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Soma and Psyche

Richard Shusterman
florida atlantic university

In the ancient legend of Cupid and Psyche, Venus was jealous of Psyche’s
beauty and plotted to punish her by binding her through love to a hideous
creature that would appear once Cupid scratched Psyche with his arrow
of desire while she slept, so that she would fall in love with the next thing
she saw upon awakening. But when Cupid saw her beauty, he was so over-
whelmed that he accidentally wounded himself with his own arrow and
thus fell deeply in love with her. The tale then describes how Venus unsuc-
cessfully tried to keep Cupid and Psyche apart, which makes a nice allegory
for the difficulty of separating the soul from desire. Though this mission
may seem as undesirable as it is unlikely to achieve, we should recall that
philosophers have frequently embraced it, seeking a therapy from desire.
But this tale of desire and soul evokes an equally difficult mission that has
been even more central to our philosophical tradition: the separation of
Soma from Psyche, of body from soul. Because so many thinkers see the
body as the irrepressible source of problematic desires (including erotic
ones), we could identify soma with Cupid in this legend. But in another

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 24, no. 3, 2010

Copyright © 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
206 richard shusterman

reading, the soma could be likened to the vile thing with which Psyche (the
beautiful soul) was meant to be punished by being bound to and enslaved
by it through desire. In any case, since Plato’s Phaedo, one famous defini-
tion of philosophy has been learning to die by separating the soul from its
troublesome bodily prison that hinders its pursuit of knowledge.
Though we may reject this philosophical project on ontological grounds
or axiological grounds, affirming that there is a basic union of body and
soul (or of body–mind) and that it is essentially valuable, there remains
the problem of how to characterize this union, if not explain it. Even if we
regard the union as an ontological given that does not require explana-
tion (in the way that dualist views of body and mind need to explain how
such ontologically different entities can be united and smoothly interact in
a single self), we still face the philosophical question of how to character-
ize that aspect of ourselves we call body and how we distinguish it from
our mental life so that we can better determine how they are related in the
body–mind union.
There is also the question of how to render this union more harmoni-
ous and fruitful, how to create better coordination between the mental or
psychic aspects of our experience and our somatic functioning. If soma and
psyche are indissolubly bound together, how do we treat tensions and mal-
functions in their connection and collaboration? Should we try to improve
their coordination by raising our mental consciousness of bodily feelings
and actions, by thinking through the body more attentively, by developing a
heightened, reflective body consciousness? Or does such increased aware-
ness only magnify our problems of coordinated body–mind functioning by
distracting us from its goals in the external world of action and leading us
to a psychologically unhealthy self-awareness and critical self-examination.
If so, how do we reconcile the dangers of somatic self-study with the
central philosophical quest for self-knowledge through critical self-scrutiny,
without excluding the body from the self?
The articles collected in this special issue were written specifically to
address these questions. With one exception, they were first presented
(in German) at a conference entitled “Leiblichkeit und Reflexion,” held
November 13–14, 2009, at the University of Potsdam, just outside of
Berlin.1 The conference was organized in the framework of a three-year
collaborative research grant by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung that
was devoted to the topic “Personale Verschränkungen zwischen Körper
und Leib. Philosophische Anthropologie und pragmatist Soma Philosophy
 soma and psyche 207

im systematischen Vergleich.” This project was directed by Professor

Hans-Peter Krüger and me. We hereby thank the Humboldt Stiftung for its
generous support of our research (including the translation of the following
texts into English), just as we thank the editors of the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy for publishing them.
I stated the long project title in German not simply for official accuracy
but because it highlights a crucial philosophical point that these articles
underline and which also makes their English translation difficult. German
has two words with rather different meanings that are commonly used
for what in English we simply call “body.” These German words for body—
Körper and Leib, with their accordingly different cognate grammatical deriv-
atives (körperlich/leiblich, Körperlichkeit/Leiblichkeit)—are typically sharply
opposed in philosophical discourse on embodiment, not only in German
but in their adaptation into French and other languages by Merleau-Ponty
and others. Very roughly speaking for the moment, Körper denotes the
physical body as object, while Leib typically signifies the lived, feeling body
or the body as intentionality or subject.2
This sharp distinction (which will be explored more fully in what
follows) can be seen as threatening to generate a problematic somatic dual-
ism somewhat analogous to body/mind dualism. Our Humboldt research
project was to examine the possibilities for reducing the perceived gap
between a person’s Körper and Leib by using the philosophical resources
of the German tradition of philosophical anthropology and the American
tradition of pragmatism. Some of the subsequent articles in this special
issue examine the Körper/Leib distinction in great detail. But they also
presuppose a substantial acquaintance with it, so I think that it is help-
ful to provide an introductory clarification of these terms in my opening
essay, before introducing the other articles and discussing how my project
of somaesthetics relates to issues raised in them.

