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<\/h1>\n<\/h1>\nPhenomenology is the science of living nature, one that takes experience seriously in the search for understanding and meaning, prior to explanation or causality. The search for the soul or the mind must take place in the living body that we are, not in the anatomical body that we have.<\/em><\/p>\n Jaap van der Wal MD PhD, anatomist-embryologist and phenomenologist<\/strong><\/p>\n Address: jaap.vanderwal45@kpnmail.nl. Sibemaweg 33D, 6224 DA Maastricht, the Netherlands. Independent Researcher – Retired Associate Professor in Medical Anatomy and Embryology<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n This article was not written to oppose science, nor to diminish the immense achievements of anatomy, or medicine. On the contrary: it is written by someone who has devoted his professional life to these disciplines. The scalpel, the microscope, the anatomical atlas, and the scientific method are not foreign to me and part of my intellectual home. And yet, throughout decades of teaching anatomy and embryology, a persistent question has accompanied me: Which body are we actually studying?<\/p>\n Modern science has given us extraordinary access to the human organism. We can visualize the brain in action, replace joints, transplant hearts, decode genes, and intervene in processes once thought untouchable. Never before has humanity possessed such detailed knowledge of the anatomical body. And yet, paradoxically, something essential risks slipping through our fingers: the lived body \u2014 the body that feels, hopes, fears, loves, suffers, and awakens each morning as \u201cI.\u201d<\/p>\n This book arises from that tension. It explores the distinction between the primary body, the body we are, and the secondary body, the body we have. The first is experienced from within; the second is examined from without. The first is participant-reality; the second is spectator-reality. Both are legitimate. Both are indispensable. But they are not identical.<\/p>\n Since the pivotal year 1543 the spectator standpoint has been increasingly privileged. The anatomical revolution of Vesalius and the cosmological revolution of Copernicus profoundly reshaped our understanding of body and world. These revolutions liberated human knowledge and laid the foundations for modern science. Yet they also subtly altered our sense of belonging. The world became object; the body became mechanism; the human being became observable structure<\/p>\n What was gained was clarity. What may have been diminished was immediacy. In this article Goethean phenomenology is applied, not as a rejection of main stream science, but a complementary path. It invites us to take lived experience seriously \u2014 not as vague subjectivity, but as primary data of existence. Before there is explanation, there is experience. Before there is causality, there is meaning.<\/p>\n The body is not merely an arrangement of tissues and organs in space. It is a dynamic process in time. It is gesture before mechanism, movement before structure, unity before differentiation. The embryo teaches us that living organisms do not assemble themselves from parts, the whole of the body is not the sum of the parts. An organism unfolds as a whole. \u201cThe body with a mind\u201d is therefore not poetic metaphor. It is an attempt to restore a unity that reductionism has fragmented. The human being is neither a ghost in a machine nor a machine without spirit. We are embodied consciousness.<\/p>\n The aim of the article isa to invite: We need not choose between science and experience. But we must learn to distinguish their standpoints. Only then can we fully inhabit both realities \u2014 the body we examine and the body we are.<\/p>\n \u201cI am an anatomist; I am the expert on your physical body. I know everything about you. I know where your middle mesenteric artery is located, how the long head of your biceps muscle functions, and in which cerebral lobe your personality is situated. When it comes to your body parts and the systems within your body, I know more about them than you do…. And yet I would wish for you now to shout, loudly and clearly: \u201cNo, you know nothing about my body. You know nothing about what it feels like to exist here in this body, to bend my arm with my biceps muscle, to feel pain, or to be hungry. You know nothing of my consciousness. Only I am the expert on the body that I am and experience, on the pain I feel, on the thoughts I think. You may measure cortical activity with a brain scan when I form certain thoughts in my head, but you will never know my thoughts\u2014let alone experience or think them.\u201d<\/p>\n Many years ago, when I was still teaching anatomy at a Dutch university, I used to begin my lectures on the philosophy of the body\u2014renamed by me somatosophy\u2014with words to this effect. In these lectures, I aimed to teach medical students something about body awareness in modern society and about the contribution anatomy as a science has made to that awareness.