, Port St. Lucie, and in Fort...

. He is internationally known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

.

Biography and career

Richard Shusterman was born December 3, 1949, to a Jewish family living in Philadelphia, USA. At age 16 he left his home and went to Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

, where he continued his education, studying English and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ; ; abbreviated HUJI) is Israel's second-oldest university, after the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The Hebrew University has three campuses in Jerusalem and one in Rehovot. The world's largest Jewish studies library is located on its Edmond J...

 from which he received his B.A. degree in English and Philosophy, and M.A. degree in philosophy (all awarded magna cum laude). He also served in Israeli Military Intelligence (1973–1976) achieving the rank of first lieutenant

First Lieutenant

First lieutenant is a military rank and, in some forces, an appointment.The rank of lieutenant has different meanings in different military formations , but the majority of cases it is common for it to be sub-divided into a senior and junior rank...

. During his Israeli education he got interested in analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy

Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...

 and this stage of his intellectual development culminated in the doctoral dissertation The Object of Literary Criticism which he wrote under the supervision of J. O. Urmson

J. O. Urmson

James Opie Urmson was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy . His nom de...

 at St John's College, Oxford

St John's College, Oxford

__FORCETOC__St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford, one of the larger Oxford colleges with approximately 390 undergraduates, 200 postgraduates and over 100 academic staff. It was founded by Sir Thomas White, a merchant, in 1555, whose heart is buried in the chapel of...

 and defended in 1979 (it was published under the original title in 1984). After teaching at different Israeli academic institutions, receiving tenure at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev   is a university in Beersheba, Israel, established in 1969. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has a current enrollment of 17,400 students, and is one of Israel's fastest growing universities....

 (with an episode as a visiting fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford University during academic year 1984/85) in 1986 he became an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple University

Temple University

Temple University is a comprehensive public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally founded in 1884 by Dr. Russell Conwell, Temple University is among the nation's largest providers of professional education and prepares the largest body of professional...

 (tenured in 1988), where he was promoted to full professor in 1991 and became a chair of the Philosophy Department (1998–2004). In 1988, as a result of both the evolution of his philosophical interests (as evidenced in his second book T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 and the Philosophy of Criticism, 1988) and personal experiences, Shusterman made a conversion from analytic philosophy to pragmatism and started his own project of developing John Dewey

John Dewey

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...

’s aesthetics. The third book he authored, Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992) was a big breakthrough in his academic career. The original approach to the problems of the definition of art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, organic wholes, interpretation

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

, popular art and the ethics

Ethics

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

 of taste he presented there brought him international fame (which is clearly evidenced by the fact that Pragmatist Aesthetics has already been translated into 12 languages). Shusterman’s position was only strengthened by his next works: Practicing Philosophy (1997), Performing Live (2000) and Surface and Depth (2002) in which he continued the pragmatist tradition, raising significant interest, provoking numerous critiques and stimulating debates not only among professional philosophers. In 2004 Richard Shusterman left Temple University to become the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

Boca Raton, Florida

Boca Raton is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida, USA, incorporated in May 1925. In the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 74,764; the 2006 population recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau was 86,396. However, the majority of the people under the postal address of Boca Raton, about...

.

Richard Shusterman is a member of many editorial boards: e.g. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Metaphilosophy, Poetics Today, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Theory, Culture, and Society, Body and Society, Akademie Verlag (Berlin) series in Philosophische Anthropologie. He has also received important grants and fellowships, e.g. Senior National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright Fellowships; and his current research in somaesthetics is supported by an Alexander Humboldt Foundation Transcoop Grant (2006–2009).

One of the important factors influencing Shusterman's philosophy has been his internationalist career: for instance, his work in France (with Pierre Bourdieu and with the College International de Philosophie) has allowed his pragmatism to engage and deploy the contemporary French philosophical tradition, while his Fulbright Professorship in Berlin enabled his pragmatism to intersect more closely with contemporary German philosophy. Similarly, his year as a visiting research professor in Hiroshima helped introduce him to Asian philosophy and Zen practice.