II

The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl was the first to provide a system-

atic discussion of Leib and Körper, for instance, in his Ideen zu einer reinen
Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913) and then again
in Méditations Cartésiennes (1931).3 Though distinguishing between Körper
as physical object-body and Leib as lived or experienced body, Husserl did
208 richard shusterman

not want to erect a sharp dualism between the two. Both are aspects of the
same living human body, and he therefore sometimes spoke of that body
as the Leibkörper, both to highlight the underlying union of the two terms
and to give phenomenological primacy to the Leib as that with which one
starts in one’s experience of the world. Leib is also what Husserl describes
as the Nullpunkt or absolute here that generates physical, measurable,
mathematical spatiality without being itself spatial in this objectified or
naturalized sense.4 From the basic Husserlian Körper/Leib distinction we
can likewise distinguish between Körperlichkeit and Leiblichkeit. The former
concerns the structural morphology of the body—the skeletal bones,
inner organs, afferent and efferent nerves, muscles, air canals, blood and
other fluids, and also the neural structures in the brain; while Leiblichkeit
denotes the lived dynamic experience of the body, its living flow of life as
it is experienced or localizable in inner lived feelings or sensations. In the
1950s, Merleau-Ponty adopted the Husserlian Körper/Leib distinction and
formulated it in terms of the physical object-body (Körper) and the lived
body (corps propre) that is a body-subject, exhibiting basic intentionality
and consciousness but that of a prepredicative, unreflective form. Merleau-
Ponty’s theory of the lived body is already very familiar to English philo-
sophical readers, and I have elsewhere given it a detailed critical analysis.5
So let me concentrate here on the continuing German story of the Körper/
Leib distinction as developed by Helmuth Plessner, an extremely impor-
tant German philosopher whose enduring significance and influence are
still not properly recognized in the English-speaking philosophical world
because of the failure to translate his major works into English combined
with our failure to read them in German.6
A key figure in the German tradition of philosophical anthropology,
Plessner (1892–1985) studied medicine and zoology before turning to
philosophy, having Husserl as one of his teachers. His study of physiology
is manifest in books like Die Einheit der Sinne. Grundlinien einer Ästhesiolo-
gie des Geistes (1923) and his masterwork, Die Stufen des Organischen und
der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (1928), but also
to some extent in Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung nach den Grenzen
menschlichen Verhaltens (1941), one of his few books to be translated into
English. Plessner also devoted considerable research to social theory, such
as his Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus (1924),
which is also published in English.7 Forced by the Nazis in 1933 to leave his
post as professor in Cologne because of his Jewish background, Plessner
 soma and psyche 209

first fled to Istanbul and then to the Netherlands, where he taught sociology
and then philosophy at Groningen. He returned to Germany as a professor
of sociology at the University of Göttingen in 1952, where he became rector
in 1960.
Plessner’s background in both animal physiology and human sociol-
ogy helped shape his special approach to the Körper/Leib distinction that
he develops in a way different from the phenomenological perspective of
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. One problem Plessner found with the phe-
nomenological approach was its reliance on the traditional idea of Ego or
individual conscious self as the starting point. This traditional idea of self
or subject, Plessner thought, was still too much contaminated by traditional
dualisms—not only that of mind as subject versus body as object but also the
dualisms of self and other, knowing and doing. Hence simply connecting
Leib and Körper with a hyphen and describing them as a union of different
aspects was insufficient.
Plessner therefore preferred to abandon the idea of a transcendental
subject or self as the foundation or starting point and, instead (already
in the 1920s in Grenzen der Gemeinschaft), replaced such methodological
individualism with a broader social theory of the sociocultural constitution
of persons through the different roles that society gives them and shapes
them with (which does not preclude persons creatively finding or invent-
ing new roles for themselves). Through the various roles a person is given
and takes on or incorporates, the person—rather than being constituted
by a single monadic self-consciousness—can display a plurality of forms
of self-consciousness according to the different roles played in society.
Personhood or selfhood is not an ontological given or a primordial,
universal phenomenological given but, rather, a social product; not only
our actions but our consciousness is a habitus formed by our sociocultural
world. So one’s Leib consciousness and Körper consciousness are also not
primordially given (in the way Merleau-Ponty described the primordial con-
sciousness of le corps propre) but, instead, will also vary with changing social
roles and sociocultural conditions.
Besides this critique of phenomenological individualism and founda-
tionalism, Plessner more directly criticized Husserl’s concept of Leib for
being localized. Although Leib was contrasted with the Körper as not being
spatial, Husserl nonetheless located it as inner in contrast to the Körper
as outer. This suggests that the Leib, though presumably nonspatial, is
somehow in the body, as if it were an inner spatial thing or something
210 richard shusterman

