Losing face

Quassim Cassam, quoted in Cheryl Chen:

…egocentric spatial perception involves a sense of oneself as a bodily presence in the world. For it is one's Body [sic] that is at the origin of egocentric space, and in relation to which other bodies are experienced as being to the left or right, above or below.

It is one's body (I assume, not having read the book from which the quotation is taken, the one's Body is something more involved) that is in fact at the origin of egocentric space, and in relation to which etc.; that need not mean that egocentric spatial perception involves a sense of oneself as a bodily presence, even to the extent of meaning that experiencing something as left involves a sense of what direction to turn one's head to bring it into view as neither to the left nor to the right. (Even someone who takes an enactive or sensorimotor approach to perceptual experiences could, I think, say that, though I can't recall if anyone who takes such an approach whom I've read does.)

I stopped reading Chen's article at the point at which I saw the quotation (just in order to write this post, not for good or anything), so I don't yet know what she will say about it; I stopped, though, because Cassam's claim harmonizes poorly with an experience which I have occasionally had, not, it is true, both recently and often, but recently (while camping) and formerly often, of being, in a strange way, almost surprised to remember, or realize the significance of the fact (it is hard to know how to put this), I have a face, and it looks a certain way, and other people see it when they look at me.—In the preceding period it is as if I have, rather, a moving view on the world, and a voice which originates from more or less the origin of that view. This attitude can more easily be brought on if I have not seen myself in a while, which makes camping congenial to it; it obviously does not survive the realization that I am so attitudinizing, which need not be brought on by mirrors or the like, though it can, strangely, survive all sorts of face-oriented activities such as eye-rubbing.

It may be that Bodies differ enough from bodies that this doesn't touch on anything Cassam says; I don't know. (For instance, if a Body is something like Merleau-Ponty's "phenomenal body"—at least as I think of that—it needn't be anything worrisome, though if that is the case I'm not sure how much support awareness as a Body can lend materialism about self-awareness, which is the subject of Chen's essay.) Qassam and Chen are really just the occasion for my noting the phenomenon, because I find it interesting, especially when it occurs, and also because whenever I try to describe it to others, I mostly get strange looks.

Comments

[Daniel Lindquist]

I'm always unclear on what sense "body" is supposed to have when people talk about "embodied" this-or-that. If the point is just that I'm aware of myself as being positioned in space, then it seems like "extended thing" gets it about right. That's very different from "thing with organs" or even "thing with parts that do stuff" (a broader class than "thing with organs"), which usually seem closer to what they want to argue for. And it's not clear to me at all whether or not being in space would suffice for being material (or whether such a claim even makes sense).