<\/p>\n Shortly beforehand, they had entered the dissection room for the first time under my supervision. At the time, this was a crucial moment in their training. For the first time, they became part of an age-old tradition\u2014long the privilege of physicians. Until only a few decades ago, the anatomy laboratory was accessible exclusively to initiates. For the first time, they held a scalpel and had to open the body of a dead human being. Or was it a corpse? In English-speaking countries one speaks of a cadaver. In any case, for many students in their early twenties, this was an intense, dramatic, sometimes even fearful experience.<\/p>\n Since 1543, we have in fact possessed two bodies. I choose this year because it marks the publication of the first modern anatomy book in human history. Andreas Vesalius, the very first modern anatomist, published\u2014on the basis of numerous dissections he had performed\u2014his monumental De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem. <\/em>For the first time in history, the human body was described in meticulous detail and represented through hundreds of magnificent illustrations. Never before had this been done at such a high academic level; eighty-five percent of those images could still be included in a contemporary anatomical atlas.<\/p>\n In my view, Vesalius was a genius who opened the eyes of (then European and \u201cWestern\u201d) humanity and laid the developmental foundation for the entire edifice of medical science that would unfold in the centuries to follow. It was a new way of seeing, unprecedented. In philosophical terms, we call this ‘object consciousness’. Medieval humanity could not yet do this: to dare to look beyond the deceased human being and to describe objectively, as a spectator (onlooker), what is revealed inside. To describe what one sees without prejudice or emotion.<\/p>\n Today we are so accustomed to this direct and objective way of seeing and thinking\u2014forming the foundation of our scientific mindset\u2014that we can scarcely imagine that once someone first began to look this way. Today we would say that in 1543 a paradigm was born. A revolution. And something else of equal magnitude occurred in 1543\u2014another paradigm shift in human consciousness, as we shall see later.<\/p>\n Since then, we have increasingly come to assume that two human bodies exist, though many today seem unaware of this. And yet, with that revolution in 1543, a body was also lost. The body that anatomists have progressively revealed in ever finer detail is The Human Body. Of course, there are countless variations of it, and ultimately each person possesses a unique individual version of The Human Body. The body described in anatomical atlases and scientific literature is the scientifically described body of Everyone\u2014but each individual human being lives his or her private version of it. Are these bodies different? And if so, are they compatible? Or is it an either\u2013or?<\/p>\n The body we experience daily\u2014the body in which or with which we awaken each morning\u2014is the Primary Body, the body of the first order. Philosophy tells us that primary reality is the Sinneswelt<\/em>, the world as we experience it through our senses. Our personal body belongs to that reality. In psychology, this is sometimes referred to as agency<\/em>\u2014the capacity to be the driver of one\u2019s own lived experience rather than merely a passenger. Often this is mentioned as our \u2018soul\u2019. In neurophysiology, it is referred to as the First-Person body. It is a unique and indivisible body. No one else can experience that body or the consciousness that lives within it.<\/p>\n The anatomical body belongs to an entirely different order. It is secondary reality\u2014that which comes to light when one objectively observes<\/strong> reality as a spectator, even when the observed object is one\u2019s own body. The body we live and experience is participant<\/strong>-reality: a reality in which we partake, which we experience from the first-person perspective. As stated in the introduction to this essay: only you can live that reality, only you can experience that body, and therefore only you can know yourself through it.<\/p>\n In neurophysiology, one also speaks of the Third-Person body. We cannot simply dismiss the first-order body as a subjective illusion while declaring the second-order body the \u201creal,\u201d scientifically objective reality. And yet this happens frequently\u2014especially in science, where everything we experience is often labeled subjective and therefore unscientific. But is that justified? In which reality do we actually live? Too often, we fall into what biologist and philosopher Rupert Sheldrake calls \u201cnothing-buttism\u201d. [1]<\/a>. Your near-death experience is \u201cnothing but\u201d disturbed cortical activity in an ischemic brain. Secondary scientific reality becomes primary\u2014becomes the \u201creal\u201d reality.