reminiscent of a mysteriously immaterial, nonspatial soul inside our bodily

prison or machine. This problematic suggestion is strengthened by the fact
that Husserl identifies Leib consciousness with inner feelings or sensa-
tions of self, such as proprioception and an inner sense of self or what he
calls one’s “sphere of peculiar ownness” that seems all too analogous to the
old dualism of an inner mind or soul that is the true self (of one’s “exclusive
ownness”) inside an outer, spatial body.8 Plessner instead avoids reification
of the Leib as something inside the Körper. Neither an object nor a subject,
the Leib is an aspect or form of behavior rather than a thing. It is the form
of lived, experiential behavior that is differently lived and interpreted in the
variety of cultures in which it is expressed.
Not confining himself to mere critique of phenomenology’s Leib/
Körper distinction, Plessner elaborated the distinction in his own way in
terms of Leib-Sein/Körper-Haben (being Leib and having body) beginning
with his 1928 masterwork, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, and
into his postwar writings.9 If this distinction sounds like a contemporary
dualistic analogue of the Platonic contrast (e.g., in Alcibiades) between the
self’s being a soul but merely having a body, Plessner intends it not as
an ontological distinction between different kinds of entities that are can-
didates (either together or individually) for constituting the true self but,
rather, as a functional or practical distinction concerning how persons in
practice, that is, in their actual behavior, relate to their bodies. This relation-
ship can and should change in terms of the different roles persons at differ-
ent times play, the different tasks they seek to accomplish, and the different
conditions or circumstances they encounter and in which they have to act.
As I interpret Plessner’s view, the person as Leibsein relates to her body
unreflectively by acting and perceiving through it, and so the body is not
thematized as an object of perception or reflection (whether an inner or
outer object). The person here in some sense is her body, since she simply
unreflectively or spontaneously lives her life and acts effectively through
the Leib’s intentionality and intelligent activity in the world. Such unreflec-
tive intelligence and the familiar consciousness that belong to a person
when she is not objectifying herself, her body, or her experience are largely
the product of habit or second nature; and such habit is formed through
the different experiences a person has through the roles she plays and the
different social conditions in which she lives. In other words, the spontane-
ous living of one’s body as Leibsein is not some presocial, primordial bodily
behavior or feeling but the unreflective spontaneity of action and feeling
 soma and psyche 211

that results from the sedimentation of habit that becomes a spontaneously

expressed second nature. It is thus a mediated immediacy, such as the kind
that pragmatist aesthetics defends in describing aesthetic experience as
both mediated and immediate.10 Because the sedimented habits of Leibsein
can derive from different habitual roles a person plays, the same person
can live her Leib in different ways according to the different situations in
which she plays different roles, and she can transition between them with
the same leibliche spontaneity as long as she has a habit of such transitions.
In contrast, when a person relates to her body as Körperhaben, the body
is objectified as something the person has, and her body consciousness
thus becomes thematized or reflective. In objectifying the body as some-
thing she experiences as having rather than simply being, the person is
distanced or decentered from full identification with her body as Leibsein.
She can explicitly examine and reflect on her bodily self as if she (as exam-
ining, reflective subjectivity) were in some sense outside it. I understand
this reflective position as what Plessner calls the ex-centric positionality
that human persons can (and often must) take with regard to their bodies
or embodied selves. According to the circumstances they encounter and
the purposes and experiences they have, persons maneuver between the
spontaneous centric position of Leibsein and the reflective ex-centric posi-
tion of Körperhaben, decentering themselves from full identification with
their bodies, when they want, for example, to carefully examine their bodies
as objects to adorn with clothes, cosmetics, or jewelry; to reshape through
dieting, exercise, or surgery; to clean and groom; or to critically assess as
objects or loci of pleasure and pain. But when such thoughtful, objectify-
ing attention to the body is no longer felt to be needed, a person recenters
herself as the spontaneous liver of her body, that is, as Leibsein, where her
explicit attention is directed elsewhere than the body (Körper) so that she
can focus on what she needs to attend to in accomplishing her purposes
and the present tasks at hand.
In this reading of Plessner, the Körper/Leib distinction is clearly not
a primordial, permanent ontological duality but, rather, a pragmatically
functioning distinction in the practical behavior of persons. Plessner’s
idea that a person alternates—according to her practical needs and
circumstances—between Leibsein and Körperhaben very much resembles
the sort of pragmatic phasing I have frequently argued for in terms of tran-
sitions between immediate, unreflective body consciousness and explicit
or even critically reflective somatic awareness (which I describe in more
212 richard shusterman

detail as “somaesthetic perception” or “somaesthetic reflection” in Body

Consciousness). Both the spontaneous and the more explicit or critical forms
of body consciousness are essential for a person’s flourishing, for successful
functioning, improved performance, and developmental growth. Before
going into further comparisons between somaesthetics and the theories of
Plessner and German phenomenology as represented in this issue’s con-
tributions, I should, however, offer some brief introductory remarks about
the articles of my German colleagues, including the logic of their sequence.

