Existentialist Bodies Against Cartesian Dualism
Philosophy has held a long-standing disdain for the body in the way it defines physical existence as an inferior instrument, object, or vessel serving consciousness, rather than the body that whispers to the mind. The body is not separate from the mind or consciousness as Cartesian dualism asserts. It is the most visceral and authentic expression of existence, persistently resisting human attempts to fully master or contain it. Due to the uncontrollable nature of the body, humanity’s deepest impulse lies in transcending the physical form: to escape the small inhabitancy of the body, sculpting it into aesthetic and supernatural ideals beyond the self, or by creating worlds of pure abstraction in literature or philosophy. The natural course of biology trumps this impulse of transcendence. But this need not be the cause for tragedy the misinformed existentialist may assume. The body is ultimately a triumphant cell, even if its transience imprisons human existence. From Camus’ Meursault to Oshii’s Kusanagi, and embodied in the self-immolating lives of philosophers like Gödel and Weil, the body stands as an inscrutable, generative force that births the consciousness and thought leading way to the greatest philosophies and literature.
Rene Descartes’ philosophical proposition “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum) forms the foundational principle of Cartesian dualism, which asserts the mind and body exist as distinct substances. The existentialist sees the body and mind as inseparable components. Jean-Paul Sartre provides three primary interpretations of the body: first, as itself, in its existence as a physical object or tool; second, in its image and performance in relation to others, and lastly, in itself as known by the other, or how one morphs their body and behavior to conform to societal perceptions. Maurice Merleau-Ponty defines the body not as an object or site of performance, but as the primary way of experiencing and understanding the world. Consciousness is fundamentally embodied: we do not have a body, we are our body. Merleau-Ponty deems the body as inherently intentional, where the body has its own intelligence, and its own way of knowing irreducible to intellectual thought, from bodily habits, skills, and movements. Every external perception stems from a perception of the body, which is not a mechanical object or a site of performance or freedom separate from consciousness, but the very medium of consciousness and the fundamental way humans exist and understand the world.
Sartre writes in “Being and Nothingness” that “the being which desires is consciousness making itself body,” elaborating that pleasure is the most straightforward conclusion of desire. Albert Camus constructs Meursault in “The Stranger” who is a character without a character or desires past physical needs; he can be precisely defined by his lack of consciousness, his vacuousness, the negation of all emotion that defines Romantic works. He is clearly a conscious being in full possession of his body, but his desires are purely physical. Meursault experiences purely physical sensations and promptly resolves those desires, processing suffering and pleasure in a similarly clipped fashion. He is a stranger to typical human qualms and the universal abstractions like love or the meaning of life that most humans search for. Tangible events or relationships like funerals, girlfriends, friends, or neighbors do not seem to have weight or importance or importance. His estrangement from desires, suffering, and pleasures make him almost no longer human, and more similar to an animal or Neanderthal. A more optimistic interpretation of “The Stranger” may find a certain transcendence in Meursault’s disposition, above human sentimentality and past typical scales of freedom. However, analyzing his mind as what Descartes would do is not productive. He has thoughts, but they are present in his mind as mere footnotes after a particularly big event, and even then they are simply so derivative that one cannot assert that Meursault fulfills this categorization of “I think, there I am.” His only thoughts are mentions of the negation of an expected feeling: he is not there if we just look at his mind, but a stranger as the title suggests; illusory, not present. He is his body first, and more troublingly, is notably not a lived body in the way Merleau-Ponty defines it. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes the body as an object and the lived body as the lived body that interprets objects in the world as representations of abstract ideals past pure sensation. He is extremely sensitive to changes in his environment and reacts in a post-reflective manner rather than pre-reflective, adjusting to the absurd world that surrounds him. Camus creates in Meursault as an extremely rare anomaly where the man is simply a body and very rarely, only towards the conclusion of the novel, a body making itself conscious. Meursault rejects Sartre’s third category where man reacts to others' bodily perception, fulfilling just the first two. Meursault is not quite the Neanderthalic entity that some interpretations make him to be: he is still relatively lucid with the capability of reflecting, as evidenced by the end of the novel. The absence of reflection is not an innocent childhood quality but almost something amorphous and alien: something exactly fitting for a modern world. Meursault embodies a phenomenological experience that prioritizes immediate bodily sensations: breathing, experiencing boredom, engaging in sexual encounters, swimming, working, existing on the beach—embodied moments that resist societal attempts to transform him into a coherent narrative. Camus later spoke of his creation as a man who refuses to simplify the flotsam of experience into categorized emotions or people, who he rejects the game of life, exists on the fringes, refuses to lie, and ultimately dies for his truth. However, Meursault does not possess the cognitive capability for reflective qualities available to discern between truth and falsity that Camus claims. He only starts to transcend the limitations of his body focused on sensational aspects after being jailed in a sensory deprivation cell, denied the immediate Mediterranean pleasures of his past world. The short novel reaches its perfect artistic conclusion with its famous phrase “a gentle indifference of the world,” but if continued, Meursault would eventually develop a sense of the lived body as his body realizes desires that cannot be fulfilled by immediate pleasures.