<\/p>\n I can best present the body of the first order based on my own bodily experience, which I cannot share with any other body. It is, of course, undeniably true what the philosopher Rumi already stated in the 13th century: \u201cStudy me as much as you like, you will not know me, for I differ in a hundred ways from what you see me to be. Put yourself behind my eyes and see me as I see myself, for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see [2]<\/a>\u201d. Simply put: no one can \u2018see\u2019 my consciousness, or how my senses interpret reality for me. When I describe the body as I experience it, I take the position of the phenomenologist. The phenomenologist is the scientist who searches for meaning, he\/she participates in the object he\/she studies, it is the attitude of empathy instead of scientific antipathy<\/p>\n What does a phenomenon mean, what does it express? Without searching for the explanation or cause of a phenomenon. The latter can be found by analyzing something objectively, but meaning can only be found by participating in the phenomenon: participatory science. What do I experience or feel? It is said that the phenomenologist also “takes as true what one observes” (a poor translation of the German \u201cNehmen Sie auch f\u00fcr wahr was sie wahrnehmen\u2019) and therefore does not only take what one considers, of which one is an objective observer, as true. Taking experience seriously, If you want to know how my body feels, you can only find out if you let me tell you about it and allow you to participate. This is not knowledge, but perhaps empathy. Let’s try it.<\/p>\n I do not have muscles. At least not when I am living my everyday life and simply being my body. Certainly, I move and perform actions, but I am never aware of muscles as such. Yes, I can flex my biceps and produce a \u201cmuscle ball,\u201d but then I am no longer engaged in movement\u2014I am looking at my arm and the biceps muscle within it.<\/p>\n Ordinarily, my muscles are not present to me. In fact, it is pathological when I become aware of a muscle. At my age, it occasionally happens that I wake in the middle of the night with a painful cramp in my musculus tibialis anterior, or something similar. That is cramp\u2014that is pathology. Suddenly, I have a muscle. It is painful and serves no functional purpose whatsoever.<\/p>\n In normal daily life, my \u201cmuscle-man\u201d possesses a certain transparency. I am barely aware of him. More than that: modern neurophysiology has demonstrated that even the brain \u201cknows nothing of muscles.\u201d The famous little muscle-man often depicted as residing in the motor cortex\u2014the homunculus\u2014is neuroanatomically a monstrosity. It does not exist. The brain is organized in movements and hierarchically structured actions. My \u201cmuscle-man\u201d is not the puppet of my motor cortex. The brain orchestrates my muscles\u2014and that is something entirely different. To be clear: the \u201cmuscle man\u201d is, of course, directly related to the spinal cord and basically functions in reflexes. Higher levels organize and orchestrate this spinal \u201cmuscle man.\u201d [3]<\/a><\/p>\n Muscles do not cause movements; muscles produce certain effects when they contract and relax. My brain can orchestrate these separate muscular effects into directed movements and purposeful actions. It is no coincidence that decades ago, physiotherapy in the Netherlands began shifting from muscle-oriented treatment to movement-oriented and action-oriented training. The bodybuilder is certainly not movement-oriented; he or she is strength-oriented and therefore muscle-focused.<\/p>\n My Vesalian \u2018muscle person\u2019 serves me and is actually a transparent whole. My students frequently confirmed this from their own experience. They would tell the story of waking up, after an evening of drinking too much, with an arm they could not use. Every anatomist knows the explanation: they had likely fallen asleep awkwardly on the floor or slumped over a chair, compressing their brachial plexus throughout the night. The next morning, they had an ‘non-arm’. \u201d\u2014a heavy, object-like appendage that had to be lifted with the other hand, that weighed heavily, that could not be moved. A \u201csleeping\u201d arm. An anatomical arm, in other words. A body part with muscles and bones weighing perhaps five kilograms.<\/p>\n According to anatomists, when a politician raises both arms before an applauding crowd, that person lifts two times five kilograms. That is entirely untrue. No one experiences it that way. Try lifting two five-kilogram sacks of potatoes\u2014that is an entirely different experience. For my half-sober students, it was an unsettling truth: \u201cI cannot move my arm anymore.\u201d Patience. Wait. The arm begins to tingle. Slowly, it becomes what it is supposed to be again: it disappears. It becomes transparent. One can move it again. A \u2018good\u2019 body is kind of transparent, If something is wrong with it, the body becomes a disruptive presence.<\/p>\n We are so accustomed, when thinking of the skeleton and locomotor apparatus, to think mechanically and in terms of gravity. The skeleton\u2014held together by screws and wires so that joints have been constructed\u2014must be hung on a hook. Place it on its feet and it collapses under gravity. But the skeleton in the living human being is brought into lightness. Gravity is overcome. The body we are and experience knows not only gravitation but levitation. The lightness of being is truly an experience.