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II. The Evolution of Body Concept

Although modern man’s attention is often considered to be reoriented from spiritual and intellectual aspects towards the bodily aspects of the human (and trans- or posthuman) condition, the body reveals impressive complexity. It had been explored from early antiquity until today; in biology, the medical sciences, philosophy, art, and religion. Autocreative and technopoietic activities addressed human embodiment in its all micro and macro dimensions. Revisiting body concepts from the basic to the most complex allows one to make the body’s trans- and posthumanist ‘evolution’ more comprehensive. However, although the concepts listed above suggest the state-of-the-art in the living and lived body-related expertise has already broken the body’s opaqueness and became “transparent” to technological and medical imagery tools,¹⁴⁶ a lot of open-ended questions are still emerging, such as the following one: Do our bodies really evolve according to the invented schemes of the posthumanist scholars? Is it just body concepts and theorizations that evolve across disciplines and explorative or experimental human practices? What position does an embodied self have today “between animal and angel, past and future, condemnation and redeeming?”¹⁴⁷ (zwischen Tier und Engel, zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft, zwischen Verdammnis und Erlösung)? Let us revisit and revise the body concepts necessary to provide at least a provisional answer.

1. Objective Material Reality, Brute Body, Fleshness, Corporeity

The term ‘brute body’ means objective materiality or simple corporeity. Nowadays, the sense of this originally Aristotelian category reflects itself in a fleshy “container for the mind”¹⁴⁸ or physical “hardware in which cognition is realized.”¹⁴⁹ To Aristotle, brute body was not even a container, but “merely ←51 | 52→substratum, indeterminate,” a “material cause of something else.”¹⁵⁰ Brute body is more than an aggregation of physical molecules, but less than a colony of cells, which, for example, make up a tissue. This term, used in technical and scientific contexts, is completely depersonalized, desubjected, deindividualized, amorphous, as it belongs to material objectivity along with dead matter, natural or artificially synthetized, mechanically – and liberally – used and reused, replaced, transformed, annihilated, etc., thus, instrumentalized. Applying such terminology to the human body implies radical reductionism and dehumanization, as illustrated by Gärtner’s “container” with no individual, or even human, features. But thinking such brute materiality in the form of a container-like exteriority would also be thinkable for radical idealism and spiritualism, dualism, materialism, and naturalism. The brute matter seems like an all-purpose, universal category, for it is “indeterminate,” plastic, easy to shape, manipulate, measure, quantificate, and distribute. “In fact ‘matter’ in the sense of ‘body’ becomes more rational an object than ‘spirit.’ ”¹⁵¹ Applied to the human body, the brute matter becomes material to shape and re-shape liberally, with rational and technological tools. It is just a Cartesian “res extensa or external reality,”¹⁵² and Husserl’s objective corporeity: Leibkörper, Raumkörperlichkeit, Gegebenheit, “physischer Dingleib,” “reales, substantiell–kausales Ding.”¹⁵³ According to Aristotle, a formal cause is shaping the brute physical matter in analogy with marble or bronze: “This is a clear case where form denotes the essential aspect while the matter is a necessary condition for representation but is more or less interchangeable. The same form could be embodied in a different lump of bronze, or even in a different material altogether.”¹⁵⁴

2. Living Matter and Soma Organikon

Every living being is built not just of solid, amorphous flesh matter (fleshness, according to Merleau-Ponty), but has natural, “organic equipment”¹⁵⁵ which is to ←52 | 53→be understood as an organized aggregation¹⁵⁶ of cells living together as a colony, or making up specific tissues (cells of the same type and function connected together), organs, and, finally, an organism as a whole. There is life in cells in terms of ongoing biochemical and physiological processes defining living matter (zoe). A single somatic cell is a microcosm with its own ‘self,’ as Jacky Stacey shows. “The cells are personified,” and a particular cell may change its identity and endanger the life of the whole body or an embodied individual.¹⁵⁷ “Both conventional and alternative accounts represent the cell as a metaphor of the self. In the scientific accounts cell are given individual identities: like us, they desire, they fear, they have intentions, they triumph, and they are satisfied.”¹⁵⁸

