Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DOI 10.1007/s10743-009-9054-x
Filip Mattens
F. Mattens (&)
Husserl Archives Leuven, University of Leuven, Mercierplein 2, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
e-mail: Filip.Mattens@hiw.kuleuven.be
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98 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:97–120
2
I will refer to Michael Martin (1992), ‘‘Sight and Touch,’’ as SAT and to his ‘‘Sense Modalities and
Spatial Properties’’ (1993) as SMSP, followed by page numbers.
3
Wherever the term ‘‘body’’ is used in relation to Husserl, it refers to the lived body and corresponds to
Husserl’s usage of the German word ‘‘Leib’’.
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Husserl Stud (2009) 25:97–120 99
something contacts one’s body to feeling one’s way around a room in total darkness.
Thereupon, he asks why all these cases are exercises of the sense of touch:
Is it because one uses the sensation of contact as access to the object? But the
following example casts doubt on that suggestion. One’s right hand may be
numb, and yet by discovering that we cannot push it through something it is
touching, we might come to know of the presence of an object, indeed manage
by movement to be aware of its shape. Would we not have tactilely perceived
that object? But, it may be objected, one must all the same have and put to use
bodily feelings elsewhere in the body in becoming aware of the immobility of
the arm. This may be so, but those bodily feelings, say in the elbow and
shoulder, do not play an attentive perceptual role in this transaction (p. 661).4
O’Shaughnessy maintains that tactile sensations or bodily feelings do not
‘‘represent’’ external objects. This leads him to conclude that immediate body
awareness is the perceptual mediator, whereas ‘‘tactile sensation is inessential to
tactile perception’’ (p. 662).
It is quite remarkable how the mere observation of what is at stake in putting
one’s hand on an object leaves such divergent impressions in the respective authors
that it leads them to conflicting and even mutually contradictory ideas about what it
is like to touch. The main point of disagreement appears to be the importance and
the role of the presence of tactile sensations. Reid believes that, generally, we
overlook tactile sensations and, similarly, O’Shaughnessy maintains that they are
inessential to the exercises of touch. Thus, both Reid and O’Shaughnessy understate
the importance of tactile sensations, whereas for Husserl, and many others after him,
tactile sensations have an exceptional status, because, unlike all other sensory
impressions, they imply a double experience. This idea of a double experience
means that tactile sensations allow for the experience of two objects, namely the
object touched and the touching object, i.e., the perceiver’s body. More specifically,
in touching, and only in touching, does the body gain its peculiar character as a lived
body and become my body. This is the second important point of disagreement
between Husserl’s account and O’Shaughnessy’s view. For Husserl, tactile
sensations are required for the constitution of the body, whereas for O’Shaughnessy,
tactile perception depends on immediate body awareness. In the following section, I
will explore the importance of these differences.
From the outset, Husserl understood that bodily movements are a necessary factor
in perception: ‘‘An immobile organ could never be a perceptual organ’’ (Ms. D13
4
All page numbers of ‘‘The Sense of Touch’’ refer to the second version printed in his Consciousness
and the World (2000). Quotations by O’Shaughnessy are taken from this work, unless stated otherwise.
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I, 6a).5 Already in Husserl’s time it was known that the human eye is constantly in
motion. Hence, Husserl’s statement may seem superfluous. However, its merit lies
in Husserl’s general characterisation of the relation between sensory impressions
and the simultaneous experience of one’s body. Namely, Husserl understood that
the direct awareness of my bodily movements, e.g., turning my eyes or stretching
my finger, is constitutive of the spatiality of the object itself. It is not just that one
has to move in order to see or feel further aspects of what one observes—as many
contemporary philosophers of perception have rediscovered. Rather, what appears
at every given moment needs to be absorbed into an accumulative perceptual
process, so that all aspects felt or seen are apperceived as the appearance of one and
the same corporeal object. Thus, for the perceptual constitution of an object it is a
necessary condition that the modifications of the visual or tactual impressions are
immediately experienced as depending upon one’s own movements. It is not just
that bodily movements widen a static perceptual horizon; rather, the point is that the
immediate awareness of one’s movements ‘‘motivates’’ the changes in what is felt
and seen, in such a way that a spatial object comes into appearance. This should be
distinguished from the trivial claim that perception is active, or that perception is
exploratory.
Here it is sufficient to bear in mind that Husserl treats vision and touch equally as
far as their dependence on kinaesthesis is concerned. If they were not functionally
connected to bodily movements, vision and touch would remain meaningless with
regard to a world of spatial objects in exactly the same way (Hua XVI, p. 160; 1997,
p. 136). This is to say that insofar as perception is concerned, Husserl does not
suppose a special connection between kinaesthesis and the sense of touch. On the
contrary, he explicitly excludes all collateral cutaneous sensations that may
accompany the movement of one’s limbs (Hua XIII, p. 331). Husserl maintains that
‘‘kinaesthesis’’ in its proper sense only concerns the bodily experiences related to
voluntary movements in their capacity to motivate changes in the visual field or in
tactual impressions. Whereas the original notion of kinaesthesis, and its precursor
‘‘muscle sensation,’’ referred to the feelings one has in muscles, joints, and tendons
when one moves, for Husserl the essence of kinaesthesis lies in the voluntary aspect
of bodily movements. It is this aspect, namely the fact that I ‘‘know’’ how to move
in order to get such and such modifications in what I see or feel that is of
constitutive importance for both visual and tactual perception (Hua XVI, p. 179;
1997, p.151).6
5
Already in his 1907 ‘‘Thing-Lecture,’’ Husserl advances this idea (see Hua XVI , p. 160; 1997, p. 136).
