Touch and Situatedness - Ratcliffe

8/12/2019 Touch and Situatedness - Ratcliffe

1/25

This article was downloaded by: [University of Tennessee, Knoxville]On: 03 February 2014, At: 10:37Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

International Journal of

Philosophical StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors

and subscription information:

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20

Touch and SituatednessMatthew Ratcliffe a

aUniversity of Durham , England

Published online: 25 Jun 2008.

To cite this article:Matthew Ratcliffe (2008) Touch and Situatedness, InternationalJournal of Philosophical Studies, 16:3, 299-322, DOI: 10.1080/09672550802110827

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672550802110827

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or

suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressedin this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content shouldnot be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.

Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672550802110827http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/09672550802110827http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20


2/25

Internat ional Journal of Philosophical Studies

Vol. 16(3), 299322

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 09672559 print 14664542 online 2008 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09672550802110827

Touch and Situatedness

Matthew Ratcliffe

Taylor and Francis LtdRIPH_A_311248.sgm10.1080/09672550802110827International Journal of Philosophical Studies0967-2559 (print)/1466-4542 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & [email protected]

Abstract

This paper explores the phenomenology of touch and proposes that the struc-ture of touch serves to cast light on the more general way in which we findourselves in a world. Recent philosophical work on perception tends toemphasize vision. This, I suggest, motivates the imposition of a distinctionbetween externally directed perception of objects and internally directedperception of ones own body. In contrast, the phenomenology of touchinvolves neither firm boundaries between body and world nor perception of

bodily states in isolation from perception of everything else. I begin by arguingthat touch does not involve two distinct feelings, a feeling of the body and afeeling of something external to the body. Rather, these are inextricableaspects of the same unitary experience, with one or the other occupying theexperiential foreground. Then I suggest that tactile experience does notalways respect a clear boundary between body and world. In touch, bodily andworldly aspects are experienced in a number of different ways and, in manyinstances, there is no clear experiential differentiation between the two.Finally, I draw these two points together in order to consider the contributionmade by touch to our sense of being situated in a world.

Keywords:

boundaries; feeling; phenomenology; proprioception; touch;vision

1 Vision and Touch

Discussion of perception in recent Anglophone philosophy has focusedmostly upon vision, and there has been surprisingly little work on the topicof touch. However, the other senses may well be unlike vision in variousrespects. Thus it should not be assumed that the structure of all perceptual

experience conforms to what might be discovered about the visual modality.In what follows, I will consider what our perceptual relationship with theworld looks like if we take our lead from touch, rather than from a certainconception of vision. If we start with touch, it is more difficult to construethat relationship in terms of detached contemplation of objects by a subject.Consider the following passage from Merleau-Ponty:

we can, at least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we constitute theworld, because it presents us with a spectacle spread out before us at a

Downloadedby[UniversityofTennessee

,Knoxville]at10:3703February2014


3/25

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

300

distance, and gives us the illusion of being immediately present every-where and being situated nowhere. Tactile experience, on the otherhand, adheres to the surface of the body; we cannot unfold it before usand it never quite becomes an object. Correspondingly, as the subject

of touch, I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere; Icannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go to the world.

(1962: p. 316)

Vision offers a view of the world that is seemingly uncorrupted by the body.Of course, what one sees depends upon where ones body is physicallylocated. However, this still accommodates the view that visual perception iswholly divorced fromperception

of various bodily states; how the bodyfeels

does not determine the manner in which a scene is perceived visually. If wethink of vision and of world-experience more generally in this way, theoutcome is a firm distinction between perception of body and perception ofworld. Vision, it seems, is an externally directed sense, which is distinct frominternally directed proprioception or body sense.

1

In the process, a some-what spectatorial construal of world-experience is also implied. The subject

looks out upon

a world of objects and views them in a way that is uncorruptedby bodily feeling.

However, as Merleau-Ponty indicates, a crisp distinction betweenperception of self and perception of non-self does not characterize tactile

experience. In touch, perception of the body and perception of thingsoutside of it are much more closely tied together. Whereas a description ofworld-experience that takes its lead from vision might emphasize thedistinction between perception of self and perception of world, a descrip-tion that takes its lead from touch draws attention to the relatednessbetween the two. It is the nature of this relatedness that I will explore here.

Although vision might be thought of as divorced from proprioception, itis important to recognize that it need not be construed in this way and argu-ably should not be. In the passage quoted above, Merleau-Ponty refers to

the illusion of a world in which our bodily situatedness is not implicatedand to a tendency to forget the role of the body in perception, thus imply-ing that visual perception is not quite so detached after all. As will becomeclear in what follows, I think that this is indeed so. Nevertheless, I willsuggest that certain characteristics of touch still make it a better startingpoint from which to explore the manner in which we are situated in a world.If we start with touch, it is easier to avoid the misleading imposition ofboundaries between perception of body and perception of world.

2 Touch and Proprioception

In recent Anglophone philosophy of mind, the two authors who haveaddressed the topic of touch in most depth are OShaughnessy (1989, 1995,




4/25

TOUCH AND SITUATEDNESS

301

2000) and Martin (1992, 1993, 1995). I will explore the phenomenology oftouch through a critique of their work. Both emphasize the differencesbetween vision and touch. Even so, I will argue that they impose upontactile experience a misleading distinction between perception of body and

perception of world.What are the principal differences between vision and touch? According

to OShaughnessy, touch, unlike vision, usually has a diachronic structure.We explore the world with touch, whereas the contents of a visual field aresimultaneously presented to view by vision (1989: p. 44). We can see thatan edge is straight just by looking at it; we do not need to actively explore it.But, in order to perceive its straightness through touch, a temporallyextended pattern of feelings and movements is required.

2

In addition, thereis no tactile analogue of the visual field. Furthermore, touch implicates

bodily awareness in a way that vision does not. Through touch, we use theproperties of our own bodies to investigate the tactile properties of otherbodies. I will focus on this last claim.

OShaughnessy acknowledges that bodily feelings are not always aconspicuous feature of tactile experience. In some cases, there is only abodily awareness; what is felt is the body. But, in others, attention is notdirected at the body; it unambiguously goes beyond our own body and weperceive the object which actively we explore (1989: pp. 434). However, inall cases, he maintains that there are two perceptions involved. There is a

feeling of the body as it comes into contact with an object and there is alsoa tactile perception of the object. He thus remarks that touch and proprio-ception are mirror-image senses, which work together in relations ofmutual dependence, one sense leading us outwards beyond ourselves, theother taking us back into ourselves (2000: p. 674). Why distinguish the twosenses, given the extent of their interdependence? Although OShaugh-nessy acknowledges that touch and proprioception depend inextricablyupon each other (2000: p. 630), he notes that there are several differencesbetween them, which rule out their identity. For example, proprioceptioninvolves an immediate awareness of bodily position and movement,whereas all tactile perception is mediated by bodily awareness.

