“Somaesthetics and C.S. Peirce”

8

Somaesthetics and C. S. Peirce

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN Florida Atlantic University

I

From its outset, the project of somaesthetics—briefl y defi ned as the critical, ameliorative study of the experience and use of the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation ( aesthesis ) and creative self-fashioning—has been largely inspired and shaped by the perspectives of classical pragmatist philosophy. Among the classical pragmatists, John Dewey has clearly been the preeminent infl uence on somaesthetics. The project was fi rst introduced through a study of Dewey’s views on immediate experience and embodiment and his work with somatic therapist F. M. Alexander. 1 Moreover, reclaiming the still vibrant utility of the notion of experience that is central to Dewey and the classical pragmatist tradition, somaes-thetics sought to balance our culture’s unhappy obsession with oppressive norms of attractive external body appearance (the realm of representational somaesthetics) by instead proposing a compensating focus on appreciating the inner experience of aesthetic feelings of one’s own body ( experiential somaesthetics). As this project developed, it was articulated in terms of three branches—analytic somaesthetics (a descriptive inquiry into the functioning of our bodily perceptions and somatic practices and their various cognitive, social, and cultural uses), pragmatic somaes-thetics (a more normative inquiry into methods of somatic improvement and their comparative critique), and practical somaesthetics (the fully embodied concrete practice of somatic disciplines). Dewey emerged as the paradigmatic prophet of this fi eld, for he was exemplary in vigorously and astutely pursuing all three of these branches, by making disciplined somatic self-cultivation a matter of personal practice and not just a topic for theoretical and methodological discourse. 2

When Shannon Sullivan advanced the somaesthetic project by emphasizing the transactional nature of somatic experience while underlining its applications to feminist and race issues, she too chose Dewey (and his concept of transac-tional selves) as the classical pragmatist inspiration for her work. 3 In Martin Jay’s “Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art,” which explores somaesthetics as a resource for progressive projects of democracy and

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2009.Copyright © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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SOMAESTHETICS AND C. S. PEIRCE 9

critique of established sociopolitical norms, Dewey once again is the featured (and only) classical pragmatist discussed. 4 The contributions of Eric Mullis to somaesthetics, which focus on theater and performance art, likewise return to Dewey as the classical pragmatist model for his arguments. 5 Others who discuss somaesthetics seem similarly focused on Dewey as the lone classical pragmatist prophet of this fi eld. 6

Our admiration of Dewey’s enormous value in this fi eld should not, how-ever, obscure the rich resources of other classical pragmatists for somaesthetics. In recent writings I have increasingly emphasized William James’s important and wide-ranging contributions to somaesthetic inquiry. 7 Like Dewey, James worked tirelessly, imaginatively, and even courageously in all three dimensions of somaes-thetics. His theoretical investigations into the bodily basis of mental activity (not only in our emotions but in our more distinctively cognitive and practical thought) helped make his Principles of Psychology a path-making book and indeed the book that inspired Dewey toward naturalism in the philosophy of mind. James’s theoretical inquiries into the body–mind nexus were also combined with intense study of various somatic disciplines to improve body-mind functioning and har-mony and to expand consciousness. Moreover, James’s pragmatism in somatic studies not only involved analyzing methodologies of practice but also took the form of experimenting with these disciplines in the most concrete and practical way by testing them on his own fl esh and consciousness.

Among the classical pragmatists, James seems even more accomplished than Dewey in articulating the fi ner points of somaesthetic introspection, in explaining its logical principles, and in giving vividly precise words to the feelings discovered in such somaesthetic self-examination. But unlike Dewey, he did not advocate the use of somaesthetic refl ection for practical life. I should further note that James played an encouraging role in the launching of the term somaesthetics , whose apparent neologism was explained and justifi ed in the words James chose to explain pragmatism , as “a new name for some old ways of thinking.” 8

James, of course, did not coin the term pragmatism but, rather, took it from his friend C. S. Peirce, the fi rst and founding fi gure of classical pragmatism. Since Peirce remains the only one of the three classical pragmatist patriarchs to be neglected by recent inquiries in somaesthetics, two questions could reasonably be raised. The fi rst is a retrospective question of why Peirce has never before been enlisted in advocating the cause of somaesthetics. One reason for not bringing Peirce to bear in this project was that I developed somaesthetics in opposition to my neopragmatist mentors who used Peirce to argue for varieties of textualism that opposed the emphasis on experience and its somatic dimension that I was especially keen to develop. I was especially reacting to Richard Rorty, who emphasizes Peirce’s assertion that “my language is the sum-total of myself; for the man is the thought,” and who has been very critical of somaesthetics, criticiz-ing that project as “a beautiful example of kicking up dust and then complaining that we cannot see.” 9 I should have done a better job of dissociating Peirce from


RICHARD SHUSTERMAN10

the textualist neopragmatist interpretation he was given and instead paid more attention to the embodied dimension of his thought. 10

Rather than dwelling on past omissions, I prefer to focus on a more future-looking question: Does Peirce have anything useful to offer the developing fi eld of somaesthetics? “Yes,” would be my most summary answer. Peirce is such a rich, wide-ranging, and profound thinker that his theories could probably be profi tably applied to almost any fi eld. I cannot try, in this short article, to give a full account of how somaesthetics could be addressed through Peirce’s thought. I simply want to suggest some of the ways his ideas could be related to the project of somaesthetics in the hope that this preliminary sketch will stimulate further and more thorough scholarly examination.

II

Peirce’s relationship to aesthetics might be a good way to begin to explore his possible import for somaesthetics. Peirce speaks rather sparingly about aesthetics when compared to Dewey or even to James, and he even sometimes describes himself as “incompetent” in this fi eld. 11 But aesthetics, through Schiller’s inspiring Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man , served as Peirce’s fi rst introduction to philosophy, and he certainly maintained a deep respect for the aesthetic dimension as being important not only for life but also for philosophical knowledge. In “The Three Normative Sciences” (a lecture delivered at Harvard on April 30, 1903), he remarks: “As for esthetics, although the fi rst year of my study of philosophy was devoted to this branch exclusively, yet I have since then so completely neglected it that I do not feel entitled to have any confi dent opinions about it. I am inclined to think there is such a normative science; but I feel by no means sure even of that” (EP 2.200). 12