In a 1916 addition to this text, he states that a static visual field does not present a spatial world, just like
an unmovable finger cannot constitute a three-dimensional horizon (Hua XVI, p. 307; 1997, p. 264). In
the above cited manuscript, Husserl summarizes as follows: the eye can only see as mobile eye; the tactile
organ, the touching finger, the touching palm of the hand, etc., is a tactile organ only in movement and in
the ability to move. (‘‘Ein unbewegliches Organ könnte nicht Organ sein der Wahrnehmung; das Auge
sieht nur als bewegliches Auge, das Tastorgan, der tastende Finger, die tastende Handfläche usw. ist
Tastorgan nur in der Bewegung und im Bewegenkönnen.’’) Ms. D13 I, 6a (1921).
6
Here one can ask whether the sensations in muscles, tendons, and joints are really necessary. Many
contemporary philosophers have argued that proprioception is required for bodily movements and
perceptually guided actions. However, there is no ground to maintain that proprioceptive sensations are
necessary. Namely, there is no reason to assume that an imaginary organism could not do the same things
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Nevertheless, the sense of touch has a peculiar relation to the body. According to
Husserl, we would never experience our own body as such if we did not have the
sense of touch. To put it very simply, when we are touched, our body appears to us;
it appears as our lived body in a way that it cannot appear in vision. For example,
imagine that I see, in twilight, a number of feet close to each other. Someone could
point with a stick at one of these feet and ask me whether it is mine. It is not
impossible in this rather absurd situation that I do not know for sure which of these
feet are mine. However, if this person were to only slightly come into contact with
my foot while she points at it, I would feel that it is my foot. The moment something
contacts me, I feel that I am touched somewhere on my body. Clearly, when I look
at my own limbs they do not appear to be any different than someone else’s.
Actually, there is no essential difference between seeing my own feet, someone
else’s feet, the feet of a doll, or any other material object. There is, however, a
crucial difference between the perceptual experiences of tapping with a stick a
material object, someone else’s body, and my own body. It is the tactile experience
of body contact that constitutes my body as such: in feeling that something touches
me, my body appears to me in a way that it cannot by simply looking at it.7
This peculiar relationship between touch and the body originates in the fact that,
as Husserl points out, I can switch my attention from the object that touches me to
my body as it is touched. In this way, tactile sensations imply a double experience.
Similarly, Michael Martin, who developed his own view starting off from
O’Shaughnessy’s theory, explains this situation in terms of the well-known visual
double perceptions. As in ‘‘aspect-shifts,’’ he explains, one can ‘‘switch’’ one’s
attention between the object and ‘‘how one’s body feels’’ (SMSP, p. 206). Like
Husserl, Martin describes the twofold direction implicit in touching something as
one double experience:
We should think of this case not as one in which we have two distinct states of
mind, a bodily sensation and a tactual perception, both of which can be
attended to; but instead simply one state of mind, which can be attended to in
different ways (SAT, p. 204).
Martin develops his description of such tactile experiences in opposition to the
classical Reidian view, which draws a distinction between perception as having an
object and sensations as being purely inner, subjective states of mind. He
categorically rejects the idea that the sensations of touch would be merely internal,
i.e., ‘‘purely subjective,’’ experiences that, accordingly, have no intrinsic spatial
character. Contrary to this view, he observes that such sensations are typically felt to
be located somewhere in one’s body (see SMSP, pp. 207–208). When something
Footnote 6 continued
as we do, and thus have control over its movements, without feeling anything in its limbs. So the
argument is, at least, inconclusive. Since Husserl shifts the constitutive importance of kinaesthesis toward
the motivational capacity of voluntary movements, I believe he would agree that it is not unthinkable that
one perceives a spatial world without ‘‘feeling’’ one’s limbs as one moves.
7
For a more extensive discussion of Husserl’s analyses, see Welton (2005).
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The same goes for my hand’s textural qualities, i.e., those qualities that are
constituted through tactual explorations of my hand’s surface. However, this is not
the case for the tactile sensations ‘‘in’’ the surface of my body; the tactile sensations
spread out in my hand do not relate to my hand like its real spatial properties relate
to my physical hand as a part of the objective world. Therefore, Husserl claims that,
even though it is felt somewhere, a tactile impression
… is not a state of the material thing, hand, but is precisely the hand itself,
which for us is more than a material thing, and the way in which it is mine
entails that I, the ‘‘subject of the Body,’’ can say that what belongs to the
material thing is its, not mine (Hua IV, p. 150; 1989, p.157).9
Comparing the localization of tactile impressions with the ‘‘surface-filling’’
properties of the hand (e.g., its color, smoothness, etc., cf. Hua XVI, p. 66; 1997,
p. 55), Husserl not only shows that from within my hand is not felt as a material
thing, but also, at the same time, that from without my own hand can appear to me
as the spatial, material thing that it is. (cf. Hua XVI, pp. 161, 280; 1997, pp. 137,
241; Hua IV, p. 145; 1989, p. 152)10
Consider the following situation, which is closely related to Martin’s example. I
am blindfolded and my ears are covered. I feel a needle prick somewhere on my
thigh. No doubt, this point contact-sensation is felt somewhere. Then I feel a second
sting a bit further on, and a third, and so on. Now, does it make sense to say that the
felt location of these sensations provides an awareness of the worldly positions
where the needles were when they pricked me?