An organic body of a single living being is made up of organs, and organs are made up of living cells organized in tissues. Unlike the brute body, “an organic body is the necessary material for the presence of an active soul.”¹⁵⁹ To Jonas, who was inspired by the concept of soma organikon from Aristotelian philosophy, even the most primitive organisms manifest some kind of an individual vegetative ‘soul.’ “Not just any amorphous matter is a potentially living body, but a very special organization of materials in very particular proportions, shapes and conditions, which represent the potential site of life, i.e., the soma organikon – something that is articulated in the mode of organs or which as a whole is an interrelated system of instrumentalities. Soul is that which assures the actualization of that potential.”¹⁶⁰

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Soma organikon was also explored by Herophilus of Alexandria, Soranus, Galen, etc. due to the hierarchy of organs, their functions, and their interrelations within the human organic body. While the Aristotelian tradition claiming the heart to be the seat of human soul was revised,¹⁶¹ Herophilus “places the dominant principle of the ‘soul’ in the ventricles of the brain.”¹⁶² Galen and Herophilus described the nervous system as the origin of motion and as a kind of “power which Galen himself defines as a ‘soul’, i.e., vital force, for all the motion of muscles and nerves ceases when soul departs.”¹⁶³ With ancient physicians the nervous system and the psyche met together and become to a unified, central organ within the human organism. Mapping the latter, they determined organs with life-supporting roles. The liver, pulmonary system, and “the heart as the centre of the blood system and the connection between the heart and the pulse-beats”¹⁶⁴ were considered as principal organs. Charged with six hundred vivisections and embryosections enumerated by Celsius and condemned by Tertulian, Herophilus contributed to the organic body definition as an integral, hierarchically organized, living totality.

The body’s first organizational principle was considered to be incorporated in two central organs, namely the heart and brain, and called hegemonicon: “One says the heart, another the meninges, and one that the brain contains the hegemonikon of the soul.”¹⁶⁵ “The hegemonikon was therefore regarded as not being dependent on a single or fixed location,”¹⁶⁶ but flexible. Interestingly, its proponents were divided in two parties: “those who maintained that the hegemonikon was found in the head (encephalocentrists) and those who argued that it was located in the heart or its immediate vasculature (cardiocentrists). Apart from Galen, on the encephalocentric side can be placed, among others, Ptolemy, Herophilus and Erasistratus, Plato (…) and certain of the Presocratics.”¹⁶⁷

Sappho was the pioneer of the soma organikon’s wholeness, complexity, and integrity. She found the archaic, preorganic concept of sṓma as “body in pieces”¹⁶⁸ ←54 | 55→inappropriate. Sappho’s body concept assumes interconnections between organs as parts of an organism and morphemes as parts of a body. She was one of the first to recognize the continuity between the external and internal, the somatic and mental (experiential, emotional and intellectual) aspects of organic life. Distinguishing these aspects, a beholder’s perception must not destroy the wholeness as it would be typical to monism and dualism. In a living organic being, there is “a knot of being” (der Knoten des Seins), which subverts dualism (zerhaut den Dualismus). Materialism and idealism attempt to untie the knot by pulling it to their respective sides – however, “in vain.” According to Jonas’ holistic ontology of organism “part of an organic body exists only in the whole as a part of the whole (…) Only as parts of the functioning whole do they remain what they are.”¹⁶⁹

3. Organic Identity and Individuality

To Jonas, an organism as “the identity that constitutes itself” shows “the ceaseless creativity of self-continuation.” It is “a constant challenge to mechanical nature,”¹⁷⁰ “open to interference, in its delicate balance of functions, which is effective only as a whole, [it is] vulnerable, and mortally so in its centre.”¹⁷¹ Thus “the existence of the organic individual is that of function and not of substance.”¹⁷² Jonas is convinced an individual organism maintains itself: and “in this polarity of self and world, of internal and external (…) the basic situation of freedom with all its daring and distress is potentially complete.”¹⁷³