Nevertheless, Peirce goes on to pursue “this line of thought” in which aesthetics not only joins logic and ethics among the normative sciences but can in some sense be seen as the highest (or most foundational or ultimately subsum-ing) of them all, because “the logically good is simply a particular species of the morally good” and “the morally good appears as a particular species of the esthetically good” (EP 2.201). In an earlier lecture, “The Maxim of Pragmatism” (March 1903), he likewise maintained that ethics must ultimately depend on a doctrine of what “possible states of things” are “admirable,” “of what it is that one ought deliberately to admire per se in itself regardless of what it may lead to and regardless of its bearings upon human conduct. I call that inquiry Esthetics ” (EP 2.142). Moreover, as he argued in a personal letter, if “Ethics is the science of the method of bringing Self-Control to bear to gain” what we desire, then “what one ought to desire . . . will be to make [one’s] life beautiful, admirable. Now the science of the Admirable is true Esthetics.” 13



As these remarks affi rm the value of aesthetics, so Peirce’s additional claim that the aesthetic dimension is essentially concerned with perceptual quali-ties and feelings is further encouraging for somaesthetics, since a great deal of these aesthetic qualities and feelings are perceived and discriminated through our somatic senses. When it comes to “defi ning the esthetically good” in more detail than the general notion of “admirable,” Peirce suggests that such goodness requires an object having “a multiplicity of parts so related to one another as to impart a positive simple immediate quality to their totality.” He strikingly insists that it does not “matter what the particular quality of the total may be,” even if it “be such as to nauseate us, scare us, or otherwise to disturb us to the point of throwing us out of the mood of esthetic enjoyment, out of the mood of simply contemplating the embodiment of the quality.” The problem in such cases is not that the object has lost the immediate aesthetic quality that defi nes its goodness but that the observers simply cannot achieve a properly discriminating apprecia-tion because they “are incapacitated from a calm esthetic contemplation of it.” Rather than a single scale of aesthetic quality dominated by a univocal notion of beauty at its summit of excellence, Peirce moreover affi rms “that there are innu-merable varieties of esthetic quality, but no purely esthetic grade of excellence” (EP 2.201–202).

The appreciation of aesthetic qualities in their innumerable varieties requires perceptual skill in discriminating such qualities, so that aesthetic enjoyment or pleasure is not a merely physical satisfaction but one that intrinsically involves cognition, even when it is essentially sensory and somatically based cognition. Although avowedly “ignorant . . . of Art,” Peirce claims a genuine “capacity for esthetic enjoyment,” which he describes as follows: “In esthetic enjoyment we attend to the totality of Feeling,—especially to the total resultant Quality of Feeling presented in the work of art we are contemplating,—yet it is a sort of intellectual sympathy, a sense that here is a feeling that one can comprehend, a reasonable feeling.” Peirce cannot say “exactly what it is, but it is a consciousness belonging to the category of Representation though representing something in the Category of Quality of Feeling” (EP 2.190). Peirce suggests that the discriminating percep-tion of such qualities requires not just natural sensory powers but skill developed through training—the sort of sensory-perceptual training advocated by somaesthet-ics and refl ected in the Greek root of aisthesis from which the term derives.

Arguing that aesthetic qualities and their associated feelings are far too complex to be reduced to pleasure, Peirce further insists that both pleasure and pain are themselves much too complex and diverse to be identifi ed respectively with any single, defi ning feeling. In defending these views, Peirce recommends a systematic training in discriminating and sharpening one’s perception of feelings, much in the spirit of somaesthetic training: “I have gone through a systematic course of training in recognizing my feelings. I have worked with intensity for so many hours a day every day for long years to train myself to do this; and it is



a training which I would recommend to all of you. The artist has such a training; but most of his effort goes to reproducing in one form or another what he sees or hears, which is in every art a very complicated trade; while I have simply striven to see what it is that I see” (EP 2.190).

Peirce should not be understood as limiting his perceptual self-analysis to visual perceptions, since the context of his remarks is the variety of pain (which is clearly more than visual) and his criticism of artists for being “narrow” in their “esthetic appreciations” because of “only having the power of recognizing the qualities of their percepts in certain directions” (EP 2.190). We know that Peirce had an unfortunately rigorous training in feelings of pain. Beginning in his senior year at Harvard and continuing throughout his life, Peirce suffered from an excruciatingly painful neurological disease called “trigeminal neuralgia—then medically termed facial neuralgia ,” which worsens with age and whose pain is “debilitating” to normal functioning, let alone intense mental labor. 14 On a happier note, we also know that Peirce spent considerable time in the pleasant training and testing of his gustatory and olfactory discrimination with respect to wine. As Paul Weiss’s biographical sketch relates, Peirce’s “father also encour-aged him to develop his power of sensuous discrimination, and later, having put himself under the tutelage of a sommelier at his own expense, Charles became a connoisseur of wines.” 15

This aesthetics-related idea of introspectively examining the quality of one’s feelings or perceptions with the aim of training one’s skill of discrimination in this area is complemented in a later text outlining the idea of meditative musing or “Musement,” which is said to have been inspired by Schiller’s notion of Spieltrieb and which is certainly not confi ned to meditation on the self and its perceived qualities of feeling but can include this. 16 Here Peirce speaks of meditative self-refl ection in connection with an “agreeable occupation of the mind” in solitary “musing,” an occupation related to “Play” and including “esthetic contempla-tion” but not mere reveries, since it involves “attentive observation” and “a lively give-and-take of communion between self and self.” Peirce urges the reader: “Awake to what is about or within you; and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation” (EP 2.436–437). Here, as in somaesthetic refl ection, we have meditative, experiential self-examination linked to aesthetic observation.

III

I should emphasize that Peirce’s contribution to aesthetics far exceeds his explicit remarks on that fi eld. Through his semiotics, Peirce has exercised an enduringly strong infl uence on aesthetic theory with respect to theories of meaning, inter-pretation, and symbolism. His famous semiotic type–token distinction has also been very infl uential in discussion of the ontology of artworks—explaining how there can be many (token) performances and texts of Hamlet , yet we still can talk



of Hamlet as one (type) work. With respect to somaesthetics, Peirce’s intricate theory of signs—with its ramifi ed classifi cation of sign typologies—could be useful for understanding different forms of somatic signs, meanings, and body language and for tracing their interrelations. For instance, his distinction among tone, token, and type could help distinguish among (1) an immediate bodily feeling (tone) that is merely vaguely registered as a quality without being individuated clearly in consciousness but that still can infl uence behavior and contribute to a meaningful experience, (2) a particular (token) bodily feeling or movement (for example, a particular headache or golf swing) that stands out in consciousness as a particular thing, and (3) the more general category (type) of such a feeling (headache) or movement (golf swing). Similarly, Peirce’s distinction among icon, index, and symbol could help distinguish varieties of body language: whether a certain bodily movement or expression denotes its referent or suggests its mean-ing iconically by resembling or imitating a quality of what it denotes—say lifting one’s arms triumphantly to express the elation of victory; whether the somatic sign functions as an index by being actually related to its meaning—sweating and turning red as a sign of being feverish or overheated; or whether the bodily movement functions as a symbol through having an established “interpretant” or convention that determines such meeting—say the two-fi nger victory sign. 17

