Vallega-Neu (2005:83-85) – a questão do corpo

When in the sixties in one of the seminars of Zollikon ¹ somebody asked Heidegger why he wrote so little about the body (Leib),² his answer was that the corporeal (das Leibliche) is the most difficult question.³ Indeed we find only few texts where Heidegger speaks explicitly about the body.⁴ Before venturing into an exposition of the body and the bodily dimension in Heidegger’s thought we should therefore first consider what makes this question so difficult for Heidegger and why he wrote so little about it.

One reason why the question of the body is so difficult for Heidegger certainly resides in our tendency to see the body as an object, a thing, a living thing, certainly, that distinguishes itself from plants and animals insofar as it has a mind. We present (vorstellen) the body to our mind as an entity, and presentational thought is exactly what, according to Heidegger, has prevented Western philosophy from asking the more fundamental question of being itself. In fact Heidegger would claim that, if we want to get to the truth of things (and thus also of the body), we would need to ask the question of being itself first.

In Being and Time Heidegger opens up the question of being itself precisely by showing that human beings are not entities (“bodies”) endowed with reason but Dasein, a word that should let resonate the way we as humans are —that is, what characterizes our being in a verbal sense. Dasein, literally translated, means being-t/here (“da” in German means both here and there), and for Heidegger the (84) issue is how we are t/here. Human being is not primarily a being (ein Seiendes) but openness to being, not only to our own being and interests but also to the being of beings in general, to the way things are, and to the way in which, for us, a historical world opens. Only because of this openness can we understand beings surrounding us as such. Being as such is a temporal event and it discloses in our being-t/here temporally in a threefold structure (Heidegger speaks of existentials) that characterizes our being-in-the-world: projection, thrownness, and being with things. Only insofar as Dasein projects itself toward the possibilities of its existence into which it is always already thrown does being disclose (erschließt sich) and are beings discovered ( entdeckt) as such.

In Being and Time Heidegger notes that even though the projecting-thrown openness to being is more original than what we discover in it, we have a natural tendency to understand ourselves through what is discovered, that is, through the things to which we relate and that we are used to think presentationally.⁵ Thus we understand ourselves as beings, as bodies (Körper) with certain faculties, and not from within our openness to being, not from within the temporality that characterizes being.

This tendency remains also when “Heidegger scholars” understand in some way the ontological difference that marks the distinction between the dis-closedness of being and the discoveredness of beings, that is, between the temporal event as which being as such is disclosed and our relation to things that come to appear in this temporal event. This tendency is a difficulty that we encounter each time we think. This is true especially of an attempt to think “body.” To think being through the ontological difference is certainly one way to keep this difficulty (to think being not as a being) open, and Heidegger would always maintain that we need to think through this difference to make a transition from metaphysical thinking (that thinks being—Sein —in terms of beings—Seiendes) to the thinking of being in itself. But in Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger also maintains that the ontological difference, as important as it may be at first for a transition from metaphysics to the thinking of being, becomes a main obstacle to think being in its truth.⁶ If we take the ontological difference as a kind of firm structure, we might again fall pray to our natural tendency to understand being in terms of beings by understanding being as a kind of open horizon that transcends beings, an open horizon that analogously to beings would be understood as a higher being beyond beings. By attempting to overcome the ontological difference, in Contributions Heidegger has to rethink the difference between be-ing (now written as “Seyn” to mark its temporal character, which Parvis and Maly in their translation of Contributions render with the hyphen in be-ing) and beings in a different way, and more explicitly in a way that would more efficiently counter our tendency to think being in terms of beings. But this rethinking of the difference between be-ing and (85) beings also impacts our possibility to think beings, and more specifically the body, more originally from within the opening of the truth of be-ing, without just objectifying them.