Forthcoming in Sport and Somaesthetics – Andrew Edgar and William Morgan (Routledge) A Dove in Flight – Sportive Somaesthetics, Metaphysical Shackles and Transformative Soaring Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza Linfield University jilunda@linfield.edu The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. Immanuel Kant 1 I. Spreading the Wings – Introduction Imagine as distinctly as you can – engaging visual, aural, tactile, even kinesthetic dynamics – a sporting, artistic, or martial performance. This could be a dancer and musician in synchronized enactment; sculptors or potters dexterously shaping clay; kendoka facing off; ice skaters gliding; tennis players volleying across the net; wingsuit fliers tracing mountain contours. Given the endless possibilities to assess these, how do we conduct appreciative and profitable exploration of such endeavors? Somaesthetics – an inquiry into the qualitative dimensions of our sensually embodied engagements – affords one of the most refined, revealing, and rigorous ways to do so. Originally, somaesthetics reflected Shusterman’s “pragmatist efforts to reshape both fields, philosophy and aesthetics. But, it has blossomed into a truly interdisciplinary enterprise.” 2 Over the years, Shusterman alone has expounded on many of the theoretical and practical gifts that somaesthetic appreciation, which ranges from art to zazen meditation. En route, he has conducted full-bodied, philosophically nuanced, and beguilingly beautiful examinations of both sensually stimulating phenomena such as food or lovemaking and intellectually stimulating concepts such as cultural politics or the sublime. Many others have expanded – critically or exploratorily – upon this pioneering work. The somaesthetic field has had some dalliances with sport but not too protracted thus far. Foreshadowing pivotal themes in earlier work, but formally laying out and defending his philosophical aspirations for the nascent subdiscipline in 1999, Shusterman mentions sport in passing as an enterprise worthy of aesthetic consideration (among others such as martial arts, meditation, or self-mastery). 3 He also makes a number of references to, but does not engage, sport in his seminal Pragmatist Aesthetics. 4 Subsequently, Shusterman has also appositely and effectively used sporting examples, as when discussing golf or baseball in relation to awareness and muscle memory respectively. 5 But, there is no in-depth nor broad engagement of sport and its philosophical literature to this day. For its part, the sport philosophical literature has shown limited interest in somaesthetics. 6 Joan Grassbaugh Forry, however, has specifically assessed the implications of the connections between sport, which she includes under the broader category of “body practices,” 7 and somaesthetic inquiry in relation to self-cultivation. Positively examining the fit between sport and the three somaesthetic dimensions (analytic, pragmatic, and practical), she advocates to expand its scope beyond bodily representation and awareness to include social elements, and further argues for conceptual refinement regarding “intelligent discipline,” “self-improvement,” and the connections between self-knowledge and bodily awareness. 8 Some of these, notably the social aspect, Shusterman and others have developed in-depth in posterior works. 9 Most recently, Satoshi Higuchi has developed an astute analysis of somaesthetics exclusively tied to Japanese culture,