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    Pragmatist somaesthetics (Shusterman) holds that heighten... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Aesthetic appreciation of everyday life requires defamiliarization, making strange, or casting an aura onto ordinary objects and activities.

    Pragmatist somaesthetics (Shusterman) holds that heightened bodily awareness during routine activities like martial arts or cooking constitutes genuine aesthetic experience without estrangement.

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    Reasons For

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    Reason for
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    • 1.Aesthetic experience requires neither distance nor contemplation; immediate sensory engagement with lived activity generates genuine aesthetic value.
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    • 2.Martial artists and cooks report deep satisfaction from bodily mastery and flow states, indicating real aesthetic phenomena regardless of traditional frameworks.
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    • 3.Restricting aesthetics to estranged observation excludes most human flourishing and reflects arbitrary Western intellectual biases rather than universal principles.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.Flow states and technical mastery are experiential goods but lack the reflective distance necessary to constitute aesthetic judgment rather than mere function.
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    • 2.If all heightened bodily awareness counts as aesthetic experience, the term loses critical force and becomes indistinguishable from any skilled activity.
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    • 3.Traditional aesthetics emphasizes contemplation precisely because it suspends utilitarian concerns; cooking for nutrition differs fundamentally from aesthetic appreciation.
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    Key Terms

    Estrangement(as what pragmatist somaesthetics claims does NOT happen)
    A feeling of distance or separation, as if something is separate from everyday life or removed from ordinary experience.
    Shusterman(as the originator of pragmatist somaesthetics)
    Richard Shusterman is a contemporary philosopher who created the concept of somaesthetics and argues that everyday physical activities can be genuinely beautiful experiences.
    aesthetic experience(Sulzer's aesthetics)
    A variety of free and unhindered activity of the representational capacity that produces pleasurable sentiments.
    pragmatism(metaphysical challenge to intrinsic value)
    A theory, especially as advanced by John Dewey, holding that the world is constantly changing such that ends and means shift by context, making timeless lists of intrinsic goods and evils untenable.
    somaesthetics(Coined by Richard Shusterman (1999: 302))
    A discipline that studies the experience and use of one's body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning.

    Connections

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    Aesthetics1 linked

    Related

    Aesthetic appreciation of everyday life requires defamiliarization, making stran...Aesthetic experience requires neither distance nor contemplation; immediate sens...Flow states and technical mastery are experiential goods but lack the reflective...If all heightened bodily awareness counts as aesthetic experience, the term lose...
    +3 moreShow less
    Martial artists and cooks report deep satisfaction from bodily mastery and flow ...Restricting aesthetics to estranged observation excludes most human flourishing ...

    Details

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    claim
    Perspectives
    2 (1 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit
    Traditional aesthetics emphasizes contemplation precisely because it suspends ut...