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Bodily Theory and Theory of the
Body
JAMES GILES
1There are, of course, other problems with the bodily theory, such as the
possibilities of bodily transfer and psychological fission and fusion. These
however are not my present concern.
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James Giles
(1) It is the only body I cannot get away from-it is always there
whenever I am conscious, and I can never see it walking away in the
distance. (2) I can see it, unlike other bodies, only from certain
perspectives: I cannot see its face except in the mirror, or the back of
its head except in two or more mirrors, and its chest and shoulders
(for example) always appear in about the same place in my visual
field, at about the same apparent distance. (3) It is the only body of
which I have kinaesthetic and other somatic sense experiences; of
other bodies I can have visual and tactile experiences, but not
kinaesthetic. (4) Most important, it is the only body I can directly
control. I can decide to raise its arm (the arm of the body I call mine),
and the arm rises; the act follows upon the decision. I cannot control
any other body in this way, but only indirectly via command or
physical force. I can also alter the positions of things in the physical
world, as in moving a chess piece from this square to that, but I can
move these other things only by moving this body: my influence on
the outside world is always by means of this body.2
Hospers is not, of course, saying that only in his case will all of this be
true; as if there were something singularly unusual about his own body.
Rather he is saying that these propositions will be true for each person
in the case of each person's own body. Thus while it is true for me that I
can never see my body walking away in the distance, it is also true for
you that you can never see your body walking away in the distance, and
it is equally true for that person over there that he can never see his own
body walking away in the distance, and so on. A corollary of this is that
what is here true for each person of his own body, will not be true of his
body when it is experienced by someone else. Thus although I cannot
see my body walking away in the distance, other persons can have this
experience of my body.
Unfortunately, Hospers does not attempt to integrate these observa-
tions into a coherent theory of the body. He merely lists them as
2 An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, second edition (London: Pren-
tice Hall, 1967), pp. 405-406.
340
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Bodily Theory and Theory of the Body
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James Giles
one could have both his eyes situated in such a way that they might see
each other, still neither eye would be seeing itself.
Although this all seems to have a bit of mystery to it-How can I have
eyes and yet never see them?-when we consider the nature of percep-
tion, it is just what we should expect. For it is this 'non-reflexivity' of
the sense-organs which allows us to perceive the world. Were my eyes
somehow to see themselves they would be 'clogged', so to speak, with
their own image and nothing else could 'get in'. Yet this very fact
requires us to acknowledge a phenomenology of the body from two
different perspectives: the body as it is from a first-person perspective
and the body as it is from a third-person perspective. It must be
emphasized, however, that this dichotomy of perspectives is not the
same dichotomy which sets apart 'the body as it is for the person to
whom it belongs' from 'the body as it is for those to whom it does not
belong'. For, as we have seen, I can in some ways take a third-person
perspective on my own body: I can look at my hand or touch various
parts of my body in the same way that I might look at someone else's
hand or touch someone else's body. In this sense, the third-person
perspective cuts across the distinction between my body as I experience
it and my experience of other persons' bodies.
With the first-person perspective, however, things are different.
From this perspective I cannot perceive the body of another. For here
the body is experienced as a point of view on the world, not as a spatio-
temporal object in the world. This is why the hand which I look at, be it
mine or someone else's, is not a hand from the first-person perspective.
It is merely something on which I am taking a point of view. However,
the hand which allows me to feel the fluidity of the water, the warmth of
the air, or the texture of my other hand, is not a hand that enters into my
perception of the world; it is my perception of the world. More pre-
cisely, it is my manual-tactile perception of the world. Thus, from the
first-person perspective my body is a maze of centres of perception
which constitute my phenomenological point of view on the world.
There is a possible objection here. For what are we to make of the
somatic sensations in my hand? What of the kinaesthetic sensations of
my fingers moving in relation to one another? As Hospers points out it
is of my body alone that I receive kinaesthetic and other somatic
experiences. And these experiences are not, like other experiences of
my hand, available to others.
Moreover, although we have shown how I can perceive my body and
yet do so from a third-person perspective, here the situation seems
somewhat different. When, for example, I taste my lips or smell my
wrist, what I am doing is using one of my sense-organs to explore
another part of my body. But in kinaesthetic and somatic sense experi-
ence I am not directing any particular sense-organ upon any particular
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James Giles
other objects, only to fall back once more into the undifferentiation of
this ground; it melts into the ground' (p. 10).
Throughout this process of perception my body, like the ground, is
also grasped unreflectively. It is not, however, grasped in precisely the
same unreflective way as the ground, i.e. as a totality of undifferentia-
tion. For the body-for-me, says Sartre, is given only implicitly. It is
what the world as ground indicates. But in what way can I experience
my body if it is only indicated by something else? Sartre's answer is that
I experience it as that which is surpassed. In an analogy given here he
says that consciousness of the body is comparable to consciousness of a
sign: 'Now the consciousness of a sign exists, for otherwise we should
not be able to understand its meaning. But the sign is that which is
surpassed towards meaning, that which is never apprehended for itself,
that beyond which the look is perpetually directed' (p. 330). In this
way then, though I experience the world through my body, in the
process of doing so I none the less (unreflectively) experience my body.
I experience it as something I neglect in order to experience the world.
But where is the evidence for this supposed experience of a body
which is grasped unreflectively as surpassed? In the process of percep-
tion the existence of our unreflective consciousness of a ground is well
supported. We need only turn to our experience of the world to see that,
as Sartre says, a figure asserts itself on a ground of undifferentiation.
But with the body things are quite different. When my sense-organs
experience the world it is plain that they neither reflectively nor unre-
flectively experience themselves. It is true that, in a sense, the ground
of my different perceptual fields 'indicates' my body so far as it indicates
a point from which the world is being viewed. But this point, as we have
seen, refers to nothing other than a certain perspectival ordering of the
objects of my perception. It is not something of which I am conscious in
addition to the ground. The sign analogy is, unfortunately, of no help
here. For although I may not reflectively apprehend the sign when I am
engaged in viewing it to understand its meaning, I can easily change
this situation and turn my gaze upon the sign qua physical object. That
is, rather than looking at the sign to realize its meaning I can look at it in
order to explore its physical features, say its fount or its calligraphy.
And this shift of attention is carried out, significantly, within the same
sense modality. But there is no analogous situation with body-con-
sciousness. When I am visually apprehending the letter-opener in front
of me I cannot suddenly shift my attention to the visual apprehension of
my eyes; for there is nothing there that can be visually apprehended. It
is precisely because there is nothing there for me to be conscious of that
Sartre seems driven to argue, in Kantian fashion, that I must have this
unreflective experience because something else is the case. Thus, after
agreeing that the senses cannot perceive themselves reflectively he goes
346
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