Shusterman’s activity is not confined to the professional academic life: in 1995 he was a delegate member of the UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

 project Philosophy and Democracy in the World and for several years he directed the UNESCO project MUSIC: Music, Urbanism, Social Integration and Culture; in the period 1998–2004 he hosted “Dialogues on the Square”, a philosophy discussion series at Barnes and Noble, Rittenhouse Square Philadelphia. As a somatic educator and therapist, he is also a certified practitioner of the Feldenkrais method

Feldenkrais method

The Feldenkrais Method is a somatic educational system designed by Moshé Feldenkrais . The Feldenkrais method aims to improve movement repertoire, aiming to expand and refine the use of the self through awareness, in order to reduce pain or limitations in movement, and promote general well-being...

.

He lives in South Florida with his second wife and a daughter. He has two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.

Shusterman's place in the Contemporary Pragmatism

It is widely agreed that contemporary pragmatism divides into at least two currents: the neo-classical and the neo-analytical

Neopragmatism

Neopragmatism, sometimes called linguistic pragmatism is a recent philosophical term for philosophy that reintroduces many concepts from pragmatism...

.

The latter, best exemplified by Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...

, can be roughly described as an amalgam of the elements of classical pragmatism and analytic philosophy, which is sometimes supplemented, especially in Rorty’s case, by the ideas of continental thinkers

Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...

 (Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

, e.g.). The former, represented, among others, by Susan Haack

Susan Haack

Susan Haack is an English professor of philosophy and law at the University of Miami in the United States. She has written on logic, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Her pragmatism follows that of Charles Sanders Peirce.-Career:Haack is a graduate of the University of...

, is more conservative in its development of the classical tradition and adopts a critical stance toward Rorty’s interpretation thereof.

Assuming this description is correct, Shusterman’s pragmatism lies somewhere in the middle between the above mentioned positions. Although his analytic background and acceptance of some of Rorty’s ideas (he even subsumes his and Rorty’s thought under a common category of “reconstructivist genealogical-poetic pragmatism”) seemingly make him a neo-analytic pragmatist, the stress he puts on the importance of the notion of experience, which Rorty would like to substitute with the notion of language, chimes perfectly with the neo-classical stance.

Besides classical pragmatism and analytic philosophy among Shusterman’s inspirations there are many different traditions and disciplines: continental sociology (Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...

)and philosophy (Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

, Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne

Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne , February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism...

, Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...

), American body therapy (Moshe Feldenkrais

Moshé Feldenkrais

Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais was an Israeli physicist and the founder of the Feldenkrais Method, designed to improve human functioning by increasing self-awareness through movement.-Biography:...

, F. Matthias Alexander

F. Matthias Alexander

Frederick Matthias Alexander was an Australian actor who developed the educational process that is today called the Alexander Technique – a form of education that is applied to recognize and overcome reactive, habitual limitations in movement and thinking.-Early life:Alexander was born on a...

) as well as East-Asian thought (Confucius

Confucius

Confucius , literally "Master Kong", was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher of the Spring and Autumn Period....

). It is worth noticing that this diversity of inspirations finds its reflection in the scope of Shusterman’s philosophical work which embraces not only aesthetics, but also metaphysics

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...

, ethics, philosophy of language, political theory

Political philosophy

Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...

 as well as metaphilosophy

Metaphilosophy

Metaphilosophy, also called philosophy of philosophy, is the study of the nature, aims, and methods of philosophy. The term is derived from Greek word meta μετά and philosophía φιλοσοφία ....

 in which latter field he advocates the idea of philosophy as the art of living.

Experience

Despite the fact that experience serves as a basic category in Shusterman’s pragmatism, both in terms of methodology (the pragmatist should always work from experience) as well as ontology or epistemology (experience “is a transactional nexus of interacting energies connecting the embodied self and its environing world”), Shusterman, contrary to his philosophical hero John Dewey, practically does not engage in constructing a general metaphysical conception thereof. He has, however, made considerable efforts to refine Dewey’s insights and to defend the latter’s idea of immediate, nondiscursive experience against the criticism put forward by Richard Rorty.

