The Phenomenology of Bodily Awareness *

Abstract

This chapter explores the dialectic between discussions of bodily awareness in the phenomenological tradition and in contemporary philosophy of mind and scientific psychology. It shows, with particular reference to Merleau–Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, how phenomenological insights into bodily awareness and its role in agency can be developed and illuminated by research into somatic proprioception and motor control. The chapter presents a taxonomy of different types and levels of bodily awareness, and a model of the spatiality of bodily awareness that explains some of the fundamental differences that Merleau–Ponty identified between our experience of our bodies and our experience of non-bodily objects. The key to these differences is that bodily locations are given on a non-Cartesian frame of reference. The final section shows how this way of thinking about the phenomenology of bodily awareness has interesting and fruitful connections with current thinking about motor control.