The “initially problematical nature of life”¹⁷⁴ is that of every single living organism. Beyond its unique and finite existence, organic life is going to strive for immortality, however, not the immortality of ancient metaphysics. Metaphysical ←55 | 56→immortality “is here replaced by the immortality of the germ-plasm as a continuous existence in itself.”¹⁷⁵

What makes the organism an individual? It is not only its unique phenotype, but its self-maintenance, internal homeostasis, intentionality, functionality, and ecological openness, i.e., an intelligent interplay with the environment, and “inwardness.” The latter represents “the outward” constantly interacting with it or using its resources. According to Jonas, that activity is “one form of the self-transcendence of organic being. (…) The transcendence, the being a self by going beyond the self, is ever more elaborate and opens up new horizons as we proceed to the higher forms, and the horizons are always horizons of transcendence, not sticking to the mere empty self-identity of a material body (…) Organic individuality and organic identity are themselves teleological facts (…) Therefore, process character, transcendence, identity by means of change, goal-directedness in terms of teleological structure of being are all one and inseparable in the ontology of the living thing.”¹⁷⁶ Jonas’ philosophical biology radically raises the value or even the dignity of living organisms, which originates from their intrinsic teleology (whereas it is obvious to him that the molecular particles of brute matter do not show any). “For the complex organic parts (e.g., cells in a multi-cellular organism) (…) the fact is that not only their membership but their existence itself is organic, i.e. (…) a product of the teleology of the whole, which therefore cannot be derived from theirs.”¹⁷⁷ Jonas’ reassessment of a living organism’s intrinsic value occurs on a definitory and descriptive level, beyond anthropomorphism and Cartesian reductionism. Underlying wholeness and individuality as core features of a living organism, Jonas provides a strong argument against the politicization and technicization of human and animal bodies: “for in real corporeal individuals the way in which the whole unites the parts and the parts form the whole is in all major respects diametrically opposed to what we found to be the case in a social whole.”¹⁷⁸

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What are the implications of Jonas’ plea for organically invented individuality, in particular for humans? As I explained elsewhere¹⁷⁹ why an “Organbank” (allograft commercialization) would reduce human tissues and organs to a lower category of ordinary things¹⁸⁰ (Bereich bloßer Dinge), here my only purpose is only to highlight that, according to the reasons articulated above, a person has an “unconditional right to one’s own organs and one’s own body” but “nobody has the right to another person’s body.”¹⁸¹

According to Jonas, organ donation and reception presupposes the active cooperation of the donor’s functioning organism as a source of wholesome organs. However, such interindividual cooperation is not just about the exchangeability and replaceability of tissues, and organs, including prosthetics and other kinds of crosscorporeal bodies. Jonas’ argument emerges not from the artificialism vs. naturalism controversy, but from individuality and identity as already prioritized by a living organism as a postdualist conceptualized whole: “The individuality of an organic being is self-centered (selbstzentriert, egozentrisch) and turned away from the rest of the world which is external to it (…). The whole integrates itself. (…) Sameness means self-determination (Selbigkeit ist selbstbestimmend, Selbständigkeit) (…). An individuality which lasts because of a creative process is a ‘living organism’ and not a ‘part of the world.’ ”¹⁸² However, being an individual organism does not imply isolation and full independence from “socio-material environments.”¹⁸³ Intended or not, the neuroscientists repeatedly confirmed the key role of organic homeostasis¹⁸⁴ and sameness for the conscious and autobiographical self of human beings. “The basic form of consciousness, core consciousness is placed in the context of life regulation; it is seen as yet another level of biological processing aimed at ensuring the homeostatic balance of a living ←57 | 58→organism; and the representation of the current organism state within somato-sensing structures is seen as critical to its development.”¹⁸⁵

