Loss of proprioception reduces one’s self to an abstract Cartesian ghost

Evidence

Oliver Sacks, who in A Leg to Stand On described his own disorder of leg proprioception after an injury, elsewhere tried simple trickery with video goggles and fake rubber arms to create the feeling that he had a third arm, or even that he was embodied in something on the other side of the room. The experiments were fun, but the leg injury wasn’t: Sacks felt an immense relief when normal proprioception came back to him and he had his whole, proper body back. It felt like getting back to his full self, having been forced to make do with an ‘I’ that was in part merely abstract, or Cartesian. His Merleau-Pontian embodied self was so much more him. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 736

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts Cartesian disembodiment with Merleau-Ponty’s embodied self; ties to the reader’s existentialism orientation goal. — connects to: Perceiving one’s own body as an object converts its lived possibilities into dead-possibilities; The Cartesian cogito is the only absolute truth grounding all other knowledge. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 21; Foucault traces the subversion of the Cartesian subject to Modernist literature and philosophy — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 287 (+3 more)
• BMF: The experience of being reduced to a merely abstract Cartesian ‘I’ evokes Jane Eyre’s inner narrative self that persists even as her body is diminished — the mind as pure surveilling ‘I’ distinct from flesh.

Broader Connections

• The self is posited to unify otherwise divergent plastic brain processes #complicates (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 191
• Sartre rejected Cartesian dualism by treating material givens as meaning-sedimented facticities #expands (0.70) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 63