<\/p>\n How much do you weigh? For years, my body weight was around 90 kg. 90 kg! You can’t believe that in situations where you are in love and dancing with your beloved. The lightness of being is accessible and tangible to everyone. How heavy can the body be after a long climb up the mountain? Can it be weighed? What is the difference between weight, heaviness, and lightness? Weight can be measured. I step on a scale and there it is: ninety kilograms\u2014objective, unavoidable, real. But when I dance or walk, nothing of those ninety kilograms is experienced. I once tried lifting a ninety-kilogram person. That is heavy. Or think of a child in your arms who falls asleep and suddenly becomes heavy.<\/p>\n Many years ago, I walked the Nijmegen Four Days Marches\u2014four days of walking thirty or forty kilometers each day. During the final kilometers of the final day, I was welcomed into the city of Nijmegen by a million spectators, cheering crowds, flowers, marching bands. I felt the fatigue and heaviness of my body disappear. Carried by the marching music, I floated over the asphalt toward the finish line. The lightness of being. That is a real experience. It cannot simply be dismissed as illusion.<\/p>\n How heavy are the dead? When students in the dissection room must turn over the body they are preparing, it requires collective effort. The dead are heavy. Indeed, the dead are heavy. Placing your father in a coffin together with your brothers is arduous work.<\/p>\n Lightness is an immeasurable so-called \u2018imponderable\u2019 reality. Once, experiments were conducted in which people were allowed to die on a scale. The idea was that if the soul left the body, the body would become lighter. Scientifically, this failed because it is impossible to measure such minute differences reliably. Philosophically, it is impossible because if the soul exists, it is precisely what body is not\u2014imponderable, without mass or weight.<\/p>\n The lightness of being. Death has a heaviness no scale can measure. Imagine spending your entire life standing on a scale. It would faithfully register eighty-five kilograms (as I now weigh). The scale would not notice if you became paralyzed from a spinal cord injury and had to carry an almost unbearably heavy body. It would not register that you died and that the heaviness of death had taken possession of your body. A scale measures kilograms\u2014not the heaviness or lightness of existence. Heaviness and lightness are qualities, not quantities. My First-Person body\u00a0 knows many gradations of weight and heaviness.<\/p>\n Of course, I must assume that you and I both have brains in our skulls. But what do we experience of that? Nothing at all. It is pathological to experience one\u2019s brain. A healthy eye is transparent. The moment the eye presents itself as a body part, you can no longer see through it. The same applies to the brain also. It applies to the whole body. The secondary body is no longer the body that serves you and that you are. It becomes present\u2014an obstacle. Let that not be the case. Because that that the body in the anatomical atlas is not your body. It cannot be. In my head there are thoughts, hopes, fantasies\u2014but brains as lived experience? No, thankfully not. When my wife\u2019s brain began to manifest itself to her\u2014when it was no longer transparent\u2014it turned out to be severe pathology: a meningioma that required surgery. The transparent body: a healthy skull is anatomically empty and filled with spirit and thought. Heaviness and weight\u2014are they the same? The question has been asked before. Heaviness and lightness are qualities that can be experienced. The melancholy of your spirit or soul cannot be measured with a scale, yet it is real. The lightness of falling in love is equally real, though no instrument can measure it.<\/p>\n During their first introduction on the dissection room, my students were always astonished by the coldness of the preserved body they were confronted with. It was a corpse, a dead man, a preserved body that I showed them. \u201cThis is sooooo cold!\u201d How cold? When I asked them to feel whether the iron sheet on which the remains were stored, was just as cold, the answer was always: No, absolutely not. When I asked them to touch the metal table on which the body lay, they would say: \u201cNo, that is not cold at all.\u201d Yet two thermometers would demonstrate that both the metal and the body had exactly the same temperature. \u201cThat cannot be true.\u201d But a thermometer is an objective scientific instrument, after all. They didn’t believe the thermometer! That’s not as bad as it seems. Just as a scale cannot measure the lightness or heaviness of existence, a thermometer may measure degrees but tells us nothing about how cold a body feels when it has become a corpse. The coldness of death is a frightening reality.<\/p>\n Cpmsider this \u00a0figure. It is a billboard in Vienna A young girl displays a large scar across her chest and says to us: \u201cMY heart has once been opened. Will you now please open YOUR heart?\u201d Everyone understands that she is speaking of two entirely different hearts. She was likely operated on for a serious congenital heart defect and now asks us to contribute to making such life-saving medical care possible for others. Everyone knows the heart she means. I have never seen anyone who, when confessing \u201cI did it,\u201d points to their head. They always place a hand upon the heart: \u201cI did it.