3

Touch andproprioception also have different objects. The objects of touch can be anynumber of things, whereas proprioception has only one object, the body.And there are various structural differences between the two senses. Forexample, proprioception does not ordinarily involve an appreciation ofproperties such as shape (1995: pp. 1767). So touch, OShaughnessy claims,differs from vision in a number of respects, a central difference being theextent to which it is entwined with proprioception.

However, it might be that vision and touch are not, after all, so different.

One approach is to maintain that touch can, after all, be conceived of in muchthe same way that vision traditionally has. A contrasting approach is tosuggest that vision needs to be reconceptualized as an active, exploratory




5/25


302

process, akin to touch. The former approach is adopted by Scott (2001), whoclaims that vision and touch are both image processing systems that extractinformation from two dimensional sheets of receptors (p. 151). He adds thattouch and proprioception are not interdependent to the extent indicated by

OShaughnessy. Proprioception is certainly more conspicuous in touch thanit is in vision. However, the relevant bodily sensations, Scott claims, only

accompany

tactile sensations. He acknowledges that proprioception andaction facilitate, in some respects, both vision and touch, but claims that theyareassociated

with both senses, rather than beingconstitutive

of them (p. 152).It is possible to individuate and distinguish perceptual modalities in a

number of ways. One might appeal to proper objects, phenomenologicalcharacter, stimuli or organs, amongst other things (Gray, 2005). If we adopta phenomenological conception of touch, a distinction between propriocep-

tion and touch is, I think, untenable. Touch, extricated from proprioception,would be so impoverished as to bear little resemblance to the rich andheterogeneous phenomenology integral to tactile experience. For example,touch surely incorporates a phenomenological distinction between the feel-ings of actively touching something and of being touched by something. Iftouch is removed from proprioception, such distinctions are lost. Withoutan awareness of whether and how the body is moving, the feeling of activelytouching something could not be distinguished from that of being passivelytouched. This is not to say that all touch would then be passive but, rather,

that the experience would involve neither the category active nor the cate-gory passive. And if, in conjunction with the loss of movement perception,a sense of bodily position were absent too, the experience would be stillfurther impoverished.

There are also much finer tactile discriminations that we make, all ofwhich would be lost in the absence of proprioception and, more specifically,kinaesthesia. Passive point contact with an object may not facilitate a widerange of different tactile feelings, even with an awareness of bodily position.But, through exploratory activity, we perceive characteristics such assmoothness, toughness, sharpness, softness and oiliness. These are notperceived as assemblages of synchronic tactile atoms, one following on fromthe next. Perception of properties such as smoothness is a matter of diach-ronic patterns of changing sensation and their correspondence with bodilymovements (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: p. 315). The range of subtle tactilediscriminations that we make is nicely conveyed by the following passagefrom John Hulls book Touching the Rock

:

As a blind person, sitting on the beach, I have poured a fistful of sandupon the palm of my other hand, allowing it to trickle through my

fingers. I have rubbed the sand between my finger and thumb,wondering at the various textures. Some of the grains are coarse andsharp, filing the skin in such a way that every little speck stands out.




6/25


303

Some are so smooth and silky that it is almost impossible to tell thegrains, the sand disappearing like water.

(1990, p. 70)

A sense of what the body is doing is partly constitutive of the ability to makesuch discriminations.

In addition, it is a mistake to limit the scope of touch to those cases wherethe skin is in direct physical contact with an object. As Merleau-Ponty notes,the absence of tactile contact can also contribute to the experience:

If I touch a piece of linen material or a brush, between the bristles ofthe brush and the threads of the linen, there does not lie a tactile noth-

ingness, but a tactile space devoid of matter, a tactile background.

(1962: p. 316)

Touch is not simply a matter of touching. Not touching is often a veryreal part of the experience and sometimes the most conspicuous part. AsMerleau-Ponty suggests, this applies to active touch, where not touchingcan incorporate a distinctive feeling of absence

, often combined with akind of bodily anticipation

of touching something. It also applies to

passive touch, to the absence of being touched. If you take off yourclothes and walk around the room (even a warm room), the sense of notbeing touched is often quite pronounced. The touch of ones clothes is notordinarily at the forefront of awareness, but their absence can be, at leastfor a short time following their removal. Furthermore, I am not sure thatthere is ever a complete absence

of touch. When swimming in the sea,after a time the touch of the water against ones body is no longer asalient object of awareness. As ones leg brushes against some unantici-pated seaweed, it might seem as though a part of the body that was nottouching anything at all has suddenly come into contact with an object.Yet the touch of the water is surely not something that is wholly absentfrom ones phenomenology, as exemplified by the contrast between howthe body feels when immersed and when exposed to the air again, orbetween the feel of the hand that smoothly glides through the water andthe hand that is impeded by a strong current. Not touching any thing

doesnot amount to having no tactile feeling. The same point can be made withrespect to the air. Much of the human body is covered with fine hairs,which are sensitive to air currents, amongst other things. And it is alsoarguable that a sense of hot and cold should be considered part of touch.

4

No part of the body is ever in a tactile nowhere. Scott (2001: p. 152)makes the following point, in claiming that touch and proprioception aredistinct senses:




7/25


304

The fact that awareness of ones body commonly occurs withouttactual experience, such as when one feels the position of a limb thatis not in contact with an external object, tells in favour of the view thatbodily awareness and touch are distinct experiences.

However, it is by no means clear that this is so. Not touching an object doesnot amount to an absence of tactile experience. Hence it is not clear thatawareness of bodily position and movement is ever fully removed fromtouch.

Given that most if not all of the tactile discriminations that we makedepend upon proprioception, it makes more sense to maintain that touchincorporates proprioception. OShaughnessy is quite right to suggest thatthere are differences between the two: they are not identical. However, it

can be maintained that proprioception participates

in touch withoutcommitment to the stronger view that all

proprioception is implicated intouch or that it is exhausted by its contribution to touch.

My emphasis here is on thephenomenology

of touch. This leaves open thepossibility that non-phenomenological methods of individuating sensorymodalities might distinguish touch from proprioception. But there is a prag-matic argument against such approaches. We can no doubt individuatesensory modalities in many different ways, and perhaps there are variousequally legitimate accounts of what a perceptual system is. Nevertheless,

any account that failed to accommodate most of the perceptual discrimina-tions that are commonly associated with a particular modality would surelybe a deficient one. Touch without proprioception is stripped of almost all itsphenomenological structure. If it is construed in such a way, a furtheraccount is thus required of what it is that does

enable us, by means of touch,to discriminate a wide range of different properties. So, although touch canbe defined so as to exclude proprioception, this just involves moving all theinteresting questions elsewhere. There surely has to be some warrant for arestrictive and consequently impoverished conception of touch. Otherwise,why not adopt a richer and more useful one?

