Body Consciousness and Performance: Somaesthetics East and West

Abstract

Embodiment is a universal feature of human life, and so is body consciousness. Body consciousness, as I understand it, is not merely the consciousness that a mind may have of the body as an object, but includes the embodied consciousness that a living, sentient body directs at the world and also experiences in itself (and through which it indeed can experience itself as both subject and object). Since the term ‘body’ is too often contrasted with mind and used to designate insentient, lifeless things, and since the term ‘flesh’ has such negative associations in Christian culture (and moreover focuses merely on the fleshly part of the body), I have chosen the term ‘soma’ to designate the living, sensing, dynamic, perceptive body that lies at the heart of the project of somaesthetics.1 Part of that project concerns the reasons and methods for raising one's somatic consciousness to promote better self‐use and consequently greater achievement of philosophy's traditional goals of knowledge, self‐knowledge, virtue, happiness, and justice. Consciousness has different levels. At its most basic form of primitive body intentionality, we can even describe a level of what could be paradoxically called unconscious consciousness. This is the sort of limited, obscure awareness we exhibit in our sleep, when, for example, we intentionally (though unconsciously) move a pillow that is disturbing our breathing.2