Myself with No Body? Body, Bodily-Consciousness and Self-consciousness

Abstract

De facto, subjects are bodily, but is this necessarily so? This question unfolds into the following two: Can one be self-conscious without being a body? Can one be self-conscious without being bodily-conscious? In this paper, I will describe different aspects of bodily-self-consciousness and argue that the most radical attempts to demonstrate the contingency of the bodily nature of self-consciousness failed. The idea here is that the strength of the anchoring of self-consciousness in the body and bodily-consciousness can be evaluated by considering whether (and which) forms of bodily-self-consciousness resist even against radical theoretical and clinical cases of purported disembodiment.