Another of Peirce’s famous tripartite classifi cations (and one readily related to his classifi cation of signs) is that of fi rstness, secondness, and thirdness. This classifi cation, which reappears and is variously explained in different contexts of Peirce’s theories, can be used to illustrate somaesthetics’ key tenet that there are different levels of body intentionality and consciousness. I have distinguished at least four levels. 18 The lowest level of somatic intentionality (which cannot qualify as full consciousness and could be paradoxically described as unconscious consciousness) is the sort of limited, obscure awareness we exhibit in our sleep: for example, when we intentionally (though unconsciously) move a pillow that is disturbing our breathing or feel we are too close to the edge of the bed (or our sleeping partner) and thus reposition ourselves without waking up to full con-sciousness. Beyond this level is the stage when we are awake and clearly conscious yet not explicitly aware of our bodily position or movements. We usually pay no attention to our feet or have an explicit awareness of them when we are walking. Yet, obviously even without explicit awareness, one knows in a practical way where one’s legs are and how to move them in walking. This level of unrefl ective, unthematized perception is what Merleau-Ponty hailed as primordial perception and as the key to the mystery of our successful perception and action.

But sometimes we do make our feet an explicit object of consciousness—when we are crossing diffi cult terrain, when we have problems of balance, or when our feet are hurting. Similarly, we sometimes move from inexplicit consciousness of breathing to situations where our breathing becomes an explicit object of our somatic consciousness, as when we notice that we are short of breath or have diffi culty breath-ing. Finally, there are cases of more refl ective somatic consciousness, such as when



we are not only explicitly aware that we are breathing but also clearly conscious of our conscious awareness of breathing and of how that refl exive consciousness affects our breathing and other dimensions of somatic experience. These explicit and refl ective levels of consciousness, which can blend or overlap into each other, I describe respectively as somaesthetic perception and somaesthetic refl ection.

In deploying his famously pervasive three categories of fi rstness, second-ness, and thirdness to characterize consciousness, Peirce describes “the true categories of consciousness” as follows: “First, feeling, the consciousness which can be included within an instant of time, passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or analysis; second, consciousness of an interruption into the fi eld of consciousness, sense of resistance, of an external fact, of another something; third, synthetic consciousness, binding time together, sense of learning, thought” (CP 1.377). These categories of consciousness correspond with the three higher levels of consciousness that somaesthetics identifi es beyond the basic intentional-ity displayed when asleep, though Peirce’s fi rst category of passive consciousness could perhaps be extended to cover also that lower level. Peirce provides a great deal more resources for somaesthetics’ inquiry into the multileveled complexities of consciousness, the different degrees of vividness and intensity of feelings, and the varieties of attention through which our consciousness and discrimination of somatic feelings can be improved in order to achieve a better use of the self in perception, cognition, and action. To appreciate the range of these resources, we need to examine his writings in psychology.

IV

We begin with Peirce’s views on methodology in psychological science, which can be usefully compared to those of his close friend William James, who is widely recognized as one of the key founders of modern psychology, though Peirce could be said to have preceded James here (as he did in pragmatism). 19 James critically underlined the fallibility and limits of introspection in psychol-ogy (and the consequent need for experimental and physiological investigations) to supplement it. But he affi rmed with characteristic exaggeration (and italics) that “ Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on fi rst and foremost and always ” in the study of mind. 20 Peirce, in contrast, was much more severe in his criticism of introspection, at least in the strict sense of the term. In referring to the then current division of psychological research “into Introspective, Experimental, and Physiological Psychology,” Peirce not only insisted on the scientifi c superiority of the “Experimental” but fi ercely denounced “Introspective Psychology [as] the old false psychology which ought not to be countenanced” (CP 7.376).

Nevertheless he recognized its usefulness as “a preliminary study” for the nascent science of psychology on the way to more scientifi c research. Part of why Peirce denounces introspection here is that he defi nes it very strictly as “direct



observations of the operations of the mind,” as immediate, directly observed data. But this, he argues, “is pure delusion” (CP 7.376). Our immediate feeling is “completely veiled from introspection, for the very reason that it is our immediate consciousness”: “We can no more start with immediate feelings in psychology than we can start with accurate places of the planets as affected by parallax, aber-ration, refraction, etc. in astronomy. We start with mediate data, subject to error and requiring correction” (CP 1.310, 7.465).

Elsewhere, however, where the notion of introspection is conceived more broadly as self-examination or “self-questioning,” Peirce grants it more respect. As James (following John Stuart Mill) also insisted, introspection can never be of immediately present data but necessarily involves some retrospection and mediation or interpretation. Peirce makes the same point: “Introspection does not directly reveal what is immediately present to consciousness, at all; but only what seems to have been present from the standpoint of subsequent refl ection. . . . We cannot directly observe even so much as that there is such a thing as present conscious-ness,” because by the time we refl ect and question ourselves on this, we have passed on to a new present (CP 7.420). Introspection, for Peirce, in this broader sense of refl ective self-consciousness and self-questioning, though certainly fallible, is no longer a delusional method; it is indeed a necessary one in many contexts of inquiry, including experimental inquiry. As “consciousness may be set down as one of the most mendacious witnesses that ever was questioned,” so “self-questioning produces no infallible response.” Nonetheless, Peirce contends that sometimes “it is the only witness there is” on important psychological questions. So in such cases, “we must make up our minds to rely entirely on self-questioning”; “all we can do is to put it in the sweat-box and torture the truth out of it, with such judgments as we can command,” while also seeking “here and there perhaps some secondary aid” from impersonal experimentation in psychology (CP 7.584, 1.579–580).

Like James, Peirce not only practiced introspection and self-examination but also argued that a subject’s introspective skills and perceptual powers of self-examination could be improved through practice and systematic training. We can recall his remarks regarding aesthetics: “I have gone through a systematic course of training in recognizing my feelings. I have worked with intensity for so many hours a day every day for long years to train myself to do this; and it is a training which I would recommend to all of you” (EP 2.190). In his psychological writings, Peirce likewise notes how we commonly have faint sensations in our minds that even infl uence our course of thought but of which we are unaware, though we can become more aware of them through training in more focused attention. “Such faint sensations,” Peirce urges, “ought to be fully studied by the psychologist and assiduously cultivated by every man” (CP 7.35).

