Coming to Our Senses - Hardcover

Berman, Morris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1626542929 ISBN 13: 9781626542921

Publisher: Echo Point Books & Media, 2015

Synopsis

An ambitious and provocative analysis of the relationship between culture, mind, and body in the history of Western society, Morris Berman's influential classic Coming to our Senses has been engrossing audiences with its carefully-researched and thoughtful exploration of somatic experience for decades. Finally back in print for a new generation of readers, Berman's treatise on the West's historic denial of physicality is relevant as ever in a society increasingly plagued by addiction, depression, and distraction. Berman deftly weaves threads of history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis into an elegant and accessible argument about the ways our physical experience of the world relates to the culture in which we exist.

To make his case, Berman draws on studies of infant behavior with mirrors; analyzes symbolic expressions of human-animal relationships ranging from cave-wall etchings to Disney cartoons; investigates esoteric breathing techniques and occult rituals; and examines the nature of creativity. Berman also illuminates Christianity's origins in early Jewish meditation techniques, explains how the notion of romantic love evolved out of medieval Christian heresy, how modern science grew out of Renaissance mysticism, and how Nazism was the most recent episode in a recurring cycle of orthodoxy and heresy. A demanding and radical work of history, social criticism, and philosophy, Coming to our Senses is a beautifully-written and vastly important book.

About this title

About the Author:

Morris Berman is a poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written eleven books and more than one hundred articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, and Mexico. He won the Governor?s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990 for Coming to Our Senses, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a ?Notable Book? by The New York Times Book Review, and in 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Berman lives in Mexico.

From Publishers Weekly:

The author's call for a life of the body--as opposed to an emphasis on success, material possessions and divisive "isms"--rigorously extends the arguments advanced in his popular The Reenchantment of the World . Stressing that the human infant's emerging self-awareness is bodily as well as conceptual, Berman views conventional birthing methods as traumatic; he faults modern infant care for a dearth of physical contact with the young. His analysis of repressed "somatic awareness" takes unusual turns: a history of mirrors, decoding of upper-class vs. lower-class body language, a review of our changing relations with animals--from reverential cave art to the treatment of other species as mere objects. Next, he identifies a countercultural tradition supposedly rooted in bodily experience and rejecting the cerebral, mechanical way of life of the dominant culture. Examples include Gnostic seers' fusion with godhead, Jewish mysticism, 11th century French Cathar heretics with their trance and ecstasy techniques, the soul travel of Renaissance occultists. This maverick synthesis challenges commonly held assumptions. Photos. First serial to Reality Club magazine; paperback rights to Bantam.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Echo Point Books & Media
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1626542929
• ISBN 13: 9781626542921
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 426