III

The first two articles can be seen as fundamentally phenomenological in

their approach to embodiment, though they develop that approach in differ-
ent ways. Gernot Böhme, emeritus professor of philosophy at the Technical
University of Darmstadt and an important figure in contemporary German
aesthetics, ethics, and environmental and somatic philosophy, devotes his
article to an analysis of the concept of body, providing in the very title of
his essay the key thesis he seeks to explain and justify: that the body can
be defined as “the nature we ourselves are.” Though the body in Böhme’s
original German title is Leib, he argues, from the perspective of genetic
phenomenology, that because the body manifests itself in very different
ways, “there cannot be one concept of the body,” and thus the philosophical
task is to analyze the body’s different concepts and provide a comparative
assessment of what they offer us, especially in terms of how each concept
of the body not only helps us to understand one’s relationship to oneself
but also can guide us in the way we live that relationship.
Böhme therefore also examines the Cartesian conception of the body
as Körper before moving on to phenomenology’s definitions of Leib. Briefly
noting Husserl’s concept of the fungierende (functional) Leib, Böhme then
pays special attention to the experiential concept of Leib as feeling, which
(though inspired by Husserl) has been more meticulously developed by the
contemporary German philosopher Hermann Schmitz, whose voluminous
writings on embodiment, though very influential in Germany, have not
been translated into English.11 The second half of Böhme’s essay is devoted
to articulating and justifying his own definition of body (Leib) as “the
nature we ourselves are” by explaining the terms and structure of this defi-
nition and then showing how it serves not only as a way of understanding
 soma and psyche 213

ourselves but also as a guide that sets an ethical task for how we should
live our bodily lives, thus providing what he calls, after Kierkegaard, an
“existential definition” of body.
Thomas Fuchs, the Karl Jaspers-Professor für Philosophische
Grundlagen der Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie at the Center for
Psychosocial Medicine of the University of Heidelberg, combines his
philosophical training in phenomenology and his professional experience
as a psychiatrist to provide a fascinating overview of the psychological
dangers a person risks in taking her body as an object of reflection. Fuchs
begins by outlining what can be called the body’s “implicit structure” as
Leib—its way of receding into the background of consciousness to function
transparently and spontaneously so that our consciousness can instead be
focused on the outside world and the tasks we want to perform there. Not
content with pointing out the value of our somatic ability to deploy this
basic level of spontaneous, unreflective consciousness, Fuchs goes on to
argue that more reflective body consciousness has an essential alienating
effect that tends to generate various psychological disorders, which he
then explains with admirable clarity and succinctness, relying partly on
his clinical psychiatric experience. The five psychopathological manifesta-
tions of “hyperreflexivity” that he analyzes in turn (apparently moving from
the mildest to the most severe) are sleep disorder, compulsive disorder,
hypochondria, body dysmorphic disorder, and schizophrenia. From this
analysis, Fuchs draws some general conclusions about the close connec-
tion of mental illness and self-observation, noting how the disruption of
implicit sensorimotor habits through explicit attention (which he describes
as “the explication of the implicit or pathological explication”) reinforces
hyperreflexivity and intensifies mental distress by putting into focus, hence
into question, what was formerly taken for granted.
Such conclusions suggest that philosophy’s key quest for self-knowledge
and self-improvement through self-examination is essentially unhealthy for
mental life. Though Fuchs does not address this issue, I have treated it in
detail, surveying the way philosophers are much divided on the Delphic and
Socratic injunction to “know thyself.”12 The issue, I believe, is best resolved not
with a simple answer that reflective consciousness is bad or good but, instead,
by recognizing that there are different modes or styles of self-consciousness
(including somatic self-consciousness) and that the mentally debilitating
nature of some modes does not entail that all modes are pernicious. Self-
attention does not always mean denigrating self-judgment; it can involve
214 richard shusterman

