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jective when viewed from the objective attitude and so itself demands to be transcended.
Bodily subjectivity is that by which my body, although part of the physical world, is nevertheless dissociated from other perceived objects and identified with myself. An object may be present in any of three ways as external, as internal, as absent (II 55) environmental objects being in the first or third class, body in the first or second. Present external objects are purely objective, not distinguished from their presentation, and are perceived only as exteriors; their unseen sides are imagined as perceived by me from a different direction, and their invisible insides are imagined, if at all, as perceived, that is, as exteriors. The exterior of my body is also perceived, although in a unique way. Whereas other objects are here or there relative to me," the body is always here, and its unseen sides are imagined only as perceived by somebody else. The interior of the body, however, is not only imagined" but also directly felt. As felt it is not distinguished from the body as perceived, but the perceived body is somehow distinguished from the felt body as something itself imperceptible.48 Feeling of the body is not psychic fact, yet it is the potentiality of psychic fact, being the possibility, although not the actuality, of being dissociated from the objective body (II 52). In actual feeling we are not interested in withdrawing from the environment, although an interest derived from higher modes of subjectivity may suggest such withdrawal (II 53), and this possible detachment is the "first hint" of freedom (II 54). The approach to psychic fact is found in knowledge, by conscious non-perception, of absence as a present fact." Here the consciousness is detached from the object. The absence is perceived, or strictly speaking non-perceived, not felt or imagined, but the object is not perceived. Non-perception may be of absence (for example, a familiar field from which a tree has been removed, now perceived as having something missing, but something unidentified) or of the absent (for example, a book we cannot find, although there is no particular place where it is not) (II 57). Perceived absence (that
46 "The objectivity of other perceived objects is constituted by their position relative to the percipient's body" (II 50), hence the latter, which has no perceived position (II 63), involves "the mystic awareness of dissociation from the object in which subjectivity consists" (II 51).
47 "To those who would not go farther in psychology [i.e., behaviorists], introspection is only observation of the indefinite body-interior" (II 62).
48 The asymmetry of distinction is a dialectical principle found throughout Bhattacharyya's works.
49 The 13 paragraphs of chapter 4 are devoted to the analysis of this concept.