While Rorty shares Dewey’s commitment to debunk epistemological foundationalism

Foundationalism

Foundationalism is any theory in epistemology that holds that beliefs are justified based on what are called basic beliefs . This position is intended to resolve the infinite regress problem in epistemology...

, he believes that the notion of language is better suited to achieve this goal than the notion of immediate, nondiscursive experience preferred by Dewey. Moreover, according to Rorty, Dewey’s theory itself collapses into a version of foundationalism where immediate, nondiscursive experience serves as justificational evidence for particular knowledge claims. To this Shusterman replies that: (a) the antifoundationalist thrust of the notion of language is not as clear as Rorty sees it (in fact language has been frequently used as a foundationalist category); (b) Dewey never really intended his theory of experience to be a kind of epistemological foundationalism, but rather wanted to celebrate the richness and value of immediate experience, including “the immediate dimension of somatic experience” and to emphasize the positive role such experience can play in improving the quality of human life. (The inspiration of body theorist-therapist F. M. Alexander is important here). Although he argues that Dewey’s theory was ultimately spoiled by a kind of foundationalism (not the one Rorty accuses Dewey of but rather one asserting that the specific quality of immediate experience is the glue that makes coherent thought possible), Shusterman believes that the philosophical value of experience can and should be reaffirmed in an antifoundationalist form. However in Shusterman’s and also in Dewey's opinion, the eastern meditation practices repair perception for understanding our dependence on the society’s moral order. Shusterman also underlines that even if, as Rorty claims, Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher. His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century...

’s critique of the myth of the given proves that immediate, nondiscursive somatic experience cannot be integrated into epistemology, it does not preclude that this experience may be usefully deployed in philosophy as such, because to think otherwise would be to wrongly conflate all philosophy with one of its subdisciplines, i.e. theory of cognition. And the fact that we can hardly imagine any form of application of the immediate somatic experience in the realm of philosophy is not a proof that this is impossible, but rather indicates that our conception of philosophy is dominated by an idealistic paradigm, naturally hostile to the body as such. The will to change this situation has been one of the reasons why Shusterman has introduced a new philosophical subdiscipline devoted to the body and its experience: somaesthetics.

Definitions of art

Shusterman has contributed to the philosophical problem of defining art by presenting both metatheoretical insights as well as definition

Definition

A definition is a passage that explains the meaning of a term , or a type of thing. The term to be defined is the definiendum. A term may have many different senses or meanings...

s of his own coinage.

On the metatheoretical level he criticizes essentialist

Essentialism

In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...

, classificatory definitions of art (preferred by the traditional analytic philosophy) which he calls “wrapper definitions” since they aim “at the perfect coverage” of the logical extension

Extension (semantics)

In any of several studies that treat the use of signs - for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, and semiotics - the extension of a concept, idea, or sign consists of the things to which it applies, in contrast with its comprehension or intension, which consists very roughly of...

 of the notion of art. Shusterman (a) finds these definitions problematic given art’s contested value and nature as well as its unpredictable development in the future; and (b) argues that there is a goal for art definitions which is more important than the conceptual coverage: namely a directional/transformational one of “illuminating the special point and value of art or […] improving art’s appreciation”.

According to Shusterman these two goals may indeed converge, but since they may as well not he finds it unacceptable to exclude any definitions only on the basis that they do not satisfy the standards of taxonomical validity, like e.g. evaluative definitions which nevertheless can be useful in their own way. Besides discussing the issue of wrapper definitions in general, Shusterman has also criticized particular definitions of that kind invented by George Dickie

George Dickie

George Dickie is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University of Illinois at Chicago and is an influential philosopher of art working in the analytical tradition...

 and Arthur Danto

Arthur Danto

Arthur Coleman Danto Arthur Coleman Danto Arthur Coleman Danto (born January 1, 1924 is an American art critic, and professor of philosophy. He is best known as the influential, long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he...

.

