I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no spirit in them.
Ezekiel 37:8
Flesh exists as a tissue generated from successive passages of time through vast regions of space. In this sense flesh is historical. Rendering the flesh from the point of its successive generation, we come to terms with one of its principal qualities: folded tissue. The soft tissue of flesh bears the mark, or trace, of successive states and is indicated in heritable folds of tissue. Bred within this tissue is an intelligibility which is only indirectly apparent to consciousness. In essence, flesh is the durable and intelligible content of productive activity. The very composition of the material element bears a specific intelligibility inherent to itself. This composition is generated through the projection of specific activities through immense stretches of time and space. In this sense it is spread out—intelligible within the immediacy of direct contact, and also through the congenital data bred into its very constitution. This intelligibility appears according to the Spinozan teaching: “The conatus with which each single thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.”[1]
The flesh—or the body in general—brings together two heterogenous realities into a coherent unity: the formal constitution of its material nature, palpable and teeming, and also a certain depth born within it, occupied by an intelligibility only latent to consciousness. These successive states—manifest in the flesh—are not fully lived out and do not necessarily manifest themselves in conscious life; they are inherited and carry within themselves latent content which may be expressed in life. They express themselves in terms of a cycloïdal ontogeny, through successive stages and a sequence of states, and are not explicitly apparent to consciousness in either an immediate or direct way. These data, present below the level of immediately lived perception, should not be excluded from a philosophical comprehension of the world. The very activity of successive production and sequential unfurling must necessarily be taken into consideration when coming to terms with the intelligibility of the flesh, just as Leibniz asserts for the world itself: “I call ‘World’ the whole succession and the whole agglomeration of all existent things…. For they all must necessarily be reckoned together as one world or, if you will, as one Universe.”[2]
Between the immediately given phenomena and its successive depth, a link can be found, and a bond may be made, serving to bridge together an embattled void within the phenomenological tradition: ontology. While the conflict between phenomenology and ontology is perhaps the founding springboard of all philosophical inquiry, bringing this dynamism into clear relief yet remains one of its most lofty tasks.Whether it be under the guise of intentionality, in the “immediate givenness” of conscious life (Husserl),[3] or in grasping phenomena in a scientific way where “everything about them” is treated by “by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly” (Heidegger),[4] the phenomenological tradition has fixed itself upon immediate and direct apprehension of phenomena; and here, right from the start, the school of phenomenology appears to occlude the indirect, the inapparent, the riddled depths—the elusive essence of the things themselves. But how can a philosophy devoted to the description of human experience systematically neglect—or bracket—these depths?
Emmanuel Falque seeks to explore these depths, even going so far to announce a “Descent into the Abyss” as he titles the first section of his, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb (2016). Here he first introduces the notion of the spread body, and it is precisely within the context of a critique of phenomenology’s limits that he brings this model into expression. He asserts that the phenomenological tradition has placed too much importance upon signifying, leading to illusory mirages which must be evacuated in order to truly render “the darkness in humankind, made up of passions and drives….”[5] This leads him to conclude, “the borders of Chaos are inaccessible through a phenomenological approach.” He reaches this conclusion by identifying two misleading tendencies of the phenomenological approach, firstly in the “constant recourse to lived experience”, and secondly “the constant recourse to the ideal of passivity as against force….”[6] These critiques serve to lay out the parameters for a paradigmatic approach, where one cannot be satisfied to understand the body either in term of its “lived” nature, nor in terms of its “extension” as an object in space: “The body spread out… is more than the simple extension of matter (the objectivity of the body) and more than pure selfhood of the flesh (subjectivity of the flesh).”[7] Here with the paradigm of the spread-body, Falque points towards “the Chaos that only our human biological body encounters: the animal and instinctual.”[8] He warns however, that “[t]he point is not simply to deploy some kind of physiology of passions, like a contemporary neurology—one that privileges the somatic over the psychic; it is important simply to understand, and to seek, what is at the foundation of our embodiedness….”; and this leads him to continue following “a line of thought based on the strength of the body…..”[9]
Falque continues to develop this notion of the spread body while further clarifying his critique of phenomenology, first focused upon the limit of phenomenality, especially in regards to “the night of phenomenology”, when “the possibility of meaningfulness is torn asunder” and not merely in terms of this ‘non-appearance’ as simply “the privation of a phenomenon that could or should otherwise appear” but more fundamentally as the impossibility of appearing altogether (the extra-phenomenal)[10]—, and secondly, he builds upon this theme in terms of questioning “the apriori of phenomenolization” in phenomenology and seeks to interrogate “this never interrogated apriori of manifestation and its possible signification.”[11] These themes coalesce in his book Nothing to It (2020), where he seeks to amend these limits in terms of a backlash of psychoanalysis in phenomenology, which he suggests will provide a means for orienting the psychic for its “descent into the abyss.”[12] This is accomplished in a return towards the unconscious of Freud—in the Id, and the chaos of the passions and drives—whose thought provides, ironically, a certain framework for delineating both the psychic from the somatic, placing the Id and its drives at the border where the psychic is anchored to the somatic, but also by recognizing that even these divisions can’t stand to hold as absolute. This in turns offers a means for recovering “the power of the ‘force’ that constitutes us.”[13] It is here in the Freudian drive that Falque finds the nexus where “rooted in a body that is not only flesh” there may be found a certain collusion with “force” that here serves to clarify the constitutive powers of the will, and how one may place the psyche in relation to it.