\u201d Apparently, that heart is located on the left. Olympians place their right hand on the left side of their chest when hearing the national anthem or seeing the flag raised. On their heart? Yet anatomically, the heart is not on the left. It is located centrally in the thorax, in the mediastinum, as your anatomy textbook will inform you. But if you ever encounter someone striking the center of their chest with a clenched fist and whispering, \u201cI have such pain in my heart,\u201d you may safely assume something is severely pathological\u2014and you would be wise to call emergency services.<\/p>\n Is a heart an organ? Is it anatomy? Certainly. But it is also soul. Consciousness. The embryo even demonstrates this quite literally. When, in the third week of human development, the heart appears, a new dimension becomes possible: interiority, individuality, the capacity for an inner \u201chere-I-am.\u201d Before that moment, such an inward dimension does not yet exist. The heart is the first organ that makes possible the experience of being present here in this body. Self-awareness. Embodiment. One might imagine the heart as analogous to the brain. The brain gives us conscious, waking awareness of ourselves and our body. The heart does so at a more dreaming, feeling level. With your brain you think; with your heart you feel. Without your heart, you could never exist here in your body. It is significant that the heart develops earlier than the brain.<\/p>\n One day my wife was cutting up a pig\u2019s heart\u2014obtained from the butcher\u2014to feed the cat. Our five-year-old daughter asked what she was doing. When my wife explained, our daughter responded: \u201cIs a heart then flesh, mother?\u201d The child had not yet experienced that the pounding heart she feels when afraid or excited is indeed a piece of flesh with anatomical structures. Children today may ask this question less often. They are told early\u2014sometimes while still in their crib, via an iPad\u2014how the body works. Several decades ago, a Dutch biologist hosted a television series explaining human anatomy to children. In one episode, he entered holding a freshly bleeding pig\u2019s heart and said: \u201cLook, this is the organ with which your mother loves you, with which you fall in love.\u201d To my mind, this was inexcusable\u2014a confusion of two completely distinct realities. I am convinced that when this presenter himself once fell in love, it had nothing to do with that bloody organ in his hand.<\/p>\n During their first introduction to the dissection room, my students had a comparable experience. On the first dissection table where they were converted lay the body of a dead man, a corpse. When I removed the cloths covering the body, they were very surprised. They hadn’t expected that.. There was hesitation, confusion. Human questions arose: How old was he? What did he die of? What do those blue spots mean? \u201cDid you shave his hair, or was he bald?\u201d No one asked about anatomy. After some awkwardness and after exchanging feelings and emotions, the inevitable question came: \u201cWhat are we supposed to do with this, sir?\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed\u2014what can one do with a corpse? We then walked to the next table. There apparently \u00a0lay another body\u2014at that time still covered with cloths to retain the preserving fluids. After having taken away the cover there was a completely different body. Here everything had been made visible by anatomists. The skin had been removed; muscles and nerves exposed; chest and abdomen opened; skull lifted. A full body. Much to see. Or rather: much made visible. This is precisely what Vesalius first did so radically in 1543\u2014he made visible what normally ought not to be visible. Medieval people undoubtedly knew that there were brains in the head and intestines in the abdomen. They might have seen such things on battlefields or in public executions. But to systematically and deliberately reveal what is inside a corpse\u2014that requires the modern spectator-consciousness Vesalius demonstrated: transforming the body of a fellow human being into an object that can be opened and dissected.<\/p>\n The students also reacted completely differently to this second body. This is what they came for, what they expected. Without any inhibitions, they set out to explore. Without hesitation they began to explore. \u201cWhere is the uterus?\u201d \u201cLook how large the aorta is!\u201d \u201cWhat is this?\u201d \u201cAnd there\u2014the brain!\u201d Everything was fascinating. Yet not everyone participated. There were always a few who kept their distance. When asked why, they accused their curious classmates of unethical, disrespectful behavior: \u201cYou don\u2019t treat people like that. Like vultures tearing apart a body. I do not want to participate in this.\u201d Most of the time, their fellow students were not particularly impressed by this comment: “This is so interesting.”<\/p>\n When I then confronted the divided group again with the first body\u2014the dead human being that confronts you with your own mortality\u2014there was always someone who would say with conviction: \u201cYes, but this body here has nothing to do <\/strong>with that other (anatomical) body over there.