Shusterman advocates a definition of art as experience he has adopted from Dewey, albeit not without making some important corrections to it. While Shusterman accepts the majority of the elements central to the Dewey’s conception of this experience (e.g., that it cannot be reduced to the private mental world of the subject being rather an interaction between the subject and the object), there are some he finds questionable (e.g. Dewey’s insistence on the unity and coherence of aesthetic experience which Shusterman would like to supplement with aesthetics of rupture and fragmentation). Secondly, he claims that Dewey was wrong to treat his definition of art as experience as a traditionalist wrapper definition, thus making it vulnerable to the valid charges that it is both too narrow and too wide (there are some artworks which do not engender aesthetic experiences and, conversely, in some cases aesthetic experience accompanies phenomena which simply cannot be redefined as art, like natural beauty, e.g.). What he should have done instead was to assign to it the directional and transformational role mentioned above. Conceived this way, Shusterman argues, the definition of art as experience has an undeniable value because even though it cannot embrace the whole extension of the concept of art it “underlines a crucial background condition, direction, and valued goal of art” (i.e. aesthetic experience) and also helps to widen “the realm of art by challenging the rigid division between art and action that is supported by definitions that define art as mimesis, poiesis, or the narrow practice defined by the institutional art world".

Shusterman also advocates a definition of art as drama

Drama

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...

tization, which supplements the definition he has inherited from Dewey not only by illuminating art’s nature from a slightly different angle, but also by serving a different, yet equally important purpose – the reconciliation of two prominent and at the same time conflicted aesthetic accounts of art: historicism

Historicism

Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...

 and naturalism. Since the notion of dramatization involves and harmonizes two important moments: of putting something into a formalized frame (e.g. “the frame of a theatrical performance”) and of intense experiential content that is framed, it presents itself as a potential synthesizing formula for historicism and naturalism which, as Shusterman argues, can be reduced to emphasizing the formal institutional frame of art (historicism) or experiential intensity that characterizes art as such (naturalism).

Both of Shusterman’s definitions have become the subject of many commentaries and criticisms.

Interpretation

Among the many debates galvanizing contemporary humanities one of the most important (if not the most important) is devoted to the problem of interpretation. Shusterman has participated in it by co-editing a fundamental anthology The Interpretive Turn, as well as by voicing his own opinions.

Shusterman’s account of interpretation is constructed in opposition to both analytic aesthetics and deconstruction

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...

, which are often said to constitute two opposite poles of the contemporary interpretive theory. As he claims, both of them share “a picture of understanding as the recapturing or reproducing of a particular […] [“separate and autonomous”] meaning-object”, yet they differ as to whether such act is possible. Deconstructionists, assuming their protean vision of language as “systematic play of differences”, claim it is not, and hence deem every reading a “misreading”, while analytic aestheticians think otherwise, usually construing the objective work-meaning as “metaphysically fixed in the artwork” and identifying it with the intention of the artist or “semantic features of the work itself”. To avoid both these extremes Shusterman proposes a conception of textual meaning inspired by late Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...

(and his notion of language games

Language-game

A language-game is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven.- Description :...

) in which meaning is thought of as a correlate of understanding, the latter term being conceived as “an ability to handle or respond to [something] in certain accepted ways” which, although shared and legitimized by the community, can be quite different and constitute many diverse “interpretation games”. Interpretation, thus, is not an act (be it successful or inherently condemned to failure) of discovering the meaning of text, but rather of constructing it, or, as Shusterman would like to put it, of “making sense’” of text. One of the corollaries of this account is that correctness of interpretation is always relative to the “rules” (typically implicit) of a given interpretation game. Since there are many different incommensurable games existing at the same time and since some of them have undergone some significant changes over history (and some may even have disappeared from use), we can speak of a plurality of correct interpretations of the same text both in synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Another consequence of this theory is Shusterman’s logical pluralism which claims not only that there can be different (even contradictory), yet equally true interpretations (that would be only a cognitive pluralism), but also that there are legitimate forms of approaching texts which do not even aim at interpretational truth or plausibility, but rather aim at other useful goals (e.g., providing pleasure or making an old text more relevant to contemporary readers).

