Abstract
Sartre’s obscure but evocative remarks on bodily awareness have often been cited, but, I argue, they have rarely been understood. This paper aims to bring the connection between Sartre's views on bodily awareness and his more general distinction between “positional” and “non-positional” consciousness. Sartre’s main claim about bodily awareness, I argue, is that our primary awareness of our own bodies is a form of non-positional consciousness. I show that he is right about this, and right to think that recognizing this point is crucial to understanding what it is for something to be my body.
Highlights
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Chicago, the University of Patras, Greece, and UNICAMP, Brazil
Is there perhaps some special “phenomenology of ownership” that singles out a certain body as my own? Or does my sense of a certain body as my own arise, not from some separable element of phenomenology, but from a recognition of general connections between certain kinds of information about this body and my own capacities for perception, sensation, and voluntary movement? Each of these positions has been defended in recent work on bodily awareness, but a point on which both sides generally agree is that bodily awareness involves a presentation of a certain body that is somehow marked as a presentation of myself
The great twentieth-century Cartesian Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that this way of formulating the problem of bodily awareness sets us on the wrong path from the start
Summary
After completing his famous argument for the “real distinction” between mind and body, Descartes acknowledges that certain sorts of experience can lead us to overlook this distinction: There is nothing that my own nature teaches me more vividly than that I have a body, and that when I feel pain there is something wrong with the body, that when I am hungry or thirsty the body needs food and drink, and so on. A significant number of contemporary philosophers endorse this sort of view: they hold that our capacity for bodily sensation, and – something Descartes does not mention – our capacity for “proprioceptive” awareness of the position and arrangement of our limbs, are specialized perceptual capacities, differing from our external senses in important ways, but sharing with them the basic structure in virtue of which a subject is informed of the condition of an object by experiencing characteristic sensory impressions normally caused by this object.. If this is right, making sense of Descartes’s observation seems to require understanding how there can be an awareness that presents a material object, not merely as one more entity encountered by the knowing subject, but as the subject herself We might call this the Subject-Object Problem: what can it consist in for the knowing subject to be presented as something in the world? Is there perhaps some special “phenomenology of ownership” that singles out a certain body as my own? Or does my sense of a certain body as my own arise, not from some separable element of phenomenology, but from a recognition of general connections between certain kinds of information about this body and my own capacities for perception, sensation, and voluntary movement? Each of these positions has been defended in recent work on bodily awareness, but a point on which both sides generally agree is that bodily awareness involves a presentation of a certain body that is somehow marked as a presentation of myself.
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