Scotts account appears to be motivated by a particular characterizationof vision. He claims that touch, like vision, is an image-processing systemthat has, as its input, patterns of sensation on a two-dimensional sheet ofreceptors. Models of vision based on such premises have a distinguishedhistory. For example, David Marrs highly influential 1982 account treatsvision as an information-processing task, which transforms a retinal imageinto a three-dimensional object representation. In taking the retinal imageas the sole input to the process, Marr presupposes that the visual system canbe understood in isolation from the other world-directed senses, from

proprioception and from the organisms active exploration of its world.However, there is growing scepticism with regard to such approaches.

Gibson (1979) famously suggested that visual perception is dependent upon




8/25


305

patterns of bodily activity, upon the way in which bodily movementscorrelate with changes in the ambient optic array so as to specify features ofthe visual environment. Numerous authors have taken their lead from thisview. For example, No (2004) explicitly appeals to the similarity between

vision and touch in order to challenge entrenched models of vision.

5

He iscritical of approaches that construe vision in terms of static pictorial repre-sentations of the world, derived from retinal images. According to No, anorganism does not passively observe a visual scene in its entirety butperceives it through a process of active exploration. Visual perception is askilful activity, involving a largely tacit sense of how bodily movementscorrespond with changing patterns of sensory stimulation. He suggests thatthe extent to which visual perception depends upon bodily activities is suchthat a lack of integration between sensory inputs and bodily skills amounts

to what he calls experiential blindness (2004: p. 5), an impoverishedexperience that bears little resemblance to the organized environment thatis revealed through visual exploration. So vision, like touch, is somethingthat is bound up with our activities. In both cases, we perceive objects invirtue of our appreciation of how their appearances change in relation topatterns of motor activity.

Acceptance of some such view need not entail that there are no signifi-cant differences between touch and vision. As I will suggest in the finalsection of this paper, one such difference renders touch a better guide than

vision to the phenomenological structure of our relationship with the world.Nevertheless, the term experiential blindness sums up, I think, the experi-ence of touch without proprioception. Stripped of all the structure thatenables tactile discrimination, it amounts to little more than undifferenti-ated sensation. If anything, it is an absence of perception, rather than tactileperception cleansed of contamination from bodily awareness.

6

Given thatvision need not be conceived of in isolation from proprioception, there areno grounds for imposing such a view upon touch, where it is even lessplausible. Proprioception is not an isolated sixth sense that, unlike theother five, is internally directed. Rather, a sense of bodily orientation,capacities and movements contributes to all perception (Gallagher, 2005:p. 140).

3 Aspect Shifts

Even if touch and proprioception are not distinct senses, the questionremains as to how the relationship between the bodily and non-bodily sidesof tactile experience should be understood. Martin (1992, 1993, 1995) offersan answer. Like OShaughnessy, he argues that vision and touch differ in

certain important respects. For example, touch does not include a tactilefield akin to the visual field. Through vision, we do not just see objectslocated in space; we also see the spatial relations between them, and there




9/25


306

is no tactile analogue of this.

7

He notes that there are experiences which doseem to incorporate some kind of tactile field, such as pressing a warm coinonto ones palm and feeling its shape. And there may also be cases of visionthat do not involve a field, such as extreme tunnel vision. But tactile and

visual fields are not isomorphic, the main difference being that the formerhas both inner and outer aspects. In touching the coin, one not onlyperceives its shape; one also perceives a part of ones body. Visual percep-tion does not include this bodily awareness. Unlike OShaughnessy, Martinsuggests that the bodily and non-bodily sides of the experience are notdistinct perceptions but aspects of a single, unitary perception. Attentioncan oscillate between them, in a manner analogous to perception of aspect-shifts (1993: p. 206). He offers the example of running ones finger aroundthe rim of a glass:

The sensation one feels in ones fingertip feels to be within ones bodyand at the limits of ones body, at the skin. One also feels onesfingertip to be pressing against an object, one which resists the furthermovement of ones finger down through the rim [. ] We should thinkof this case not as one in which we have two distinct states of mind, abodily sensation and a tactual perception, both of which can beattended to; but instead simply as one state of mind, which can beattended to in different ways. One can attend to it as a bodily sensation

[] or attend to it as tactual perception of something lying beyond thebody but in contact with it.

(Martin, 1992: p. 204)

Martin claims that the body is always the proper object of tactile feeling:anything which one feels in this way is taken to be part of ones body.However, tactile feelings are felt to occur at bodilyboundaries

, at the placeswhere the body meets the world. Hence they provide a sense of the limits ofthe body and, by implication, of there being a space outside of those limits(1992: pp. 2012). They fall within the boundaries and so are felt to beevents within ones body, at the skin. But it is possible to attend to eitherside of a boundary. Thus, by means of touch, we explore entities through theways in which they come into contact with our boundaries: One measuresthe properties of objects in the world around one against ones body. So inhaving an awareness of ones body, one has a sense of touch (1992: p. 203).The body is a kind of template that perceives things external to it throughthe ways in which they impress upon its boundaries. An organism canexplore the world by sensing its body, where it can move, where and how it

is impeded.

8

Although I agree that bodily and non-bodily sides of the experience areaspects of a single perception rather than being two distinct perceptions, I




10/25


307

suggest that Martins account of boundaries is phenomenologicallyincomplete and potentially misleading. He claims that the body is experi-enced as an object

of awareness and does not indicate that it can be felt inany other way:

awareness of ones body as ones body involves a sense of its being abounded object within a larger space, and that just is to locate it withina space of tactual objects. The two kinds of awareness are [] interde-pendent.

(1993: p. 213)

OShaughnessy (2000: p. 628) similarly indicates that the body is perceived

in an object-like way. He notes that, in touch, the body does not appear toconsciousness as a rival object of awareness as we actively engage with oursurroundings. However, he adds that the background bodily awareness thatwe have when focusing upon an object external to the body is no differentin structure from when bodily awareness occupies the experiential fore-ground. Thus the difference would seem to be one of intensity; during tactilecontact, the body can be felt to a greater or lesser degree. He offers theexample of a game of tennis and comments that even though ones atten-tion is focused primarily on the path of the ball, and doubtless also though

to a much lesser extent on the path of the racquet, some small measure ofattention must be left over for the movement of the arm (2000: p. 632).Although the arm is perceived to a lesser extent than in certain other scenar-ios, it is still perceived in the same fashion. He appeals to phenomenologyin support of this, suggesting that we can reflect upon tactile explorationwhilst engaging in it and, in so doing, attend to the hand as an object ofawareness and, at the same time, to the object that it touches (1989: p. 46).

However, the body can befelt

in quite different ways, and recognition ofthis is essential to an understanding of tactile experience. One problem withreflecting upon experience is that the act of reflection can itself alter theexperience. As Gallagher (2005: pp. 301) observes, any experimental situ-ation that places the subject in a reflective attitude in order to ascertainsomething about pre-reflective experience is questionable. And this appliesequally to phenomenological reflection. For example, when reaching out totake a cup of hot coffee from someone, my hand is not conspicuous as anobject; it is experienced as that through which an object is to be grasped. Butif I reflect on the act whilst performing it, my hand might become moreconspicuous, object-like. And an exchange that would have been routineand effortless then becomes uncomfortable. I strain to grasp the cup; the

way in which my hand is felt now impedes the smooth movement ofreaching. My touch on the cup is awkward. I dont feel the cup so much asmy own cumbersome fingers.