Serious, sometimes indefinable interdependencies (but not ‘by-play’ factors) must be involved when Jonas claims that cloning an individual organic body is impossible because its actual shape, condition, and character are determined not only by their genome which, unlike the organic body, can be cloned. “A body as a whole is so individualized and is so much myself that it remains unique and belonging to my identity in the same way in which the brain, fingerprints, or immunological reactions belong to it.”¹⁸⁶ It is not restricted to a sum of particular organs, properties, functions, and skills. It is thoroughly holistic, and that is how it should be perceived and respected by others. “My identity is the identity of the whole organism (…) even when the higher functions which have a seat in the brain have stopped working. How else can one fall in love with a woman and not only her brain? To love the expression of someone’s face? A delicate silhouette?”¹⁸⁷

4. Own Body

It was Aquinas who pioneered the concept of one’s own individual body, which anticipated modern phenomenological approaches. In his polemic against St. Paul’s body-aversive, spiritualist doctrine, Aquinas claims that “any separation of soul from body goes against its nature and is imposed on it. (…) soul is not the whole human being, only part of one: my soul is not me.”¹⁸⁸ In other words, to Aquinas, my soul is not a whole and true me as it was in Pauline tradition: “For Saint Paul (of Tarsus) the true Self is the new man ‘called’ by a personal God, hence created by a vocation; he does not fall under the yoke of the Senses like the old Adam since the new life is both in and out of the world, manifested by his love.”¹⁸⁹ Aquinas initiated the first serious discussion on the embodied personal self. His statement is clear, and refers to its Aristotelian origins: “So if soul is deprived ←58 | 59→of body, it will exist imperfectly as long as this situation lasts.”¹⁹⁰ Although the refusal of reincarnation as incompatible with the resurrection dogma was the precise background for that discussion, Aquinas is to be recognized as a pioneer of the Western concept of one’s own body and embodied selfhood in at least two phenomenological aspects: namely as one’s own–hence–individual body, and as an embodiment inseparable from mental and spiritual lifeforms.

In the Zen and Shinto tradition before its Westernization, as Hiroyuki Noguchi puts it, the formation of the body concept, its individuality, and identity, looked rather different. A meditative treatment of the Japanese body provides several steps to “switch from mental concentration to bodily concentration” in order to “separate the self from the body,” and finally to “encounter the pure body” belonging “only to nature itself: the body ‘as is’. To encounter the body ‘as is’ means that all sensations of the flesh disappear. What emerges instead, is a body of mist or air-like quality.”¹⁹¹ Its new nature “is one of total passivity; it can fluctuate with the true sense of being alive.”¹⁹² However, the life experienced is not that of an individual living organism, “but the life that flows through all beings in a world where everything is alive.”¹⁹³ Opening up to the life cycle should nourish and strengthen the individual life’s potentials, including the mind’s creativity. That practice is more of a therapeutic than of a sacral, esoteric, or celebrative character.

