"Sense" in Being and Time

The opposition just posited - between the world of meaning, on the one hand, and the world of senseless, inert bodies, on the other - is it artificial or contrived? Far from being a contradiction needing resolution, are these worlds not already, originally and always, conjoined, as Merleau-Ponty has taught us? Flesh is a body that is part - a body-part - of this great body that is the universe (we leave aside the question of whether another, or an infinite number of others, is possible). Flesh, the living, sensing body, is a constituent part of the universe, even if it has raised itself - but why "raised"? - to the level of self-awareness. Admitting the worldly nature of flesh does not require us to nullify or diminish the realm of meaning, the so-called "space" of reasons. "Meaning is not a mysterious gift from outside nature," John McDowell reminds us; to think so would commit us to a "rampant platonism". Cognition, and the mind as such, is "embodied". In its acts of knowing it need neither be absorbed by nor separated from what it knows, but is or at least can be "simply present and available".

In significant continuity with Merleau-Ponty's work, a growing field of research now seeks to demonstrate the thesis that the fleshly body is a worldly body, and to do so while respecting the prerogatives of both phenomenology and science. To take one notable example, Evan Thompson in Mind in Life aims to integrate phenomenology and cognitive science in an "enactive" approach that promises to describe and explain at once: "Starting from a recognition of the transcendental and hence ineliminable status of experience, the aim would be to search for morphodynamical principles that can both integrate the orders of matter, life, and mind, and account for the originality of each order". Once a dynamic morphology of sufficient complexity is recognized - made possible by new topologies, differential geometry, etc. - it is possible to "map," and then to demonstrate, dynamic and isomorphic relations that arise between physiological systems and perceptual forms.

The effort to achieve such a demonstration, Thompson thinks, would have been embraced by Merleau-Ponty, had a morphology of sufficient richness and complexity been available to him. From this perspective, the remove at which classical phenomenology stands vis-à-vis science, emblematic of Husserl's Krisis (to say nothing of Heidegger's position), is not a matter of principle, but only a contingent, conceptual constraint, bounded as it was by the limits of the sciences then-available. In any case, if Husserl thinks it is the task of phenomenology to assign the sciences their ultimate meaning, it cannot accomplish this task unless a genuine connection arises between phenomenology and the sciences it purports to ground. Otherwise, phenomenology amounts to little more than a series of one-sided assertions and pronouncements about the world of experience, which the world of science can safely ignore. But if the results of the sciences can be altered by taking into account phenomenological insight, as advocates of this approach have shown, then the sciences cannot afford to ignore it.

How should we account for this development phenomenologically? How is it possible that a phenomenological analysis according to the strict phenomenological reduction of what is given in intuition, far from providing the antidote to materialism, naturalism, or reductionism, is now enriched by it, to the point of morphing into a "naturalized phenomenology"? We should not fail to notice that protagonists of the enactive approach refuse "objectivism" quite explicitly, and insist on the irreducible, transcendental character of "experience" as the condition for the possibility of the appearance of any object. In addition, and this point is perhaps more important, we are not dealing with a conflation of methods or perspectives, since the engagement with science goes hand in hand with and is predicated upon the insistence on the importance and irreducibility of the phenomenological perspective. One might reasonably consider such an approach to offer a kind of concrete synthesis of mind and world, rather than the a priori one Kant sought.

If the world of experience is irreducible to the world of science and yet integrated with it, is that not what we ought to expect and indicative of a certain correctness? Or, alternatively, in order to effect such an integration of phenomenology and science, has the concept of experience, necessarily, become a concept of scientific experience alone? Or, yet again, are we dealing with a Malebranchean parallelism that is simply harder to detect because the lines now overlap, or intertwine, to use Merleau-Ponty's word? What is involved in the reduction of experience to scientific experience (that is, the experience of the scientist) and what are its consequences? I will offer three objections, which will lead us into a more refined and direct engagement with the question of flesh and its relation to the body before opening onto a theological question.

First, properly speaking, I do not and cannot have an experience of my neurons as objects. It is true that I can connect my own scull, let us call it le crâne propre, to a brain scanner, and vary my thinking as I watch correlating parts of my brain light up on a screen. On the basis of such correlations between my thought and my body, can I ever claim to have an (original) experience of my neurons as sensible or intellectual objects? It would be a reflective experience, and nothing would keep me from learning something perceptually about my body in this way. But what I observe on the screen is not my body and can never be, at least if by body we mean the original, subjective body in its original givenness to itself, its auto-affection, or pre-reflective awareness.

Second, if what I observe is not my body, but only a visual representation, can we say that the correlation has proved successful, that we have evidence for it? Even if one embraces the brilliant level of engagement of phenomenology with science, even if one were to achieve the perfect accord of carnal affectivity with the perception of the body, the problem of principle remains: these are two irreducible orders of givenness, of phenomenality. A fundamental practical problem also remains: Imagine a real-time projection of every dynamic alteration of the organic body flashed on a optic lens, available to the concrete perception of my eye - visible. Is it even possible to perceive, organically, the immense complex that is the organic body, all in one view?

A third and parallel objection can also be raised. The possibility of such a perception is highly-specific, and more often than not, prohibitively expensive. What is given in it goes well beyond what is given in the range of perceptual experience available to anyone. If the notion of what is phenomenal - and, even more, its phenomenality - however broadened and enriched, is available only to one who has already entered into the scientific perspective, and if such a perspective excludes in principle the subject that perceives, feels, or enjoys, then such an approach can indeed admit perception, feeling, or enjoyment, but only on the condition that they become what they are not, which is to say, reports of a perception, feeling, or enjoyment. The problem is not that such reports can be mistaken, which in any case might prove relevant for the experiment, but rather that, in the phenomenality of such a report, the original phenomenon is torn from its original givenness, apart from the world, in order to disclose it in a visibility that is foreign to it. Yes, the scientist engrossed practically in an experiment, or theoretically in the effort to design or modify a model for what is observed experimentally, also perceives - that is, sees through forms, however rarified they may be. But experience has here been reduced to scientific experience. It can be extended to the universal - taken as universal experience - only by a decision.

If many suspect the world of science and with it virtual reality, automation, and so-called artificial intelligence have encroached too far, it is because the lifeworld as living has been colonized by technology. That is why those who adopt it, who prefer to experience the world or themselves as mediated by technology, risk losing knowledge of the world or themselves apart from it. "The information age will be the age of idiots," claims Henry in 1987. The orgasm-feigning robot that will cater to your every wish, or discipline you as programmed, perhaps when you least expect it - or can it learn that you expect that? - is indeed a body without flesh. "Life is but a motion of the limbs… why may we not say , that all Automata… have an artificiall life?"