2.3 The Problem of Bodily Unity

(42) We are now ready to return to the question of unity. Recall that Madame I, the woman who had lost her body image, was insensitive to pain. Think also of the case in which you wake up in the morning, having lain awkwardly on an arm, cutting off the blood flow there. Lacking any bodily feeling in that arm, you would be unable to experi­ence pain in the arm.

One cannot feel a pain without feeling the pain in a par­ticular bodily region.¹⁴ The region may not be precisely delimited, but nonetheless, each pain is felt essentially as localized in a part of the body of the owner. Where there is no general bodily feeling in a given body region, it is not possible to feel pain there. What is true here for pains is true for itches, tickles, and other such bodily experiences. It is thus a phenomenological requirement for feeling a pain that one feel the bodily region in which the pain seems to be.

Again, this is not to suppose that the relevant bodily region actually exists. The point is that feeling a pain requires feeling a location that is itself felt as a location within a body part, whether or not there really is such a part.

This feeling of the given bodily region is not a discrete feeling distinct from the feeling of another bodily region. I argued earlier that there is just one general bodily feeling, a feel­ing that represents the whole body space and bodily parts occupying that space. Feeling a pain in one's left leg, say, necessitates that one have a general bodily feeling that, in part, represents the left leg. Likewise, feeling an itch in one's right arm necessitates that one have a general bodily feeling that, in part, represents the right arm.

(43) It will not do to try to explain the phenomenological unity of my pains and itches, for example, by saying that they are projected onto the same background body feeling or image. Pains and itches are not projected in this way at all. I thus oppose the following remarks by Barry Maund (2002):

[T]he pain one feels in one's leg is a subjective feeling that one "projects" onto the leg. It is not a real projection. One has a body image which represents the body. The pain is projected onto, is located on, that part of the body image which represents the leg. Likewise with colors. There is a subjective quality which one "pro­jects" onto an external object, say to the moon, to represent it as yellow.

This seems to me completely wrong. If I see the moon, I am not aware of a subjective visual field that represents the moon. I am aware of the moon and perhaps some stars located in distant regions of space before my eyes. Likewise, if I have a pain in my leg, I am not aware of an image that represents my leg. I'm aware of my leg and its condition. To suppose that it is the representation itself—the subjective visual field or the body image—of which I am really aware in these cases is like supposing that if I desire eternal life, what I really desire is the idea of eternal life. That, however, is not what I desire. The idea of eternal life I already have. What I desire is the real thing. And it does not help, of course, to say that it must be the representation of which I am aware, since the case might be one of hallucination—no moon or no leg—for patently, if there is no eternal life, it still isn't the idea of such a life that I really desire. If the pain is a phantom one or the visual experience totally delusive, as noted earlier, I simply undergo an experience that repre­sents something that isn't there.

(44) Nor will it do to say that the unity of my pain and my itch is achieved simply by the simultaneous presence of the experience of general bodily feeling. For the unity is experi­enced, and a conjunction of experiences is not an experi­ence. It seems, then, that there must be a further overarching experience that subsumes the three experiences—an experi­ence of the pain, the itch, and the body unified together. But this experience requires that there be an experience of the unifying relation, else there can be no experience of the three experiences as unified. So, now we have four compo­nent experiences. And as in chapter 1, a regress has begun to which there is no end.¹⁵

45. In chapter 1, I took the view that in everyday percep­tual consciousness, at any given time, there is a single expe­rience with a rich, multimodal content. My proposal now is that in bodily experience, there is just a single experience too at any given time. In the case above, this experience is an experience of the body with pain in the left leg and itching in the right arm. Under a less encompassing description, it is an experience of the body. It is also an experience of a pain in a leg. And it is an experience of an itch in an arm. There is one experience here that can be described in very different ways. That experience represents the body space, its bound­aries, the body parts, their movements, their orientations relative to one another and to the Earth, and the distur­bances that are occurring in discrete regions of the body, both internally and on its surfaces.

46. Counterparts to many of the obvious objections to a view of this sort have already been discussed in chapter 1, so I shall not repeat my replies here. There is, however, one new objection I want to take up, namely that, on the pro­posal I am making, if there is but a single rich bodily experi­ence at a time, then, in the case above, it follows that the pain in my left leg is one and the same as the itch in my right arm. And that surely is absurd.

47. It is certainly true that on my proposal, in the above case, the token experience of a pain in my left leg is one and the same as the token experience of an itch in my right arm. There is one experience here that represents both tissue damage in my left leg and a surface disturbance of a certain sort in my right arm. But pain (or painfulness) is experi­enced in one place and the quality of itching in another. These qualities are different qualities, represented by my experience as being tokened in different parts of my body. So, there is no mistaken identification of pain and itching and certainly no absurd consequence that in attending to pain, I am attending to itching or vice versa.

(48) My response, then, to the question of what unifies dif­ferent simultaneous bodily experiences is that it is a pseudo- question, based on a mistaken assumption. There is only a single bodily experience at a time, an experience with a very rich and complex bodily phenomenal content. Qualities that are experienced in undergoing bodily experience—qualities that are not qualities of experiences but rather qualities of bodily disturbances, if they are qualities of anything—are experienced together at a time by entering into this shared content. In this way, the painfulness of a pain, the itchiness of an itch, the ticklishness of a tickle are phenomenologi- cally unified. And, as with the case of perceptual experience, unity goes with the closure of experience under conjunction.

(50) We have now an explanation of both the unity of per­ceptual experience at a time and the unity of bodily experi­ence at a time. The question of their combined unity and that of conscious thoughts and moods is the focus of chapter 3.О The Unity of

Perceptual and Bodily Experiences, Occurrent Thoughts, and Moods