Embarking upon this descent into the depths, Falque follows the lead of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose unfinished master-work was fixed precisely on this lacuna in the Husserlian phenomenological paradigm. For Falque, this journey leads toward “the obscure point of what is below or beneath signification intended by the Freudian ‘unconscious’ and recovered in the Merleau-Ponty-Pontyan ‘raw nature’”, and his conclusion is that philosophers must “come back to the organic body and not be satisfied with any attempted escape from it into the psychic.”[14] While Falque continues the course set out by Merleau-Ponty, Falque minimizes the ontological elements so central to the initial endeavor. One way to understand the course being charted out is to look at perhaps the first and most complete representation of this later work, his The Visible and the Invisible (1961), where Merleau-Ponty frames a general critique of the Husserlian school of phenomenology:
It is necessary to take up again and develop the… latent intentionality which is the intentionality within being. That is not compatible with ‘phenomenology,’ that is, with an ontology that obliges whatever is not nothing to present itself to the consciousness …. It is necessary to take as primary, not the consciousness … with its distinct intentional threads, but the vortex …, the spatializing-temporalizing vortex (which is flesh and not consciousness facing a noema).[15]
Falque’s decision to approach this critique from the camp of the masters of suspicion (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx)[16]certainly has its value, though it also has a certain limitation which itself must be overcome. Falque finds in Merleau-Ponty a route to identify “a new mode of phenomenality, or rather another manner of describing our darkness.”[17] While Falque certainly has justification in taking this task and following the course set out by Merleau-Ponty in regards to a certain depth psychology, or a phenomenology of the underground, there is a certain tendency in his thinking that rejects the ontological impetus which had driven much of Merleau-Ponty’s final endeavor in the first place. In radicalizing the Freudian aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s thought (and injecting a strong Nietzschean element), he seems to overlook if not detract its ontological character. In one way Falque could be critiqued for a certain romanticism of the flesh where he seeks to subtract any ontological value of the flesh while at the same time to stabilize it in a place at antipodes to the psychic, tending to strip it of any inherent intelligibility while substantializing within the flesh a perpetual chaos and spontaneity, without any place for a subsisting order or structure—save for a super-added theological account. It remains to describe more clearly how the intelligible nature of the flesh may be signified without idealization or a philosophically unjustified leap into theology, and also to better describe the relation between the fundamental intelligibility of the flesh with human consciousness. It does not follow from the unconscious nature of the body that it would then lack any intelligibility; and further, the unconscious nature of the body would in no way negate any structural or organizing principle within it (even if operative at an unconscious level), which Falque’s treatment of the body would seem to suggest.
