Body and the Metaverse: A Critical Reading in Light of Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

This article examines how the emergence of the metaverse challenges classical philosophical conceptions of the body, taking Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the body as will to power and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body (le corps propre) as critical benchmarks. It argues that virtual environments do not simply extend embodiment but reconfigure it through avatars, digital presence, and algorithmically mediated perception. Drawing on posthumanist thought (Braidotti, Hayles, Haraway, Floridi) and on critical theory (Byung-Chul Han), the study asks whether Nietzschean and phenomenological frameworks remain adequate to interpret digital embodiment, or whether the metaverse calls for a new ontology of the “digital body.” The article concludes that while Nietzsche's affirmation of bodily creativity illuminates the avatar as a site of self-fashioning, Merleau-Ponty's insistence on the lived, sensing body exposes the limits of disembodied digital presence, and that a genuinely new philosophy of embodiment is needed to think through this hybrid condition.