What is the Flesh? For David Abram it is the tissue that binds us to the sentient earth; for Melissa Clark it pertains to the lives of sentient creatures and for Bryan Bannon it is all relations between singular bodies, living and nonliving. The problem with these approaches is that the Flesh either gets circumscribed to the point of seeming arbitrarily parochial or holistically stretched out to the point that it seems to accommodate absolutely anything at all. What I would like to suggest is that the Flesh of the world pertains to the conditions for life, while the style of the flesh pertains to styles of both living and dying. In lieu of invoking the ground as the grounds of this fleshy style, I would like to invoke the image of water, which pops up in several passages in The Visible and the Invisible. When describing the Flesh, Merleau-Ponty writes ‘To designate it, we should need the old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.’ Whilst Merleau-Ponty is reluctant to identify Flesh as water as such, his invocation of elements pertains, as he outlines, to the ‘old’ sense of the term, as opposed to its scientific meaning, that is in terms of the chemical composition one would find in the periodic table. What this ‘old’ sense of the term might mean remains vague, but one could plausibly conjecture that Merleau-Ponty is referring to the Pre-Socratic sense of the term. Thales, as Aristotle recounted, was allegedly the first to posit water as the first material cause. But this was indeed a slippery slope, as attested by continual efforts to seek more foundational elements, such as fire and air respectively. For Aristotle, there is a naivety to postulating one particular element as a grounding cause and this is because not all causes are strictly material. Yet, for Heidegger, the pre-Socratic interest in the elements wasn’t merely an investigation into material causes themselves, but was more importantly an investigation into what allowed meaning and the world to appear in the first place. If we are to consider the world as significance a la human significance then it becomes clear that the element in this sense might only relate to the human realm, and yet the necessary coalescence between the elements of the natural world in Pre-Socratic philosophy (water, air, fire, earth) and Heidegger’s fourfold (earth, sky, divinities, mortals) suggest that meaning and world are not all too human. Merleau-Ponty, however, arguably takes this further than Heidegger.
Taking seriously the work of Jakob Johann von Uexküll, who effectively initiated the field of biosemiotics with his conception of the Umwelt, Merleau-Ponty’s Fleshy notion of the elemental perhaps takes this to its extremes when he declares ‘language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests.’ But is it everything in this sense? Merleau-Ponty appears to be referring to particular things to demonstrate the Flesh, e.g. waves and forests. Again, water features in the imagery of the waves and yet the waves are recalcitrant to reification. Rather than being the primordial layer, water acts as a significant condition for the emergence of fleshy styles (think of the first signs of life beginning in water). As Aristotle suggests, regarding the reasons for Thales’ attributing water with a foundational cause, he most likely saw ‘that the nutriment of all things is moist’. Instead of seeing water as the first principle, water can be recognised as essential to all living things. Notwithstanding this biological and ecological fact, there is something intuitive about the significance of water. Water as element or Flesh is something essential not only to life in the biological sense, but also in the phenomenological sense. As Merleau-Ponty writes
‘Perception is not first a perception of things, but a perception of elements (water, air . . .) of rays of the world, of things which are dimensions, which are worlds, I slip on these “elements”.
This element of water has a necessarily worldly dimension; it is essential to worldliness itself, but this worldliness is not confined to humans but disperses itself amongst living things, whose Fleshy relations are necessarily intimate and vulnerable. This is suggested when Merleau-Ponty asks ‘Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each?’. This Fleshy synergy is not only sentient, but symbiotic. Bonds are able to take place between nonliving entities and yet these bonds are not necessarily symbiotic nor Fleshy. The living and the dying, however, form an intimate chiasm in their capacity to be truly exposed to another, to respond to another through the medium of water.
In an age of water insecurity, where waterways are threatened by continual pollution and commodification, an aquatic philosophy is perhaps needed now more than ever. What could this look like? Perhaps in Merleau-Pontian terms, this slippery and fleshy philosophy would be a philosophy of vulnerability, one that recognised our contiguous bond with the elemental. Water, like air in the Irigaryian sense, takes us beyond the ground and into something more fluid. This philosophy of the flesh, where the distinction between ourselves and the world is entirely blurred, as demonstrated famously by the two hands touching, is also strikingly encapsulated by one’s immersion in water. In a river, a lake or the ocean, one’s distinction between body and environs is entirely shaken. This needn’t be some humdrum piece of nature writing. Instead, this sentiment extends beyond humans and even animals and applies to all living beings who rely on this watery otherness to exist. Interestingly, water is not merely a source out there, but is always with us - think of the fact that the human body is made up of 55-60% water. Yet water too has a dark side. In aphotic zones, the bodies of refugees sink. Away from sight, water is forgotten, something to leave for human waste and remains. But this will catch up, as water levels rise and pollutants contaminate our sources of hydration. Water cannot be ignored, for it is what makes us vulnerable, vulnerable to slipping into death, but also to slipping into life.
References
D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage Books, 1997
Aristotle. Physics. Hackett Publishing Company. tr. C. D. C. Reeve. 2018
B. Bannon, Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Ponty's Relational Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41(3):327-357, 2011
M. Clark, “Ontology, Ethics, and Sentir: Properly Situating Merleau-Ponty.” Environmen-tal Values 11 (2002): 211–25
Greaves, Tom. "Environmental Arts as First Philosophy: This too a NeoPresocratic Manifesto." Environmental Humanities 3, no. 1 (2013): 149-55
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University, tr. A. Lingis, 1968,
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