These tendencies within Falque’s treatment of the flesh—here characterized as a certain romanticization—are hedged against in his recent essay In Flesh and Bones, where he introduces the concept of the corps praxique, in the turn towards the “‘real’ or ‘effective’ (wirklich) world,” and the effort to “rediscover the objective” by means of praxis.[18] This is a necessary step in order to assuage the antagonism towards intelligibility which his thought tends to take. This is also a promising aspect to develop in light of his notion of the ethics of the spread body, particularly if it could be brought into conjunction with the research on “the facility of mystical theology” in his treatment of the praxis experimentalis involved in an “aesthetic operation” where “the mystical takes over from the theological, the theological from the philosophical, the philosophical from the mathematical.”[19] Much progress could be made if this chain could be developed in light of the intelligibility of the flesh, where the material subsistence of the body (or bodies in general), can be viewed in terms of common structural patterns of organization rooted in mathematics, or in an intelligible ontological substrate that is practically viable. The formal distinctions Falque makes between the psychic and the somatic are helpful, but only insofar as they show the fundamental integrity of composed beings; it seems worthwhile to try and link this chain, brought out in the context of effective practice, with his notion of the spread body, particularly when expressed in the following terms:
…I am being held and maintained in life via ‘organic forces within me’ that make me and render me alive, neither only via my matter or my hylē nor exclusively via my spirit or my psychē but via a ‘body’ or a soma through which the whole of myself is expressed and hence also generated.[20]
I would contend that such a maneuver towards the powers of the bodily nature must also lead to a more fundamental backlash of the traditions of French spiritualism, one of whose primary concerns could be considered the very question of “force.”[21] Here phenomenology finds itself overcome by such figures as Henri Bergson, Maurice Blondel, Felix Ravaisson, Maine de Biran et al., and here perhaps finally with the traditions of Neo-Platonism. Falque recognizes the contribution of a number of these figures in some ways,[22] but his emphasis upon the école du soupçon seems to preclude their contributions. It must be said that the full thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s later thought is more in the direction of Blondel’s ontology and Henri Bergson’s vitalism, than in the radicalization of Nietzsche’s, or even Freud’s, thought, to which Falque seems so earnestly committed. One missed opportunity in this drive towards the unconscious depths is in the clarification of the intelligible nature of the flesh, which perhaps may be brought out here in a major challenge that this tradition of French spiritualism poses to philosophy, and which seems so necessary at this particular moment in time, found in the recovery of a certain supplément d’âme:
Bergson calls for an enlarging of the soul [lesupplément d’âme] as a precise requirement for the modern industrial society. Technical progress has disproportionately increased the material capacities of modern man…. Consequently, if we do not want technical progress to serve only those men who are able to implement advanced scientific approaches and increase the difference between rich states and poor peoples, a counterweight is necessary: it is the ‘supplément d’âme’ in the sense Bergson speaks of. In order to solve the problems of growth, there must be an ethical reference, a concern for justice, a spiritual impetus.[23]
Such models as the spread body can meaningfully contribute to this question, but this concept needs to broaden its scope to help render a better description of the intelligibility of the flesh, to clarify the dynamics and activities involved in the operations of the flesh, their relation to human cognition, and how they all relate to patterns of human behavior. This association can be approached in terms of the ascent of data, and the dawning of the age of Artificial Intelligence, as flesh is itself a log of productive activity which is not only intelligible, but hyper intelligible, so much so that the philosopher must have something to say on the matter; this becomes apparent with the manifestation of virtual lives, virtual realities or even virtual bodies or virtual flesh, perhaps serving to constitute a kind of psychological double, perhaps even an anti-soul, which persists in digital space and is not only a unique extension of one’s own personal life, but becomes a very active element in ones lived experience.
The Intelligibility of the Bodily Nature and the Spectre of Artificial Intelligence
The limitations which have beset the human mind for millennia are now being overcome in an unprecedented manner—memory, analytic processing power, and the simultaneous synthesis of various points of information, etc., are all just now coming to be mastered, as computing technologies can now record and transmit a wide array of information with perfect memory, immense collections of data can be processed and immediately analyzed, and vast quantities of information immediately synthesized. The aforementioned processes lay out the basic modes of a new operative force in human life: artificial intelligence. Through the power of automation, AI has the power to substitute capital for labor, resulting in massive inequalities between wealthy firms and the common lot of humanity. The monopolization of the intelligibility of the flesh has resulted in massive gains for certain sectors of society, and the ongoing obliteration of others.
