Review of 'Sensing with tools extends somatosensory processing beyond the body'

Deep History of Extended Body

In "Resisting Representation", Scarry traces the deep history of the notion of extended body: "The idea of raw materials and tools as an extension of the human body has many different sources: in the nineteenth-century European philosophy of work, in political and economic philosophy, in phenomenology, and in philosophy of perception. The last is implicitly the starting place of all others for it is the actual perceptual experience of extension that gives rise to the idea in its elaborated forms. James J. Gibson, for example, in "The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems" notes the at-once startling and (once stated) wholly familiar fact that "The man with a walking stick can even feel stones, mud, or grass at the end of his stick," and again that "In use [of a pair of scissors], one actually feels the cutting action of the blades". The idea is most elaborated by and thus most identified with Hegel, Feuerbach, and above all Marx. [...] It is precisely because earth and tools are man's extended body that property, which severs the worker from his extended body, places him in the position of selling not his work but his now-truncated activity of labor: thus the idea is central to Capital" (Scarry, 1994, p. 85).

The notion of extended body or, more broadly, extended self has also figured prominently in literature and spirituality. For example, in the very first paragraph of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" we encounter the fluidity of the self: "I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V" (Proust, 1992, p. 1), which culminates in Proust identifying with his experience [in speaking about the taste of madeleine]: "this essence was not in me, it was me" (ibid, p. 61). Cultivating compassion is another instance of 'I' expanding to encompass, in Darwin's words, "all sentient beings" (Ekman, 2010).

References
Ekman, P. (2010) Darwin's compassionate view of human nature. The Journal of the American Medical Association 303: 557-558.
Proust, M. (1992) In Search of Lost Time. New York: The Modern Library.
Scarry, E. (1994) Resisting Representation. New York: Oxford University Press.