Merleau-Ponty revealed that the perceiving body and the perceived world are made of the same “flesh”—neither matter nor mind nor substance, but the element in which seer and seen, toucher and touched, exchange without coinciding. “My body is made of the same flesh as the world, and the world is made of the same flesh as my body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 248). The soul, in this lexicon, is not a separate passenger. It is “the hollow (creux) of the body, just as the body is the protrusion of the soul into the world” (p. 249). There is no longer body and soul. There is flesh, simultaneously visible and invisible.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.