The different stings are felt at different locations, and in this way a certain
characteristic of my bodily self comes to the fore; namely, my body appears as
extended, which means, at the very least, that I feel something at different places of
my body. This experience implies that my body appears as having different places.
In a certain sense, the spatiality of my body itself is experienced, and,
simultaneously, my body appears as spatial. Clearly, if I had no feelings in my
body, my body would not appear. Conversely, when something moves all over my
body, my entire body becomes manifest. Without the possibility of continuous
change of location, my body would not appear as the one spatial body that it is. If
these stings were not felt in different locations, all stings would be felt as a
9
Husserl adds, somewhat provocatively, that what happens to the body as a material thing is, so to speak,
none of my business. To illustrate this I would like to consider the following situation. I wake up in the
middle of the night, but my body has shrunken to half its usual size. In a certain sense this has nothing to
do with my lived body, but only with my body as a material thing. By myself, I will not sense what
happened. My body as lived body has not changed at all. I will first discover what happened when I
encounter other material objects (e.g., the door handle will be too high ‘‘for me’’). This shows that the felt
locations of tactual contact only become involved with the objective world when I meet the spatial order
of the objective world. In this sense, by itself my body is not immediately a part of the objective world.
10
This should not be confused with the experience of my body as a thing like any other corporeal object
in space. According to Husserl, this requires a higher-level apperception of my body, which is motivated
by the perceptual nexus of carrying an object and being carried as an object (cf. Hua XV, pp. 280–281).
Moreover, in this context it becomes apparent that, at the lower level, my body can never be fully
constituted as a corporeal object in the same way as other things, for I can never perceive it from a
distance.
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repetition of the same sting; this means that the corresponding sensations would
only differ in intensity, and no body would appear. But, this is not true of us. On the
contrary, the location of sensations in the body precisely allows that something can
contact all the areas on one’s body, one after another, in exactly the same way.
Thus, having no visual or auditory perceptions, I become immediately aware of my
body and its spatial nature without thereby being aware of ‘‘real’’ locations in the
world. The question then is whether this spatiality informs me about the spatiality of
the world: is it sufficient to say that the felt location of contact informs me about the
location of the contact felt?
A series of tactile sensations, in their peculiar felt location, constitutes the
spatiality of the body itself as a field of possible tactile experiences. But for Husserl
this bodily spatiality is not yet the spatiality of the objective world. It simply makes
no sense to say that, purely based on what one feels, without any additional
perceptions, the felt location of a needle prick can provide an awareness of the
spatial location of the needle in the world. This is not to deny that the extension of a
tactual field is required for the perception of space; it provides the basis from which
objective space is tactually constituted, but it is not yet objective space itself. One
could say that being touched is sufficient for the body to be constituted as ‘‘spatial;’’
but in order to constitute the spatiality of the world, bodily movements must
motivate the contents of active tactual exploration.
Here Husserl’s view appears as a middle position in between a Reidian position
and Martin’s solution of Reid’s insoluble gap between sensations in the mind and
spatial qualities in the world. Martin closes the gap by assuming that bodily
sensations are typically felt as located, and these are locations on the body, which is
itself a part of the physical world, ‘‘so that the spatial character of a tactual
perception is that of the location of whatever connects with one’s body’’ (SAT, p.
204). Husserl also observes that bodily sensations are typically located. However,
these felt locations form a spatial field in its own right; they simply cannot inform
one about the spatiality of the objective world. Thus, even though Martin and
Husserl initially focus on the same characteristics of the sense of touch, they ascribe
essentially distinct roles to the body in tactual perception.
At the outset of this section, it was said that Husserl treats vision and touch equally
with regard to their relation to the body, in so far as sensory perception is concerned.
Here it becomes clear why.
Through touch, and only through touch, the body is constituted as such. Apart
from tactile sensations, we also have sensations that accompany our movements,
namely kinetic sensations. Such feelings are also located in the body, but, Husserl
says, for this they depend on ‘‘primarily localized’’ sensations (Hua IV, p. 151;
1989, p. 158; see also Hua XVI, p. 162; 1997, p. 137), i.e., cutaneous sensations.
Thus, tactile experience puts the different aspects of the body in their place; through
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touch, and only through touch, the different sense organs are experienced as part of
the body11 and the different systems of voluntary movement, which mutually
extend, or neutralize, each other12 are unified as one body. As a whole, the body
becomes a perceptual organ that accompanies all sensory impressions. In its
capacity as the all-encompassing perceptual organ, the human body situates the
contents of experience. The most obvious case is visual perception. A certain aspect
of an object appears to me; its profile, corresponding to a given angle, appears
within my visual field. In an ontologically neutral sense, this profile as it occupies an
area of my visual field can be called an ‘‘image.’’13 When I move, the profile-image
changes, corresponding to the direction and extent of my movement. Yet I do not
take the object to be changing. This is so because the change in the image is
motivated by my voluntary movement. Every perceptual process is a complex
combination of concurrent and interfering cases of this paradigm. The same goes for
tactual exploration of spatial objects. The changes in what I feel are motivated by
the awareness of the nature of my own movements. The whole of what is felt of an
object at every given moment Husserl calls a ‘‘tactual image’’ (Hua XVI, p. 68;
1997, p. 57; Hua IV, pp. 69, 166; 1989, pp. 73, 174). Again, the body’s function is to
situate each such image in the course of a series of sensory images. In such a
perceptual process, a spatial object comes into appearance.