In modern Western phenomenology, one’s own irreplaceable body often appears in twofold meaning, such as to have the own body (however, not as a physical object, but, rather, “as a work of art”)¹⁹⁴ and to be one’s own body. The first meaning still betrays a Cartesian externalist, objectivist, and mechanical touch, although exteriority remains one of the most important body aspects in phenomenology. Ownership is also found in Husserl, as he claims “my physical body to be preoriginally mine” (mein Leib als das ursprünglichst meine).¹⁹⁵ My body was widely explored by Merleau-Ponty who claims, “I am my body, I am my life” and leaves behind us, “once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy” as well as the “traditional dichotomy of body and consciousness.”¹⁹⁶ ←59 | 60→Can my body cease to be mine? Having agreed with Jonas that “nobody has the right to another person’s body,” it is easy to recall a number of situations in which a subject is confronted with her ‘disembodiment’ or “closure of the self from the body.”¹⁹⁷ Bettelheim and Giddens refer to body and self dissociation reported by victims of tremendous horror in death camps. Biopolitical and disciplinary discourse powers may deprive persons of their inalienable right to their body. A changed feeling of the body and unusual existential feelings accompany a number of psychiatric disorders. In schizophrenia, one’s own body may disappear or appear as if it is alien body.¹⁹⁸ At the same time, phenomenology teaches “that the bodily self is a non-thing [Nicht-Ding], which is never ‘bodily present’ [leibhaft gegenwärtig], as things are.”¹⁹⁹ Furthermore, body shaming is explained as “out of the body” feeling while the latter is dominated by the oppressive body narratives or images.²⁰⁰ “The body becomes the focus of power and this power (…) subjects it to the internal discipline of self-control,”²⁰¹ which provides the right to own body with social sanctions. This conventionalized body was told to become our social skin, typical for modernity. In her book entitled The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice, Annemarie Mol shows human embodiment and bodily identity (including disease, pathologies, etc.) to ←60 | 61→be “done,” “enacted,” constructed or deconstructed by medical practices, social representations, biopolitical and normative discourses: “The vagina for instance. This organ is no longer capable, all by itself, of turning someone into a woman. A lot more is required to do womanhood: specific styles of talking, ways of walking, dressing, addressing.”²⁰²

5. Experiential Body

Husserl explored both the objective and subjective (Ich-Organ) aspects of one’s own body in terms of phenomenological, i.e., experience-based, synthesis. According to his analysis in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität II, the conscious I learns to identify her body as one’s own body (soma) on the basis of experiencing the latter as experienced from the first-person perspective (ich lerne meine selbsterfahrene Leiblichkeit, mein Leib untrennbar vom Somatologischen, in geistlicher Beziehung zum Ich-Organ). However, the identification process occurs in a mediated way, i.e., by means of another bodily organ (erst auf dem Umweg über den Andern).²⁰³

Experiencing bodily reality (corporeality), identifying and recognizing it subjectively as ‘my’ personal body would both meet and transgress the criterion of one’s own body. That criterion does not predetermine one’s own body to be limited to natural or actual body landscape. It also applies, e.g., to lost organs and phantom limbs still identified or even experienced as integral parts of my body landscape, and a part of my body’s functionality. With the experiential body, a novel level of body concept will be achieved. It transcends the ‘preoriginally mine’ corporeality and its limited, egological ontologies to finally acknowledge “that a human body is not a discrete entity ending at the skin, and that material ←61 | 62→technologies constantly disorder our boundaries,”²⁰⁴ opening them to various kinds of somatechnics, and crosscorporeality. However, before addressing these new phenomena, a basic experiential body approach needs to be introduced.

To humans and probably also to a large number of animals, one’s own body is a lived, sensed, and experienced body on the one hand, and living/sensing body with a huge sensorium on the other. Husserl described this,²⁰⁵ in a manner impressive to contemporary scholars combining phenomenology and embodied mind theory, as follows: “When my hand touches the table and when I pay attention to the very touching, I am, after all, conscious of an experiencing organ and not of an experienced organ.”²⁰⁶ According to Zahavi, “the relation between the touching and the touched is reversible, since the touching is touched, and the touched is touching. It is this reversibility that demonstrates that the interiority and the exteriority are different manifestations of the same (…) Thus, it is exactly the unique subject-object status of the body, the remarkable inter-play between ipseity and alterity characterizing double-sensation, which permits me to recognize and experience other embodied subjects.”²⁰⁷