Striving to move psychology beyond introspective self-questioning and training in discriminations of sensations and feelings, Peirce deployed methods of experimentation, using others as well as himself to test the range of conscious-ness and its perceptual discriminations. He gives a great deal of attention to



some experiments in psychophysics that he conducted concerning consciousness thresholds in discrimination of tactile pressure and of color. These experiments also considered how the length and intensity of attention affect not only our capac-ity for making conscious discriminations of differences but also our confi dence in our judgments of these difference. Peirce initially made these experiments to test Gustav Fechner’s famous Unterschiedsschwelle theory (with its quantitative psychophysische Maasformel ) that James also contested. 21

Peirce’s experiments involved exposing subjects (in carefully controlled conditions) to small differences of pressure (applied via the force of different given weights to their fi ngers) or to small differences of color. The experiments were designed to examine behavior at the alleged point (i.e., the threshold or Schwelle ) where no perceptual discriminations between the slightly differing pressures (or colors) could be felt. The subjects who were exposed to slightly differing stimuli not only had to judge the difference (i.e., in the pressure experiment, which pressure was stronger) but also had to report a mental “confi dence level” about whether they were right in their judgment of the differences of pressures (or colors). 22 The results showed that even when the differences were minimal and the subjects felt that they could not feel a real difference (so that their confi dence level about mak-ing the correct judgment was zero and they had to “guess”), the subjects’ apparent guesses were of a statistically signifi cant higher accuracy than they should have been if the subjects had really been merely guessing by blind chance rather than with the help of some subtle, not fully conscious perception of difference.

Peirce found that even when subjects “marked [their] confi dence as zero,” their answers indicated that the allegedly unfelt or undiscriminated “difference of pressures” seemed to be felt enough to issue judgments that were “correct three times out of fi ve” (CP 7.35). Moreover, the same experiments indicated that increased attention and practice in discriminating differences improved the subjects’ discrimination and that the progressive relationship of errors and correct judgments was more aptly explained by a “mathematical theory of errors” that Peirce calls “the theory of least squares.” Such facts alone, he con-cluded, cast serious doubt on the Fechnerian idea of a universal constant for the Unterschiedsschwelle or threshold of perceptual distinction.

These experimental studies, moreover, led Peirce to some interesting insights about consciousness and attention that are philosophically more important than his challenging of Fechner’s theory. Before addressing them, we should note, however, that Peirce’s use of subjective reports of a “confi dence level” shows that in pragmatic terms he did rely on introspection or self-questioning in his experimental psychology. Even if we argue that the subjects’ judgments of which pressure was stronger are not really judgments of their internal sensations but, rather, of the objective pressures of the weights and are therefore not self-examination or self-questioning of one’s feelings (hence not introspection even in the larger sense), the subjects’ judgments of their own confi dence in making their judgments of difference are clearly self-judgments based on introspectively questioning their felt confi dence level.



Peirce’s experimental fi ndings indicate that there are multiple levels of consciousness, and he develops this idea in various ways. The most obvious conclusion from the experiments is that there are elements in the subject’s “fi eld of sensation” that the subject feels (or is conscious of) enough to base a correct perceptual judgment yet that remain beneath the subject’s level of explicit awareness. Our consciousness thus contains sensations, feelings, or ideas that clearly guide our choices yet remain “so faint that we are not fairly aware of having them” (CP 7.35). Peirce eventually comes to describe consciousness in strikingly fi gurative terms as “a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are count-less objects at different depths,” many of which are “sunk” too deep (“in a great depth of dimness”) for us to be aware that they are even in our consciousness (CP 7.547).

Various infl uences, however, can “give certain kinds of those objects [or ‘ideas’] an upward impulse which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer” or “level of easy discernment” in which they can emerge into clear, explicit awareness (CP 7.547, 7.554). Other factors will bring ideas down into the “deeper” and “dimmer” levels of conscious-ness where we are not really aware of them. These factors of upward and downward infl uence include momentum, associations with vivid ideas, relationship to our purposes, and the momentum of temporal succession “so that the idea originally dimmer becomes move vivid than the one that brought it up.” We should also recall the infl uence of our own efforts of attention, refl ection, and “the control which we exercise over our thoughts,” which have the capacity of calling up ideas from deeper levels and holding them up in explicit consciousness “where they may be scrutinized” (CP 7.554). This capacity for our attentive and refl ective discipline has practical consequences for monitoring, regulating, and transforming habits of thought and behavior.

Peirce offers some distinctions to differentiate some of the different levels of consciousness. One key distinction of levels is that between merely being some-how (even minimally) conscious of something and having a distinct awareness (an explicit consciousness) of that thing. Peirce speaks of “sensations so faint that we are not fairly aware of having them” yet that must be present to some degree in consciousness since such presence seems necessary both to explain our cor-rect perceptual discriminations and to provide the fundamental basis for training ourselves to bring such sensations into greater consciousness or explicit aware-ness. 23 Convergent with his talk of different levels of consciousness, Peirce also speaks of “different degrees of vividness” that the various “ideas in [one’s] con-sciousness” display: “How vivid the most vivid of them are depends upon how wide awake I am.” One’s ideas will have “a certain maximum limit of vividness . . . which a few of them always attain.” But there is only room in one’s “consciousness for a few at this highest level of vividness.” Thus, if other ideas “force themselves up, some of those that were at the surface must subside. Below these vivid surface ideas there are others less vivid, and still deeper others that are so dim that only



intense effort, perhaps by no effort that I can possibly exert, can I assure myself of their presence” (CP 7.497). 24 Yet, as his experiments “proved indirectly,” these ideas are nonetheless present in consciousness and manifest themselves through correct judgments signifi cantly beyond what mere probability would achieve.

Another related distinction with respect to our contents of consciousness concerns their objective and subjective intensity: “Feeling, by which is here meant that of which we are supposed to be immediately conscious[,] is subject to degrees.” But Peirce astutely differentiates between “objective intensity which distinguishes a loud sound from a faint sound” and “subjective intensity which distinguishes a lively consciousness of a sound, from a dull consciousness of it.” Although “the two kinds of intensity are apt to go together, yet it is possible for a person at the same time to recall the tick of a watch and the sound of a neighboring canon, and to have a livelier consciousness of the former than of the latter, without however remembering the latter [as] a fainter sound than the former” (CP 7.555).

