Notes on the Human Body

There is a body that moves through the world, a body that is the bearer of all sensations, the zero point of all movement. More than one object among many, we take it in good faith that the body is the absolute here, a privileged phenomenal thing that occupies this known planet, we call “Earth.” The human body is recognised as more-than-a-thing through the power of sensation. It feels its way through the world, thinking in advance of cognition. At the same time, it is raw biology, a physio-chemical unity in action. Flesh, bone, blood—this melancholy hum of life. The body is nature. Merleau-Ponty in Nature: “Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity” (208). Disquiet is the result of this thought. Why? Because human life sediments itself in the patina of arrogance, refusing to contend with its prepersonal materiality—my body, no longer me. As such, phenomenology must become bio-phenomenology as it maps this unfolding of life within life.

Where am I in this flesh-world? Clearly I am not here, have yet to arrive. “The concern is to grasp humanity first as another manner of being a body” (Ibid.). How does the human body find itself? There are other bodies around me, some similar, others different in their silence. How does the human body distinguish itself from other biological bodies, each of which plays a part in this umwelt? It would be arbitrary to assign one particular element—reason, memory, self-consciousness—that gives “life” to the human body. But this is what Max Scheler appears to do. Scheler talks of “spirit,” by which he means he the capacity for an affective relationship to the world—love, kindness, wonder, bliss, anxiety, despair, etc. Thanks to spirit, so he argues, the human body is “existentially liberated from the organic world.” For Scheler, the dignity of the human body is evident through its ability to transform the world. Even the body itself becomes objectified in the human gaze, such that philosophical detachment is afforded. The animal, meanwhile, “is involved too deeply in the actualities of life,” a melancholy state that deprives it of a genuine “self.” Thus Scheler joins Heidegger in assigning a loss of world to non-human bodies. Not being able to sense the world “as world,” the non-human body remains “immersed in [the world] ecstatically.” Scheler’s move toward spirit is too advance, too ready to confer an ethical value upon the term “human.” After all, the impression one gets from reading him is no less different than reading Hegel: spirit is the teleology of human life, and the physical body—this flesh—is incidental to that project.

Scheler is premature in his commitment to spirit. The problem faced is that he speaks of the body on the one hand, and the spirit as descending into that object. Merleau-Ponty suggests an alternative in the form of a “wrapping of a body-object around itself, or rather, a truce of metaphors” (209). This is the brute, wild being that Merleau-Ponty will speak of as being prior to the personal body, with its dramas and affective states. It is the body that coincides with the late rather than the early Merleau-Ponty, the body as belonging to the flesh. Already this incipient body is involved in the world, already directional in its brute structure: “But the eye is entirely external finality made for what is absent made for a future vision” (209). There is a temporal duration to the biological body. More than movement, it occupies a bodily schema, projecting and introjecting the world it finds itself in. This is “the miracle of sensation” Merleau-Ponty talks about, which he will later identify with the libidinal body.

The Animal is Silent

The animal is silent, and we do not share the same language. Who does the animal speak to in his silence? To those who share in this language, which is invisible to the human being? The animal’s body is full of pathos and expression, its eyes and ears caught up in the texture of the world, yet its voice is mute. There is a silence that takes place with the animal, but a silence through which communication is dependent. Heidegger will speak of this silence in terms of poverty, an inability to see the world as world. A line is drawn in Heidegger’s analysis, a refusal to meet the animal face-to-face. For him, the silence of animal is an opportunity for Dasein to define its ontology, a model that is created from the inverse ontology of the animal. The animal’s silence is worldless, a life with no no existence, a pure facticity. But melancholy intervenes in this silence, a void opens in the expression of animal. Heidegger doesn’t acknowledge it, but it’s there, wedged between the gaze of the human and the animal. After all, is one ever alone when in the company of animals? Or, in the muteness of the animal, isn’t there already an imperative to be heard? The animal becomes an invitation to an unhomely sadness, in whose eerie presence the intimacy between human and animal is amplified.

The pressing question, and one that Alice Kuzniar asks in her outstanding book on the topic, is: Whose sadness is at stake in the animal’s uncanny silence? Whose yearning takes place in the void between animal and human? Asking this question, the human becomes detached, and so alienation and philosophy ensue, the products of what Max Scheler calls “spirit.” Distance, detachment: the world as world, but also as other. In turn, human life ceases to be a member of this planet in the solar system. For the human, the otherness of the animal, with its silent vigilance over the world, becomes the Heideggerian void, a boundary from which no two ontologies can occupy the same time and space. The animal’s silence is conceived in the human’s spirit, a silence that is as much metaphysical as it is from the voice of the animal itself.