11/25


308

The question therefore arises as to whether the distinct bodily feeling thatOShaughnessy finds always accompanying tactile perception and the body-object emphasized by Martin are both artefacts of reflective exercises, exer-cises that may be influenced by debatable presuppositions about experience.

How do we arbitrate between conflicting intuitions on this matter? An exam-ple offered by Merleau-Ponty (1964a, 1968) serves to make clear (a) the wayin which reflection can alter the structure of an experience and at the sametime (b) how the body, during the course of tactile exploration, is not felt inan object-like way. Merleau-Ponty considers the experience of touchingones left hand with ones right hand and remarks upon the following:

the moment perception comes my body effaces itself before it andnever does the perception grasp the body in the act of perceiving. If

my left hand is touching my right hand, and if I should suddenly wishto apprehend with my right hand the work of my left hand as ittouches, this reflection of the body upon itself always miscarries at thelast moment: the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, Icorrespondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand.

(1968: p. 9)

When one hand touches the other, the two hands are felt in very different

ways. One is an organ of perception, rather than an object of perception,whilst the other is an object of perception. When a hand is engaged in activetactile exploration, it is not encountered in a thing-like way at all, as illus-trated by the contrast between how it feels and how the other hand is simul-taneously felt. But perhaps the relevant feeling is lurking in the backgroundsomewhere and can be attended to. However, when we try this, we end upchanging the structure of the experience. The touching hand is no longerthat which feels but that which is felt, and there is a switch between the rolesof the two hands, between perceiver and perceived. The touched hand,being itself an organ of perception, now becomes the toucher. And thepreviously touching hand becomes the perceived object.

9

There is a subtlereversibility in the roles of the hands. And, when the touching becomes thetouched, the bodily side is notfelt

in the same way

that it was previously. Inmaking the bodily aspect of touch available as a perceptual object, wechange the way

in which the body is perceived. We cannot make it conspic-uous without altering the way both the hand and the object it is in contactwith are experienced.

The example of the touching hands is effective because it serves to makesalient two different ways in which ones body can be felt by presenting

them both at the same time, thus inviting comparison. The background sideof the relation between toucher and touched, the touching, is not justrecessive: it has a very different structure. The touching hand is what does




12/25


309

the feeling

rather than what isfelt

, and it performs this role precisely in so faras it is not

experienced in an object-like way. I thoroughly doubt that anykind of reflective exercise allows us to gain pure, unadulterated access to thestructure of pre-reflective experience. However, examples like this do at

least serve to show that it is wrong to construe all bodily feelings as objectsof awareness and that phenomenological enquiry can proceed withoutdoing so.

The term bodily feeling turns out to be equivocal. In one sense, a bodilyfeeling is a feeling that has the body as its object. In another, it is a feelingdone by the body that has something other than the body as its object.

10

Inroutine tactile activities and the like, bodily feelings are the feeling of some-thing other than the body and, in other situations, they are principally feel-ings of the body. What we have is neither the perception of two objects

(OShaughnessy) nor the perception of one object that can be attended toin two different ways (Martin). Instead, touch is a relationship betweentouching and touched. How the touching body feels is inextricable from howan object is felt and, when the body itself is the object, it is experienced in avery different way. The body, as it touches, is not the unpleasantly conspic-uous, awkward, uncomfortable, uncooperative, clumsy, pleasured or painfulbody. It is in virtue of its not feeling any such way that it becomes a mediumof awareness and plays the role of perceiver rather than perceived.

As the example of the touching hands suggests, it is possible to reflect

phenomenologically on the feeling body whilst it is doing the feeling. Butthere are two risks. By attending to it, one might inadvertently change theexperience and reveal a body-object where there was not one before, or onemight also pick up on the feeling body but subsequently misinterpret it as anobject, the felt body. But could it be that, in those cases where the body isthat which feels rather than that which is felt, it is not actually felt at all? Orperhaps it is felt, but only weakly? A distinction between strong and weakfeelings does not accommodate the phenomenological difference betweenthe roles of perceiver and perceived. For example, when you wake up aftersleeping on your arm, you are more aware of your numb hand than of whatit touches, and yet this is precisely due to diminished feeling. When normalfeeling returns, it does not manifest itself as a perception of the hand but,rather, as the phenomenological transparency of the hand, which becomesperceiver rather than perceived. However, it is not that, in the latter case,there is less feeling or no feeling. The renewed feeling manifests itselfas

theperceptual transparency of the hand, in its being an organ of perception,rather than a perceived object. As the transition from a numb hand to aneffective organ of tactile perception illustrates, the feeling body is phenom-enologically accessible precisely as a feeling body, so long as the temptation

to reconstruct it as an object, by altering or misinterpreting the experience,is resisted. OShaughnessy (2000: p. 662) claims that tactile sensation isinessential to tactile perception, given that you can sense an object




13/25


310

impeding your path even with a numb arm. Such claims are based on amisconception of touch. Touch is not a matter of one object colliding withanother; it is a sense of relatedness between the two that is quite variable instructure and often involves patterns of skilful manipulation, which only

facilitate perception in so far as they are inextricable from patterns of feel-ing. It is only when the body is felt as an organ of perception

that somethingother than the body can be an object of perception. If the body neither feelsnor is felt, all we have is a collision of bodies, and that does not amount toperception.

In addition to misconstruing the perceiving body, OShaughnessy andMartin impose an overly strict division between the bodily and non-bodilysides of touch. The example of the two hands touching might suggest thattactile experience does indeed have a dual perceiverperceived structure.

But things are not so simple. There are many other variants of tactileperception. The bodily and worldly sides of the tactile relation can take upthe experiential foreground to varying degrees

and in different ways

. Whenone is passively touched, the body is often in the foreground and theperception incorporates little if anything of the worldly side of the relation.But the categories of passive, momentary tactile contact and active, tactileexploration do not exhaust the varieties of touch. As OShaughnessy (1995:p. 176) rightly says, touch encompasses extremely heterogeneous phenom-ena. Consider the following:

1 Visually guided manipulation of an object in a routine situation.2 Exploratory touch.3 Being in long-term bodily contact with a familiar object, such as a

garment.4 Being scraped by a branch whilst walking.5 Feeling the cold wind against ones face.6 Being touched expectedly / unexpectedly by another person.7 The feeling of having clammy hands.8 The feeling of not being touched; perhaps of not being wrapped up in

clothing.

