Bodily awareness without the body

Abstract

This chapter explores the consequences for bodily awareness of a plausible and influential metaphysics of the self. The first part of the chapter presents the animalist view that we are each identical to animals, and clarifies its relation to superficially similar metaphysical claims made in terms of ‘one’s body’. Reasons are given for animalists to adopt the anti-reificationist position that ‘one’s body’ is no more an independent entity than ‘one’s mind’. Contrary reasons for reifying the body are found wanting. The second part of the chapter proposes that bodily awareness should accordingly be conceived, not as awareness of an entity called one’s body, but as an animal’s awareness of its own non-psychological condition. It is argued that this animal self-monitoring conception supports the view that bodily awareness is a form of self-awareness, and, despite certain differences from paradigm cases with respect to the independence of its objects, also a form of perceptual awareness.