In this account, the human body is not a physical object that is used to transpose
its own spatial properties, felt from within, to the objective spatial properties of
other objects. The immediate awareness of its conditions is not an end product
which is to be read—via a shift of attention—as an interpretation of the world.
Rather, the human body is an organ; it has a functional contribution to the process of
perception that is essentially different from the contents of experience. Perceptual
contents are interpreted in light of the body’s conditions; or, more accurately, all
perceptual appearances occur against the background of the present bodily
condition. In more Husserlian terms, the immediate awareness of the respective
‘‘kinaesthetic situation,’’ which is generally in continuous modification, ‘‘moti-
vates’’ the course of sensory contents. Thus, the difference between one’s awareness
of the condition of one’s body during perceptual exploration and the course of
sensory impressions that this generates is just that these latter sensory impressions
are able to present aspects of the same enduring object, because they are spatially
11
What goes for the above example of seeing and touching one’s feet equally applies to the sense organs
themselves. They are part of one’s body, and thus one has sensations that are felt to be located (in the
body) when something touches them. Hence, it is only through touching one’s eyes that they are
experienced as located in one’s body.
12
For example, I can stretch my finger to scrape over a surface, but I can extend my reach by moving my
wrist, and again by stretching my arm, or turning my shoulders and upper body. Finally, the distance I
cover in this way can be further extended, or completely neutralized, by stepping backward. Analogously,
I can turn my eyes left and right. But I can extend my visual scope considerably by moving my head, my
upper body, and, finally, I can, in principle, visually explore every corner of the world by walking over
there. Husserl calls these different groups of movements that gradually extend one’s perceptual horizon
different kinaesthetic systems. We are immediately aware of all possible movements of a certain system,
and of the combination of different systems, as a kinaesthetic capability.
13
Note that ‘‘image’’ is not used to explain perception here. As is well-known, Husserl fervently rejected
the so-called picture-theory of perception.
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To say that the body is a perceptual organ is to say that, in tactual perception, the
body is not what is perceived—neither for itself nor as a perceptual intermediator.
Yet this is how Martin wants to interpret the role of the body in perception. In
tactual perception, Martin suggests, we ‘‘exploit’’ the physical object that our body
is (SMSP, p. 214).
As was pointed out above, Martin starts by rejecting the idea that feelings of
touch are inner, and therefore non-spatial, sensations. Instead he argues, like
Husserl, that tactile sensations are typically felt to be located. Unlike Husserl, he
assumes that these sensations are felt as located in a physical object (e.g., one’s
fingertip), which is located in the objective spatial world. The sense of our body we
have through these sensations is different from the other senses, since the body is
the ‘‘sole object’’ of body awareness (SMSP, p. 209). However, if my body is the
sole object of body-sense, how then can it be felt as mine? Why should it not be felt
as simply coinciding with the entire world? If there are only bodily sensations, then,
indeed, only the body will be felt, and nothing can be felt as without it. Therefore,
Martin assumes that
We have a sense of ourselves as being bounded and limited objects within a
larger space which can contain other objects. A sense of our limits brings with
it a sense of the world extending beyond those limits (SMSP, p. 212).
It remains unclear how this contrast between the inner realm of bodily feelings
and the world outside it is constituted. Having a sense of being a limited object or
having a sense of one’s limits rather seems to coincide with, or even derive from,
the awareness that the world extends beyond what I can feel. Martin explains that
the contrast between body and world is not between different qualities that
sensations might have—a positive quality of feeling to be internal to one’s body,
which other sensations would lack (see SAT, p. 202)—but ‘‘between places where
one does feel sensations to be located and places where one simply cannot feel them
to be’’ (SMSP, p. 212).
It is not clear how the awareness of a contrast with places that cannot be felt
comes about. Most philosophers will not encounter this problem, since they
generally start from this contrast; namely, the sense of touch is usually taken to be
the experience of outer objects, which implies the awareness of one’s body. In
Husserl, for example, this problem does not occur, since this contrast is constitutive
of the body itself. When I put my hand on the table, I also sense my hand; however,
when I put my hand on my knee, I do not only feel my hand as it touches the
material object that my knee is, but I also feel my knee as it is touched. The
experience of the difference between touching a table and touching my knee is
sufficient—if not necessary—for the experience of the difference between one’s
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body and other physical objects. But Martin holds a different view on the order of
dependence:
Since one is aware of nothing but one’s body, it does not have to be identified
as such within experience; there are no other objects of awareness to contrast it
with. But since one is aware of it as in a world which contains many other
objects, one nevertheless has a sense of it as one’s body in contrast to other
objects, things which one doesn’t feel (SMSP, p. 213).
What most philosophers might find unacceptable is the suggestion that there is an
awareness of one’s body that precedes every awareness of other objects, and, even
more so, the suggestion that one could have an initial awareness of one’s body as in
a larger world that can contain other objects. But Martin finds a further
corroboration of his view in the case of kinaesthesia. One is indeed only aware
of the posture of one’s own body, but ‘‘one is also aware of one’s body as in a space
which extends beyond it and contains it’’ (SMSP, p. 212). To illustrate this, Martin
refers to the awareness one has of the relative position of one’s hands. One feels
their relative position and thus one is aware of a region of space in between them,
which extends beyond what one feels. This awareness should then be sufficient to
have a sense of space, and possible objects, outside oneself (see also SAT, p. 206).