nonjudgmental curiosity or positively constructive criticism in the mentally

healthy hope of self-improvement. Similarly, we need to distinguish between
an obsessive mode of self-attention and modes of self-awareness that we can
readily turn on or off.13
As we distinguish between modes of somatic self-consciousness, we
also need to distinguish contexts. Though in most everyday contexts it is
unproductively disruptive to examine ourselves and the way we perform
our actions, this does not mean that there are not important contexts where
such self-observation and self-analysis is extremely useful and therapeutic.
I have frequently argued this with respect to the improvement of bad habits,
which must be made explicit in order to be properly observed and cor-
rected. Aware of my arguments, Fuchs does acknowledge, at the end of his
essay, that self-reflection and explication of the implicit can be therapeutic
tools “for overcoming pathogenic relationships and patterns of behavior.”
We need, therefore, to devote more philosophical and clinical attention to
distinguishing those modes and contexts of somatic self-consciousness
that improve our practical functioning, mental health, and capacities for
pleasure and goodness from those modes and contexts that are generally
noxious in their effects.
Hans-Peter Krüger’s article provides us with an excellent transition
from the phenomenological approach to that of philosophical anthropology
by examining the kinds of criticism that phenomenologists have directed
at Helmuth Plessner’s theory of embodiment. In doing so he also clarifies
Plessner’s use of Leib and Körper and the notion of the “ex-centric” (and
its contrasting “centric”) positionality of persons to which I earlier referred.
Krüger gives special attention to Plessner’s analysis of the person’s posi-
tioning in laughing and crying, which he sees as limit experiences where a
person in some way loses her control of the situation and herself, including
her ability to balance between Leib and Körper. The result is that in laugh-
ing and crying, the Leib expresses itself by bursting forth with a spontaneity
that derives not from its normal range of socially sedimented roles and
habits but, instead, emerges from a more basic (though in some sense still
socially shaped) somatic expression.
Krüger also explains in detail how the Leib/Körper distinction in
Plessner’s theory emerges from a third factor that is not simply the organism
that lives in the body as Leib and has a body as Körper. That distinction,
just like the distinction between inner, lived body experience and outer cor-
poreal processes, relates to persons rather than mere human organisms.
 soma and psyche 215

But persons, according to Plessner, derive from the perspective of a shared

social world (Mitwelt), which is different from the mere Umwelt of interac-
tions between organisms and their environment. As products of the shared
world of social culture, persons are creatures whose nature is always in
some essential way more than merely natural because it is necessarily also
cultural; human persons are by their very nature cultural artifacts and not
mere organisms.
Gesa Lindemann, professor of sociology at the University of Oldenburg,
also focuses her article on Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, and (like
Krüger) she highlights some major differences between Plessner and
phenomenology. These differences include not only Plessner’s complex
pluralistic methodology (which contains Kantian, phenomenological,
hermeneutic, and natural scientific perspectives) and his choice of philo-
sophical starting point in the shared world of persons’ co-relations rather
than in the subjective lived experience of the individual self or ego. Plessner
also differs in prioritizing the object over the individual subject or ego as
what first determines the possibility (and value) of knowing that object.
This leads Plessner to argue for the view that objects (both animate and
inanimate) have a form of self-referentiality that preserves their identity
or individuation when they are perceived in different ways (e.g., as having
different perceptual properties) because they are in different states or in
different contexts of perception. Animate objects are distinctive by the
special, active way they distinguish and position themselves with respect
to their surroundings. Living things do not simply have bodily boundaries;
they use and adjust these boundaries both to distance themselves from and
to engage with their environments. This dimension of self-regulation of
boundaries is also a key part of Plessner’s theory of positionality.
As Plessner’s theory of persons and their Leib/Körper relations
depends on the structure he calls the shared world (Mitwelt), Lindemann
articulates some key points of this structure. It forms the persons who
constitute it; it is prior to the self’s experience as a living body since it is a
condition of such experience, just as it is a condition of the self’s experience
of the outside world because both self-experience and world experience are
mediated through the Mitwelt. The Mitwelt, moreover, is an open, evolv-
ing structure rather than a fixed fundamental ontology. Since persons are
defined as such by the Mitwelt, this means that in different social worlds
(for example, in different historical epochs or different cultures or coun-
tries), there can be real differences as to who (or what) counts as a person.
216 richard shusterman

Noting how premodern societies included plants, animals, and gods in the
Mitwelt, Lindemann then devotes the rest of her essay to exploring the way
the modern Western world has structured its Mitwelt and how the body in
it seems to be differently experienced and understood than the way it was
in earlier Western cultures.
The final article in this special issue provides a third general
perspective on embodiment and mental life. Rather than phenomenology
or philosophical anthropology, Andreas Heinz, chair of the Psychiatry
Department at the Charité Medical University in Berlin (together with
his junior colleague Ulrike Kluge), deploys a methodology that might be
characterized as critical genealogy blended with a pragmatic functionalist
approach. Rather than presuming a fixed, universal human essence that
generates a fixed, universal norm of health with corresponding definitions
of disease, their essay examines the concept of mental disorder by pragmat-
ically contextualizing it in social and historical space. After noting the prob-
lematic contrast of mental and organic disease (with its equally problematic
social and economic consequences), Heinz and Kluge then examine more
fully the equally problematic ways our understandings of mental illness
rely on general notions of health and disease that in turn rely on simplis-
tic notions of human evolutionary development through which disease is
then regarded as “a breakdown of . . . higher functions.” If early religious
developmental views saw humankind in a continuing degenerative fall
from the perfect state in which God created our species, modern evolution-
ary theory has recast the developmental direction as an ascent from lower
primitivism to higher perfection while preserving the idea of degeneracy in
terms of disease, portrayed as a regression (a familiar Freudian term) back
“into a more primitive condition.” Unfortunately, as the essay shows, this
notion of degeneracy has too often been used to portray modes of behavior
different than those valorized by the modern West as not simply culturally
different but primitively backward or evolutionarily inferior.
Rather than trying to ground notions of health and disease in terms of
human essence or evolutionary development, the article suggests a posi-
tive, pragmatic approach to defining mental health. This would not be in
terms of the absence of a defined mental disorder or in terms of specific
ways of living and character traits but, rather, in terms of mental functions
that enable persons to choose effectively between different ways of living
and forms of character. These functions—flexibility of behavior, empathy,
and self-efficacy—are explained in the article, which then explores to what
 soma and psyche 217