Peirce could have been clearer in his formulation of examples here. His examples jumble together the sensations of present experiences of loudness with one’s very different retrospective consciousness of those sensations, which are by necessity, different, remembered feelings or ideas. The distinction Peirce is looking for, however, is not between feelings of present sensations and feelings of remembered ones. We could, instead, suggest a different example that avoids this confusion by contrasting the loud noise of street traffi c or a blaring radio to the soft tap on one’s door from an eagerly awaited guest. The sound of the tap may be objectively lower in intensity, but it has greater subjective intensity since our attention is more intently directed on it. Moreover, this greater subjective, attentive intensity in the present can explain how, later, the recalled idea of the tapping sound is clearer and more subjectively intense than the remembered traffi c or radio noise.

Peirce underlines that even faint feelings with “light subjective intensity” nonetheless “affect the emotions and the voluntary actions” and that usually “they are much less under control than . . . more [subjectively] intense” feelings. This is obvious once we realize that it is harder to control that of which we are barely conscious. In order to deliberately control a feeling (or to intentionally work on it so as “to affect its transformations”), we need to direct our attention to it, and it is hard to attend to that which “is scarcely perceptible” in faint or dim conscious-ness so that we are not even aware of it (CP 7.555). Consequently, if we wish to increase our control of feelings so as to enhance our control of the actions that feelings (even faintly perceived feelings) affect, then we should devote some effort to improving our recognition and discrimination of faint feelings by improving our capacities of consciousness toward greater skills of awareness and attention.

Among the very faint feelings that often strongly infl uence us without our awareness Peirce highlights some “which are especially interesting. These are those which tend toward a reaction between mind and body, whether in sense, in the action of the glands, in contractions of involuntary muscles, in coordinated



voluntary deeds,” and so on (CP 7.555). In short, Peirce identifi es the particular importance of the sort of mind-body feelings that form the focus of somaesthet-ics in its attempt to increase our understanding of body consciousness so that we can better deploy it to improve our self-use and our interaction with our sur-rounding environments, including our interactions with others. A substantial part of our understanding of others (including our misunderstandings) is guided, as Peirce realizes, by such faint sensations, which are often colloquially described in contemporary culture as “vibes” or “energy” (CP 7.35).

Peirce argues that such faint sensations can be rendered more vivid and present to explicit awareness if we augment our efforts of attention—by increasing either the “intensity of attention” or “the period of attention.” On the basis of his experiments, where he distinguished and deployed two levels or degrees of “effort of attention” (“vigorous” and “very light effort”), Peirce claims: “Sensations that differed less, no more matter how little, could still be discriminated just as well as sensations that differed more, if the effort of attention were greater, or if it were longer continued.” Moreover, “during the period of attention, the difference of sensation was continually increasing in vividness” (CP 7.546).

Besides distinguishing levels of vividness in consciousness, degrees of objective and subjective intensity, and degrees of attentive effort, Peirce’s psycho-logical experiments led him to distinguish between mere consciousness of feelings, explicit awareness of feelings, and “refl ex consciousness” of feelings. There are faint feelings in our consciousness of which we are not aware, but their presence “is shown by the fact that a greater effort of attention would detect” them and bring them into vivid, explicit awareness. But such awareness is not the highest level that consciousness of feelings can reach. Insisting that “it is one thing to feel a thing [even if it is felt clearly] and it is another thing to have a refl ex feeling that there is a feeling,” Peirce maintains that his “experiments conclusively show that consciousness must reach a considerable vividness before the least refl ex feeling of it is produced.” But vividness alone does not entail refl ective consciousness. This higher, more refl ective level of consciousness—that somaesthetics describes as somaesthetic refl ection—can only be directed to contents of consciousness of which we are already explicitly aware so that we can attend not only to them but also to how we attend to them and how our attention to them affects how we experience them. Peirce seems to be formulating this idea in affi rming that it is only at the “upper layer of consciousness” whose elements have high “degrees of vividness” that our “refl ex consciousness, or self-consciousness, is attached” (CP 7.547).

Peirce’s psychological research provides encouraging material for experiential somaesthetics by indicating the complexities of various layers of consciousness, diverse intensities of feeling, and different degrees of effort of attention. His research, moreover, suggests that more intense and disciplined attention can succeed in rendering faint sensations and feelings much more vivid, discernable, and consequently more manageable. It points toward the pragmatic



conclusion that we should therefore be better able to monitor and control the effects of such feelings on our thought and action, thus improving our capacity for effective self-use and coordination with others.

But Peirce was likewise astute in acknowledging also the dangers of refl ex feeling or self-consciousness. He recognized how such self-conscious refl ection often seems to impede the fl uidity of action and thought, rendering us awkward, hesitant, and uncertain: “Everybody knows how self-consciousness makes one awkward and may even quite paralyze the mind. Nobody can have failed to remark that mental performances that are gone through with lightly are apt to be more adroit than those in which every little detail is studied while the action is proceed-ing.” Speaking from personal experience, he adds “that self-consciousness, and especially conscious effort, are apt to carry me to the verge of idiocy and that those things that I have done spontaneously were the best done” (CP 7.45). For precisely these dangers, James rejected the use of somaesthetic refl ection in practical life, though he advocated its use (and indeed used it superbly) in his psychological theo-rizing. In practical life, James insisted that we should simply trust our spontaneity and habits: “Trust your spontaneity and fl ing away all further care.” 25

While I too celebrate skillful spontaneity as the mode of action that can usually serve us best in everyday, routine functioning, I think a good case can be made for self-conscious refl ection in many contexts of practical life. 26 As I argue in Body Consciousness , refl ective somatic awareness or self-consciousness can be defended against James’s criticisms (and similar ones advanced by Merleau-Ponty) by arguing for its practical importance in stages of learning various sensorimotor skills and in stages of correcting habits, where spontaneity simply will not suffi ce. John Dewey, through his work with somatic educator F. M. Alexander, rightly iden-tifi ed spontaneity as simply the product of entrenched habit, which is often fl awed and cannot be revised without placing it under the scrutiny of self-consciousness. Moreover, why must we concede that refl ective consciousness of one’s bodily actions necessarily impedes the smooth performance of those actions and that such consciousness must therefore be confi ned only to learning and habit correction?