Another of Shusterman’s contributions to the theory of interpretation is his critique of a widely held view he calls ‘hermeneutic universalism’ and attributes to Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method .-Life:...

, Alexander Nehamas

Alexander Nehamas

Alexander Nehamas is Professor of philosophy and Edmund N. Carpenter, II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Nietzsche, Foucault, and literary theory....

 and Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish

Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist and legal scholar. He was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island...

, among others. Agreeing with basic antifoundationalist thrust of the hermeneutic universalists’ position, Shusterman simultaneously rejects their thesis that “to perceive, read, understand, or behave at all intelligently […] must always be to interpret” and seeks to refute it with many original arguments. He also insists that the notion of interpretation needs a contrasting category to guarantee its own meaningfulness. If everything is interpretation then the concept loses its point. Shusterman argues that immediate, non-interpretive understanding can serve that role of contrast. Hence, inspired by late Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s theory of hermeneutic circle, Shusterman proposes to distinguish (while underlining the functional rather than ontological character of this distinction) between

“the immediacy of uninterpreted understandings of language (as when I immediately understand simple and pertinent utterances of a language I know well) and the mediacy of interpretations (as when I encounter an utterance or text that I do not understand in terms of word-meaning or contextual relevance and then have to figure out what is meant)”.

Among Shusterman’s achievements in the theory of interpretation there are also the accounts of literary criticism he created in his earlier, analytic period , as well as his pragmatist arguments against interpretational intentionalism and his genealogical critique of deconstructionist (Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

’s, Jonathan Culler

Jonathan Culler

Jonathan Culler is a class of 1966 Harvard graduate and Professor of English at Cornell University. He is an important figure of the structuralism movement of literary theory and criticism.- Background and career:...

’s), analytic (Joseph Margolis

Joseph Margolis

Joseph Zalman Margolis is an American philosopher. A radical historicist, he has published many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy, and has elaborated a robust form of relativism....

’) and neopragmatist (Richard Rorty’s, Stanley Fish’s, Walter Benn Michaels

Walter Benn Michaels

Walter Benn Michaels is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History...

 and Steven Knapp

Steven Knapp

Steven Knapp is the current president of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., having assumed office in August, 2007. He is the 16th president of the university, succeeding Stephen Joel Trachtenberg. Previously, he was the provost and dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the...

’s) literary theories which, as he claims, are all governed at their core by an ideology of professionalism.

Popular art

According to Shusterman, one of the most pressing sociocultural problems of today is the aesthetic legitimation of popular art. Although popular art may now seem to be socially justified, its artistic value is still questioned which is the constant cause of the following problems:

• popular art is “deprived of artistic care and control” which could protect it against the negative influence of the market, and, as a result, it often becomes “brutally crude in sensibility”
• satisfactions provided by this kind of art cannot be full since they are diminished by a sense of humiliation which is induced in its audience by official art institutions’ explicit disapproval of popular art forms.
• this situation in turn “intensifies painful divisions in society and even in ourselves”.

A sincere advocate of popular aesthetics, Shusterman is nevertheless careful to distinguish his stance from one-sided apologia and he would rather characterize it as ‘melorism’ which “recognizes popular art’s flaws and abuses but also its merits [while also holding] that popular art should be improved because it can and often does achieve real aesthetic merits and serve worthy social ends”.
Putting his meliorism into practice, Shusterman seeks to win aesthetic legitimation for popular art in two ways:

• on a general theoretical level:
  • he promotes the definition of art as experience, assuming that it could “effect the artistic legitimation” of popular art (e.g., “rock music
    Rock music
    Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
    
    ”) “which affords such frequent and intensely gratifying aesthetic experience to so many people from so many nations, cultures, and classes”;
  • provides counterguments to the most influential criticisms of popular art (e.g., Theodor W. Adorno
    Theodor W. Adorno
    Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....
    
    ’s and Allan Bloom
    Allan Bloom
    Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academic. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University...
    
    ’s);
  • analyzes (both on conceptual-etymological as well as genealogical level) the phenomenon of entertainment to highlight the crucial positive role it plays in human existence;
• Shusterman also engages in the aesthetic criticism of particular genres of popular arts and of its concrete works, arguing for artistic value of country music
  Country music
  Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...
  
   and rap
  Hip hop music
  Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...
  