\u201d And everyone agreed. And so it is. In the dissection room there are no corpses, no dead people. Death does not reign there; it does not smell of decay. It is clean, sterile, distant. In the dissection room, science reigns. There lie anatomical preparations\u2014and these appear to have nothing to do with people, whether living or dead.<\/p>\n Now it gets tricky. Do those two realities, those two bodies, really have nothing to do with each other? Of course they do. They must. But in a particular way. One may safely assume that within every living human being\u2014including your body\u2014there is an anatomical body hidden. The body you are contains the anatomical body you have. But not the other way around. Medical students are educated for years about THE anatomical body\u2014the body of the human being, the body of everyone. Yet in daily practice they will never encounter that body. They encounter people who present their primary body to the physician: with pain, fear, mortality. Of that lived body the physician knows nothing. That is not what he or she studied. But the physician does understand the anatomical body that can be made visible, repaired, operated upon, treated. And when medical intervention is successful, the patient becomes \u201cbetter\u201d in his or her lived body as well. If one is convinced that we are biological machines and that the body is nothing but spatial anatomy\u2014a conglomerate of organs\u2014then your body and mine do not fit into that worldview. But the reverse does fit.<\/p>\n The hierarchy is therefore as follows: Within every living primary body (the First-Person body), there is also the secondary scientific body. (the Third-Person Body). But within the secondary one, THE anatomical body, there is no lived body, the primary reality. The anatomical body is rather \u2018empty\u2019: soulless and inanimate.<\/p>\n Now it becomes truly fascinating. In which reality do we actually live? Something else happened in 1543. Another genius opened our eyes to objective spectator-reality: Nicolaus Copernicus. Until then, the human image of the world had been shaped by a geocentric framework: The Earth was the center of the universe\u2014or at least of the solar system. Stars, sun and planet were Sky and Heaven.<\/p>\n Copernicus (though not the first to suggest it) declared that this could not be true. The Earth was not the center; the Sun was. The Earth was \u201cnothing but\u201d one of the planets. There it is again\u2014Sheldrake\u2019s nothing-buttism. Thus our Earth\u2014of which there is only one in this universe\u2014became \u201cone of the planets.\u201d We began to view ourselves heliocentrically and today even cosmocentrically, for Earth is now \u201cnothing but\u201d a small blue sphere at the edge of one among billions of galaxies. A worlds was lost. Literally. We lost the Earth and gained a planet. And of planets, we now know, there are many\u2014exoplanets scattered through an immense universe. From Mother Earth to a speck of insignificance in a spiral arm of a galaxy.<\/p>\n Every child must undergo this paradigm shift. Just as my students must cross the threshold from the pre-scientific lived body to Vesalian scientific anatomical reality. A child stands on the beach at sunset with a parent and watches the sun sink into the sea. Children ask questions: Where does it go? Does it get wet? Will it come back? Oh\u2014tomorrow morning, over there? And where is it at night? The father patiently explains. He draws a sketch in the sand and says: \u201cIn reality, the Sun stands still and the Earth rotates on its axis.\u201d And then follows the story of exchanging the geocentric worldview for the heliocentric one. The child must learn that one can look at things from another standpoint. But the crux, the punchline is in the father\u2019s first two words: \u201cIn reality.\u201d\u00a0 If the child were philosophically trained, it might ask: \u201cIn which reality? Because in my reality the Sun moves and the Earth certainly does not. You can see that, can\u2019t you?\u201d.<\/p>\n The child still participates in the Earth. The child is a phenomenologist, living in the experienced world\u2014the Sinneswelt<\/em>\u2014in which we awaken every morning. The parent is teaching the child to adopt a standpoint outside the Earth\u2014imagining oneself on the Moon or on the Sun\u2014and from there the picture can indeed be reversed. He\/she represents the spectator consciousness that the child still has to learn. The child still lives in the na\u00efve\u00a0 consciousness of the participant. It will learn, it will forget.<\/p>\n But are stationary suns and moving Earths more real? Of course the child must learn about this other reality. But if we collectively begin to believe that this standpoint alone constitutes reality\u2014and that the experienced world is illusion\u2014then something is lost. The Dutch philosopher Frits Staal (1930-2012) puts it simply: \u201cSunset is a pre-scientific concept, and sunset has turned out to be a scientific myth.