In many cases where awkwardness of action is attributed to the fact that the action is performed with self-consciousness or refl ective awareness, the awkwardness, I believe, does not in fact derive from the attention or awareness that one gives to the proper body movements needed for successful performance of the action. Rather, such awkwardness actually results from being distracted from the proper bodily movements (and their attendant feelings) by overriding feelings of desire or anxious worry regarding the results (i.e., success) of the action and the verdict of how certain people judge the effectiveness of one’s performance. The problem is not that of refl ective awareness of what one is actually doing but, rather, distraction from one’s actual actions by thoughts about one’s success in achieving the ends of those actions. 27

Peirce is helpful in providing another, related explanation for the distraction that seems to be generated by our efforts of self-conscious attention to our



performance: “Perhaps it is because in trying very hard we are thinking about our effort instead of about the problem in hand” (CP 7.45). In other words, though affi rming that an effort of more intense attention can improve our performance of discrimination, Peirce recognized that the act of trying to make that attentive effort can itself constitute an effort that may instead distract from one’s attentive effort to concentrate on the objects of self-consciousness that we wish to discriminate or on the movements of our own bodies that we wish to observe and perform successfully. The lesson, then, is not to reject the value of effortful attention to one’s consciousness or behavior but, rather, to learn when it is useful to do so and how to better direct one’s attentive efforts toward the specifi c foci intended rather than having the effort itself (or the remote rewards or fears associated with the intended action) constitute the focus of attention. To explore and develop such skills of focused attention (which rely on a host of sensorimotor factors that infl uence our powers to attend) constitutes one of the central tasks of experi-ential somaesthetics; and Peirce, as we have seen, surely provides resources and encouragement for its pursuit.

V

Despite the wealth of material Peirce offers, I feel obliged to conclude by briefl y noting a few reasons why he remains less exemplary for the fi eld of somaesthet-ics than Dewey or even James. First, Peirce seems more limited than James and Dewey in his discussion and practice of somatic disciplines. 28 Second, Peirce’s philosophical theorizing also speaks much less of the body than do his two famous classical pragmatist disciples. Though Peirce clearly affi rmed the body’s impor-tance as a physiological ground for our mental life on earth, he did not explore in comparable detail the various ways it shapes our perception, feeling, and thought. If James’s psychological theories pervasively insist on explicitly inserting the body and discussing its role at the core of every mental state and activity (except the will), Peirce is much more restrained in his account about the body’s role in mental life, 29 though he, of course, repeatedly recognizes in general terms “that intimate dependence of the action of the mind upon the body,” which includes “the dependence of healthy mind-action upon the state of the body” (CP 5.385, 6.551). 30 Peirce likewise affi rms the body’s essential role in human consciousness, distinguishing through such consciousness the signifying human being from the signifying word: “A man has consciousness; a word has not.” And what “we mean by consciousness” is “that emotion which accompanies the refl ection that we have animal life” (CP 7.585). Peirce, however, is keen to emphasize that mind is much more than mere consciousness, with the latter’s defi ning sense of animal vitality and “feeling” (CP 7.364–367).

Moreover, while Dewey affi rms a “body-mind” monism that celebrates the human body as an intrinsically sentient, interactive, purposive subjectivity rather



than a machine, Peirce tends more toward a mechanistic conception of the body, even when praising it: “The body of man is a wonderful mechanism, that of the word nothing but a line of chalk” (CP 7.584). 31 If Dewey emphatically puts the human body at the essential core of human subjectivity—not merely a means or medium through which the human subject grasps the world but an essential expres-sion of who that subject is—Peirce seems closer to the philosophically traditional view of the body as a tool or instrument used by the thinking subject who is thus essentially different from it: “The organism is only an instrument of thought” (CP 5.315). One of the key elements of somaesthetics is that it treats the body as soma— a living, sentient, subjectivity rather than a mere mechanical mechanism or tool that is used by something else (a mind or soul or person). The soma is not just a tool for perception and action but also the purposive, intentional agency that deploys tools (including bodily organs) in perceiving (i.e., aesthesis) and acting. It is thus not simply a means or medium for realizing ends but also a locus where ends are experienced and appreciated. These points (and others) help justify the ugly neologism of somaesthetics and distinguish it from the conventional concern with mere bodily beauty that treats the body as an object.

Peirce further claims that human “essence is spiritual,” since “the only internal phenomena” that humans always present “are feeling, thought, atten-tion . . . [, which] are all cognitive” (CP 7.591). Though embodiment certainly is consistent with spiritual essence and cognition, embodied essence does not seem so easily identifi able with spiritual essence if we interpret the body as a mechanism and identify it essentially with animal life. Peirce himself cautions that “an undue ascendancy of animal life” obscures “this truth” of our spiritual essence (CP 7.584), and he elsewhere claims that “when the carnal conscious-ness passes away in death, we shall at once perceive that we have had all along a lively spiritual consciousness which we have been confusing with something different” (CP 7.577). 32 James likewise gave occasional philosophical expression to hopes for incorporeal modes of individual consciousness that would survive one’s bodily death, in an afterlife.

Dewey’s resistance to that disembodied prospect, his insistence that even our will is essentially somatically constrained, and his recommendation (inspired by the Alexander Technique) to develop heightened bodily consciousness so as to ensure better self-use in perception, thought, and action (including our communication with others), all combine to make him, in my eyes, the best clas-sical pragmatist paradigm for the project of somaesthetics. 33 But appreciation of the best should not be an excuse to denigrate or ignore the good. Research in somaesthetics should therefore be grateful for the rich resources that Peirce provides and should deploy them more thoroughly. This article is an invitation to continue such research. Let me close by suggesting one orientation where Peircean perspectives might both deepen and critically engage somaesthetics.

Does construing the soma as a sentient, perceiving, purposive agency imply that it can be characterized as fundamentally semiotic? I think it does. Not only



does the soma produce, perceive, and respond to signs, it also functions as one. So whatever else it may be, the soma is a seme or sign; and this implies that semiotics should certainly be useful in enriching or extending the project of somaesthetics. Does this further imply that somaesthetics must be fi rmly grounded in Peirce’s science of semiotics? Could that science perhaps even wholly subsume somaesthet-ics, so that somaesthetics would be simply reduced to it and essentially rendered superfl uous? Though such questions are worth posing, I cannot adequately address them here, not only because somaesthetics is still in the stage of exploration and development but also because of the complexity of Peirce’s semiotics.

Let me close, however, by noting one problem in trying to collapse somaesthetics into Peircean semiotics. Somaesthetics clearly seems to cut across the limits defi ned by Peirce’s science of semiotics. Peirce identifi es semiotics with the normative science of logic, arguing that because all thought is “performed by means of signs, logic may be regarded as the science of the general laws of signs.” Hence “logic, in its general sense, is . . . only another name for semiotic ({sémeiötiké}), the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs” (CP 1.191, 2.227). As a normative science, logic or semiotics is defi ned as “most purely theoretical,” and Peirce repeatedly insists that such “pure science has nothing at all to do with action” (CP 1.618). 34 Contending that “pure theoretical knowledge, or science, has nothing directly to say concerning practical matters,” Peirce fi rmly separates science and theory (logic or semiotics thus included) from practice. He even goes so far as explicitly “condemning with the whole strength of conviction the Hellenic tendency to mingle philosophy and practice” (CP 1.634, 1.637).