  . What is worth stressing, Shusterman was probably the first art philosopher ever to write about rap, and despite the fact that the accuracy of his treatment of this music genre is sometimes questioned, his groundbreaking role in this regard cannot be denied and it has been appreciated worldwide.

Somaesthetics

Somaesthetics’ is a term coined by Shusterman to denote a new philosophical discipline he has invented as a remedy for the following problems:

• According to Shusterman our culture’s growing preoccupation with the body has not yet found an appropriate response in the realm of philosophy which simply neglects the somatic or textualizes it or reduces it to gender or racial difference, and thus is unwilling or unable to counteract the negative aspects of the current body boom (such as the tendency that “contemporary aesthetic ideals of body remain enslaved by shallow and oppressive stereotypes that serve more to increase profits for the cosmetics industries than to enrich our experience of the varieties of bodily charms”).
• Despite the relative abundance of humanist disciplines devoted to the body they lack
  • a conceptual framework that could integrate their efforts (and also allow for their better cooperation with natural sciences and various somatic methods);
  • “a clear pragmatic orientation, something that the individual can directly translate into a discipline of improved somatic practice”.
• Philosophical aesthetics has paid very little attention to the body as a result of “the willful neglect of the body in Baumgarten’s
  Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
  Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten was a German philosopher.-Biography:Baumgarten was born in Berlin as the fifth of seven sons of the pietist pastor of the garrison, Jacob Baumgarten and his wife Rosina Elisabeth....
  
   founding text of modern aesthetics, an omission reinforced by subsequent intellectualist and idealist theories (from Kant
  Immanuel Kant
  Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
  
   through Hegel
  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
  
   and Schopenhauer
  Arthur Schopenhauer
  Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
  
   and on to contemporary theories that emphasize disinterested contemplation)”.

The above mentioned conditions have determined the nature of somaesthetics as a grounded in philosophical aesthetics yet interdisciplinary project of theory and practice which can be defined as:
To clarify the terminological issues one needs to mention that Shusterman has intentionally put the term ‘soma’ (instead of the more familiar ‘body’) in the name of his disciplinary proposal to emphasize one important feature of his conception of corporeality. For Shusterman, who is a true disciple of Dewey in this regard, bodily and mental (as well as cultural and biological) dimensions of human being are essentially inseparable and to signify this unity (this “sentient perceiving «body-mind»”) he prefers to use the term ‘soma’ which, unlike ‘body’, does not automatically connote passive flesh contrasted to dynamic soul or mind.

Although Shusterman’s project may at the first glance seem utterly innovatory and even iconoclastic, its various elements, as Shusterman himself admits, can be traced to many respected traditions: ancient Greek philosophy and the later Western philosophies (Michel de Montaigne, John Dewey, Michel Foucault), but also East-Asian wisdom such as Confucianism.
Somaesthetics divides into three fundamental branches:

• analytical somaesthetics which is a “descriptive and theoretical enterprise devoted to explaining the nature of our bodily perceptions and practices and their function in our knowledge and construction of the world. Besides the traditional topics in philosophy of mind, ontology, and epistemology that relate to the mind-body issue and the role of somatic factors in consciousness and action, analytic somaesthetics also includes the sort of genealogical, sociological, and cultural analyses advanced by Beauvoir, Foucault [and] Pierre Bourdieu”;
• pragmatic somaesthetics which (in “contrast to analytic somaesthetics, whose logic is essentially descriptive”) “has a distinctly normative, often prescriptive, character because it involves proposing specific methods of somatic improvement or engaging in their comparison, explanation, and critique”;
• practical somaesthetics which “involves actually engaging in programs of disciplined, reflective, corporeal practice aimed at somatic self-improvement”.

