Richard Shusterman first coined the term, “somaesthetics,” in the 1990s and wrote two book length studies of the concept: Body Consciousness (2008), and Thinking through the Body (2012).  As he explains it in Ars Erotica, somaesthetics is “the critical study and meliorative cultivation of the body as a site of sensory appreciation or perception (aesthesis) and of creative self-fashioning in which one uses one’s bodily appearance and conduct to express one’s values and express oneself” (vi). Following Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, Shusterman returns to the largely lost practice of seeing philosophy as an art of living. As such, “then the soma (the sentient, purposive, lived body) is the necessary medium through which one practices philosophy as an art of living” (xi). And an integral part of the art of living is the erotic life.

Modern aesthetics has eschewed such an approach to (fine) art since the eighteenth century when first Alexander Baumgarten and then Immanuel Kant conceived of art in a narrow sense as an appreciation of the pleasures of form, feeling, and meaning so long as such pleasures were explored “disinterestedly.”  Ars erotica is thus excluded from a true art form since sex, like eating, is thought to be too visceral and ‘interested’ to be approached in a disinterested manner. 

Before that point in time, however, beauty was indelibly tied to eros. In lengthy, impeccably researched chapters, Shusterman explores this relationship in the classical world beginning with Greco-Roman erotic theory, and moving on to consider the Judaic and Christian conceptions of sexual life and their focus on reproduction, Chinese Qi erotics in Confucianism and Daoism, Indian erotic theory, the Islamic and Japanese traditions, and ending with a chapter on the life of eros in Medieval and Renaissance Europe.  

The book is far too vast to cover its various chapters adequately in a short review. Instead, I will focus on just two discussions, one regarding an aspect of Indian erotic theory and the other a short, speculative discussion at the end of the book on why modern aesthetics has divorced itself from eros. By covering briefly these two discussions, I hope to give you not only some idea of the subject matter about which Shusterman converses but also his incredible scholarship and the intellectual depth of his discussions. 

The Kamasutra is justifiably the most famous erotic text in the Indian tradition, and Shusterman discusses it fully in Ch. 7 (pp. 202-249). However, Shusterman also discusses an earlier work, the Natyaśastra, written between ~200 BCE to ~200 CE, whose main subject is dramatic theory. The text “serves as founding text of all Indian aesthetics, largely through its articulation of the seminal concept of rasa (literally ‘juice’ or ‘essence’), which is used to explain the distinctively aesthetic forms of experience, pleasure and emotion” (216). The Natyaśastra’s first chapter relates the story of Brahman’s dissatisfaction with the first drama that the emperor Bharata and his sons produced for the gods, and was therefore directed by Brahman to create “a new work ‘to include the Graceful … Style [that is] appropriate to the Erotic Sentiment’ and requires beautiful females …. These beautiful ‘eternally young women who are the courtesans and the dancers of heaven … because, like courtesans, they are unmarried ‘public women’ who ‘willingly dispense their favors'” (216). Here, then, we get a direct link between courtesans and beautiful dramatic art. Courtesans themselves must be “skilled in acting … and be always engaged in attending teachers and in the application of the art, and be endowed with [erotic] sportiveness … and be acquainted with the sixty-four arts and crafts” (Natyaśastra, qtd, 216). Erotic encounters, then, are both dramatic and intellectual endeavors thereby refining eroticism and “deploying its energy to cultivate and master the senses:” it is this “aesthetic edification of lovemaking [that] forms a crucial theme of the Kamasutra” (219). 

Second, as noted above, is the move in the eighteenth century to conceive aesthetics as the product of disinterested perception. This was a precipitous change that not only excluded the body (or soma) from aesthetic consideration but also erased a link between beauty and eros that had existed in the West since Plato’s seminal dialogues, Symposium and Phaedrus (see, 391-396). In a tantalizingly brief final section of the book, Shusterman explores why this may have happened. His thesis is that while “erotic love could embrace the spiritual along with the carnal … even if the latter was regarded as inferior or vulgar,” the relationship between eros and beauty became increasingly difficult with the rise of materialism in seventeenth century European thought. If everything is material, then that includes the soul as just another type of body. This renders all erotic love carnal, a point made explicitly by Hobbes when he equates love with the “appetite which men call lust” (qtd, 392), and which was echoed by Spinoza in his claim that “men, in fact, generally love women merely from the passion of lust, and esteem their cleverness and wisdom in proportion to the excellence of their beauty” (qtd, 393). Hence, Shusterman argues, the “combination of materialism and eighteenth-century trends of philosophical sensualism and libertinism must have made it more difficult to maintain the traditional idea of love of eros as a physically expressed but spiritual loving desire that was distinct from lust. This in turn made it more problematic to define the spiritually ennobling notion of beauty in terms of eros. For if such love is defined as the desire to enjoy beauty by possessing or uniting with it, and if this loving desire for union is inescapably physical or carnal and thus linked to lust, then beauty seems diminished in its spiritual quality and blemished by a hint of lewdness and corruption” (393). I hope Shusterman pursues this idea further in future work.  

Besides Shusterman’s scholarship, one can see from the brief discussion in the last two paragraphs how sexist and misogynistic much of classical thought about eroticism was. Shusterman himself is aware of that and indeed worries that publishing this work at this time is inappropriate because “erotic theory of the major philosophical traditions has contributed to the objectification and subjugation of women through ideas that foster exploitative misogynistic attitudes” (ix). Recognizing that, Shusterman hopes, however, that “critical study of these classic erotic theories provides genealogical tools to analyze and neutralize the complex and multiple roots of sexist thinking, while allowing us to recover whatever positive, redeeming elements these theories may contain” (x). I concur and am glad Shusterman published this work. His Ars Erotica is a big, beautifully written and researched book that can be savoured, and like eroticism itself, returned to repeatedly.  

Robert Scott Stewart, Ph.D. is a Professor of Philosophy at Cape Breton University, Canada. He is co-author of Philosophizing About Sex (Broadview, 2015), and co-editor of Expanding and Restricting the Erotic (Brill, 2020).

Categories: Sexuality, ArtAndPhotography

Keywords: ancient sexuality, art