Abstract
It has been suggested that our experiences of embodiment in general appear to constitute an experiential ground for dualist philosophy and that this is particularly so with experiences of dissociation, in which one feels estranged from one’s body. Thus, Drew Leder argues that these play “a crucial role in encouraging and supporting Cartesian dualism” as they “seem to support the doctrine of an immaterial mind trapped inside an alien body”. In this paper I argue that as dualism does not capture the character of such experiences there is not even an apparent separation of self and body revealed here and that one’s body is experienced as uncanny rather than alien. The general relationship between our philosophical theorizing and the phenomenology of lived experience is also considered.
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Notes
Nussbaum delineates seven ways in which the term ‘objectification’ can be understood: (1) instrumentality (the objectifier treats the object as a tool of his or her purposes); (2) denial of autonomy (the objectifier treats the object as lacking in autonomy and self-determination); (3) inertness (the objectifier treats the object as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity); (4) fungibility (the objectifier treats the object as interchangeable; (a) with other objects of the same type, and/or (b) with objects of other types); (5) violability (the objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary-integrity, as something that it is permissible to break up, smash, break into); (6) ownership (the objectifier treats the object as something that is owned by another, can be bought or sold, etc.); (7) denial of subjectivity (the objectifier treats the object as something whose experience and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account). Objectification, she goes on to suggest, “is a relatively loose cluster-term, for whose application we sometimes treat any one of these features as sufficient, though more often a plurality of features is present when the term is applied” (Nussbaum 1995: 258). Her categories are not exhaustive. For example, they do not quite capture the way objectification can result purely from the way the objectifier conceptualises the other person, especially if this becomes culturally pervasive and politically dominant (though this will normally be accompanied by characteristic ways of treating the other). This possibility is something we will encounter hereafter when we examine Fanon’s account of racism.
In giving his phenomenological description, Fanon makes no claims to a universal truth and often insists that he writes only as someone from the Antilles, a Martinican. His aim is not to produce a totalising account but to write the book for “[t]hose who recognise themselves in it,” and to persuade them to “tear off... the shameful livery put together by centuries of incomprehension” (Fanon 1952:14). Like Du Bois before him (see below), Fanon is therefore as much making a strategic intervention within a particular social order as writing an essay in phenomenology; it is an attempt to shape consciousness, not merely to report it.
Cf. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Soul of Black Folk (and below).
Du Bois was writing from an early twentieth century African-American perspective. He says, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois 1903: 3).
As I have already noted with reference to the touch of a lover, experiencing one’s being through others need not be something necessarily malign. However, this is something more manifest where there are relations of power and the other is privileged and antagonistic.
For women, what goes for the bodies of white people here also goes for the idealised male body. And for disabled people, the idealised bodies of the able bodied. The experience of resurfacing for the disabled, where one’s debilitation is more permanent and becomes more central to one’s sense of identity, is a complex phenomenon. Depending on the nature and extent of one’s impairment, one’s body resurfaces against a background which is a medley provided by the invisible, functioning body and/or the bodies of the able bodied taken as a norm. Disability therefore also has a social and not just an individual dimension. Indeed, for many disabled rights activists it is primarily a social phenomenon. (See Wendell 1996.)
Often white people, for example, will deny they have an ethnicity, and are puzzled when asked what ethnic group it is to which they belong. They see themselves as unmarked by the categories of colour politics. This is why Helen Charles speaks of “the protected sphere of whiteness” (1992: 33); it is protected by an unrecognised privileging of a certain form of racial embodiment, taken as the norm.
Incidentally, something universally contradicted by the testimony of both professional torturers and their victims.
I must thank Julia Jansen for drawing my attention to this last point.
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Burwood, S. The apparent truth of dualism and the uncanny body. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 263–278 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9073-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9073-z