The body’s sensory dispositions offer plentifulness of impressions and experiences used as a measure of human wellbeing and happiness. It is not only curiosity; the idea of progress and human hubris accelerate the development of technologies and the so-called human enhancement across ages, beyond askesis, commitment, and humility. Being situated in and belonging to the world as an exploratory, agential, and interactive individual and experiencing one’s body and through one’s body, which can be quantified “according to the disposition of my limbs”²⁰⁸ and the functionality of my body. Even in the case of passive touch, our body remains engaged and world-directed. My experiential embodiment provides “non-conceptual feelings of the body” such as exteroception and proprioception, which “constitute a background [existential] sense of belonging to the world and a sense of reality,”²⁰⁹ and objects’ presence and absence, though in some general aspect my body is “an impersonal being.”²¹⁰ However, there are several special types ←62 | 63→of extended or even ecological experiential body which are groundbreaking for understanding how bodily identity nowadays is evolving, transgressing boundaries, and expanding over various bodily terra incognita-like territories.

6. “… Like Organs of One Single Intercorporeality” ²¹¹

“… what Husserl is referring to when he writes that the possibility of sociality presupposes a certain intersubjectivity of the body,”²¹² initiates the phenomenological discussion around intercorporeality: interhuman,²¹³ biological/environmental, extended,²¹⁴ and technologically improved. That discussion is crucial to understand a series of most recent conceptualizations of the human embodiment in terms of extended, crosscorporeal, ecological, and hybrid embodiment. These concepts radically expand one’s own body’s ontology and establish a new epistemological framework for defining embodiment today.

It is Maurice Merleau–Ponty’s theory that expands the old frame the most because being one’s own body (one’s “natural self”) cannot be disconnected from objective and intersubjective reality. This might be Merleau-Ponty’s core ontological claim; however, notions of corporeality and intercorporeality should not be reduced to materiality and mechanical connections. Rather, “to be a body, is to be tied to a certain world (…); our body is not primarily in space: it is of it,”²¹⁵ it has the world, as Merleau–Ponty claims. His claim sounds different than Heidegger’s Dasein as “in–der–Welt–sein” but it essentially connotes a similar sense of an experiential field shared by subjects, thus, intersubjective and social. For sharing something with others requires spatiality; the intercorporeality bridges the gap between me vs. the world around, inner vs. outer, immanent vs. transcendent. According to Merleau–Ponty, “the world is wholly inside and I am ←63 | 64→wholly outside myself.”²¹⁶ Beyond “inside and outside” there is a “living cohesion” and a continuous, phenomenal “field of experience.” Intercorporeality does not require shaping linear interconnections from subject to object and subject to subject. In my intercorporeal condition, Merleau–Ponty clarifies, “I am neither here nor there, neither Peter nor Paul; I am in no way distinguishable from an ‘other’ consciousness, since we are immediately in touch with the world and since the world is, by definition, unique, being the system in which all truths cohere.”²¹⁷ That kind of coherence corresponds with Heidegger’s “familiarity” and “being with,”²¹⁸ but expands them as intelligible and not experiential relations rooted in the reality of all inter-subjects. It is, therefore, not only intellectual but also a preoriginal corporeal “Miteinander-sein” beyond ontological dualisms such as the Cartesian res cogitans vs. res extensa. It is to bridge the gap between “internal mind and external world,”²¹⁹ which was unacceptable to Heidegger. “The experience of being there is not a matter of being plonked into a [fixed or determined, E.N.] spatial location but of being practically situated in an interconnected web of purposes, an appreciation of which is inseparable from practical activity. We are not in the world like peas sitting passively in a pod [nor are we “thrown” in the world without having any control over our position, E.N.]. Our activities and our sense of being part of the world are inextricable; the world shows up as a space of practical, purposive possibilities that we are entwined with,” while to Heidegger, being–in–the–world was not a matter of intercorporeality, sharing and the “causal facilitation but of a tacit understanding that renders the world intelligible.”²²⁰ According to Merleau-Ponty, humans “knit together as a cohesive functional whole” within a shared space–time.²²¹ To make any experience, they need an embodiment that embraces interiority and exteriority.