Mind the Body is a book in the philosophy of empirical psychology. That is, Vignemont judges some of the findings, arguments, and priorities of empirical psychology. Her main point is that one’s ownership of one’s own body “cannot be reduced to a sensory quality” but also has “agentive and affective dimensions” (pp. 47-48). Of course, this point has been well-known and well-argued ever since Socrates dismissed Anaxagoras in Plato’s Phaedo 97c-99c. Perhaps its finest recent expression is in Meditation on a Prisoner by Edward Pols (1975) and any number of subsequent works on action theory. However, these thinkers worked primarily from a philosophical or even abstract standpoint. Vignemont, on the other hand, meets empirical psychology on its own turf. Her express purpose is to analyze bodily awareness both philosophically and empirically with special reference to cognitive science (p. 9), i.e., to integrate philosophical and scientific theories of the body (p. 10); and in this she seems to be successful. The possible equivalence of the body and the self does not concern her (p. 33) – at least not here.

We have all been to social gatherings where someone engages us in conversation, presses too close, and, although never touching us, makes us feel that not only our own respective personal spaces, but also even our very selves, have been violated. What is the ground of this feeling? An answer to this question could lie in body map theory (p. 84), which offers a definite but malleable structure for information about the spatial properties of an owner’s body. A body map is a body owner’s subjective but discernible three-dimensional representation of the extent of perceived bodily experiences in space (p. 88). It may or may not correspond to natural, anatomical, or physical boundaries. Rather, it is analogous to a rubber band (p. 92) in the sense that it can stretch larger than, but cannot shrink smaller than, its normal size.

There are at least two basic models of the body map: the liberal (pp. 89-90), which only loosely constrains the contours, shape, and magnitude of the body, allowing for such phenomena as extra limbs or relative formlessness; and the conservative (pp. 90-92), which more tightly constrains these properties and is more skeptical about being able to explain empirical findings of unusual bodily phenomena in a unified or consistent way. There are also “hot” and “cold” body maps. A hot map involves peripersonal space (p. 178), which might include not only one’s immediate space for breathing, nontranslocational motion, etc., but also the space required to wield a tool such as a hammer or a guitar, as well as the tool itself. If one’s hot map “grounds the sense of bodily ownership” (p. 170), then one’s space is equivalent to one’s body. A cold map is simply a description of the body’s persistent properties (p. 162), so that one’s body is restricted to its purely physical dimensions. As a “stored template” or “frame of reference (p. 91), either kind of body map can serve heuristic as well as organizational purposes.

Body map theory attempts to account for both visual and tactile experiences of one’s own body (pp. 83-84). Sometimes an observer has a more accurate awareness of an owner’s body than the owner does. Nerves can be tricked. Extensive psychological data reveals various disconnects between visual and tactile representations of the same bodily phenomena, some natural and some created in the lab. For example, novocaine can make the lips seem bigger than usual to the touch while vision tells us they remain the normal size (pp. 6, 85-86). Body map theory overcomes the apparent contradictions between such pairs of perceptions.

Peripersonal space is specific to the hot body map and notoriously difficult to define with precision, not only because it is subjective, but also because the body owner quaperceiver can mislocate sensations, as numerous psychological experiments have shown (pp. 95-98, 178). Body ownership involves not only the bare facticity of a certain portion of physical space, but also a sense of ownership (p. 19), and there are many ways in which this sense can be distorted. Even when it is not distorted, one can still have a skewed or idiosyncratic perspective, e.g., either a protective, inward-directed, anxious, defensive or a “working,” outward-directed, confident, opportunistic view of one’s body. Mediating between these protective and working body maps (pp. 181-182) is the bodyguard hypothesis (pp. 167-204), which unifies several aspects of body ownership, but in so doing attributes to the owner perhaps an excess of affection, care, or even narcissism (pp. 189-190). The owner’s egocentric location, spatial awareness, and lived experience together create a center which makes the bodyguard hypothesis plausible. All this science and metaphysics of the human body has ramifications for an ethics of respect for the privacy, peripersonal space, or bodily integrity of other people.

Quite a few psychological or neurological pathologies can result in a sense of disownership or nonrecognition of one’s own body, in whole or in part (p. 19). Insofar as these bodily disorders, i.e., abnormal states of the awareness of one’s own body, are due to either psychosis or physical insults such as epilepsy, stroke (p. 212), migraine, etc., Vignemont’s phenomenology of bodily awareness involves themes of disharmony or aberration which cannot be adequately expressed in any ordinary vocabulary. Accordingly, her investigation requires some rather arcane terminology, which should not be seen as jargon, but instead as necessary to denote several very precise concepts intrinsic to the psychology of bodily awareness and the description of attendant neuropathological conditions. Two of the most prominent among these terms are proprioception, i.e., one’s sense of the position and extent of one’s body, especially as regards movement (p. 5); and somatoparaphrenia, i.e., one’s delusional alienation from part of one’s body or denial of possessing that part (pp. 9, 214-215). The scope of proprioception seems to be more visual than tactile, but this has not been firmly established (p. 66). Somatoparaphrenia is a variegated neurological phenomenon, typically occurring subsequent to brain injury, although there is no consensus about the specific locus of the causal lesion in the brain. To help readers with these and other complexities, Vignemont includes three useful appendices (pp. 207-216): a list of some of the many types of bodily illusions, a glossary of terms describing bodily disorders, and a list of some of the signs of somatoparaphrenia.

This is a very wide-ranging book, with references from Descartes to Artaud to Merleau-Ponty to Wittgenstein to Pylyshyn to Gallagher and beyond. Yet it is not eclectic; on the contrary, its arguments are nearly seamless. It is systematic rather than historical, but its extensive bibliography (pp. 217-255) of the history of the personal or psychophysical aspect of the philosophy of self-cognition contains a few conspicuous absences, notably Hegel, whose contribution to the literature of self-consciousness ought not to be ignored; Sartre’s novel, Nausea, which remains probably the most poignant statement of the felt disparity between person and body; and Ravven’s The Self Beyond Itself, which has sparked much debate since its publication in 2013.

© 2018 Eric v.d. Luft

Eric v.d. Luft earned his B.A. magna cum laude in philosophy and religion at Bowdoin College in 1974, his Ph.D. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in 1985, and his M.L.S. at Syracuse University in 1993. From 1987 to 2006 he was Curator of Historical Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He has taught at Villanova University, Syracuse University, Upstate, and the College of Saint Rose. He is the author, editor, or translator of over 640 publications in philosophy, religion, librarianship, history, history of medicine, and nineteenth-century studies; owns Gegensatz Press; and is listed in Who’s Who in America.