Martin thus maintains that we have an original awareness of our own body that is,
in addition, sufficient to indicate the world outside us. The reason why Martin holds
on to the structural priority of body awareness originates in the fact that, on the face
of it, there is no such thing as a tactual field, analogous to the visual field in sight.
However, in visual perception the visual field introduces the spatiality of the world.
Lacking a proper sense field, it becomes unclear how the tactile-sense can present a
spatial world. Martin’s goal is to demonstrate that, due to the spatial nature of bodily
sensations, the body can fill this gap. To that purpose, he has to argue that the body
is not only suitable, but also available for this. The sense of one’s body must
(at least to a certain extent) be prior to tactual perception if one wants to argue that a
certain ‘‘feature of bodily awareness, the contrast between inner and outer, provides
what we need for the sense of touch’’ (SAT, p. 203).
The idea is that, when we tactually explore the world, we employ our bodies to
disclose the spatial properties of external objects.
One measures the properties of objects in the world around one against one’s
body. So in having an awareness of one’s body, one has a sense of touch
(SAT, p. 203; see also SMSP, p. 213).
Since there is no equivalent of the visual field for touch, we have to rely on our
body. We can do so because our body is itself a spatial object among other spatial
objects. Moreover, our body is flexible; we can spatially reorganize its different
parts. Therefore, Martin can say that the arrangement of one’s body ‘‘mirrors’’ that
of the object touched; in being aware of the former one can attend to the latter (SAT,
p. 206).
In this way, Martin substantiates his claim that ‘‘touch is dependent on bodily
awareness’’ (SAT, p. 197; SMSP, p. 213). The origin of this idea can be found in
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Husserl Stud (2009) 25:97–120 109
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110 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:97–120
14
Previously, O’Shaughnessy explained that ‘‘there is no apriori reason why body awareness must have a
sensation cause.’’ It is possible in principle that one is immediately aware of the posture of one’s limbs
(without mediation of sensations). Intuition without sensation, he argues, is a ‘‘theoretical possibility’’ (p.
662). This claim safeguards his general thesis that touch does not depend on sensations, like vision does,
and therefore touch is a more direct access to the world. However, his initial claim prioritising touch over
the other senses is based upon the supposition that ‘‘it is not really possible to suppose a man might have
full command over his limbs and lack tactile-sense’’ (p. 661). But why would this not be a ‘‘theoretical
possibility?’’
15
Martin says he is indebted to O’Shaughnessy’s work (see SAT, p. 197; SMSP, p. 217), but he distances
himself from O’Shaughnessy’s claim that there is nothing like a sense field in touch at all (see SAT, pp.
207–210).
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Husserl Stud (2009) 25:97–120 111
for instance. In moving the finger, one is aware of it as moving. The finger
traces out a singular path, relative to the rest of one’s hand, and one is aware of
it as doing so. In attending to the rim of the glass, one is aware of the rim as
not moving to one’s finger (SAT, p. 205).
On the face of it, this observation does not contradict Husserl’s descriptions. Yet
what both authors infer from such observations is essentially different with respect
to the body’s contribution to tactual perception. Like O’Shaughnessy, Martin
ascribes a more direct role to body awareness than Husserl does. Basically, they
assume that we are directly aware of the shape that our moving limbs trace. So it is
not so much the moving limbs, but the figural properties of their movements, from
which they expect a literal ‘‘translation.’’ Thus Martin and O’Shaughnessy assume
that only by copying spatial figurations of the world using our body parts as tools do
we get to know the world’s spatial properties. They consider the body to be a
scanning device, whereas for Husserl the body enters into a functional interplay
with what is felt. For Husserl, our body enables our voluntary movements; in this
way, the body generates motion in the sensory contents, which, in turn, generates
patterns of modifications that bring the visual or tactile momentary impressions into
relief.
Clearly, Husserl seeks to ascribe a specific role to the body in perceptual
processes in general, whereas O’Shaughnessy and Martin use every opportunity to
show that touch and vision are essentially different, a project for which the body
proves to be extremely helpful since touch is spread out all over its entire surface,
whereas eyesight is not.
O’Shaughnessy must demonstrate that touch is essentially different from vision,
since he believes that vision has no direct access to the world. In sight,
consciousness discovers outer objects ‘‘through landing upon inner sensuous
objects.’’ Consequently, O’Shaughnessy wants to show that touch and the body are
interdependent, because he believes that ‘‘we gain epistemological access to the
world through immediate epistemological access to one small part of it: our own
body’’ (p. 662).
On the other hand, Martin’s philosophical project is to efface all hopes of a
common theory of visual and tactual perception. Several authors have rejected
Martin’s ambition. For example, Michael Scott argues for a unified account of sense
perception:
The fact that there is a usually seamless integration of information yielded by
the two sense modalities, and that they provide common information about the
properties of objects, such as their shape, lends support to this approach (2001,
p. 159).
Far more radically, Husserl maintains that, in principle, every strictly visual
property (e.g., color) ‘‘could have a parallel in the sphere of tactile appearances’’
(Hua IV, p. 71; 1989, p. 75), and vice versa.
Regardless of how the differences between sight and touch should be understood,
one effective way to evaluate theories about the dependence of touch on body
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The most obvious critique of this theory of tactual perception can be found in
O’Shaughnessy’s seminal discussion itself. At the outset, O’Shaughnessy provides
an overview of the variety of the ‘‘exercises of the sense of touch’’:
The simplest of all cases is that of momentarily feeling something contact a
point on one’s body. Probably the next most simple case is feeling something
extensive momentarily contact one … one might passively feel an insect
wander across one’s forehead. Or actively run one’s hand around the outside
of a box with a view to discovering its shape. Finally, one might feel one’s
way around a room in total darkness; or, if blind, navigate one’s way across an
entire city (p. 661).
