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Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science pp 180–200Cite as

Myself with No Body? Body, Bodily-Consciousness and Self-consciousness

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De facto, subjects are bodily, but is this necessarily so? This question unfolds into the following two: Can one be self-conscious without being a body? Can one be self-conscious without being bodily-conscious? In this paper, I will describe different aspects of bodily-self-consciousness and argue that the most radical attempts to demonstrate the contingency of the bodily nature of self-consciousness failed. The idea here is that the strength of the anchoring of self-consciousness in the body and bodily-consciousness can be evaluated by considering whether (and which) forms of bodily-self-consciousness resist even against radical theoretical and clinical cases of purported disembodiment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

     See, e.g. Descartes’ Letter to Mesland.

  2. 2.

    See, e.g. Descartes’s reply to Arnauld.

  3. 3.

     This thought-experiment was first developed to illustrate the sceptical problem of the existence of the external world.

  4. 4.

     A classical interpretation of this thought-experiment can be summarized by the following voice: “[A] disembodied but appropriately stimulated brain in a vat could - phenomenologically - enjoy exactly the same kind of conscious experience as you do right now while reading [these words]. In principle, it would even suffice to properly activate just a subset of this brain, the minimally sufficient neural correlate of your present state, to make a ‘phenomenological snapshot’ of exactly the same kind of conscious experience emerge.” (Metzinger, 2003, 547). Compare with: “I remark, in the next place, that the mind does not immediately receive the impression from all the parts of the body, but only from the brain, or perhaps even from one small part of it…” (Descartes, 1641, VI, 20).

  5. 5.

    Putnam (1982) mentions that “the computer is so clever that if the person tries to raise his hand, the feedback from the computer will cause him to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ the hand being raised”. Interestingly for the point at stake here, he adds a little later: “Of course, if we were two lovers making love, rather than just two people carrying on a conversation, then the suggestion that it was just two brains in a vat might be disturbing”.

  6. 6.

    See below (sections on The body-as-object and The body-as-subject).

  7. 7.

     See Brugger (2006).

  8. 8.

    See Iriki et al. (1996).

  9. 9.

    “Once the stick has become a familiar instrument, the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 175-176).

  10. 10.

     The irreducibility of the experiential dimension of the body to the other three dimensions is meant to be epistemological and does not imply any dualist view according to which the mind would be ontologically irreducible to matter.

  11. 11.

     Cosmelli and Thompson (forthcoming) use the term “body” to mean a self-regulating system comprising its own internal, homeodynamic processes and capable of sensorimotor coupling with the outside world.

  12. 12.

    “The importance of the body can be measured in considering precisely what it would take to sustain a disembodied brain and the supposed experience that goes along with it” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, 131)

  13. 13.

     One’s body is taken as a content of intentional state when it is what I am conscious of (e.g. I look at my hand). Even when it is not the case, one’s body structures one’s intentional states both spatially and temporally, by defining an “here” and “now” to which one’s perspective is anchored. See sections on The body-as-object and The body-as-subject for more details.

  14. 14.

    See the glossary in De Ridder et al. 2007, 1830.

  15. 15.

     “Such statements are common after spontaneous OBEs but they can be based more on emotion than reasoning” (Blackmore, 1982, 5).

  16. 16.

    Focal electrical stimulation at currents of 3.5 mA, for 2 seconds, of the junction of the right angular gyrus and the posterior superior temporal gyrus, in a 43-year-old right-handed woman, for intracranial presurgical epilepsy evaluation for intractable seizures.

  17. 17.

    Contrast with: “a minimally sufficient neural correlate for the OBE state in human is likely to exist” (Metzinger, 2003, 503).

  18. 18.

     See also Knoblich et al. (2006). See next section for a discussion of the idea that the body is not merely experienced as an intentional object, even an “extraordinary” one.

  19. 19.

    In some cases, the body-as-object might be experienced but not recognized as mine. For example, a patient suffering from somatoparaphrenia may claim that his limb in fact belongs to another person. Such cases concern the possibility of failures of self-attribution of body parts, and is not the focus of the present investigation which rather concerns the inverse issue of the (im)possibility of being self-conscious without being bodily-conscious.

  20. 20.

    See section on The body-as-subject.

  21. 21.

     This does not rule out the possibility that the body can be experienced both as-object and as-subject.

  22. 22.

     Such absence-as-object is only contingent since, as underlined above, a shift of attention can easily lead these body parts to be taken as-intentional-objects.

  23. 23.

    See also Sartre (1943, 304, 316); Compare with Wittgenstein (1921, 5.631-5.641).

  24. 24.

     There is no identification of the body-as-subject, therefore no possibility of misidentification (Legrand, 2006, 2007d).

  25. 25.

    “I did not feel bodiless”, Waelti 1983, 18; in Metzinger 2003, 491. In this particular case, the subject reports to experience himself as an agent deliberately moving through space but this aspect would be too exceptional to be considered as a common feature of OBEs.

  26. 26.

     Importantly, these data suggest a role of the vestibular cortex in the induction of OBEs (Blanke, 2004; Arzy et al. 2006; Lopez and Blanke, 2007).

  27. 27.

    The form(s) of bodily-consciousness that would prevail even in cases of “asomatic OBEs” remain to be assessed.

  28. 28.

    Metzinger (2003, 500) concludes that “the self-as-object is not a strictly necessary condition” but this seems to neglect the fact that a major component of OBEs is the experience of the body-as-object, and the experience of it as mine.

  29. 29.

