Richard Shusterman Quotes & Sayings

Art's role (like philosophy's) is not to criticize reality but to change it; and little change can be effected if art remains a cloistered domain. — Richard Shusterman

The three branches of somaesthetics: the analytic study of the body's role in perception, experience, and action and thus in our mental, moral, and social life; the pragmatic study of methodologies to improve our body-mind functioning and thus expand our capacities of self-fashioning; and the practical branch that investigates such pragmatic methods by testing them on our own flesh in concrete experience and practice. — Richard Shusterman

Somaaesthetics can be provisionally defined a the critical meliorative study of one's experience and use of one's body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning. It is therefore also devoted to the knowledge, discourses, and disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it. — Richard Shusterman

Improved perception of our somatic feelings not only gives us greater knowledge of ourselves but also enables greater somatic skill, facility, and range of movement that can afford our sensory organs greater scope in giving us knowledge of the world. Besides augmenting our own possibilities of pleasure , such improved somatic functioning and awareness can give us greater power in performing virtuous acts for the benefit of others, since all action somehow depends on the efficacy of our bodily instrument. — Richard Shusterman