Be careful not to let your latent prejudice show, lest you reveal yourself as an enemy to progress! Indeed, you may not have heard of fleshism, but your preference for embodied human existence betrays you.

“Fleshism,” is considered a type of “discrimination” to the transhumanist movement, which seeks to improve the human condition and person through technology. Fleshism sees a purely digital conscious existence as less real or substantial than its physically dimensional counterpart.

The most prominent recent Fleshist is Paul Kingsnorth, author of the bestselling book “Against the Machine,” in which he refers to the concept of “Fleshism.” In the book, Kingsnorth traces the rise of a “machine mentality” that prizes efficiency over beauty, quantity over quality, and things (“machines”) over people. This approach to reality sees nature as something to be conquered, not cooperated with.

One of the symptoms of the machine mentality is regarding the union of soul and body, which historically constituted life and wholeness in a person, as an arbitrary preference. In fact, the machine mentality would see this slavish devotion as anti-progress and prejudicial.

Kingsnorth’s Fleshist ideology defends “hylomorphism,” which describes all substances as a combination of matter and form. According to Aristotle, the “formal” reality of a substance precedes the material; therefore, there cannot be any matter without a form. Furthermore, because the form gives substance to the matter, the form must be found in the substance itself.

So, what does this have to do with Fleshism? Aristotle argues that the form of a human being is his soul, while the matter is the body. Therefore, if we separate the soul from the body of a man, he is no longer fully himself because his substance has been torn apart.

This matters in the context of the Fleshism controversy because a desire for union between soul and body is a desire for true identity. While the proposed goals of the transhumanist movement may seem admirable on the surface, the sad reality is that it creates a disembodied half-existence in the short lives we have now. Fleshism, far from a backwards, prejudiced view of human nature, is actually the perennial and holistic view that helps one live a fuller, embodied and abundant existence.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Grok