Shusterman himself works in all three somaesthetic subdisciplines:

• within the analytic field he theorizes body’s status as the basic medium of human existence and the fundamental role it plays in the realm of cognition, ethics, politics and aesthetics;
• in pragmatic somaesthetics
  • he analyzes different somatic disciplines (e.g., Feldenkrais method, Alexander Technique
    Alexander Technique
    The Alexander Technique teaches the ability to improve physical postural habits, particularly those that have become ingrained and conditioned responses...
    
    , Bioenergetics
    Bioenergetics
    Bioenergetics is the subject of a field of biochemistry that concerns energy flow through living systems. This is an active area of biological research that includes the study of thousands of different cellular processes such as cellular respiration and the many other metabolic processes that can...
    
    );
  • criticizes different thinkers, such as Edmund Burke
    Edmund Burke
    Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....
    
    , William James
    William James
    William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
    
    , Maurice Merleau-Ponty
    Maurice Merleau-Ponty
    Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
    
    , Simone de Beauvoir
    Simone de Beauvoir
    Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
    
     and Michel Foucault, for either neglecting or misconceiving the value of various forms of somatic care;
  • scrutinizes the issue of Asian erotic arts;
  • discusses the value of somaesthetics for education in the humanities;
• As a certified practitioner of Feldenkrais Method and a somatic therapist he gives workshops on somaesthetics that include practical exercises and demonstrations, but also has experience in treating different cases of somatic disabilities.

While undeniably a new phenomenon, somaesthetics, which by now forms the center of Shusterman’s philosophical inquiries, has already influenced many scholars working in fields as diverse as philosophy, art education

Art education

Art education is the area of learning that is based upon the visual, tangible arts—drawing, painting, sculpture, and design in jewelry, pottery, weaving, fabrics, etc. and design applied to more practical fields such as commercial graphics and home furnishings...

, dance theory

Dance theory

Dance theory is a fairly new field closely related to music theory and specifically musicality used to describe the nature and mechanics of dance. While musicality deals with finding a particular matching pair of dance and music that fit each other in various respects, dance theory is a broad term...

, health and fitness studies.

Books by Richard Shusterman (selection)

• The Object of Literary Criticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984).
• T. S. Eliot and Philosophy of Criticism (London and New York: Duckworth and Columbia University Press, 1988).
• Analytic Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) – editor.
• The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) - edited with D. Hiley and J. Bohman.
• Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) – translated into 12 languages: Chinese, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Finnish, Spanish, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovakian, French and Polish.
• Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge,1997) – translated into German, French, Chinese and Polish.
• Interpretation, Relativism, and the Metaphysics of Culture (New York: Humanity Books, 1999) – edited with Michael Krausz.
• Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) – editor.
• La fin de’l experience esthetique (Pau: Presse Universitaire de Pau, 1999).
• Performing Live (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) - translated into German.
• Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd edition with a special introduction and a new chapter, (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
• Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
• The Range of Pragmatism and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell,2004) – editor.
• Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) - translated into French and Korean.

