"Sense" in Being and Time

Is there a body without flesh? The question seems as rhetorical as the inverse one Falque poses to Henry. We already know Henry's answer: A body cannot appear, and thus be, unless it is first given to flesh. This rule applies whether I am dealing with a material body in the world or with the corps propre, my own body. In the one case as in the other, a body cannot appear unless it is first given to sensibility, and nothing is given to the senses I call mine unless it affects me. Apart from this affective instance, without a flesh that is impressional, I have no way of saying whether I am dealing with the front of a thing or its backside, its blue hue or hardness, girth or speed, or with its disappearance, because I know nothing about it. I can offer no description, phenomenological or otherwise. Of what would it be the description? I have no access to a thing unless it is given to me in experience, or in imagination, as composed of what is so given. Unless I can be affected, unless I am endowed with flesh, nothing like a body can appear and I am simply not entitled to speak of a body, not even as an idea.

Why then ask whether there is a body without flesh if such a possibility for these decisive reasons is unintelligible? Can any further precision show the question to be worth the annoyance of posing and the labor of investigating? What is a body and what is flesh? According to the standard definition, a body in general is a material thing bearing sensible or intelligible properties - the categories of Aristotle (time, change, motion, quality, size, place, etc.), or the sensible qualities of Galileo or Descartes (extension, figure, etc.), the pure forms of intuition of Kant (space and time), or the properties of sub-atomic physics (spin, location, charge, mass, etc.). Even in the latter cases, where the properties of a body are not known through the senses, but through instruments of measurement that have been designed to detect and record what the senses cannot, senses nevertheless must intervene to "read" such instruments. The physicist that denies that our senses tell us the truth of the universe must consult the senses in some way in order to arrive at that conclusion.

The question can nevertheless be answered affirmatively. Yes, there is a body without flesh. The universe is populated with bodies of this sort, which are what they are independently of any appeal to flesh for their appearance. First, for the strict reason that they do not appear to flesh and do not affect it directly. In itself, flesh knows nothing about them. Second, because they are what they are, and will be what they will be, whatever we may wish to assert about flesh, or even if we wish to ignore flesh, and what is given to it, altogether. It is not even obvious that someone must observe the Large Hadron Collider, since programs can be designed for that purpose, and register the events in question with more subtlety and precision than the "naked eye". If we were smart enough, we would program those computers also to interpret the data better than we can, find errors in our assumptions, mistakes in our models, and so on. From this perspective, not only is there a body without flesh, perhaps an infinite number of them; in addition, if we are to arrive at the truth of the bodies that populate the universe, we must ignore flesh altogether.

Including our own? Nothing prohibits the positive sciences from applying the same methods to the human body they apply to the cosmos. Whether we are dealing with cell biology, genetics, neuroscience, or the other cognitive sciences, no reference to flesh is required, and it is not obvious how any discussion of flesh, in Henry's sense, can be included in either the assumptions, methods, or results of these fields. It is true that some forms of cognitive research on so-called "live" subjects do involve prompting the subject of research to "think about" or "imagine" an object, and so forth. Through a process of trial and error, it is possible to correlate material events in the brain with reported experiences, so that eventually consciousness would be, as Daniel Dennett says, "explained". What seems to be, and is called, an experience of something, is in fact, caused or occasioned by material episodes of which we are entirely unaware. Edit the episode (or what codes for it), edit the experience. Even if some are uncomfortable with the idea of dismissing human experience as entirely illusory, the scientific position is clear: the material, bodily event is phenomenal; the experience of sensing and of sensed, scientifically speaking at least, is epiphenomenal, or worse, illusory.

If such a conclusion seems difficult to accept, resolving it goes beyond the purview of science. Let politicians, therapists, pharmaceutical companies, social workers, school teachers, and prison guards deal with the consequences. Science must tell us only what is true. We must dare, precisely not to think anymore, but to experiment. It is no longer the philosopher who dethrones the gods of the mythmakers, but the scientist; and in the universe of science, only one god is worthy of the name. Evidence. But the etymology of the word is no longer its meaning. If e-videre means to come from seeing, here in question is not seeing, nor even what is seen, at least if that must involve and depend upon sensibility. Rather, a certain way of determining and "explaining" the material world, including what we do see, that is the arche and telos of science, the limits of its veritas and its realitas. Is the ambition of science anything but to establish once and for all a correct explanatory account of the universe in all its dimensions on the basis of an exact understanding of the causal relationships that govern its constituent parts?

In any case, we are up against a problem. We have in phenomenology a reference to flesh and to the sensing body as a necessary condition of experience and definition of reality, and the exclusion of any such reference in the natural sciences, as a condition of any experimentation and also as a definition of reality. How should one respond intellectually or practically to this apparently-unresolvable dilemma cutting the history of reason in two? On the one hand, the world of our experience, with all its sensible delight - our ambitions, aims, and hopes, fears and regrets, joys and sorrows, love and hate - this world of meaning, of sense, of value. On the other, the empirically-observable, material world of bodies visible to us, or detectable in dimensions far beyond what we can see - this material world, the better understanding of which continues to benefit humanity in myriad ways.

An objection arises: Where is the dilemma? If the visible universe is an element, and a marvelous element, of the world of experience, as of creation, then no rational person ought to resist the desire to understand the mechanisms by which it operates. Can one really suppose it to be a world of inert bodies in which no meaning, no sense, can be found? The apparent contradiction between sense and nonsense - here, the world of meaning and the world of senseless bodies - covers over another one that is more difficult. We are up against two incompatible definitions of the real. If so-called "first-person" experience cannot be reduced, and what is observed in the third-person can never be raised to the level of experiencing itself, for what kind of correlation can we hope?