1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (English translation Robert Baldick, London: Penguin, 1965): I see my hand spread out on the table. It is alive – it is me. It opens, the fingers unfold and point. It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat underbelly. It looks like an animal upside down. The fingers are the paws … it is me, those two animals moving about at the end of my arms. My hand scratches one of its paws with the nail of another paw; I can feel its weight on the table which isn’t me… (pp. 143–4)
2. The phenomenoIogical/Heideggerian/existentialist provenance of much of the present essay will be evident to anyone familiar with the relevant literature: it is more pervasive than the acknowledged references. However, it is equally rooted in the analytical and linguistic tradition. I hope it will, in a sense, move between both, in the way suggested by ‘The Philosophies of Consciousness and the the Philosophies of the Concept, Or: Is There Any Point in Studying the Headache I have Now?’ in Raymond Tallis, Enemies of Hope: a critique of Contemporary Pessimism (London: Macmillan, 1997).
3. R.M. Rilke, The Notebooks ofMalte Laurid Brigge (English translation by John Linton, London: Hogarth, 1930).
4. See, for example, The Phenomenology of Perception (English translation by Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Of course, it is easy to exaggerate the naivety of Descartes’ dualism. Descartes emphasised that he was not lodged in his body Tike a pilot in a vessel’.
5. Assuming it was presented to me in adequate light and I had not recently ‘changed out of all recognition’.