Somaesthetics, on the contrary, is from the outset inspired by this very Greek ideal of philosophy as a practice of life that Peirce condemns, an ideal that was, however, embraced by other American thinkers such as Thoreau, James, and Dewey and that essentially informed the title of the book in which the somaesthetic project was fi rst articulated— Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life . Somaesthetics, moreover, has always been conceived as a discipline that intimately integrates theory and practice. Two of its major branches—pragmatic and practical somaesthetics—are especially practice oriented, the latter indeed being emphatically a matter of practical doing rather than theorizing, criticizing, or talking about somatic disciplines. Indeed, even somaesthetics’ most theoretical branch—analytic somaesthetics—is structured on the presumption that theorizing itself is a situated practice that is always already infl uenced by the practices from which it starts and which it takes as models or topics of inquiry. This essential emphasis on integrating theory and practice makes it seem unlikely that somaes-thetics could be simply assimilated into Peirce’s semiotics or normative science of logic, which is instead defi ned by theoretical purity. 35

Somaesthetics, thus conceived, will get very poor marks for purity. Not only does it mix theory and practice, but it also includes a variety of theoretical disciplines and methods both within philosophy and beyond it, while its pragmatic and practical dimensions engage (both critically and reconstructively) a variety of


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RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

different somatic disciplines. For philosophical aesthetes who prefer disciplinary and theoretic purity to practice, somaesthetics will inevitably be judged as an ugly mongrel, and its messy interdisciplinarity will be seen as an impediment to theoretical progress. It could never hope to match the systematic unity and rich architectonic of Peircean thought. But for those who have an aesthetic taste for métissage and an urge to link philosophy with other disciplines of theory and practice, somaesthetics offers a fi eld for inquiry and action.

Notes I wish to thank C. J. Davies for help with some of the library research for this article. He also suggested that since Peirce regards inquiry as a response to the “irritation” of doubt, it might be that certain somatic experiences (namely, irritations) lie at the very origin of the scientifi c inquiries from which the principles of pragmatism itself are drawn. I leave it to Mr. Davies and other researchers to explore this intriguing hypothesis, whose confi rmation would further reinforce the view that pragmatism is very much a philosophy of embodied experience. I also thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers of this article for helpful comments. 1. See Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997), chap. 6, “Somatic Experience: Foundation or Reconstruction?” 2. Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999): 299–313; Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 2000), chap. 10. Foucault is also invoked in these texts as an instructive exemplar of a philosopher impressively active in all three branches of somaes-thetics. See also Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Care of the Self: The Case of Foucault,” Monist 83 (2000): 530–51. 3. Shannon Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), see especially chap. 5, “Transactional Somaesthetics,” where she uses Dewey and F. M. Alexander to temper some of Nietzsche’s views on embodiment and gender. 4. Martin Jay, “Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 36, no. 4 (2002): 55–68. 5. Eric Mullis, “Performative Somaesthetics: Principles and Scope,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 40, no. 4 (2006): 104–17; Eric Mullis, “The Violent Aesthetic: A Reconsideration of Transgressive Body Art,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2006): 85–92. 6. For example, Peter Arnold, “Somaesthetics, Education, and the Art of Dance,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 39, no. 1 (2005): 48–64; Wojciech Malecki, “Von nicht-diskursiver Erfahrung zur Somästhetik: Richard Shusterman über Dewey und Rorty,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 56, no. 5 (2008): 677–90. 7. See Richard Shusterman, “William James, Somatic Introspection, and Care of the Self,” Philo-sophical Forum 36 (2005): 429–50; and especially the chapter on James in Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), which is the longest chapter of the book. 8. See Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, 263. The words, of course, are the subtitle of James’s famous book Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907). 9. The Peirce quotation is from volume 5, page 314, of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–58); hereafter CP. One prominent place Rorty invokes this quotation is in his introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xx. For Rorty’s criticism of somaesthetics, see his “Response

24



to Richard Shusterman” (in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson [Cambridge: Polity Press], 157). 10. Vincent Colapietro has already underlined this dimension in his instructive book Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), where he insists that for Peirce “the subject is a historical and incarnate being” (39). I should also note Robert Innis’s more recent interpretive use of Peircean sign theory to embrace the whole range of perceptual experience (including nonverbal), “even at the lower threshold of perception, where the embodied subject fi rst encounters the world,” thus pushing “meaning-making down to the deepest somatic and perceptual levels,” (Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technics [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002], 19, 168). 11. See Nathan Hauser and Christian Kloesel, eds., The Essential Peirce, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); hereafter EP. Peirce avows in “The Seven Systems of Metaphysics” (1903): “I am still a perfect ignoramus in esthetics” and “ignorant . . . of Art” (EP 2.189–190). He refers to being “incompetent” for “defi ning the esthetically good” in “The Three Normative Sciences” (1903; EP 2.201). 12. For detailed discussions of Peirce’s account of normative science, see Beverly Kent, Charles S. Peirce: Logic and the Classifi cation of the Sciences (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987); Vincent Potter, Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967); and John Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). 13. See Peirce’s letter to Lady Victoria Welby, cited in Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 49. For an instructively detailed discussion of Peirce’s respect for the aesthetic, see Victorino Tejera, “The Primacy of the Aesthetic in Peirce and Classical American Philosophy,” in Peirce and Value Theory: On Peircian Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Herman Parret (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1994), 85–97. 14. See Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce, 14. Peirce’s father, Benjamin, also suffered from this ailment, and they both took strong drugs (such as opium) to deal with it. C. S. Peirce “later also used morphine and probably cocaine” and seems to have suffered from addiction. His neurological malady prompted him “with the aid of his father” to develop “a high degree of self-discipline” to work around these bouts of pain and a high degree of self-awareness to sense the imminent onslaught of an attack (Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce, 14–15). In this sense, we can understand the poignancy of Peirce’s remark that among artists there “are extremely few who are artists in pain” (EP 2.190). 15. See Paul Weiss’s entry on Peirce in the Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner, 1934), 398. 16. See Thomas Sebeok, The Play of Musement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). 17. Peirce has a third triple typology of signs—seme, pheme, and delome—whose application to somaesthetics is not as clear as the other two typologies, so I will not discuss it here. For an expla-nation of this typology, see C. S. Peirce, “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmatism,” Monist 16 (1906): 506–7. 18. See Shusterman, Body Consciousness, chap. 2. 19. Peirce published in experimental psychology before James did. Indeed, he is said to have published the first American paper in the new experimental field of psychophysics in 1877: C. S. Peirce, “Note on the sensation of color,” American Journal of Science 113 (3rd series), no. 13 (1877): 247–51. 20. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 191. 21. For James’s critique of Fechner’s theory, see James, The Principles of Psychology, 508–18. 22. For Peirce’s extensive and carefully detailed account of these experiments and the various strategies and equipment deployed, see CP 7.21–35, 7.546–547. The experiments were conducted with Joseph Jastrow, a student of Peirce at Johns Hopkins, whom Peirce converted from a philosophy



