Proprioception: from "proprius-ception, ‘one's own’ ception (...) the 'body' itself as, by movement of its own tissues, giving the data of, depth"
(Charles Olson, "Proprioception")

Up until now, it has not proved common in philosophy for readers to experience the breathless rush through sensory landscapes one finds in novels by William Gibson, or better, Jeff Noon (Vurt, Pollen). Philosophers of most stripes like to recapitulate; to reconstruct a context; to take you back a few steps in time and show you the emergence of an idea. Granted, there have been a few books in recent years coming out of the phenomenological tradition which emphasize the most physical (embodied, carnal, corporeal, fleshly, perceptual, etc.) elements of that tradition. The relevant names here are Merleau-Ponty, and before him Husserl and Kurt Goldstein, whose fascinating book The Organism has recently been reissued by Zone Books. (Thinkers who seek to emphasize the materiality or concreteness of social relations, that is, the primacy of the social world in structuring our consciousness of self, will instead invoke Heidegger, who has been translated into the American idiom, or should one say Californian, by people like J. Searle over the last 15-20 years: no part of human action can be understood in isolation from the "Background." But here we are concerned with the body and its environment, rather than society and the self.) But nonetheless, ever since Kant, in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, reproached Swedenborg for trying to build a philosophy on private experience, whether mystical or hallucinatory, philosophers have shied away from the 'kaleidoscope' approach. Well, Andy Clark's Being There (subtitled Putting Brain, Body and World Back Together) puts the aforementioned novels to shame. We move at lightning speed through Artificial Life robotics, Gibsonian perception studies, Scott Kelso's dynamic systems models, the slime mold ... all of this glazed over or dusted with a fine sheen of dernier cri phenomenological utterances. The title, Being There, would hopefully not be allowed outside of MIT's cognitive science series, and its cheerful cult of bad taste. What I'll be trying to do here is to talk a leaf out of Clark's book and argue for the priority of bodily reality in understanding brain and mind.

Why proprioception? Isn't it a mere physical feature of the working of our organism, like metabolism? Well, if we are interested in thinking through the body, as a critic once put it, we must care about the ways in which the body is radically non-Cartesian, that is, the way in which it can talk to itself without having to retreat into a state prior to any body or world. Knowledge in the Cartesian view only begins after we have eliminated all physical determinants through a process of doubt. The view I am associating with "proprioception" has been taken by a variety of thinkers, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, J.J. Gibson, and most recently Andy Clark: "the body is a great system of reasons, a war and a peace ..." (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra). The word itself was first used in this illustrative sense, rather than as the sole concern of physical therapists, by the poets Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. Olson was dean of Black Mountain College, author of Call me Ishmael, The Maximus Poems, and many other pieces of "projective verse," as well as the prose collection entitled Human Universe, which includes "The Resistance," in which our theme of the primacy of the body is sounded with ethical overtones -- quite reminiscent of what Foucault expressed a few years later: the last threshold of resistance I have is my body. Ethico-political norms can only be evaluated in accordance with what is tolerable or intolerable for my body. But to return to proprioception, here is how Olson defines it:

The data of depth sensibility / The 'body' of us as object which spontaneously (...) produces experience of, "Depth," viz. SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES.

II.

If perception includes sensory-motor acts in such a way as to include our body itself, conversely, we must think of the body so as not to exclude its subjectivity, what Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, called one's "corps propre," the sense that one's body is one's own. My lived history as an active individual, as an organism with a certain intake of meat and nicotine and alcohol within specific cultural boundaries, is not merely the development of the set of frozen boundary conditions which comprise my individuality physically, from electrons and protons to atoms to molecules to my genetic make-up. It also includes what Searle calls a Background, a "scaffolding" which is partly tied to my own perceptual make-up (Gibson's "affordances," more or less). My experience has accumulated to form part of my cognitive horizon. Clark adds one twist on this: "the constraints of evolutionary holism" (p. 89), i.e., the way in which I evolve as a series of responses to environmental challenges. One can push this a final step further and say that biologically speaking, an organism is historical inasmuch as it cannot be fully understood in abstraction from its 'prehistory', including its heredity. The history of my organism is not just the sum of the situations it faced and the solutions it found through adaptation (or skill). This is still a strictly spatial understanding, and the organism is truly a time-bound entity, with what the cognitive scientists call "time-critical behavior." As Simondon puts it, each organic act presents a temporal structure which is adequate to a given situation.

Time to conclude. The body which I experience is always my body, regardless of prostheses, hallucinations, etc.; experience is always my experience. In proprioception, I have an inner sense of how the various parts of my body 'communicate' among one other (cf. neurological interest in "body images," the well-known phenomenon of 'phantom limbs', etc.), but also a projection towards the physical world around me, all at once. To understand what it means to think, to compute information, to have a trillion neurons firing in my brain, to have consciousness either at a 40 Hz frequency (F. Crick) or at the quantum level (Penrose), one must really understand this: it's all about bodily sensation. Earlier, I had praised the computational model for having demystified the 'sanctum' of brain and cognition; now I can add Feuerbach's immortal words: "The sense of touch is atheist from birth": our faculty of sensing, of which touch is a particular case, constructs the world for itself. The world is not pre-given by a divinity, or by a rational re-construction, a 'set of instructions' in the current vocabulary. "Vision and touch are not reason's 'raw material', its substrate, but rather the essence of the fully realized human relation to reality." Call it what you will: touch, sensation, embodiment, incarnation; the brain in its bodily context "creates chaotic activity to make sense of the world" (in Freeman and Skarda's phrase), and thus it makes the world its own.