And the list goes on. In some cases, the body is more conspicuous and, inother cases, an object external to the body is more conspicuous. And thereis a spectrum of cases, rather than a simple foreground/backgroundstructure, with the body occupying either

one or

the other. Where oneaspect occupies the experiential foreground, it can be experienced in quitedifferent ways. Ones body can feel clumsy or conspicuous. And one mightalso dwell on pleasurable bodily sensations. On the other side of the rela-

tion, objects can solicit all manner of tactile feelings; something can feelslimy, rough, hard or soft. Tactile perception also seems to have an intrinsicvalence to it; things can feel pleasant to the touch, soliciting further




14/25


311

exploration. Or they can feel unpleasant in a variety of ways. But there arealso plenty of cases that do not involve a clear distinction between perceiverand perceived. In contrast to active tactile exploration of one hand byanother, consider putting ones palms together, as if to pray. There is no

touchertouched structure here. Indeed, it is not clear quite where the feel-ing is. It does not seem to be located

in one hand, the other or both; there isjust the touch that unites them. As I will now show, there are many suchcases. They serve to challenge (a) an emphasis on bodily boundaries and (b)the assumption that touch always involves two clearly distinguishableaspects, a bodily and a non-bodily aspect.

4 Boundaries

Touch often has a feelingfelt structure, and what feels need not be what isfelt. Sometimes the body occupies both roles and, on other occasions, anobject outside the body is felt. This structure is suggestive of the possibilitythat what feels and what is felt need not be spatially coincident. After all,what is seen is not located in the same place as the organs of sight, and whatis heard is not experienced as residing in the ears. In fact, there are plentyof cases where the object of touch is not located at the physical boundarybetween body and world. An oft-quoted example is the blind persons cane,which is an organ of perception, rather than an object that is encountered

by the hand. One feels through the cane, rather than encountering it as aperceptual object (Hull, 1990).

11

There are many other examples. As amedical practitioner recently informed me, I have recurrently been struckby how the stethoscope vanishes: it is just the heart sounds. Despite meholding and manipulating a tool to access that sound.

12

Ihde (1983: p. 95)gives the example of running a pencil along a desk and perceiving thetexture of the desk. He notes that the skinobject boundary, the feeling ofpressure, cannot be brought to the forefront of awareness without alteringthe experience:

by conscious effort you can [] make this fingerpencil aspect of theexperience stand out. But when it does, the pencildesk aspect tendsto fade and vice-versa. While both aspects are present one tends tostand in the centre of the [f]ocus while the other fades to a fringeawareness.

(1983: p. 96)

Once the assumption that what feels must be what is felt is discarded, it

becomes clear that touch need not have a bodily boundary or an entity inphysical contact with a boundary as its object. The relevant boundaries arenot fixed and, in some cases, extend beyond the skin. This view becomes all




15/25


312

the more plausible once it is acknowledged that we have quite a lot of hair.Many tactile experiences do not involve something coming into contact withthe skin but, rather, with body hair. Consider a cats whiskers or vibrissae.These are connected to several nerves, under limited muscular control and

extremely sensitive. The cat uses its whiskers to explore its environment,and one of their roles is to perceive the width of openings relative to thewidth of the cats body. For whiskers to be effective, what is perceived mustnot be the surface of the skin, where the relevant nerves are located, butobjects located a certain distance from the skin. Now, use of the termperception here is not phenomenological; I have no idea what a cats tactilephenomenology is like. But such examples at least suffice to show that thefeatures of the environment that an organism detects via touch are notalways objects and events at bodily boundaries. The function of touch is not

always to register objects in direct contact with bodily boundaries. Andphenomenological reflection is of course possible with regard to our ownbody hair, which, when disturbed, does not always generate feelings of theskin. Consider having the hair on ones head caressed by another person.One feels the touch of the other, but not simply as a pattern of changingsensations situated on ones scalp. The feeling is much more diffuse thanthat, spread out beyond the skin and lacking a precise location.

The extension of boundaries also implies that touch does not alwaysrespect a clear boundary between a bodily feeling and an object that is

touched. When a skilled tennis player holds a racquet during a game, herhand is not experienced as perceptually confronting the racquet. Rather,boundaries become blurred during such activities, and it is not wholly clearwhere the touching ends and the touched begins. Cases like the racquet andthe cane, which involve an extension of bodily boundaries, also include adiminution or loss of certain other bodily boundaries. In feeling with

thecane, rather than feeling the cane, the boundary between body and canedisappears. Hence some ways in which the body feels

involve a lack ofdifferentiation between the body and certain objects that it is in contactwith.

The diminution or loss of boundaries is also integral to many experi-ences of passive touch. In these cases, the feelingfelt structure can bediffuse or altogether absent. There is a tendency in the literature toemphasize instances of active touch that are at the forefront of awareness.But touch is much more pervasive than this, and touches that fall into theexperiential background do not distinguish boundaries so cleanly. To takeanother example from Ihde, consider the way in which boundariesbetween body and object fade when you are lying on a really comfortablesofa or bed:

I find that the cloud-like couchme experience is so vague that noteven any clear distinction between me and where I end and couch is




16/25


313

capable of being made. Inner and outer, subject and object are herenot at all clear and distinct.

(1983: p. 97)

There is a continuum of touchingtouched differentiation, with greaterdifferentiation usually applying when the touch is a more salient aspect ofexperience. Whilst I was writing this paper and making notes, I tried toreflect on my tactile experience at the time. There was a cool breeze on myleft forearm, from a draught coming through the open window. I felt the gripof the pen, with my hand more salient than usual, as it was tiring. I felt mysweaty finger slipping on the pen and, as it happened, that part of my body,rather than the pen, became the object of awareness. My feet felt hot in my

shoes. Did I feel my clothes? Most of my body was in contact with them, andyet I did not draw a firm boundary between them and me. In fact, the lightbreeze on my arm was a much more conspicuous aspect of the experience,with clearer boundaries. On reflection, I could feel the rub of my collar onmy neck and a slight tightness where Id done my belt up one notch too far.But my tactile relationship with my clothes was not a salient part of myexperience, as touching or as touched. There was no firm experientialboundary between me and them. Indeed, I would have had a much clearersense of my bodily boundary had they been absent.

When we are habituated to tactile contact, we do not fully differentiatebetween the bodily and non-bodily sides of the experience. Thus touch is arelation in which one side, the other or neither may be conspicuous, and itinvolves variable degrees of selfworld differentiation.

There is nothing mysterious about this, once it is recognized that sensa-tion at a boundary need not be feeling of a boundary and also that, evenwhen what is felt does happen to be a bodily boundary, it need not be feltas

a boundary. Touch is often a sense of diffuse or absent boundaries and,where boundaries are involved, they need not correspond to the physicalboundaries of the body. The bodyworld or insideoutside distinction is notan essential element of tactile experience, and the assumption that it isstems from the unwarranted a priori imposition of an internalexternalcontrast upon it.