extent there are also basic dysfunctions of vital mental capacities that could
conversely define mental disease and to what extent these definitions would
be transculturally valid.

IV

I conclude this essay by briefly relating somaesthetics to some key issues

and theories presented by my German colleagues in the articles that follow.
Emerging from the embodied pragmatist tradition of James and Dewey
(though also inspired by East-Asian philosophies and Western somatic
therapies), somaesthetics insists on the soma’s role as medium of perception
and sentient intentionality that defines it as something more than a mere
physical object-body. In developing somaesthetics as a field combining
theory and practice, I have devoted considerable attention to the ways that
the soma’s attentive, discriminating perception (including self-perception)
can be improved through various methods for cultivating body conscious-
ness. For that reason, German colleagues have often asked why I insist
on using the word soma (even in German translations of my work) rather
than Leib, which would emphasize the sort of sensory appreciation of inner
bodily feelings that so much of my work explores, in methods such as the
Feldenkrais Method, the Alexander Technique, and Zen meditation. My
reason for preferring the concept of soma is not only that the Leib/Körper
distinction is neither entirely clear to me nor uncontested in German
philosophical discourse but also that somaesthetics is just as much about
Körper as Leib, exploring the use of the body’s external representations and
physical performances for aesthetic self-stylization.
If my work in somaesthetics has focused largely on the appreciation,
discrimination, and use of inner bodily feelings (typically associated with
Leib) to improve our experience and action, this is because mainstream pop-
ular culture identifies bodily aesthetics too narrowly with external appear-
ance as defined by top models, beauty queens, movie stars, bodybuilders,
and the like, so I thought I should redress the balance by focusing on other,
inner dimensions of bodily beauty. Though I also argued from the outset
that somaesthetics’ concern with external bodily form was essentially criti-
cal and meliorative, that it aimed at challenging the oppressive exclusivity
of mainstream stereotypes of bodily beauty and thus increasing the options
of aesthetic somatic self-fashioning and aesthetic appreciation of other
218 richard shusterman

bodies that do not fit the entrenched mainstream stereotypes, the dominant

ideology of beautiful bodies pervading our advertising-shaped Lebenswelt
has often overshadowed that message. Even some good philosophical
minds have misconstrued somaesthetics as a reinforcing symptom of that
superficial, narcissistic, mercenary world of seductively pretty illusions.14
I thus realized that it was necessary first to focus on the meditative,
cognitive, perceptual dimensions of somaesthetics in order to overcome
the prejudice that cultivation of aesthetic somatic experience was necessar-
ily a shallow, trivial pursuit. In launching somaesthetics it was not enough
to argue that stylizing the body’s external form (as Körper) need not be a
superficial, uncritical project. Yet this was always part of my argument—
that style goes to the core of personality.15 Moreover, somaesthetics’ concern
with the physical body also goes beneath the Körper’s surface appearance,
extending to its anatomical, physiological, and neurological functioning,
the better understanding of which can be applied to improve both our per-
ceptual, sensorimotor powers and our abilities to care for and stylize our
external appearance. In short, the concept of soma deployed in somaesthet-
ics embraces both Körper and Leib, because somaesthetics is very much
concerned with both and sees them as essentially integrated in human
experience through their productively phased alternation.
Rather than trying to adjudicate which of the different phenom-
enological and philosophical explications of the Körper/Leib distinction
captures most accurately the meaning of these terms, I should simply
note that Plessner’s account seems more resonant with somaesthetics’
conception of human embodiment and body consciousness. Besides the
shared emphasis on the functional phasing between spontaneous, implicit
body consciousness and explicit, reflective somatic consciousness, there
is also a shared recognition that the soma and the roles it takes (either
in unreflective, habitual spontaneity or in critical self-consciousness) are
essentially shaped by the social world in which it is situated. Individual
somatic consciousness—however immediate, independent, and prior to
social awareness it may seem—is always the product of a social background
that shapes that consciousness, typically without being an element in it.
Somaesthetics also shares Plessner’s insistence on the variety of culturally
styled bodies and forms of somatic consciousness rather than the phenom-
enological affirmation of some putatively primordial, foundational, univer-
sal body consciousness that (in Merleau-Ponty’s words) is “unchanging,
given once and for all,” and “known by all men” in all cultures and times.16
 soma and psyche 219