This situation provides the means for a certain reciprocity, where the basic features of this new AI and its modus operandi help lead towards a precise articulation and meaningful approach for understanding the basic features of human experience. The basis, or even motive power, of AI is found in the virtual reserve of human data, consisting in nothing other than the trace,—or the “exhaust”—of human behavior. What industrial capitalism once claimed: nature, forests, rivers, oilfields, human labor, etc., is now in the age of AI being substantially overshadowed in value by this digital reserve of human data, now being rendered to the point where ‘private human experience’—human interiority itself—is now a raw ‘material’ to be exploited.[24] All of this has changed the basic way humans must think of their place in the world. Developing the frayed threads of a philosophy of the flesh, or of nature, or of matter in general, helps provide a useful framework for coming to human terms for how this new technological paradigm can be understood in reference to the human being. Emmanuel Falque’s development of a certain ethics of the spread body offers a constructive model to help address and better describe the stakes of this new power This goes to confirm a remark made by Anne Davenport in light of Falque’s thought, that indeed “phenomenologists might also have very helpful suggestions about the ethical aspects of AI.”[25]
[1]Baruch de Spinoza, “Proposition 7,” Ethics, in Spinoza: Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis / Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 283.
[2]Leibniz, “Theodicy, I, 8,” in Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard (Bibliobazaar, 2007), 131. Translation modified.
[3] Edmund Husserl, “§68. The task of a pure explication of consciousness as such: the universal problem of intentionality,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 233.
[4]Martin Heidegger, “§7. The Phenomenological Method of Investigation,” in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward S. Robinson (Blackwell, 1967), 59.
[5] Emmanuel Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, trans. George Hughes (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016), 15.
[15] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Note from April, 1960,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible; Followed by Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 244. See also my own response to this question, “At the Confluence of Phenomenology and Non-Phenomenology: Maurice Blondel and Emmanuel Falque,” in Transforming the Theological Turn: Phenomenology with Emmanuel Falque, ed. Martin Koci and Jason W. Alvis (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020).
[16] Here Falque also takes a lead from Paul Ricœur with his école du soupçon, as described in his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (Yale University Press, 1970).
[17] Emmanuel Falque, "Le «spiritualism incarné» de Maurice Merleau-Ponty," in Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, Le supplément d'âme ou le renouveau du spiritualisme, De visu (Paris: Hermann, 2016), 228.
[18] Emmanuel Falque, "In Flesh and Bones," Crossing: The INPR Journal I (2020): 23-24.
[19] Emmanuel Falque, "The All‐Seeing: Fraternity and Vision of God in Nicholas of Cusa," Modern theology 35, no. 4 (2019): 765, 82, 84.
[20] Emmanuel Falque, “Toward and Ethics of the Spread Body,” in Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought, ed. Sarah Horton, et al., trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 101-2.
[21] Dominique Janicaud, Une généalogie du spiritualisme français (La Haye: M. Nijhoff, 1969), 6.
[22] See Falque’s “A Phenomenology of the Underground,” in Emmanuel Falque, The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates, trans. Bradley B. Onishi and Lucas McCracken (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), 49; and also the aforementioned "Le «spiritualism incarné» de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,"in, Le supplément d'âme ou le renouveau du spiritualisme.
[23] Jean-Louis Viellard-Baron, “Introduction,” in Le supplément d'âme ou le renouveau du spiritualisme, 7-8. Cf. Henri Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris : PUF, 1941), 330. « Or, dans ce corps démesurément grossi, l’âme reste ce qu’elle était, trop petite maintenant pour le remplir, trop faible pour le diriger. D’où le vide entre lui et elle. D’où les redoutables problèmes sociaux, politiques, internationaux, qui sont autant de définitions de ce vide et qui, pour le combler, provoquent aujourd’hui tant d’efforts désordonnés et inefficaces : il y faudrait de nouvelles réserves d’énergie potentielle, cette fois morale. Ne nous bornons donc pas à dire, comme nous le faisions plus haut, que la mystique appelle la mécanique. Ajoutons que le corps agrandi attend un supplément d’âme, et que la mécanique exigerait une mystique. »
[24] For a remarkable account on this subject see, Shoshana Zuboff, "Big Other and the Rise of Instrumentarian Power," in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile books, 2019), 378. She describes this process in striking terms: “[it] exiles us from our own behavior. It severs our insides from our outsides, our subjectivity and interiority from our observable actions.”
[25] Anne Davenport, "Falque’s Fraternal Finitude," Research in Phenomenology 49, no. 2 (2019): 279.
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