\u201d Scientifically speaking, this is correct. But what about reality? Staal concludes: \u201cA sunset has proven to be a scientific myth and therefore possesses no reality-value.\u201d Consider what that implies: sunset is not real; it is an illusion.<\/p>\n Did evolution then take place in an illusion? If children learn from the outset that the world they directly experience is illusory and that the \u201creal\u201d reality is given by scientists who study bodies and planets as objects, then they must live in perpetual tension: What is truly real?<\/p>\n Pre-scientific does not mean historically outdated. Medieval people did not think<\/strong> the Earth was flat and that the Sun described an arc. They perceived it that way. That is not belief\u2014it is experience. Pre-scientific reality is not historical past; it is present actuality. It is the world in which we live.<\/p>\n “Death has nothing to do with passing away. The sun sets and the moon sets, but they have not disappeared” [5]<\/a> \u201cThe sun and the moon do not disappear when they set.\u201d Are you present while you sleep? I am not. Each morning I return to my body. Scientifically, I know it is no longer exactly the same body I left the evening before. Processes have occurred, cells renewed, changes taken place. \u201cYou are there all night,\u201d my students would protest. \u201cWe could sit beside your bed and observe you.\u201d Very well. Imagine they do so. Every hour they note: He is still there. Yes\u2014from the spectator standpoint. A standpoint I can only adopt mentally toward myself. They are spectators; I am participant. As participant in my body, during deep sleep I have no body-awareness. In that sense, I am not there. This is a matter of standpoint\u2014not opinion. Science is not \u201cjust another opinion,\u201d as some contemporary conspiracy thinking suggests. Science is a disciplined method. But within philosophy and science there are different standpoints, different methods. The anatomist\u2014which I also am\u2014is a spectator with object-consciousness. But I am also the phenomenologist who seeks to understand the embryo by participating in its movement.<\/p>\n The embryo has taught me that the body is not an anatomical construct, assembled of parts like a machine that start to function when it is complete. That is scientifically incorrect. The embryo shows us that from the very beginning (outset) we are a bodily unity (a whole) that subsequently differentiates into organs and structures. We do not arise from a cell; the zygote is already a one-celled human body. From the outset it grows and differentiates into trillions of cells. Every living being is a whole that is not the sum of its parts. Every living being exists in time. Every living being is autopoietic\u2014it brings itself into being. Our body is a process. In living nature, form, anatomy, and structure always arise out of movement. Movement precedes form<\/strong>. The embryo is not merely a past phase. Even as adults we remain embryonic in the sense that we are ongoing processes in time. Therefore, it is scientifically illegitimate to reduce the human being to a machine or robot. Let us return to the two bodies.<\/p>\n What can you do with a movement? The most common position of the scientist is to explain, while the phenomenologist is looking for something else, namely meaning, understanding, and felt sense of lived experience. Explanation or Meaning? What is the difference? Take the example of a fist. I close my hand in a certain way; a fist appears. What is the explanation? Muscles contract; tendons pull; nerves stimulate; the spinal cord transmits; the motor cortex commands. A chain of cause and effect. Cut the tendons\u2014no fist. Cut the nerves\u2014no fist. Damage the anterior horn cells in poliomyelitis\u2014no fist. Sever the spinal cord\u2014no fist. Ultimately, one may say: the brain moves us. A seamless scientific account. Highly satisfying. It allows interventions, treatments, exoskeletons, spinal repairs. The brain moves us, and the fist is an example of this. Or proof of it?<\/p>\n But what is a fist? When do people make a fist? And what do those fists mean? The phenomenologist seeks meaning, not cause. Context matters. There are many fists. Nelson Mandela’s fist of triumph when he was released from prison. The fist of power and dictatorship, as made by dictators such as Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The fist with which, in the distant past, the boxer Mohammed Ali always wanted to box a white man in the hope of knocking him out; the fist of aggression. A fist can also be a gesture of fear or shame. The fist as a gesture<\/strong>. A gesture is different from a movement. Movement is the visible manifestation of a gesture; the gesture itself is a supersensory meaning, entity. To understand the triumphant fist, one must inwardly recognize the gesture: Free at last. Participatory science.<\/p>\n Perhaps bodily forms themselves are such expressions. What is expressed in the human body? Something quite different, presumably, from what is expressed in the body of a lion.<\/p>\n In search of the perpetrator, the actor, agency. Is there a formative principle\u2014a soul? That question belongs to another chapter.