The Bodily Self by Bermúdez José Luis;

Author:Bermúdez, José Luis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Self-consciousness; Bodily awareness; Agency; Action; Perceptual content; Proprioception
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

6 Conclusion

Let me draw the threads of the argument together. I began by considering two of the central themes in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the body in Phenomenology of Perception. The first theme stresses the distinctiveness of how we experience our own bodies, and in particular the phenomenological differences between our awareness of the spatiality of our own bodies and our awareness of the spatiality of the extrabodily physical world. This theme is predominantly phenomenological. The second theme has to do with the relation between the phenomenological investigation of bodily awareness and the scientific study of the body. This second theme emerges particularly in Merleau-Ponty’s development of the distinction between the objective body and the phenomenal body—between the body as a physical mass of bone, muscles, and nerves and the body as it is lived and experienced. As we saw, Merleau-Ponty develops this distinction in a way that places our first-person experience of our bodies and of our actions outside the domain of third-person physiology and scientific psychology.

The principal aim of this essay has been to try to accommodate the insights behind the first theme in Phenomenology of Perception in a way that keeps the body and bodily awareness “within the world,” and hence without following Merleau-Ponty in the conclusions he draws from the distinction between the phenomenal body and the objective body. It is true that our experience of our own bodies and of our own agency has a number of very distinctive features that sets it apart from our experience of nonbodily objects. But these differences can, I suggested, be illuminated by thinking about the physiological and psychological mechanisms and information sources that underlie them. As we saw in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Schneider, careful distinctions between different types of body-relative information and different ways of representing the body show promise for dealing with the puzzles and problems that led Merleau-Ponty to the distinction between phenomenal body and objective body. More importantly, I proposed a way of thinking about the spatiality of bodily awareness that goes a considerable way to explaining the fundamental differences that Merleau-Ponty identified between our experience of our bodies and our experience of nonbodily objects. The key to these differences is that bodily locations are given on a non-Cartesian frame of reference. As brought out in the final section, this way of thinking about the phenomenology of bodily awareness has interesting and fruitful connections with current thinking about motor control.

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