One evening early on in this project I looked down to find my hands were no longer attached to my body. From my journal:
2020-6-23
Yesterday evening around 9, sitting at the counter after eating, my hands resting on my stacked ankles, regarding them, the unaccustomed veinedness of the backs of the hands—an impression they were not part of me. Mild but clear, and unbidden: these were alien features of the world. It is not that I experienced revulsion for them or a desire to have them removed or destroyed … just a neutral dissociation. Looking at them now, on the keyboard, I can summon it again, even as they move under my command. An abiding awareness of the distinction between self and milieu …
The experience continued for a period of weeks. It came and went. At times, as I recall—though I do not see a record of this in my journal—it extended to encompass the entirety of the arms, the right arm in particular. At no point was it disturbing—often, in fact, it was distinctly pleasurable. It was less a tactile or proprioceptive experience than a visual one. Looking at my hands I experienced a recurrent alternation in the visual impression they made: now my hands appeared parts of a whole that I identified as my self, now they appeared separate. Soon I could flip my perspective at will and, again, there was something distinctly pleasurable in this. It was the same kind of pleasure as that of autonomous sensory meridian response, the tingling up the back of the skull some people experience when they hear certain impulsive sounds—crackling, crunching, the stridulation of orthopterans. It has since abated: looking down at my hands, once again on the keyboard, I can summon the dissociative sensation but faintly. But the memory of how pleasurable it was remains, as does the insight, if the term is warranted, that even the most settled-seeming of relationships, such as that of one’s hands to one’s body, is something that is continually being remade, with greater or lesser success.
(The experience I’ve described could be construed as a mild form of somatoparaphrenia. Reports of a sensation of limbs or extremities “floating free” are uncommon, though this may be mainly because experiences of this sort do not cause the distress and practical difficulties that lead sufferers of typical forms of hemispatial neglect to seek help. It is notable that the experience, in my case, was distinctly bilateral.)
One other thing about this episode warrants comment: at the time of this experience I had begun running distances again after a yearslong break, and I had got exceptionally thin (“the unaccustomed veinedness of the backs of the hands”).
250. My having two hands is, in normal circumstances, as certain as anything that I could produce in evidence for it.
252. But it isn’t just that I believe in this way that I have two hands, but that every reasonable person does.
253. At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.
Thus Wittgenstein in 1950, dying of cancer, no doubt in pain. It was a couple months after the thing with my hands that I came across On Certainty, and completely by chance—it had not occurred to me look for “work” on “epistemology of the body” or whatever.
Wittgenstein was taking up an argument offered by his friend G. E. Moore in a paper of 1925 and a talk of 1939. Moore described a class of assertions that admit, he held, neither doubt nor proof beyond the assertion of a privileged knowing. His type-specimen was the assertion that “two human hands exist”. The proof consists in saying, “Here is one hand, and here is another,” displaying your hands as you speak.
Moore’s insistence that “Here is one hand …” is something we know appeals to the conceit that when it comes to our explorations of the world our body is something we have a privileged relationship with. The body represents, as it were, well-surveyed country. This is a view I do not share.
Wittgenstein seemed to think Moore had been a bit casual about the relationship between believing and knowing. But he did come to feel, in the course of making the notes later published as On Certainty, that in any coherent system of beliefs there will be some that serve as a hinge—that which must stay fixed in order for the rest to function, as with a hinged door—and that it is pointless to ask what grounds we have for these hinge beliefs. They are constitutive of the “language game” we are playing, the repertoire of strategies by which we create meaning in the course of our recurring interactions. Within a language game, gestures have meaning by virtue of the fact that they invite a bounded range of responses. Those gestures that invite no response—or that allow any response?—do not represent valid “moves” in the game. Of course the game itself is a theme of continual revision. More than that: the game is the medium of its own revision.
I am struck now by a certain canalization of thought at play here. Implicit in a conversation about whether having hands is a matter of knowing or believing is, I sense, a refusal of experience. This is a conversation whose participants either cannot imagine or will not entertain the compositional worldview described by Santos-Granero in the passage I quoted in [2] (“Amerindian constructivism … conceives of all living beings as composite entities …”). The longer I go on, the more conversations of this form feel beside the point.