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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger, bodily existence « Previous | |Next »
December 19, 2006

Though Heidegger does not write all that much on the body as in embodiment his understanding of the body explicitly confronts Cartesian mind/body dualism in that he rejects the idea that a body takes up a bit of space like a thing in favour of bodily being. In Nietzsche vol. 1, where he is discussing rapture as an aesthetic state, he says:

Ultimately we dare not split the matter in such a way, as though there were a bodily state housed in the basement with feelings dwelling upstairs. Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, is precisely the way we are corporeally. Bodily being does not mean that the soul [consciousness/mind?] is burdened by a hulk we call the body. In feeling oneself to to be, the body is already contained in advance in that self, in such a way that the body in its bodily states permeates the self. We do not 'have' a body in the way we carry a knife in a sheath. Neither is the body [Leib] a body [Korper] that merely accompanies us and which we can establish, expressly or not, as also present-at-hand. We do not 'have' a body [Leib] rather, we 'are' bodily[leiblich]. (pp.98-9)
This idea of bodily state, bodying, bodying forth, or being embodied hints at, or points to, the idea that as beings-in-the-world we are bodily, and that embodiment mediates our existence. This is what was taken up, and developed in the Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau Ponty.

What we can see though, is that Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche in the 1940s, picks up on Nietzsche's vitalist treatment of the body in the Will to Power and in Thus Spake Zarathustra----where the body is understood as a site of history shaped by forces--- and then begin to rework them. Heidegger's brief remarks are then picked up, and then elaborated, by both Merleau Ponty (embodiment) and then Foucault (the body is understood in historical terms).

I guess what I am beginning to realize is just how important or crucial Heidegger and his lectures on Nietzsche, with their critique of Nietzsche's individualism/voluntarism, is for French philosophy in the 1960s. This not the usual postructuralist reading in the Anglo-American academy. That places Nietzsche in the foreground and Heidegger in the background. I would argue that Nietzsche's influence is mediated by Heidegger.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:49 PM |