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.It is not my brain but Imyself who use pronouns in a declarative way and thus take responsibilityfor my thoughtful speech.The brain does not function as an agent but aspart of me; I am the one who does these things.The terminology usedhere is often slippery and misleading.Sometimes the troublesomeexpressions are only shorthand for more respectable claims, but somethought should be given to how the vocabulary and syntax used in brainscience can fit coherently with the vocabulary and syntax we use when wespeak with one another and when we speak about ourselves as thinking,knowing, conversing, and acting, that is, when we speak about ourselves asresponsible agents.This chapter and the next two will explore this topic.193 194 The Body and Human ActionBodily Presence and AbsenceTo discuss the way human thinking is related to the brain, we must firstspeak more generally about the human body, of which the brain is one ofthe governing parts.Our body is one among many bodies in the world, but it is experiencedin a way different from any other, and a number of authors have examinedhow our own corporeality is given to us.1 Other bodies can be placed overagainst ourselves, and we can even remove them entirely from ourpresence, but my own body always remains the zero point, the Nullpunkt,as Husserl calls it, from which my experiencing takes place and aroundwhich the world is spatially and temporally centered for me.2 My own bodyis always an inescapable here for perception, action, and speech.Evenwhen we speak over a cell phone, when I and my interlocutor are farremoved from one another, I highlight the point where I am located andfrom which I intervene in the world, whether by motion, action, or speech.I might be having an effect a thousand miles from where I speak, but thateffect is defined as being a thousand miles from here.My own body has distinctive patterns of presence and absence.Any bodythat is facing me can be gone around, turned around, or disassembled, sothat all its parts can be laid open to my experiencing, but my own body, asa center of experiencing, essentially involves special kinds of absence,which Drew Leder, in his book The Absent Body, has called forms ofdisappearance.3 Even though my body is with me always, it has distinctiveforms of inaccessibility.Leder distinguishes three modes of disap-pearance in human corporeality.The first is what he calls focal disappearance, which occurs in thesenses and other parts of the body that are engaged in our perceiving.Aswe focus on the thing that we are experiencing, our organs of perceptionbecome transparent to us.When I grip a baseball or move it around in myhand, for example, I do not feel my own hand; I feel the stitches and thesurface of the baseball, and my hand focally disappears. True, I can turnmy attention to my hand, but then I marginalize my perception of the ball.1Among the authors who explore the special experience of human corporeality, one canmention Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Erwin Straus, HansJonas, Leon R.Kass, and Drew Leder.2For an elegant formulation of the body as the zero point, see Edmund Husserl, Analysen zurpassiven Synthesis (1918 1926), ed.Margot Fleischer, Husserliana XI (The Hague: MartinusNijhoff, 1966), 297 8.On p.298, Husserl says that the body is a special object in that italways bears in itself the Nullpunkt, the absolute here, in relation to which every otherobject is a there. In a footnote he observes that the zero point is also the center oforientation for the above and below, the right and left, the front and back of our ownbodies.3Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 25 7, 53 6. The Body and the Brain 195I stop exploring it.When I look at a soiled carpet or listen to someonesing, my eye and my seeing and my ear and my hearing give way to what Iam perceiving.They disappear; I am focused away from the participatingparts of my body.A second form of bodily absence is what Leder calls background dis-appearance. As I concentrate on seeing or touching something, there areparts of my body my legs, for example, or my back or the arm that hangsby my side that are not involved in the perceiving.They also recede frommy awareness, but in a different way than the parts presenting the thing inquestion do so.The background parts are not transparent but dis-regarded.They might attract my attention, but if I were to turn to them Iwould turn away from the object I was experiencing and would make themmy focus; until then, however, they fall into background disappearance.Atany moment, some parts of my body are involved in focal disappearanceand others in background disappearance.The latter provide a context forthe former.A third kind of bodily absence is depth disappearance, and it dealswith the dimensions of my body that are not available at all to my imme-diate perceiving, such as the viscera, heart, lungs, and veins.When I chewa morsel of food, for example, I touch, taste, and smell it, but swallowingmakes it vanish as an object of perception.It goes into my insides anddisappears in a way different from the way my eyes and hand disappearwhen I see and touch things, and different also from the way my back andlegs disappear when I am reading a book.The motions of these deep parts of my body, furthermore, are not subject to my direct control, as aremy back, legs, and arms, and I could not perceive them from within even ifI wanted to.They function anonymously.I can sometimes feel them whenthere is some dysfunction, but the feeling is generalized, not easy to locate,and does not present the organ as such.Cramps are not a way of per-ceiving the stomach [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.It is not my brain but Imyself who use pronouns in a declarative way and thus take responsibilityfor my thoughtful speech.The brain does not function as an agent but aspart of me; I am the one who does these things.The terminology usedhere is often slippery and misleading.Sometimes the troublesomeexpressions are only shorthand for more respectable claims, but somethought should be given to how the vocabulary and syntax used in brainscience can fit coherently with the vocabulary and syntax we use when wespeak with one another and when we speak about ourselves as thinking,knowing, conversing, and acting, that is, when we speak about ourselves asresponsible agents.This chapter and the next two will explore this topic.193 194 The Body and Human ActionBodily Presence and AbsenceTo discuss the way human thinking is related to the brain, we must firstspeak more generally about the human body, of which the brain is one ofthe governing parts.Our body is one among many bodies in the world, but it is experiencedin a way different from any other, and a number of authors have examinedhow our own corporeality is given to us.1 Other bodies can be placed overagainst ourselves, and we can even remove them entirely from ourpresence, but my own body always remains the zero point, the Nullpunkt,as Husserl calls it, from which my experiencing takes place and aroundwhich the world is spatially and temporally centered for me.2 My own bodyis always an inescapable here for perception, action, and speech.Evenwhen we speak over a cell phone, when I and my interlocutor are farremoved from one another, I highlight the point where I am located andfrom which I intervene in the world, whether by motion, action, or speech.I might be having an effect a thousand miles from where I speak, but thateffect is defined as being a thousand miles from here.My own body has distinctive patterns of presence and absence.Any bodythat is facing me can be gone around, turned around, or disassembled, sothat all its parts can be laid open to my experiencing, but my own body, asa center of experiencing, essentially involves special kinds of absence,which Drew Leder, in his book The Absent Body, has called forms ofdisappearance.3 Even though my body is with me always, it has distinctiveforms of inaccessibility.Leder distinguishes three modes of disap-pearance in human corporeality.The first is what he calls focal disappearance, which occurs in thesenses and other parts of the body that are engaged in our perceiving.Aswe focus on the thing that we are experiencing, our organs of perceptionbecome transparent to us.When I grip a baseball or move it around in myhand, for example, I do not feel my own hand; I feel the stitches and thesurface of the baseball, and my hand focally disappears. True, I can turnmy attention to my hand, but then I marginalize my perception of the ball.1Among the authors who explore the special experience of human corporeality, one canmention Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Erwin Straus, HansJonas, Leon R.Kass, and Drew Leder.2For an elegant formulation of the body as the zero point, see Edmund Husserl, Analysen zurpassiven Synthesis (1918 1926), ed.Margot Fleischer, Husserliana XI (The Hague: MartinusNijhoff, 1966), 297 8.On p.298, Husserl says that the body is a special object in that italways bears in itself the Nullpunkt, the absolute here, in relation to which every otherobject is a there. In a footnote he observes that the zero point is also the center oforientation for the above and below, the right and left, the front and back of our ownbodies.3Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 25 7, 53 6. The Body and the Brain 195I stop exploring it.When I look at a soiled carpet or listen to someonesing, my eye and my seeing and my ear and my hearing give way to what Iam perceiving.They disappear; I am focused away from the participatingparts of my body.A second form of bodily absence is what Leder calls background dis-appearance. As I concentrate on seeing or touching something, there areparts of my body my legs, for example, or my back or the arm that hangsby my side that are not involved in the perceiving.They also recede frommy awareness, but in a different way than the parts presenting the thing inquestion do so.The background parts are not transparent but dis-regarded.They might attract my attention, but if I were to turn to them Iwould turn away from the object I was experiencing and would make themmy focus; until then, however, they fall into background disappearance.Atany moment, some parts of my body are involved in focal disappearanceand others in background disappearance.The latter provide a context forthe former.A third kind of bodily absence is depth disappearance, and it dealswith the dimensions of my body that are not available at all to my imme-diate perceiving, such as the viscera, heart, lungs, and veins.When I chewa morsel of food, for example, I touch, taste, and smell it, but swallowingmakes it vanish as an object of perception.It goes into my insides anddisappears in a way different from the way my eyes and hand disappearwhen I see and touch things, and different also from the way my back andlegs disappear when I am reading a book.The motions of these deep parts of my body, furthermore, are not subject to my direct control, as aremy back, legs, and arms, and I could not perceive them from within even ifI wanted to.They function anonymously.I can sometimes feel them whenthere is some dysfunction, but the feeling is generalized, not easy to locate,and does not present the organ as such.Cramps are not a way of per-ceiving the stomach [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]