5 Being in Touch with the World

The structure of touch serves to cast light upon the more general way inwhich we experience ourselves as situated in a world. OShaughnessy (1989,2000) claims that touch, rather than vision, is our most fundamental or

primordial sense. Although it is eclipsed by vision in most of our experi-ences, it is essential, he thinks, to the animal condition. Tactile contact withthe world is bound up with the having of an animal body. Agency and touch




17/25


314

work together: we couldnt have motor control without touch and viceversa. Similarly, Montagu (1986: p. 3) remarks that touch is the parent ofour eyes, ears, nose and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiatedinto them, a fact that seems to be recognized in the age-old evaluation of

touch as the mother of the senses. I suggest that this emphasis on thecentrality of touch to our relationship with the world is right and also thattouch is partly constitutive of a sense that we have of being in a world, whichis integral to all non-pathological forms of experience.

13

Touch is not a localized phenomenon that occurs only in hands or finger-tips. Once we take into account all the varieties of touch, it is clear that thebodily surface as a whole is involved in touch. Certain touches are inconspic-uous, but it is precisely in virtue of their inconspicuousness that theycontribute to our phenomenology. As I write this, the feeling of my body

touching the chair is not a salient part of the experience, and I draw no clearboundary between my body surface and the cushion of the chair. It is thisinconspicuousness that constitutes

a sense of comfort, of being situated in anenvironment in such a way that my attention can be directed at other things.When I feel an itch or an ache and adjust my position, this is not simply atransition from a lack of feeling to a feeling. Once we stop thinking of bodilyfeelings as perceptions of a body-object, it is possible to see that the relevantpart of the body can be felt precisely as

inconspicuous, as

undifferentiatedfrom its surroundings. There is no doubt that the nerve endings in my

fingers are more concentrated and, as I type, more active than those in mybottom as it rests upon the seat. But the difference between the two feelingsis not just a matter of neural density or activity. These are not a reliablemeasure of the extent to which a body part is phenomenologically conspic-uous or of the way

in which it is felt. Recall the example of the numb hand.It is conspicuous precisely in so far as normal responsiveness is diminishedor absent. The absence of normal sensation is what makes it appear in anobject-like way.

Given the pervasiveness of touch, we might think of the whole skin as atactile field (although I do not wish to suggest that this field is isomorphicin any illuminating respect with the visual field). It is misleading to empha-size only one aspect of tactile perception, such as a hand resting on the rimof a glass, and then wonder whether the sensory receptors in that hand aloneconstitute a field. As Montagu (1986: p. 127) observes, the very phrasesense of touch has come to mean, almost exclusively, feeling with thefingers or hand. But, by analogy, it would be a mistake to investigate thevisual field by considering only a small part of the retina that happened tobe where ambient light from an especially conspicuous object was falling. Sowhy consider only a slab of skin that is most proximal to an object at the

forefront of awareness? We should at least consider the skin as a whole, theentire organ that, in conjunction with proprioception and movement,facilitates tactile receptivity. Ihde suggests that the field as a whole becomes




18/25


315

conspicuous on those occasions when the entire skin is simultaneouslyaffected in the same way by the environment. He gives the example of jump-ing in a lake and feeling ones entire body coming into contact with the cold,wet environment. And, when one steps out of the water and feels the warm

sun on ones body, there is another all-encompassing bodily feeling, whichmight be described as a sense of bodily exhilaration. He then indicates thatthis touch-field is integral to a sense of connectedness between self andworld, a sense of belonging to the world:

when the whole of my touch field touches and is touched by thesurrounding world, I realize how intimate is the Iworld relation intouch. Through touch, I am constantly in touch with that whichsurrounds me. But also in those states it is difficult to say just where I

end and the world begins. All the specific touches found in focalattentiveness are never separate from the total Touch as the constantfield in which I live.

(Ihde, 1983: p. 99)

The structure of our relationship with the world cannot be adequatelyconveyed in terms of any account that imposes a clear boundary betweenself and non-self or bodily and non-bodily upon all experience. The relat-

edness, the connectedness integral to touch provides a better clue. It iscurious that so many accounts of perception emphasize the selfworldboundary, the distinction between subject and object or the separationbetween bodily and non-bodily. Of course, our experience does incorpo-rate a distinction between self and world, but that is not to say that everyaspect of our experience conforms to the distinction. Indeed, I suggest thata sense of being situated in

a world, rather than being cut off from it orviewing it from some strange, detached, dislocated standpoint, is partlyconstituted by those tactile relations that do not

cleanly differentiate selffrom non-self. Consider tactile experiences in which the body or thedistinction between bodily and non-bodily is especially conspicuous. Manyof these involve confronting an object, having ones activities impeded ordisrupted by it. When we are comfortably passive or involved in a smoothcontext of bodily activity, neither the body nor the physical boundarybetween the body and everything else is especially conspicuous. Body andworld are, to some extent at least, undifferentiated. As I type these words,I do not feel my fingers as objects. Neither do I perceive the keys as aseries of isolated objects, perceived sequentially. Indeed, when the typingprogresses smoothly, the keyboard is not cleanly differentiated from my

manipulation of it and my attention is directed at neither the bodilyactivity nor the keyboard but at the project of writing that the activity ispurposively directed towards.

14




19/25


316

Heidegger (1962) offers the well-known example of using a hammer andnotes, amongst other things, that when activity in a familiar context ofequipment and projects proceeds smoothly, a tool that one uses is notexperienced in an object-like way but is integrated into the activity. The

handhammer contrast is not a part of the experience. This kind of fluid,practical coping contributes to our sense of relatedness to things and to theworld as a whole, our sense of being in

the world rather than being detachedobservers of a place to which we do not belong. As Heidegger remarks, theless we stare at the hammer and the more we seize hold of it and use it, themore primordial does our relationship to it become (1962: p. 98). Fluentpractical manipulation is at the same time a loss of boundaries betweenbody and equipment, of being bound up with things. He adds thatequipment is only experienced as distinct from ones activities and appears

as an object to a subject when it goes wrong in some way. That is, when it ismissing, unsuitable, broken or difficult to use or when it gets in the ways ofones task.

Bodily boundaries and bodyworld duality are generally more conspicu-ous when things go wrong or when one is engaging with something unfamil-iar and perhaps threatening. They are often symptomatic of impediments toour situatedness in the world. As Josipovici observes:

If I touch what I have touched a thousand times and seen a thousand

times it is as though I had not touched it. On the other hand if, with myeyes closed, I touch something that I cannot recognize, I will pull myhand back sharply in fear and revulsion.

(1996: p. 29)

In a scene from the film Flash Gordon

, some characters undergo a trialwhich requires them to insert an arm into one of several holes in a treestump. Inside lurks a tree beast, whose sting will result in an agonizingdeath. What would the experience of touch be like in this case? A sense ofthe boundary between the hand and everything else would surely be unusu-ally pronounced. Everything that brushed against it would be immediatelyfelt as distinct from the body, as alien, disruptive, hostile. The hand itselfwould feel very conspicuous, at the forefront of awareness. And, as it movedthrough the stump, activities would be timid, awkward and very much in theforeground of awareness, a far cry from the practical familiarity, fluidity andintegration between perceiver and object that characterize the experienceof typing and the sense of being rooted in an environment, not whollyseparate from it, that the latter involves.