Secondary literature

• Abrams, J. J., “Pragmatism, Artificial Intelligence, and Posthuman Bioethics: Shusterman, Rorty, Foucault,” Human Studies, 27, 2004.
• Abrams J. J., “Aesthetics and Ethics: Santayana, Nietzsche and Shusterman”, The Modern Schoolman, vol. LXXXI, no. 4, May, 2004.
• Altieri Ch., “Practical Sense – Impractical Objects: Why Neo-Pragmatism Cannot Sustain an Aesthetics”, REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 15, 1999.
• Arnold P. J., “Somaesthetics, Education, and the Art of Dance”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 39, no. 1, Spring, 2005.
• Barnes T. J,“American pragmatism: Towards a geographical introduction,” Geoforum, vol. 39 (2008) - available at the author's website, see: http://www.geog.ubc.ca/~tbarnes/papers.html
• Bourmeau S., “Le corps au coeur”, Les Inrockuptibles, no. 629, 18 Dec. 2007.
• Ghosh R. K., “Art as Dramatization and the Indian Tradition”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 61, no. 3, Summer, 2003.
• Grabes H., “The Revival of Pragmatist Aesthetics”, REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 15, 1999.
• Guerra, G., “Practicing Pragmatism: Richard Shusterman’s Unbound Philosophy”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002.
• Haskins C., “Enlivened Bodies, Autheniticity, and Romanticism”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 36, no. 4, Winter, 2002.
• Higgins, K., “Living and Feeling at Home: Shusterman’s Performing Live”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 36 no. 4, 2002.
• Jay M., “Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 36, no. 4, Winter, 2002.
• Johnston J. S., “Reflections on Shusterman’s Dewey”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 38, no. 4, Winter, 2004.
• Leddy, Th., “Moore and Shusterman on Organic Wholes”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.49, no.1, Winter, 1991.
• Leddy Th., “Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 16, no.1, 2002.
• Maher G. C., “Brechtian Hip-Hop. Didactics and Self-Production in Post-Gangsta Political Mixtapes”, Journal of Black Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, September, 2005.
• Maleuvre D., “Art and Criticism: Must Understanding Be Interpretive?” , Substance, vol. 30, no. 3. (rev. of Pragmatist Aesthetics).
• Mullis E. C., “Performative Somaesthetics: Principles and Scope”, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 40, no. 4, Winter, 2006.
• Nehamas A., “Richard Shusterman on Pleasure and Aesthetic Experience”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 56, no. 1, Winter, 1998.
• Rorty R., “Response to Richard Shusterman”, in M.Festenstein and S.Thompson (eds.) Richard Rorty. Critical Dialogues (Cambridge: Polity Press 2001).
• Säätelä S., “Between Intellectualism and «Somaesthetics»”, XIVth International Congress of Aesthetics, Proceedings Part II, ed. A. Erjavec, L. Kreft and M. Bergamo, Filozofski Vestnik, 2/1999.
• Soulez A., “Practice, Theory, Pleasure, and the Problems of Form and Resistance: Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 16, no.1, 2002.
• Taylor P. C., “The Two-Dewey Thesis, Continued: Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 16, no.1, 2002.
• Tupper, K.W. “Entheogens & education: Exploring the potential of psychoactives as educational tools”, Journal of Drug Education and Awareness, vol.1, no.2, 2003.
• Welsch W., “Rettung durch Halbierung? Zu Richard Shsutermans Rehabilitierung ästetischer Erfahrung”, DzPhil, Berlin 47 (1999)1.
• Zerbib D., “Richard Shusterman: les effets secondaires d'une philosophie douce”, LE MONDE DES LIVRES 29.11.07.
• Zerbib D.,“Richard Shusterman: intelligence du corps”, LE MONDE DES LIVRES 29.11.07 (a review of Richard Shusterman's Conscience du corps: pour une soma-esthétique).

External links

• http://www.shusterman.net/ - Richard Shusterman’s official independent site.
• http://wise.fau.edu/bodymindculture/ - The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at FAU, directed by Richard Shusterman.
• http://www.radiofrance.fr/chaines/france-culture2/emissions/suite_idees/fiche.php?diffusion_id=57451 - a 45-50 minute radio interview (in French) with Richard Shusterman; it concerns mostly Professor Shusterman's latest book Body Consciousness, translated into French as Conscience du corps: pour une soma-esthétique.
• http://www.lepoint.fr/content/debats/article?id=214541 - "Richard Shusterman, philosophe nomade", an interview (in French) with Richard Shusterman, published in Le Point (December 13, 2007).
• http://wise.fau.edu/humanitieschair/pdf/zerodeuxdef__Interview_from_Sommaire_2_no_48_Spring_2008.pdf - "Biological Aesthetics", an interview with Richard Shusterman, published in 02 (No. 46, Summer 2008).
• http://wise.fau.edu/humanitieschair/pdf/Soma_Holiday_complete_PDF.pdf - "Soma Holiday", an interview with Richard Shusterman, published in artUS(No. 21, 2008).
• http://www.fau.edu/humanitieschair/multimedia/francecultureshusterman_munier_091116.mp3 - radio interview (in French) with Richard Shusterman; it concerns the recent French translation of Shusterman's book The Object of Literary Criticism, but also the development of his philosophy in general (November 16, 2009).