<\/p>\n Phenomenology is not an alternative to science. It is complementary. It restores what has been reduced to objective observability. It reunites what has been split apart. Medieval humanity possessed what might be called a na\u00efve consciousness\u2014not negatively meant, but pre-scientific primary awareness. They did not believe the Sun arced across the sky; they experienced it. That too is reality. Perhaps we must strive to regain more of that reality alongside spectator-reality\u2014the objective world that has given us technology, science, medicine. But something risks being lost: spirit, soul, purpose, meaning, direct experience.<\/p>\n In the primary body we live\u2014there is soul, there is spirit, there is meaning. It is the body with a mind.<\/p>\n FIRST-PERSON REALITY<\/td>\n THIRD-PERSON REALITY<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n <\/p>\n Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem<\/em> (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1543). (Optioneel moderne editie: <\/em>Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body<\/em>, trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman, Novato, CA: Norman Publishing, 1998).<\/p>\n Rupert Sheldrake, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery<\/em> (New York: Deepak Chopra Books, 2012). (In Britse editie: The Science Delusion<\/em>, London: Coronet, 2012.)<\/p>\n Nicolaus Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium<\/em> (Nuremberg: Johannes Petreius, 1543). (Moderne editie optioneel: <\/em>Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres<\/em>, trans. Edward Rosen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).<\/p>\n Frits Staal, Exploring Mysticism: A Methodological Essay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jaap van der Wal<\/p>\n Maastricht The Netherlands<\/p>\n February 2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> The term nothing-butism was originally coined by Julian Huxley, a British biologist and humanist (1887 \u2013 1975)<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Jalal ad-Din Rumi in<\/u> Div\u0101n-i Shams-i Tabr\u012bz\u012b 1372: A1:168<\/em><\/p>\n [3]<\/a> At the spinal cord level, the muscles are, of course, represented in the central nervous system i.c. the ventral horn motor neurons.<\/p>\nSummary and message
\n(AI generated, with the consent by the author)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\nphysicians, to remember that patients present not anatomical objects but lived bodies;
\nscientists, to recognize that objectivity does not exhaust reality;
\nphilosophers, to bridge explanation and meaning;
\nevery reader, to rediscover the transparency and mystery of their own embodiment.<\/p>\nWhich Body Do We Live in?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
A Second Body<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Two Bodies?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Who Has Muscles?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Lightness of Being
\n<\/strong><\/h3>\nWho Has a Brain? <\/strong><\/h3>\n
Is a Heart Flesh, Mother?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Two Types of Dead ?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Different Realities<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Revolution and Paradigm Shift of 1543 \u00a0[4]<\/a> <\/strong><\/h3>\n
The na\u00efve reality of a Sunset<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Lost World<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Movement is Primary. Anatomy(Form) is secondary<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Cause and\/or condition?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The two bodies schematically compared with each other<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n\n
\n THE PRIMARY BODY <\/strong><\/p>\n THE SECONDARY BODY <\/strong><\/p>\n \n Personal and mortal<\/td>\n Anonymous and “eternal”<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Pre-scientific Unity Oneness, simplicity<\/td>\n Anatomical-scientific multiplicity, complexity<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n The lived (closed) body<\/td>\n The abandoned (opened) body<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n The “Subject-body” that I AM<\/td>\n The “Object-body” that I HAVE<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n The body of the PARTICIPANT<\/td>\n The body of the SPECTATOR<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n The mindful body, with consciousness animate<\/td>\n The mindless body, NO consciousness inanimate<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Transparent \u2013 serving and ‘disappearing’<\/td>\n Present body \u2013 present and \u2018obtrusive\u2019<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n The undivided whole body<\/td>\n The divided \u2018anatomized\u2019 body<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Unity of mind (spirit) and body (polarity)<\/td>\n Duality of mind (spirit) versus body<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n The speaking body<\/td>\n The body discussed<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n The Body with a Mind<\/td>\n The body without Mind – zombie<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n References<\/strong><\/h3>\n