There are many different kinds of bodily conspicuousness and inconspic-uousness and, at any one time, different parts of the body will be conspicu-ous to different degrees and in different ways. Not all modes of bodily




20/25


317

conspicuousness impede perception and activity or constitute a sense of thebody as a discrete, bounded object. For example, Young (2005: Chapter 3)discusses the phenomenology of pregnant embodiment and notes that thepregnant body need not be conspicuous in an unpleasant way that interferes

with perception of the world or in a way that draws firm boundariesbetween it and everything else.

15

Only a minority of tactile experiencesinvolve the kind of characteristics that OShaughnessy and Martin take tobe typical of touch, where the body is experienced as an object of aware-ness, distinct from its surroundings. What characterizes rootedness in afamiliar situation, belonging to a context, is the extension and diffusion ofboundaries, a blurring of the selfworld distinction. Perception of the bodyas a discrete object with clear boundaries is, at the same time, a failure toperceive and engage with the world, a loss of connectedness. Suppose that

ones whole body were experienced as a bounded object, ending at the skin.What would experience be like? Many phenomenologically minded psychi-atrists have pointed out that this kind of predicament is characteristic ofexperiential pathologies such as schizophrenia (see, for example, Stanghell-ini, 2004), where diminished bodily affect is, at the same time, an object-likeconspicuousness of the body. In conjunction with this, there is a lack ofrelatedness to the world, a failure of the body as a feeling rather than feltentity and a consequent sense of unreality, estrangement and lack of practi-cal belonging that pervades all experience.

16

The altered feelings involved

are usually referred to as affects, suggesting emotional rather than tactilefeeling. But it is arguable that various emotional feelings incorporate tactilefeelings (Cataldi, 1993: p. 128). After all, we often talk of things that makeour hair stand on end, make our skin crawl or send a shiver down thespine. And level of affect is frequently measured via skin conductanceresponse. Is increased or decreased electrical activity in the skin justsymp-tomatic

of affect, or does it also contribute

in some way to the experience?Even if the latter possibility is rejected, I suggest that the structure of feel-ing more generally is at least isomorphic with touch, in not conforming torigid boundaries between body and world (Ratcliffe, 2005; 2008). Touchthus serves to illustrate something of our relationship with the world, whichis a matter of belonging and connectedness, rather than of confrontationbetween body and object. We are situated in the world, rather than beingentities that are alienated from it and have to hook up with an externalrealm by means of perception. It also seems plausible that touch is at leastpartly constitutive of selfworld relatedness. This is not to suggest that theselfworld relation simply is touch. Rather, it incorporates touch and itsoverall structure is touch-like, in so far as it involves a reversible relatednessbetween self and world, where the two are variably differentiated and one

or the other can occupy the foreground of experience to different degreesand in different ways. Accounts that emphasize a bounded body-objectmisconstrue connectedness as alienation.




21/25


318

It is also worth noting that, through our various activities, we change andmanage our boundaries. For example, in taking hold of someones hand,you might at first sense a clear boundary between yours and theirs. But, ifyou continue to hold it for a prolonged period, perhaps whilst walking

together, the boundaries may well diffuse. Opposition between boundedbodies becomes diffusion of boundaries and a sense of connectedness.Given the extent of tactile contact between people and the many differentways in which people touch each other, it is curious that studies of intersub-

jectivity almost invariably emphasize visual perception of one person byanother. Merleau-Ponty (1964a) is an exception, in arguing that touch isfoundational to intersubjectivity. When you touch one of your hands withthe other, you experience their oscillation between perceiver and perceived.And, he claims, when your hand is held by that of another, there is a similar

appreciation of that persons hand as something that can take up both posi-tions. It is also arguable that tactile relations make a significant contributionto interpersonal development, not as boundary-makers but as structures ofrelatedness that take several different forms (Montagu, 1986). And it isinteresting to note the range of tactile metaphors that are routinelyemployed to describe people. As Montagu (1986: p. 10) notes, people canrub each other up the wrong way and have prickly or abrasive personal-ities. We talk of getting in touch with people, of certain people being hardto deal with and needing to be handled carefully, of people being touchy

and thick/thin skinned. It is telling that the tactile metaphors used todescribe difficult people correspond with those tactile experiences thatinvolve confrontation and boundaries, such as encountering a hard, abra-sive or prickly object. Encounters such as these, where boundaries arepronounced and the subjectobject distinction is clearest, are preciselythose that disrupt our relatedness. They certainly do not typify it.

Vision does not so obviously manifest the reversibility and relatednessthat can be made explicit by reflecting upon touch. This absence ofreversibility in vision is a key difference between the two senses. Never-theless, proprioception and bodily activity structure visual perception too(Gallagher, 2005). The difference is that, in vision, the world-side almostalways occupies the foreground. However, it is arguable that vision issusceptible to at least some degree of reversibility. Merleau-Ponty (1962:p. 315) gives the example of being subjected to a blinding light, whichinvolves a feeling of ones eyes rather than being a perceptual reachingout into the world. As with touch, when the bodily side is perceived in anobject-like way, we have, at the same time, a failure to perceive theworld-side.

Most experience incorporates a taken-for-granted sense of relatedness to

the world, of not being wholly separate from it, which remains presupposedwhen we carve ourselves off from the world in theory or pit ourselvesagainst part of it in practice. I suggest that the structure of touch, with its




22/25


319

reversibility and varying degrees of differentiation between the two sides,can serve as a guide to this aspect of experience and circumvent some of thepitfalls that occur when world-experience is modelled upon vision,abstracted from its bodily context.

A question I have not addressed here is that of the extent to which visualand tactile perception are phenomenologically distinct from each other.Both, I suggest, incorporate proprioception and, in so far as they share thesame aspects of proprioception, have some common structure. Merleau-Ponty not only maintains that vision is touch-like but also claims that visualand tactile perception are inter-mingled in certain ways. Wesee

textures andthe like. Objects, presented visually, incorporate a sense of salient tactilepossibilities; any object presented to one sense calls upon itself the concor-dant operation of all the others (1962: p. 318). So the phenomenology of

perception does not ultimately submit, in its entirety, to compartmentaliza-tion into discrete senses. Indeed, the fundamental structure of perception is,according to Merleau-Ponty, unitary. He remarks of the painter Czannethat he does not try to use color to suggest the tactile sensations whichwould give shape and depth. These distinctions between touch and sight areunknown in primordial perception. [] Weseethe depth, the smoothness,the softness, the hardness of objects (1964b: p. 15). Ihde (1983: p. 100)similarly comments on the artificiality of an emphasis on touch, conceivedof in isolation from the other senses. When I see textures, he says, I also

feel them.I have argued that touch without proprioception is an abstraction fromthe richness of tactile experience. I have also suggested that conceiving ofthe body solely as a perceptual object is an abstraction too, which extricatesthe perceiving body from a context of relatedness and misconstruesconnectedness as estrangement. This is hardly a good point of departure forany conception of our relationship with the world. But, if Merleau-Pontysphenomenological claims are plausible, a word of caution is in order. Thephenomenology of touch may itself be an abstraction from perceptualexperience, not all of which can be interpreted in terms of discrete sensorymodalities.