graduate student into the fi rst Hopkins Ph.D. in psychology. They published a paper based on these experiments in 1884: C. S. Peirce and J. Jastrow, “On small differences of sensation,” Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 3 (1884): 73–83. 23. English is fortunate to have two words to distinguish the level of mere consciousness from explicit awareness. The French only have “conscience,” which is one reason why, I think, some of their best somatic philosophers fail to recognize the value of refl ective body consciousness but instead focus on its dangers while celebrating the suffi ciency of unrefl ective spontaneity. For more on this idea, see the preface to the French edition of my book Body Consciousness, entitled Conscience du corps: Pour une soma-esthétique (Paris: l’Éclat, 2007). 24. Peirce seems ready to extend the range of vividness/dimness “all the way down to [the level of ] zero” vividness (CP 7.497). 25. William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Dover, 1962), 109. 26. For my appreciation of unrefl ective understanding and action, see my “Beneath Interpretation,” in Pragmatist Aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), chap. 5. 27. For more detailed argument on this point, see Richard Shusterman, “Body Consciousness and Performance: Somaesthetics East and West,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 2 (2009): 133–45. 28. We should recall, however, that besides his training in wine tasting and in dealing with intensi-ties of pain, Peirce apparently also made a disciplined effort to deal with his left-handedness, which he regarded as a formative infl uence on his thinking and a hindrance to its expression. Having at one point trained himself to write right-handed (yet eventually reverting back to left-handed writing), Peirce had so mastered the relevant sensorimotor skills that he could “write ambidextrously and simultaneously, a logical problem and its answer” on the blackboard (Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce, 15, see also 13–15, 43–45). Peirce also seems to have practiced body-mind disciplines of visualiza-tion in which one imagines an action or sensory stimulus and then records or rehearses the responses (as they are felt in our bodies through our essentially embodied sensorimotor imagination) so that a desired habit or tendency can be created as if the stimulus and reaction occurred in the outside world of action. On this point, see Kent, Charles S. Peirce, 4. 29. James is also exemplary for somaesthetics in providing the psychological principles of attention for practical techniques of somaesthetic refl ection and heightened awareness to somatic conditions and feelings. For a detailed analysis of these principles and techniques, see Shusterman, Body Consciousness, chap. 5. 30. Peirce, however, opposed the idea of a strict dependence of mind on the particular state of the brain, asserting “that the connection between the mind and the brain is an accidental one.” This view formed part of his resistance to the deterministic doctrine that material conditions in the brain would necessarily cause certain mental ideas. His evidence for this view of the mind’s relative freedom from particular brain conditions is that patients who suffered brain damage in a certain place were usually able to recover their mental functions after a time: “When a lobe of the brain is extirpated . . ., for the time being, that prevents [certain forms of ] mental action. The injury may be such that there is no recovery. But usually recovery does take place. Other parts of the brain are made to do the work, after a fashion, with perhaps other parts of the body. The remarkable thing is, that those very actions, now performed with other organs, show the same mental idiosyncrasies, down to the minute details that they did before” (CP 7.376). Peirce’s remarks here seem to be attributing a creative, formative freedom to the mind in reshaping the brain rather than in being determined by it. Contemporary neuroscience is increasingly exploring the same phenomenon of mental recovery but under the category of brain plasticity, after working for many years under the contrasting paradigm that mental functions had permanently fi xed localizations in the adult brain, once the childhood stage of brain development had been completed. These new neurological fi ndings clearly indicate that our intentional mental acts (especially through disciplines of attention and retraining) can indeed redesign some of our neural networks so that we can really speak of the mind reshaping the brain. Here Peirce’s views



on the formative power of mind and mental discipline are not only prescient but encouraging for the somaesthetic project of improving our cognitive function and sensorimotor performance through disciplines of heightened body consciousness. 31. He likewise resisted the idea that mind could be reduced to bodily mechanism such that “mental phenomena are exclusively controlled by blind mechanical law, as they certainly must be if mind be but an aspect of matter and matter is governed by such a law” (CP 5.274). 32. On the other hand, Peirce affi rmed that in our worldly human life even the soul (as a spiritual thinking entity and therefore a sign) must have material embodiment: “It can be shown from the fact that the soul itself is of the nature of a sign, that such semiotic life there could not be unless there were a substantial and conscious life as the basis of it” (from an unpublished Peirce manuscript from 1905 [MS 298, 00016]; for more details on this manuscript and others, see Richard Robin, Annotated Catalog of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967]). For an instructive account of how Peirce saw the self as an organic, substantive entity (though involving a network of habits and undergoing “continuous and even profound changes”), see Colapietro, Peirce’s Approach to the Self, 86–87. 33. Having discussed only Peirce, James, and Dewey in this article, I should at least mention that George Herbert Mead is another classical pragmatist with important somatic insights (for instance, concerning the formative role of body language or “conversation in gestures”). See George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1934] 1967), 14, 63, 253–54. 34. For a vigorous critique of Peirce’s conception of normative science and theory as divorced from practice and practical matters, see Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism, 207–18. 35. Moreover, given that Peirce distinguishes logic and aesthetics as different normative sciences, while identifying semiotics with the former, it might be diffi cult to confi ne somaesthetics (with its obvious links to aesthetics) within a discipline other than aesthetics (even if aesthetics is thought to be the ultimate ground of logic). Not only does somaesthetics seem to be centrally concerned with issues of aesthetics (and ethics) and thus resist being located wholly within the normative science of logic or semiotics, but its concern with “Qualities of Phenomena in their immediate phenomenal character, in themselves as phenomena,” suggests that somaesthetics also goes beyond all three branches of normative science that, for Peirce, together constitute one of the “three grand divisions” of philosophy and instead extends into a further of “these three grand departments”—phenomenology (EP 2.196–97).


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