The two-first cases are not really cases of the perception of an object, as
O’Shaughnessy himself suggests elsewhere.16 The last two cases do not fit into the
scenario of tactual shape perception ‘‘through’’ the perception of one’s limb-
movements, as O’Shaughnessy admits during the elaboration of his theory. Namely,
representationalism fails to hold as soon as an object is more complex than basic
shapes or larger than oneself (see pp. 668–669). This means that, according to
O’Shaughnessy himself, this theory applies to precious little.
16
O’Shaughnessy writes that these ‘‘cases can easily be understood merely as examples of body
awareness’’ (p. 664). As the reader might already have noticed, O’Shaughnessy and Martin understand the
most basic case of skin contact as ‘‘body awareness’’ (see also Martin’s SAT, p. 209), while they stretch
the common notion of the sense of touch, which relates to cutaneous sensitivity, so far that it lies almost
completely beyond what we usually understand by touch. This complicates a comparison of their theory
with other views.
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Husserl Stud (2009) 25:97–120 113
So what is the range of this theory? The examples O’Shaughnessy and Martin
provide concern the perception of the shape of a box and a glass via the awareness
of the shape of the movement of a specific body part, e.g., a finger or a limb. In this
way, O’Shaughnessy believes, we ‘‘discover’’ that something is circular, rectangu-
lar, parallelepiped, and so on (pp. 665, 674). The examples used are typically about
(a) objects whose size does not extend beyond arm’s reach, and about (b) straight
lines, squares, and circles. One could say that these shapes are among the most basic
geometric figures, the ones that children first learn to draw. These figures stand out
in the visual world because they are so simple. Of all the shapes that can be seen or
felt, these figures are highly recognizable. In a parallel way, it is easy to imagine the
movement one has to make to trace a circular path or to draw such a circle in the air.
In fact, the transition from a circle-movement toward tracing out a square is not a
big step: understood from within the movement itself, a rectangular shape is also
drawn by going around, but this time making sharp turns instead of one gradual turn.
Such movements are extremely simple, and it is very easy to relate these basic
movements to their corresponding figures. Therefore one might even think that these
examples inspired the theory, rather than that the theory is developed to explain the
tactual perception of such shapes. To put it differently, the theory is about these
examples, rather than these examples merely illustrating the theory. The theory’s
range of application coincides—more or less—with such examples.
One can further ask what might be responsible for the limited range of this
theory. O’Shaughnessy realizes that the theory is only about relatively simple and
small objects, but he is satisfied with the idea that in more complex cases his
representationalism continues to hold piecemeal. Thus, he seems to understand the
minimal range of his theory as a problem that originates in our tactuo-perceptual
abilities—instead of in what the theory believes touch is about. Yet, O’Shaugh-
nessy, just like Martin, has a specific expectation about what tactual perception
should achieve, namely shape recognition. This expectation—which both authors
seem to forget is very specific—originates in the larger plan of their work.
O’Shaughnessy’s view of touch is inspired by his negative conception of visual
perception,17 and likewise, Martin’s elaboration of it is motivated by his conviction
that touch is fundamentally different from vision. Strangely enough, they orient
their theories toward visual perception. More specifically, the explanatory power of
their theory addresses the spatial quality of visual objects. Of course, seeing and
touching a circle should amount to having the same idea of an object’s shape. But,
the problem lies in what it takes to arrive at this perception. This theory describes
what one should have to do with one’s body in order to pick up information
identical to the information that is present in visually perceived shapes. In other
words, they demand from the sense of touch that it should ‘‘intuit’’ the identical
phenomenal spatial qualities as vision.
17
O’Shaughnessy (1980, p. 11) is convinced that, unlike touch, ‘‘a purely visual consciousness of
physical reality is nothing.’’
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114 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:97–120
Apart from the fact that, in the end, this theory proves to be about precious little,
there are at least three reasons why one might be sceptical from the outset as to
whether this theory’s approach is appropriate.
To start with, the idea that I intuit the shape of an object because I intuit the shape
of my movement presupposes that I do indeed intuit the shape of my movements.
However, does a movement have a shape? If one wants to maintain that a movement
does have a shape, this can only refer to a visual shape, for, according to the theory
under consideration, a tactual perception of a shape requires that one intuit the shape
of one’s own movements. Thus, the idea that one intuits the shape of a movement
can only be inspired by the visual perception of movements. Still, the theory can
assume that I am immediately aware of the movements I make, and thus of the
shape of my movements—or, in the theory’s jargon, that I ‘‘body-sense perceive’’
the shape of my movement (p. 668). But the point is that there is little reason to
assume that, in themselves, voluntary bodily movements would have a shape. It is
more likely that we name the shape of the path of our moving hand after the shapes
of the objects we know. We are indeed familiar with turning-movements (and
stirring-movements), but it is highly questionable whether we would call them
‘‘circles’’ if we had never discovered the peculiar spatial character of circular
objects through sight or touch. To relate turning or stirring to circles is something
that is inspired by the tactual perception of shapes—if not simply by the visual
perception of movements. To put it another way, it is highly questionable whether a
community of blind bodily beings who never had contact with the sighted would
call their movements ‘‘rectangular’’ or ‘‘circular’’ before they ever touched an object
with the corresponding shape.18 We cannot put this suggestion to the test; it remains
unclear whether ‘‘shape’’ would have a meaning with respect to movements only.
