Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an ...

This suggests that sensations are neither purely from external stimuli nor purely from internal cognition: there is rather an interplay between the two, where the body discovers itself via the world and also discovers the world through itself. Hence, the phantom limb “is not the mere outcome of objective causality; no more is it a cogitatio.” ¹⁰ Lying in the indistinct space between cognition and external stimuli, the sensation felt by the patient is similar to a reflex—an action that is neither merely a reaction to stimuli nor fully cognitive. In fact, “reflex movements, whether adumbrated or executed, are still only objective processes whose course and results consciousness can observe, but in which it is not involved.” ¹¹

Hence all cognition—every act of knowing—can only happen retrospectively: the meaning of the reflex can only be inferred after the fact. In other words, the phantom-limb sensation can only be known at the very moment in which it is felt, where the “experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness and as a ‘dated’ moment; it is of essence to survive only as a matter of being and with a certain degree of generality.” ¹³ It is a “personal existence…without, in other words, being able either to reduce the organism to its existential self, or itself to the organism.” ¹⁴ Hence the phantom limb “is not a recollection, it is a quasi-present and the patient feels it now…with no hint of it belonging to the past.” ¹⁵