University of Durham, England

Notes

Thanks to Shaun Gallagher, Richard Gray, Daniel Hutto, Beata Stawarska andto audiences at the universities of Toru[nacute] and Hull for helpful comments on anearlier version of this paper.

1 A possible exception is when we perceive our own bodies visually. However,visual perception of the body lacks the immediacy of proprioception. Unlikeproprioception, visual perception of, say, my arm does not itself incorporate asense of that arm as mine.

n




23/25


320

2 OShaughnessy (2000: pp. 6678) claims that tactile perception of edges and thelike is, sometimes at least, representational. We can intuit the shape of an objectthrough the pattern of corresponding limb movements that occur as we activelyexplore it via touch. He notes that this is not the case when we touch complicatedobjects. The shape of the object is not perceived in virtue of its structural corre-

spondence with the many hand movements that are employed to explore it.However, OShaughnessy suggests that representation still holds piecemeal. Inother words, although the pattern of movements as a whole does not correspondto the shape of the object, individual movements mirror parts of that shape.

3 Proprioception is sometimes construed more narrowly, as an awareness ofbodily position rather than an awareness of both bodily position and bodilymovement. However, for current purposes, I adopt a conception of propriocep-tion that incorporates kinaesthesia. This is consistent with OShaughnessys useof the term. See Gallagher (2005) for a detailed discussion of proprioception.

4 It is possible to lose a sense of hot and cold whilst retaining tactile feeling(Gallagher, 2005: Ch. 2). But this need not imply that the two are distinctsenses.

Visual perception of colour can be lost, whilst perception of shape, depth andmovement are retained. But colour perception is certainly part of vision.

5 Merleau-Pontys later work also draws attention to some similarities betweenvision and touch. Indeed, he hints at the idea that vision is a kind of distance-touching (see Cataldi (1993) for a discussion).

6 In attempting to lessen the gulf between vision and touch, No tends to empha-size only one aspect of touch active, skilful exploration of the world. However,he does acknowledge that there is also passive touch and that certain tactileexperiences are not facilitated by bodily activities. He suggests that skilfulactivity is also necessary for the experience of passive touch, given that the abilityto discriminate between being touched and actively touching depends upon an

appreciation of the correspondence between bodily activities and changes intactile feeling (2004: p. 16).

7 Martin adopts a phenomenological conception of the visual field, rather than aconception explicitly based upon a philosophical theory of perception. Heobserves that OShaughnessys account of the field presupposes a sense-datatheory (Martin, 1992: p. 197).

8 Martin does not think of an organism as having only one boundary. There areboundaries within boundaries. For example, a bone stuck in the oesophaguspresses against one boundary, but this boundary is internal to another boundary(1992: p. 272).

9 Of course, even when part of ones own body is an object of tactile perception,

it is not perceived in exactly the same way as an object that is not a part of onesbody. This is clearly illustrated by the contrast between mundane cases oftouching ones own body and experiences such as that of touching the side ofones face after it has been anaesthetized for dental surgery.

10 Elsewhere (Ratcliffe, 2005, 2008), I argue that this equivocation applies tobodily feelings more generally, including those that participate in various kindsof emotional experience.

11 See also Merleau-Ponty (1962: p. 143) for the example of perceiving with a cane.The blindmans stick, he says, has ceased to be an object for him.

12 Thanks to Matthew Broome for this example.13 In claiming this, I certainly do not want to imply that vision does not contribute

to the structure of being-in-the-world. It does. And, as Hulls (1990) accountmakes vividly clear, the onset of blindness leads to a radical reshaping of howone finds oneself in the world.




24/25


321

14 See Merleau-Ponty (1962: p. 144) for a brief discussion of the phenomenology oftyping. The relevant knowledge, he says, is in the hands and cannot be formu-lated in detachment from the activity in question. The ability is embedded in theactivity of an agent, and the activity itself is only called forth by certain organizedenvironments.

15 See Ratcliffe, 2008: Ch. 4 for a discussion of some of the different ways in whichthe body is experienced.

16 See Ratcliffe, 2008: Part II for a detailed discussion of altered bodily experiencein psychiatric illness and its inextricability from changes in the sense of realityand belonging.

References

Cataldi, S. L. (1993)Emotion, Depth and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space,Albany:State University of New York Press.

Gallagher, S. (2005)How the Body Shapes the Mind,Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.Gibson, J. J. (1979)The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception,Hillsdale, N.J.:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Gray, R. (2005) On the Concept of a Sense,Synthese147: 46175.Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson,

Oxford: Blackwell.Hull, J. (1990)Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness,New York: Pantheon

Books.Ihde, D. (1983)Sense and Significance,Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.Josipovici, G. (1996)Touch,New Haven: Yale University Press.

Marr, D. (1982)Vision,New York: W. H. Freeman.Martin, M. (1992) Sight and Touch, in T. Crane (ed.)The Contents of Experience,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 196215.

(1993) Sense Modalities and Spatial Properties, in N. Eilan, R. McCarthy andB. Brewer (eds)Spatial Representation: Problems in Philosophy and Psychology,Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 20618.

(1995) Bodily Awareness: A Sense of Ownership, in J. L. Bermdez, A.Marcel and N. Eilan (eds)The Body and the Self,Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,pp. 26789.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962)Phenomenology of Perception,trans. C. Smith, London:Routledge.

(1964a) The Philosopher and his Shadow, in hisSigns,trans. R. C. McCleary,Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 15981. (1964b) Czannes Doubt, in hisSense and Non-Sense,trans. H. L. Dreyfus

and P. A. Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp. 925. (1968)The Visible and the Invisible,trans. A. Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern

University Press.Montagu, A. (1986)Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin,3rd edn, New

York: Harper & Row.No, A. (2004)Action in Perception,Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.OShaughnessy, B. (1989) The Sense of Touch,Australasian Journal of Philosophy

67: 3758.

(1995) Proprioception and the Body Image, in J. L. Bermdez, A. Marcel andN. Eilan (eds)The Body and the Self,Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 175203. (2000)Consciousness and the World,Oxford: Clarendon Press.




25/25


322

Ratcliffe, M. (2005) The Feeling of Being, Journal of Consciousness Studies 12(810): 4360.

(2008)Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality,Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scott, M. (2001) Tactual Perception,Australasian Journal of Philosophy79: 14960.

Stanghellini, G. (2004)Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies: The Psychopa-thology of Common Sense,Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Young, I. M. (2005)On Female Body Experience: Throwing like a Girl and OtherEssays,Oxford: Oxford University Press.



Touch and Situatedness - Ratcliffe

Documents