Yet it is clear that the idea that I perceive an object’s shape because I intuit the
shape of my own movement is based on a highly questionable supposition
concerning the relation between shape and movement prior to perception. In any
case, the names we have for our movements do not refer to shapes.
Secondly, even if we assume that we intuit our movements directly as ‘‘shaped,’’
the theory focuses on shapes as we know them through vision—i.e., as (complete)
figures. If one wants to perceive in touch the same as in vision, one would have to
invent something like limb-movement representationalism. In other words, if one
wants to perceive in touch a circle-figure as we know it in sight, one has to grope
over the entire circle and somehow imagine the end product of this process. Now,
several psychological studies have demonstrated that we are actually rather bad at
recognizing familiar objects from manually tracing their contours. Most signifi-
cantly, recent research shows that blindfolded people perform such tasks
considerably better than congenitally blind subjects.19 This demonstrates that it is
naı̈ve to assume that blind people would reconstruct an entire figure in their minds
that corresponds to what a figure is for sighted people. Sighted people do this, and
18
This is not to say that such a subject would not be able to understand the concept of a circle.
19
See for example Klatzky and Lederman (2003, pp. 107–109).
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this might explain why they perform better at the recognition of objects by their
contour-shape. We somehow complete the object in visual imagination as we feel
across its surface; we try to picture for ourselves what we are feeling. This is
something a congenitally blind subject cannot do, and it is thus mistaken to assume
that the product of tactual perception should correspond to the nature of visual
figures. Movements must be involved in tactual perception, but the mistake is to
assume that these movements must tell us the same thing about an object’s spatial
properties as vision does. It is quite possible that, if I were blind, my immediate
awareness of my turning-movement would tell me that this object is ‘‘round,’’ which
would mean for me that it can roll, that it has no edges, and so on. This might be
what I feel when moving around this object’s perimeter, and there is no need to
assume that my immediate grasp of roundness has to work via that which
corresponds to a circular shape in vision, i.e., a complete figure with a specific basic
geometry. In other words, through exploratory limb-movement I immediately grasp
the spatial-corporeal condition of the object, and there is no figure-intuiting
involved. If a congenitally blind person gropes over the top of a large box, crosses
over the edge, and continues to feel downwards over the side, this person perfectly
perceives the spatial character of this part of the box. However, to assume that, in
order to perceive how the box is, this person must have a certain shape
representation analogous to ‘‘:’’ is a mistaken idea inspired by the way shapes
appear in vision and are represented in contour drawings.
A third problem for the theory under consideration is that we simply do not do
what it describes. Even if one focuses on sighted people, neglects that they are
rather bad at it, and restricts the theory to small and simple shapes, one still has to
admit that contour following is not what we usually do. In reality it does not seem to
be necessary to trace around the perimeter of an object. Yet the theory advances
contour following as the paradigm of tactual perception, as if the contour-shape is
the information we seek to extract from touch. The theory assumes that the (only)
way to perceive a circle with one’s hands is to ‘‘draw’’ a circle—tracing a circle is
something we do neither with our skin, nor with our hands, but with a pencil. To say
that this corresponds to the prime case of tactual perception is to sustain a rather
robotic conception of what it is like to touch. It neglects what we usually understand
by touch and it fails to appreciate the tactile organ par excellence, namely our
hands. If one asks a blindfolded person to recognize a plate, it is very unlikely that
(all-round) contour following is what this subject will do. Even if one explicitly
asked what the shape of the object is, it is quite possible that this subject answers
correctly by simply picking up the plate with both hands. In all likelihood, grasping
the plate simultaneously with two hands will be sufficient to know that it is round.20
Now, the point is that, in the tactual sphere, to discover that something is round is to
perceive a circular shape.
20
Clearly, in order to sort books and records or boxes and balls according to shape, it is sufficient to pick
them up. Of course, it is always possible that the plate has an irregular shape (e.g., a sharp corner) where it
is not touched; but this is no different from the fact that, when I see a ball, it is always possible that it is
pointed on the side that I cannot see at the moment.
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116 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:97–120
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Footnote 21 continued
surface and moving it around along the surface, one will discover the difference between a box and a
cup—one will feel either continuous curvature or the inner corners. However, since the interior spaces are
so small compared to the length of the stick, one’s hand hardly moves itself as it steers the stick around
inside the respective object. Hence, it does not make sense to say that one should have to intuit the
movement of one’s hand as a means to perceive the shape of the object. Moreover, even if one made
larger gestures to perform this task, it is quite possible that one feels that the box is ‘‘rectangular’’ while
one’s hand movement was rather circular. Or, if one grabs a large box and gropes across its surface in
several directions with both hands simultaneously in order to determine its shape as quickly as possible,
the combination of the shapes of the movements of both hands will not be, and does not have to be, cube-
like at all.
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118 Husserl Stud (2009) 25:97–120
shapes. For example, I do not sense, from within my body, that my legs are straight
while my skull is round. I do not sense that my eyes and mouth form a triangle, and
I can hardly tell the shape of an object that contacts my skin. Yet, as a matter of fact,
I can discover these shapes by touch. According to movement representationalism, I
can ‘‘discover’’ these shapes because I immediately ‘‘body-sense’’ the shape of my
limb-movement which ‘‘mirrors’’ the shape of the object. But it remains unclear in
what this idea’s explanatory power consists, since it is unclear why my own
movements would have a shape for me. If another subject draws an ‘‘S’’ in the air
with its finger, I can say that I ‘‘see’’ the S-shape of the path of its finger tip.