     This coheres with the authors conclusion that “Because the present illusion was neither associated with overt disembodiment nor with a change in visuospatial perspective, we argue that we have induced only some aspects of out-of-body experiences or rather the closely related experience of heautoscopy that has also been observed in neurological patients” (Lenggenhager et al., 2007, 1098).

  30. 30.

    ”Individuals with anorexia nervosa are unable to maintain a normal healthy body weight, often dropping well below 85% of their ideal weight” (Bulik et al. 2005, 52).

  31. 31.

    In the following I will only refer to women as cases of anorexia are found mostly among women. But note that men would make up approximately 10% of anorexia nervosa (Weltzin et al. 2005).

  32. 32.

    Her body image is distorted both exteroceptively (“I’m fat”) and interoceptively (“I’m full”).

  33. 33.

    “Self-devaluation is the essence of the illness” (Bruch, 1978, 154).

  34. 34.

    It should be clear that this statement does not imply that it’s all there is to anorexia which is obviously a more complex pathology.

  35. 35.

    “Anorexia nervosa is an extremely complex illness, much more than dieting gone wild” (Bruch, 1978, 94).

  36. 36.

    “The anorexic’s rituals - her food compulsions, her exercise routines, her militaristic regimenting of every aspect of her life, every movement and action of her body - have a goal, a purpose, which only peripherally has to do with being thin to be thin, and has everything to do with changing and modifying the self, while at the same time communicating the “attitude” of the self” (Lester, 1997, 485).

  37. 37.

    “You think you are worthwhile only if you do something very special, something so great and dazzling that your parents and other people you care about will be impressed and admire you for being super-special” (Bruch, 1978, 137-138). “I was trying to be somebody my parents wanted me to be, or at least the person I thought they wanted me to be… it was really a self-imposed pressure because he never outwardly asked me… I did the best I could, but I guess it wasn’t good enough; I failed in all ways but at least from now on I can try to be the best “me” possible and hope that he’ll love me just the same even if I can’t meet all his desires for me” (Bruch, 1978, 86).

  38. 38.

    “In hunger I am King” (Kazantzakis, 1963; in Bruch, 1973, 250). “This line … expresses the essence of the inner problem in genuine anorexia nervosa… the anorexics struggle against feeling enslaved, exploited, and not being permitted to lead a life of their own. They would rather starve than continue a life of accommodation” (Bruch, 1963, 250).

  39. 39.

     The “efficacy” (for the patient’s project) of this process may explain why anorexics often deny their illness for a long period. Moreover, “starvation produces serious physiological disturbances that make the condition self-perpetuating” (Bruch, 1978, 95). Eating disorders would constitute the major contribution to mortality from psychiatric disorders (Bulik et al. 2005).

  40. 40.

     “thinness, the very path of her liberation, is that which further enslaves her” (Lester, 1997, 487).

  41. 41.

    Note, however, that her conscious realization of the intrinsic hopelessness of her project may allow the patient to open her way out of anorexia.

  42. 42.

     Even though no biological factors have been mentioned, this discussion does not mean to neglect the importance of therapies developed from the consideration of the biological factors that would contribute to the etiology of anorexia.

  43. 43.

    The view that anorexia has to do with self more than with body-image per se coheres with cognitive theories (Williamson et al., 2002) and empirical investigations in psychology (Benninghoven et al., 2007) and neurosciences (Seeger et al., 2002) according to which body-image in anorexia would be more distorted in self-directed judgments than in judgment of the body image of an average woman.

  44. 44.

    Anorexics would thus experience the therapist’s interpretations as “indicating that someone else knows what they truly mean and feel, that they themselves do not understand their own thoughts. The goal of individual therapy should be to help them develop a valid self-concept and the capacity for self-directed action… it does not matter whether or not the interpretation is correct; what is harmful is that it confirms a patient’s fear of being defective and incompetent” (Bruch, 1978, 130). Likewise, even though it initially aimed to denounce anorexia, recent pictures of anorexic women (e.g. “No Anorexia” by Oliviero Toscani) may well be counter-productive, as they objectify the body which attends to live as subject. By being so projected, her body is “de-selfed” again. Moreover, “we might even speculate that if anorexia nervosa becomes common enough, it will lose one of its characteristic features, the representing of a very special achievement. If that happens, we might expect its incidence to decrease again” (Bruch, 1978, xii-xiii). However, one might add today, this will not happen if anorexic bodies are pictured and projected. Indeed, this advertisement cannot help patients “giving up this unnatural pride in something that doesn’t accomplish anything” (Bruch, 1978, 139).

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Olaf Blanke, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Thor Grünbaum, Line Ryberg Ingerslev and all participants in the workshop “Research in Progress” held at the Center For Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. I acknowledge the support of the European Commission under the Marie Curie Research Training Network DISCOS (Disorders and Coherence of the Embodied Self).

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  1. Danish National Research Foundation: Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Dorothée Legrand

  2. Chercheur CNRSCREA: Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée, ENSTA-32, boulevard Victor, 75015, Paris, France

    Dorothée Legrand

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  1. FB Philosophie und Philologie, Universität Mainz, Jakob Welder-Weg 18, Mainz, 55128, Germany

    Daniel Schmicking

  2. Dept of Philosophy & Cognitive Sciences, University of Central Florida, Colbourn Hall 411, Orlando, 32816-1352, U.S.A.

    Shaun Gallagher

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Legrand, D. (2010). Myself with No Body? Body, Bodily-Consciousness and Self-consciousness. In: Schmicking, D., Gallagher, S. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2646-0_10

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