Body Consciousness and Performance: Somaesthetics East and West

Embodiment is a universal feature of human life, and so is body consciousness. Body consciousness, as I understand it, is not merely the that a mind may have of the body as an object, but includes the embodied that a living, sentient body directs at the world and also experiences in itself (and through which it indeed can experience itself as both subject and object). Since the term 'body' is too often contrasted with mind and used to designate insentient, lifeless things, and since the term 'flesh' has such negative associations in Christian culture (and moreover focuses merely on the fleshly part of the body), I have chosen the term 'soma' to designate the living, sensing, dynamic, perceptive body that lies at the heart of the project of somaesthetics.1 Part of that project concerns the reasons and methods for raising one's somatic to promote better self-use and consequently greater achievement of philosophy's traditional goals of knowledge, self-knowledge, virtue, happiness, and justice. Consciousness has different levels. At its most basic form of primitive body intentionality, we can even describe a level of what could be paradoxically called unconscious consciousness. This is the sort of limited, obscure awareness we exhibit in our sleep, when, for example, we intentionally (though unconsciously) move a pillow that is disturbing our breathing.2 Beyond this level is the stage when we are awake and clearly conscious of the object we perceive, say the cup of coffee we are holding and drinking from, but are not explicitly aware of it as a distinct object of consciousness, as when we are drinking the coffee absentmindedly or simply noticing the coffee's taste and not the cup. Yet, even without explicit awareness, we can handle the cup with efficiency and ease. This level of unreflective, unthematized perception is what Maurice Merleau-Ponty hails as primary consciousness and the fundamental, unappreciated key to the mystery of our successful perception and action.3 We reach a higher level of when we have explicit awareness of the cup, when we attend to it as a distinct object of consciousness; and we can distinguish a fourth, more reflective level, when we are not only explicitly conscious of the object but also conscious of how (and that) we are conscious of it. Here we consciously monitor our awareness of the object as an explicit datum of consciousness, noticing, for example, how our attention to the cup makes it look bigger or feel heavier. These different levels of that we noted with respect to objects like pillows or cups can also be found in the sense we have of our em-