The Body and the Self ed. by José Luis Bermúdez, Anthony Marcel, Naomi Eilan (review)

THE BODY AND THE SELF edited byJose Luis Bermtidez, Anthony Marcel and Naomi Eilan. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 1995.376 pp. ISBN: 0-262-02386-5. Reviewed by Rudolf Arnlieim, 1200Earliart Road #537,Ann Arbor, MI 48105, U.S.A. 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. 1 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. 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 or her tongue, the infant, watching with 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 One overall result deserves particular 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 perspectively. 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 percept 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 andjoints. 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 whold is located in an evolutionarily 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 inJ. Cole andJ. 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...