"Sense" in Being and Time

In light of Michel Henry's phenomenology of life and its critique of scientism, such a decision stands out in all clarity, but in order to admit it must we follow his characterization of flesh as originally auto-impressional? For Henry, the reality of flesh is invisible, irreducibly and in principle. In its original givenness, where it is given to itself as auto-impressional and the only place its givenness is original, it does not and cannot appear in the exteriority of world. Nor can flesh be extended to the world in the manner of Merleau-Ponty's touching-touched, sensing-sensed, feeling-felt chiasm. Endowed with a power the world forever lacks, the hand that is touched, when it is a question of one's own body, can become the hand that touches. That is correct. But the in-principle reversibility of touching and touched that characterizes the living body does not extend to the material world. No coffee cup "touches" the hand that holds it, nor has a stone ever picked up the hand that throws it. The ontological duplicity that distinguishes phenomenologically the body of flesh from the worldly body seems unassailable.

But have we lost the body in its worldly reality in the process? Emmanuel Falque thinks so. In his view, Henry's thesis concerning auto-affection, and originary flesh as auto-impressionality, fails to account for anything like the body, or the embodied condition as we actually experience it, in "flesh and bone," as he says: "[N]othing indicates, beyond his masterful descriptive analyses, that there is a genuine access to the body through the flesh. Put otherwise, everything happens as if the flesh, that is to say the experience of our own life, becomes so invasive here that we would come to forget that it is possessed and even experienced, at least materially and visibly, in and through a body". For Falque, the flesh that is ours is not only seeing but also visible. It can indeed be seen and touched. This visibility is not simply one way of access to flesh, and to flesh that is ours, but the first way of access. We experience and possess flesh also through our body; and there is no flesh, for us, that we cannot also see or touch.

Falque and Henry thus offer two quite distinct conceptions of flesh that seem incompatible. For Falque, Henry's flesh "disincorporates," "absorbs," and ultimately "destroys" the body, and with it all the "thickness" of what is felt. After all, "it is also necessary to recognize the weight of our own body (and its kilos, we dare to say!) without which this pain [of a steep climb, for example] would never be experienced" (157). What phenomenological reality would such a pain have, if not for the fact of the body's quite material weight, which does not simply explain or measure the pain at a causal level, as the reference to kilos might suggest, but is also involved in the very fact and event of it? Falque certainly must have the phenomenality of weight in mind, precisely its heaviness, and not only the relative scientific measure of a primary quality.

On the other hand, there is no question that in Henry's approach only an auto-impressional flesh can experience its own heaviness or lightness. I feel the weight of another not perceptually, by seeing it, but only and at most when the other (the other's weight) is quite strictly bearing down upon me. But even in this case, I do not feel the weight of the other, properly speaking - that is, its heaviness for the other, which remains strictly invisible (an object not of sensibility, but impressionality). Its impressional status does not make it inhuman. Quite the contrary. For Henry, the heaviness or lightness of flesh can be felt only because it is capable of feeling itself, and a worldly body - the strict concept we all have in mind when we speak of a worldly body - is not so capable, even if it can be assigned a weight value. For Falque, heaviness or lightness can be felt only by a flesh that also weighs something, and thus also bears the properties of a worldly body. Otherwise, how can we say that is its own heaviness? I think such a question motivates Falque's objections. The phenomenology of incorporation, and not only of incarnation, has its own legitimacy, but seems impossible if the phenomenological distinction of flesh is not first admitted. Of course, we can question whether kilos, to use one of Falque's examples, is an essential characteristic of the body, or only of its relation to the earth. The physicist will speak of gravity, but not flesh, and nothing keeps gravity from serving as a total principle of explanation in a so-called "unified theory".

In Henry's perspective, I do not experience the "weight" of my body, which strictly speaking is an abstract measure. Rather, I experience, as a resisting continuum, the resistance of the body I am; and I experience fatigue in my effort to overcome it. A worldly body, from this angle, experiences no such resistance or fatigue, but friction and entropy. Moreover, the fatigue of my flesh is not fatigue at a distance, but my own proper exhaustion. If the weight of my flesh is felt, it is felt because my flesh feels it in itself, not because it senses it at a distance, as a sensed body. I can always form the intention of the object "weight," assign it to my body, which I also see, and appeal to my perception of the weight and the body to gather these two distinct objects together in a unity. But no fatigue is felt in such a perception, since fatigue is affective. I feel the fatigue, before I have a perception of it, and whether or not the thought of it ever crosses my mind. That is why, for Henry, the flesh is auto-impressional, without any reference to the sensed body.

In my own view, though I do not pretend to have fully demonstrated it here, I think Henry's position is necessary if Falque is to have what he wants, which is the body in its visible, material, incorporated reality - and to have this together with flesh - in a way that also supports a genuinely theological conception of incarnation and incorporation. Moreover, I think Falque gets a deeper version of what he wants if he embraces Henry's perspective, for only what transpires in flesh can account phenomenologically for what we "observe" in the living body, not only the phenomena of birth and growth in the mundane sense, but also of distress, sorrow or joy, which do not register visibly in the body at random, but account phenomenologically for, indeed explain, what so registers (the lines of distress in a face, tears of joy upon seeing a loved one, etc.).