Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness

"This is a book of philosophy by a philosopher who has made the body her focus, and works also with empirical data from psychology and neuroscience to study the self as an embodied entity. There is a lot of work on this now, both conceptual and empirical. But as she notes, embodied theorists often don’t pay much attention to the body itself. A lot of the literature on embodied cognition is rather disembodied, and very abstract – not really descriptive of the embodied experience, which is hard to account for, and indeed hard to talk about. The question she investigates here is: what is actually happening in the body that would help us account for our sense of embodied self? She takes a hard look at substantial experimental data to fill in the picture, never losing sight of the philosophical questions regarding the interpretation of this data. That is true, and perhaps I shouldn’t have used the phrase so much in my book, now that you point this out. Certainly it bears further characterisation: it is, following Merleau-Ponty, the lived body as that through which we sense, perceive, act upon and interact with the world. It is ontologically prior, in other words. And of course, it includes the brain that subserves it–to repeat the important point Damasio makes, that the brain serves the body, not the other way round. And that’s why I chose these books, because I am interested in the philosophy that connects with empirical work. I think philosophical acumen is necessary for good science – to devise both what are the questions that matter, and the validity of interpretations. And vice versa: much philosophical questioning can be tackled empirically today. This cooperation in fact goes back to early modernity, when most philosophers were also “natural philosophers”, that is, investigating the natural world, as do experimentalists today. Abstract and empirical enquiry were complementary. We have returned to this, which is a good thing. And this book is an excellent example of the necessary complementarity of these approaches. It is quite technical insofar as it offers precise philosophical argumentation. But it’s extremely clear and never uses any jargon, so it is accessible. Each chapter is divided into arguments, counter-arguments and then conclusions. What she ultimately defends in this book is what she calls the ‘bodyguard hypothesis’ as what grounds and motivates the sense of body ownership–that is, the sense that my body is my own–what gives this sense its content of “mineness”. She uses inter alia the notion of peripersonal space – the space immediately surrounding the body, which works as an interactive zone that defines the self in relation to the world, and as a protective buffer. The way in which we define the boundaries of the self in embodied terms has to do with the evolution of this body map. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The neuroscientist Michael Graziano has done a lot of research on peripersonal space (PPS), which she invokes. He has shown that it has evolved in animals as a way of gauging and acting upon threats that are perceived by the organism, either consciously or not: it allows us to protect ourselves against such threats. On this basis, she conjectures a protective and a working body map –and she defines her bodyguard hypothesis as what one uses “when one experiences as one’s own any body parts that are incorporated in the protective body map.” This is how one gets a sense of embodied unity, or, in other words, a unified sense of self. And so the idea of the self as a unity is in fact a physiological construct, an illusion that we live by. It’s an ancient idea that goes back to the Presocratics in the West and to Buddhists and some Yogic traditions in India, and has always had its place in theories of the self, throughout history. But now we have experimental data to give us a more concrete understanding of how this unity is constructed. And how it can break down, for that matter. Yes: it comes down to the simple fact that it is the only way for us to stay alive. Homeostatic regulation through allostasis is the physiological story told by Damasio. De Vignemont focuses especially on body ownership. They are different approaches to the issue of defining the processes involved in constituting an embodied self. We can certainly say that there is no such thing as the self, if we identify the self with a kind of Cartesian substance akin to the old idea of soul. Rather, there is a self such that it is inherently constituted by the body. This book shows in a refined way how that is the case, how “the boundaries of the body that I experience as my own are those represented in the protective body map.” She carefully draws out the content of this particular body map, including, importantly, the mechanisms involved in body ownership and the related sense of agency – that I am the author of my bodily actions. These senses are constructed – we know this because they can be disrupted. There is a vast scientific literature on this, based on experimental setups such as the rubber hand illusion, different versions of which de Vignemont analyses at length, and which involves the experimenter stroking the hidden hand of the participant before whom was placed a rubber hand, which ends up feeling like the part of the participant’s body that is stroked. These types of illusions, which encompass the phenomenon of what one calls proprioceptive drift, are powerful, and, as she shows, they can be confidently marshalled as evidence for the bodily makeup of the self."