The primary limitation of philosophers compared to other mediums lies in their ties to abstract interpretations of reality, lacking the imagination to explore past possibilities of immediate reality. Mamoru Oshii attempts to answer the difficult question of where the next destination of humans will go after so much technology. The film’s title derives from Arthur Koestler’s novel “Ghost in the Machine,” which argues that the modern man will eventually surrender to the essence of a machine as the world becomes more technologically advanced. Motoko Kusanagi challenges Descartes, Sartre, and even Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies of the mind and body. As an organic brain embodying a hyper-feminized, hyper-weaponized cyborg existence with attached prosthesis, Kusanagi is capable of impossible feats of physicality. She is a perfect melee style fighter, capable of enduring extreme physical pain and accomplishing feats of combat past human flesh. Despite what her body can do, however, Kusanagi cannot shed the human brain that questions her body and existence. Notably, she does fit the Cartesian assertion “I think, therefore I am.” Kusanagi’s soul is defined, contoured and brought into reality by her body. Kusanagi asserts: “there's a remarkable number of things needed to make an individual who they are.” She is an ultimate embodiment of existential freedom-–a consciousness that redesigns its own physical existence, transforming existential choice from a metaphysical concept into a tangible, technological reality. Her ability to transfer consciousness, inhabit different bodies, and fundamentally reconstruct her physical self becomes the most extreme manifestation of Sartre's core philosophical principle that existence precedes essence. Merleau-Ponty would see Kusanagi's body as an expanded mode of intracorporeally. Her technological augmentations are not tools but extensions of consciousness, where her perception becomes a technologically mediated experience. Her ability to interface directly with networks, to perceive beyond human sensory limitations, represents an expansion of bodily perception that Merleau-Ponty could only theorize. The science fiction imagination provides what philosophical discourse cannot: a living demonstration of how consciousness exists beyond traditional biological boundaries, while still maintaining a profound, embodied relationship with the world. Far from being a mere technological artifact, Kusanagi represents the ultimate challenge to Cartesian dualism. In her cybernetic existence, the boundary between mind and body dissolves completely. Where Descartes would separate thought from physicality, Kusanagi embodies a radical unity of consciousness and technological form. Her body is not an instrument or shell, but the primary medium of her being—an extreme manifestation of Merleau-Ponty's assertion that we do not have a body, but are our body. Through her, we witness the body's capacity to transcend biological limitations while remaining the fundamental ground of experience.
The self-immolation of philosophers like Kurt Gödel and Simone Weil offers a real-life perspective on embodied existence. In the later years of his life, logician Gödel lived in obsessive fear of being poisoned, only consuming food prepared by his wife Adele. When she died, Gödel refused to eat and died of starvation. His death certificate states: “malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disorder.” Simone Weil’s is similarly a logical extension of her work and desire to assume the suffering of the less fortunate. The coroner wrote on her death note is a verdict of suicide, due to voluntary starvation, undertaken in solidarity with her compatriots in France under the German occupation. These philosophers’ deaths transform the physical bodies and lives into a site of ultimate philosophical treatises. These two philosophers, as supported by the large disdain philosophers have for the body, lived in the abstract world more than the physical. This is true for even Weil, who attempted to supplant her philosophizing by stripping herself of material comforts, but was not ultimately able to find the connection between the body and mind until self-immolation. Descartes’ fundamental premise that mind and body are separate substances is radically undermined by Gödel and Weil's corporeal philosophical statements. While these philosophers may have defined their lives by Descrates’ assertions: thinking, therefore becoming, their legacies remain entrenched in the fact that their body had rejected sustenance, as a unwelcome home for a troubled mind, causing their suicide and starvation. Where Descartes would see the body as a mere "spatial extension," their lives demonstrate the body as an active, meaning-generating entity. Gödel's obsessive fear and ultimate self-starvation and Weil's voluntary deprivation become not just physical acts, but conscious philosophical choices that collapse the mind-body dichotomy. It makes perfect sense that these philosophers found their ends how they did: these are not mere acts of physical deprivation, but existential statements that bring philosophical thought into real bodily experience. Gödel and Weil's extreme bodily choices represent the ultimate expression of existential freedom. Rather than waiting for a natural biological end or committing suicide in a quicker, less painful fashion, these philosopher choose to disintegrate that is not merely self-immolation but rather a conscious, embodied statement on the type of life: incompleteness, a fizzling out, rather than shortening their life like a short period mark. Merleau-Ponty would see these philosophers' experiences as the most profound demonstration of his theory that physical choices are not separate from their consciousness but are the very medium through which consciousness expresses itself. Weil's stripping away of material comforts and Gödel's obsessive bodily control become ways of knowing, of experiencing the world—not instruments of thought, but thought itself.
There is profundity present in the way each individual body composes, exists, and speaks before essence or consciousness can intervene. Humanity’s deepest philosophical impulse lies not in escaping the body, but in understanding its generative creative and destructive ability. There are many things humans do with the body: strip it bare with plastic surgery or pamper it with makeup, sculpt representations of it, design medical diagrams of it, but it is very rare that one fully embraces and lives in their body. The existentialist bodies mentioned, from Meursault, Kusanagi, and real world examples like Godel and Weil exemplify this powerful exchange. The body remains our most subversive text: a rebellion against the illusion of pure consciousness, a persistent reminder that existence is not a concept to be analyzed, but a sensation to be lived. Our corporeal existence stands as a perpetual challenge to philosophical categorization–at once fragile and infinitely generative, simultaneously a prison and the most authentic platform of human experience. We find no limitation in the body, but the most radical form of freedom.