If somaesthetics rejects such ahistorical, culturally unchanging,

and socially independent universalism, another key way it differs from
phenomenology is its active integration of practical somatic disciplines to
improve our powers of body consciousness and awareness. Somaesthetics
is not just embodied philosophy in the sense that it takes the body seriously
and positively and that it makes it central to its theories; it is also embodied
philosophy, in that it is meant to be exemplified somatically in the behavior
of those who practice it. Somaesthetics, I should recall, emerged out of the
marriage of pragmatist aesthetics with the idea of philosophy as an art of
living whose somatic expression should convey part of the philosopher’s
message or teaching. Its essential commitment to meliorative practice and
its introduction of disciplines of such practice into the core of its project
may also distinguish it from philosophical anthropology, whose approach
seems to be more traditionally theoretical.
Plessner’s philosophical anthropology raises some interesting
ontological issues that my earlier accounts of somaesthetics have not
adequately clarified. First, what is the extensional range of soma for
somaesthetics?17 My work has concentrated exclusively on the human
soma, but do higher animals also have a soma? If we assume that they have
living, purposive bodies that not only are in some way conscious of their
bodily feelings and body parts but also aesthetically groom or therapeuti-
cally nurse those parts when needed, then such animals would seem to have
a soma, a body they experience as both subject and object, as Leibsein and
Körperhaben. What about robots and dolls? Here the bodies are not living
in the biological sense, but they can certainly be purposive, in that their
bodies can be programmed to react purposively to stimuli (as human soma
are also programmed to do through biological input as well as social train-
ing). With dolls, the aesthetic appearance of external bodily form seems
to be particularly important and is essentially modeled not merely on the
human form but also on what a given culture sees as aesthetically impor-
tant in that somatic form. Because of their culturally shaped humanoid
soma, we tend to treat dolls differently than stuffed animals.18 Robots and
dolls are interesting borderline cases, whose logic I cannot pursue here.
Second, what is the relationship of the human soma to the self
or person? Though far too complex to treat here, the question is worth
noting as a task for future analysis. My initial position would be that the
soma cannot be simply identified with the self or with the person because
there are things we would attribute to the self or person that would not be
220 richard shusterman

attributed to her soma. If we take a broad Jamesian notion of the empirical

self as what an individual can call her own, then we can think of many
things that belong to that individual (bank accounts, university degrees,
books, children, students, debts, etc.) that do not belong to her soma. This
does not mean that there is an independent, incorporeal self mysteriously
existing apart from the soma while somehow controlling or directing it.
It might seem tempting to posit the self as such a supervising entity that
regulates the transitions between spontaneous, implicit somatic experi-
ence and explicit or reflective body consciousness. But I think that this can
be adequately explained through the soma’s self-regulation in terms of its
acquired habits and skills (including habits and skills of critical awareness
regarding some of its own habits).
If being a soma implies both spontaneous Leib consciousness and
explicit awareness of the body as object, then being a self implies still more:
not only consciousness of differing from other selves but also an ability to
sustain a mental narrative of the continuity and development of oneself
and one’s relation to other selves (for instance, in terms of one’s different
roles as a self) and an ability to act to sustain that continuity and regu-
late those relations. This in turn implies a social and conceptual matrix to
anchor such a lived narrative in practices of individuation and role-playing.
By this account of self, some (notably animal) somas may not achieve self-
hood, while some (notably human) somas may lose it by losing all their
capacities of self-individuation and narrative self-coherence.
Personhood like selfhood essentially involves a sociocultural matrix,
but I would refrain from conflating them. Personhood involves the confer-
ring of a particular sociocultural status (implying certain rights or special
forms of treatment) that is determined and bestowed by a particular socio-
cultural world. A human soma or a human self could be denied the status
of persons in certain societies (where they are treated as mere livestock for
eating or mere tools of production), while nonhuman soma or even mate-
rial objects devoid of biological life can be given the status of persons, as
can immaterial entities (such as angels) and mere institutional constructs
(such as corporations).
The metaphysics of somaesthetics requires a much more detailed and
rigorous treatment than I can provide here. If the German discussions
of Leib and Körper are very useful for thinking through the ontological
issues of embodied mental life, I want to remind readers that the following
essays on soma and psyche are also especially concerned with how a proper
 soma and psyche 221

understanding of human embodiment can, in actual practice, improve the

conduct of our lives and institutions and promote the psychosomatic health
of ourselves and our society.