However, if I could not see, how would I come to ascribe an S-shape to a
movement. The problem is this: in a strictly tactual world, one cannot say that
movements have a shape based on the perception of the shape of a movement, since,
according to the theory, the tactual perception of the shape of something else’s
movement presupposes that my movement has a shape for me. Therefore, this can
only be true in a derivative sense. I do not originally apperceive my own body’s
purposive actions as themselves having a specific shape. Rather, if we can
occasionally infer the shape of an object from the shape of a familiar movement, this
presupposes that I have learned to relate (the imaginary path of) the movement of
the tip of a body part to the shapes of things.
One can say that movement representationalism gives a role to the body that is
much too literal. Does this mean that we have found a fundamental criticism that
applies to this theory, but not to Husserl’s idea of the body as an organ? Things are
not that black-and-white. That the above criticism seems to leave Husserl’s account
undisturbed is only due to the fact that the core of Husserl’s theory does not specify
the content of tactual perception. Husserl does not itemize what we perceive by the
sense of touch. O’Shaughnessy and Martin, on the other hand, assume that what
needs to be explained is how we tactually perceive spatial properties, the size and
shape of an object in particular. In so doing, they align themselves with a centuries-
old conviction that considers the sense of touch to be the most appropriate access to
the world’s primary qualities. Devoid of the perspectival foreshortenings that typify
visual perception, the act of touching offers the means to measure out an object’s
dimensions. Bringing the body into contact with an object, one finds out how many
digits, how many thumbs, how many handbreadths, or how many feet an object
really is. Similarly, one can rely on our body’s ability to trace figures in order to
represent shapes as a technique that is not affected by perspectival deformation. In
this way, the idea that one’s movements ‘‘mirror’’ the properties of objects is a
natural extension of the idea that one ‘‘measures’’ the spatial properties of objects
against one’s body.
But here what is implausible about this suggestion becomes apparent. To use
body parts to measure out an object is to rely on an invariant unit that, therefore, can
be used to measure any distance. The respective body part becomes itself the
standard. Bodily movements, however, cannot gain this status because they are not
invariant in the same way. One cannot perform the identical movement twice, just
as one cannot draw exactly the same line more than once. Therefore, S-shaped
objects are a template for S-shaped movements, rather than the other way around.
After all, a template is a physical object that helps one draw a certain shape over and
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over again, as one moves around it. So, the epistemic status of the body’s
representational role is essentially different in this case.
Nevertheless, since the cutaneous sense field is not adept at perceiving shapes,
the evident solution is to invoke the body’s ability to trace figures for the perception
of shapes. In principle, movement representationalism would perfectly fulfil this
task. However, as a matter of fact, it does not; in fact, it cannot. The factual nature
of our tactual abilities compels me to conclude that, against the background of
visual perception, the sense of touch can hardly be considered apt for shape
perception. ‘‘If a man were by feeling to find out the figure of the peak of Tenerife,
or even of St. Peter’s church at Rome,’’ Thomas Reid (1764, p. 78) asserts, ‘‘it
would be the work of a lifetime.’’ I think Reid is mistaken. I believe this man would
never succeed. Or better, he would never start. Overall shape is not a perceptual goal
for touch as it is for vision. The fact that body contact is perfect for measurement is
only half the story. Pacing off a distance, hand after hand, or foot by foot, works
perfectly precisely because it requires no spatial representation; the only comple-
mentary operation needed is counting.
Still, it cannot be denied that we sometimes succeed in finding out something
about the shape of objects through touch. Since the cutaneous sense field is almost
shape-blind, movements must play some role. But the idea of sterile contour
following cannot explain how we perceive shapes. On the other hand, if one adheres,
like Husserl, to the contrast between bodily movements and—in analogy with
vision—a tactual field, one has to admit that the cutaneous field cannot function in
the same way as the visual field. Here Martin’s premises seem more promising. He
accepts that there is something like a sense field; however, touch does not depend on
it as vision does. Yet, like O’Shaughnessy, Martin tends to orient the contents of
touch in line with visual properties. Clearly, what it is like to touch is different from
what it is like to see, and still we can agree that we discover the same circularity of a
given object through sight and touch. However, to say that in touch we do something
different than in sight is only one step in the right direction. One also has to abandon
the idea that the phenomenal tactual quality must correspond to the phenomenal
visual quality. To put it very simply, visual shape is not a tactual property—the
examples that favor movement representationalism may be, at best, exceptions.
As was to be expected, the human hand plays a complex role in tactual
perception. It cannot be denied that (in a minimal sense) it functions as a peculiar
sense field; it has a certain extension. At the same time, this sense field can itself
change shape—it can open and close, and fingers can move apart or clench together.
In this way, the hand is both a sense field and a template, and it introduces motion. A
hand’s grasp discloses the spatial nature of an object locally. Different grasps at
different places complete the picture. The hand is indeed essentially different from
the visual field; however, this does not imply that it would not stand in a similar
relation to voluntary movements. Even if one rejects the idea of a tactual sense field,
and therefore neglects the fact that this sense field stands in a functional relation to
voluntary bodily movements, one has to recognize that a hand does not ‘‘do’’ the
same as one’s limbs or the rest of one’s body. Consequently, tactual perception
depends much less on body centred movements to disclose spatial properties than
one might expect.
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References
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