The Body and the Self

edited by Jose Luis Bermudez, Anthony Marcel, and Naomi Eilan
The MIT Press Cambridge, MA, USA 1995.
376 pp. ISBN: 0-262-02386-5.


Reviewed by Rudolf Arnheim


This collection of essays addresses the question of how people or animals deal with the outer world and how they distinguish it from their own selves. The self is made aware to us by our consciousness. More specifically, a person or animal's own body holds an intermediate position between what belongs to the outer world and what is a component of the self.

I was disappointed to find that the majority of the chapters, including those by the editors, were written by adherents of analytical philosophy, the esoteric game of nit-picking conceptual definitions of mostly obvious facts. I leave it to initiates to comment on these exercises. But I find much value in the articles on developmental psychology and neurological reports on the pathological effects of deficient consciousness in patients. These scientific studies rely on approaches that have long been accepted as classics, but they refine them most valuably with new procedures. One overall result deserves particular attention: our sensory exploration of the outer world is not aroused primarily by its mere exposure to our eyes, ears or touch, but by action --- the action of our own body or events in the outer world.

One striking example is given in experimental reports by A. N. Meltzoff, K. Moore and G. Butterworth on the behavior of infants. When a person protrudes his tongue, the infant, in fascination, repeats the gesture promptly. But when simply shown the protruded tongue the infant does not imitate what it sees. The conscious mind's equivalent of physical action is volition. We experience our willing as the initiator of our bodily actions. The arena in which we can watch our will in operation is consciousness. More generally, consciousness is the arena of the self. The self, one of this book's main subjects, is experienced first of all as the focal point from which we face the world perspective-wise. But this point of observation becomes immediately the seat of the will, the agent of our physical action. I shall say more about the self at the end of this review.

The other main subject of the book is the experience of our body, and there we are faced by the distinction between the body image and the body schema. The body image is the precept probed by our vision, proprioception and touch. As all our percepts, this one is the outcome of exploration, which can be quite comprehensive or more local, but is never a perfect replica of what the senses receive. The body schema is produced almost entirely by the proprioceptive sensations of tension and action in the muscles, tendons and joints. Apparently vision is likely to win over proprioception when the two senses are in competition. As far as the representation of the body image in the brain is concerned, there is evidence that the higher brain areas of the cortex are limited to the separate lateral control of the body halves, whereas the central control of the body as a whole is located in an evolutionary older subcortical area.

How and why conscious awareness came about in evolution we probably shall never know. But how indispensable it is in our present organic setup is made dramatically clear in J. Cole and J. Paillard's report on two patients deprived of any awareness of what their limbs do or can do. In these patients the sensory receptors of the limbs are still functioning, so that the hands and feet can still react; but no direct awareness of this reaches the patients' minds. Without being able to feel what the body is doing, the patients learned how to make their limbs perform the intended moves, by persistent, laborious concentration on what they have been taught. Standing upright works as long as the patient meticulously controls it, but when at all distracted he or she falls down. They can learn the correct pressure needed to grasp an egg without crushing it.

But there is a difference between what Paillard calls morphokinetic and topokinetic acts. Asked to trace an 8 shape in the air (morphokinetically) the patients have no trouble, because the place and size of the shape are not prescribed; but to point to a visual object or pick it up (topokinetically) is more difficult. Also, to accompany speech with gestures appropriate to communicate effectively with other people calls for strenuous learning, gesture by gesture.

As I mentioned before, the self is experienced as the focal point from which we observe our body and the outer world. The persistent proprioceptive awareness of our body helps us to feel that our self keeps existing. The infant learns to distinguish between what belongs to its own self and what does not by what it can or cannot control. Its will can move the hands and feet, but to move a toy takes more than willing. Also there is at first no notion of anything existing beyond what is directly perceived. Hence the importance of the experiments first described by Albert Michotte as the tunnel effect and now refined by Meltzoff and Moore.

When a moving object disappears behind a screen, an infant stops attending to it. Only at a later stage does it watch for the object's reappearance on the other side. It has discovered that action can persist regardless of whether seen or not. One important distinction seems to me to have been neglected in these studies, namely the double focus of the self's activity. Normally attention is focused on the task to be performed, so much so that the self all but vanishes from consciousness. Hours may go by unnoticed, meals may be skipped. But watching one's self as it performs is a more sophisticated attitude. One needs this shift of focus to learn how exactly a certain action is carried out. This is indispensable, for example, for the functioning of the patients referred to above. But to the normal person it can also be a handicap, blocking intuitive invention and creation. Actors must learn to move naturally while observing the rules intuitively that become a part of their behavior on stage. Painters or sculptors may be hampered by the useful rules they have acquired, if these intellectual prescriptions overtake the impulse and the feel of what looks right.