notes
1. At the conference, I gave a different paper (on body consciousness and action)
that was subsequently published as “Körperbewusstsein und Handeln,” Deutsche
Zeitschrift für Philosophie 6 (2009): 831–44. I therefore provide here a new essay,
which also serves as an introduction to this special issue.
2. The problem of English translation in rendering these terms is worth
highlighting, and it is why in some contexts of my essay and the ones that follow
I have felt it necessary to insert the German terms in order to make things clearer.
I remember first encountering this translation problem when (in a German
translation of one of my English texts) I first saw the German original of a passage
I cited in English from Dialectic of Enlightenment that deployed both Körper and
Leib in a single sentence: “Die Körper is nicht wieder zurückzuverwandeln in
den Leib.” If the published English translation I used rendered this misleadingly
as “The body cannot be remade into a noble object,” an allegedly improved new
translation seems no less misleading: “The body cannot be turned back into the
envelope of the soul.” Neither “noble object” nor “envelope of the soul” seems
close to the meaning of the single word Leib, but simply repeating the word
body would hardly be a better solution. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1988), 248; and the English
translations by John Cummings (London: Continuum, 1986), 234, and Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 194. I briefly note this
problem of translation in my Performing Live (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2000), 250, but it warrants repeating as subsequent translations continue to be
misleading.
3. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und
phänomenologischen Philosophie (Halle: S. M. Niemeyer, 1913); Edmund
Husserl, Méditations Cartésiennes: Introduction á La Phénoménologie, trans.
Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: A. Colin, 1931). This latter work,
based on two two-hour lectures Husserl delivered in German at the Sorbonne
in 1929, was translated and first published in French but was not published in
German during Husserl’s lifetime.
4. See Edmund Husserl, “Umsturz der Kopernikalischen Lehre in der
gewöhnlichen weltanschaulichen Interpretation. Die Ur-Arche Erde bewegt sich
nicht. Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum phänomenologischen Ursprung der
Körperlichkeit, der Räumlichkeit der Natur im ersten naturwissenschaftlichen
Sinne. Alles notwendige Anfangsuntersuchungen” (unpublished Manuscript
D 17, 1934).
222 richard shusterman

5. Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and

Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 2.
6. The following account of Plessner has greatly benefited from the research
of Hans-Peter Krüger, who has written extensively on this subject. See, for
example, Hans-Peter Krüger, Zwischen Lachen und Weinen, 2 vols. (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1999–2001); Hans-Peter Krüger, Philosophische Anthropologie
als Lebenspolitik: Deutsch-jüdische und pragmatistische Moderne-Kritik (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2008).
7. Helmuth Plessner, Die Einheit der Sinne: Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des
Geistes (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1923); Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen
und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (Berlin: De Gruyter,
1928); Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen
Radikalismus (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1924), and its English translation, The Limits of
Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, trans. Andrew Wallace (New York:
Humanity, 1999); Helmuth Plessner, Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung nach
den Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens (Arnhem: Van Loghum Slaterus U.M., 1941),
and its English translation, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human
Behavior, trans. J. S. Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1970). Plessner’s most important texts have been collected and
published in a ten-volume series, now reprinted also in paperback: Helmuth
Plessner, Gesammelte Schriften in zehn Bänden, ed. Günter Dux, Odo Marquard,
and Elisabeth Ströker (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003).
8. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology,
trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), sec. 44, 93–94.
9. Contemporary discussions of Plessner have simplified the orthographical
form of this terminology to Leibsein and Körperhaben, and I will follow this
practice here.
10. See, for example, Shusterman, Performing Live, chap. 1. I make the same
case for the mediated immediacy of linguistic understanding with unproblematic
contexts and utterances in languages we know in my Pragmatist Aesthetics (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), chap. 5.
11. See, for example, the volumes of Hermann Schmitz’s multivolume System
der Philosophie that are explicitly devoted to Leib issues, such as Der Leib (Bonn:
Bouvier, 1965), Der Leib im Spiegel der Kunst (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966), and Der
leibliche Raum (Bonn: Bouvier, 1967).
12. See my Kneller Lecture, “Self-Knowledge and Its Discontents,” Philosophy and
Education Yearbook, 2007: 25–37.
13. For more detailed discussion of these points and those of the following
paragraph, see my Body Consciousness and “Body Consciousness and
Performance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 2 (2009): 133–45.
14. See, for example, Casey Haskins, “Enlivened Bodies, Authenticity, and
Romanticism,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 36 (2002): 92–102 (from a
symposium on Performing Live).
 soma and psyche 223

15. See Shusterman, Performing Live, chap. 10; and most recently with respect
to style’s somatic dimension, my “Somatic Style,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 69, no. 2 (2011), forthcoming.
16. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge, 1962), xiv; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy
and Other Essays, trans. John Wild, James Edie, and John O’Neill (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), 63.
17. Another question of range pertains to the soma’s boundaries. These are
not entirely identical with those of the human organism because of phenomena
of incorporation through which a person can extend her somatic feeling and
performance through instruments that through habituation become part of the
lived somatic experience of a person: contact lenses, false teeth, high heels, a
cane, etc.
18. I owe these points about dolls to philosophical discussions with Hyijin Lee.
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