The Formulation of the Problem
The Zollikon seminars contain Heidegger’s most explicit and extensive references to the problem of the body. In a conversation following these seminars, dated March 3, 1972, Medard Boss prompts Heidegger to respond to Jean Paul Sartre’s reproach that Heidegger “only wrote six lines about the body in the whole of Being and Time.”87 In this case, Sartre’s complaint sets up a contrast with the position of French existential philosophers and phenomenologists, for whom the body is a cardinal problem that deserves extensive analyses.88 To illustrate this point, I shall refer briefly to the position of Alphonse de Waehlens, for it has become a paradigmatic point of reference in comparisons with Merleau- Ponty.
In his preface to Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior, De Waehlens affirms that Heidegger takes as evident our capacity of movement, perception and action, dismissing a concrete account of our bodily being, thus neglecting “…the world that for us is always already there.”89 Here, Merleau-Ponty’s work is presented as a counter-example, which demonstrates the possibility and advantages of an explicit phenomenological analysis of the body, on the basis of similar premises to those present in Heidegger’s existential analytic.
Heidegger’s response is at the same time simple and thought provoking. He says: “I can only counter Sartre’s reproach by stating that the bodily is the most difficult [to
87 Zollikon Seminars, 292/231.
88 See Richard Askay, "Heidegger, the body, and the French philosophers," 29. See also Zollikon Seminars, 156/120.
understand] and that I was unable to say more at the time.”90 Let me, then, examine in detail Heidegger’s response, considering primarily those indications given in the Zollikon seminars. Heidegger accepts implicitly that it may be necessary to say more about the body than he did in Being and Time,91 for to qualify the bodily as the “most difficult” [das Schwierigste] is to assert, in the superlative, that this phenomenon has the character of a fundamental philosophical problem, that is, a problem that deserves extensive and persistent examinations. Yet, apart from some sessions in the Zollikon seminars, some parts of his lectures on Nietzsche from the 1930s, and a session in the seminar on Heraclitus with Eugen Fink (1966-67),92 Heidegger never meditates expressly on the phenomenon of the body.93 Hence, he acknowledges that he could not say “more” about the body in Being and Time, and that this is a central problem; however, in the years that followed he never undertook the task of meditating on the body as such, even though the themes of poetry and art, importantly influenced by his reading of Nietzsche, contain a reference to the bodily dimension of existence.94 Thus, two interrelated questions arise: Why is the problem of the body qualified here as the most difficult?95 And, why was Heidegger unable to say “more” about the body in Being and Time, and thereafter? For now, I will focus on the first question, for it produces
90 Zollikon Seminars, 292/231. “Sartres Vorwurf kann ich nur mit der Feststellung begegnen, daß das Leibliche das
Schwierigste ist und daß ich damals eben noch nicht mehr zu sagen wußte.”
91 It is worth noting that despite this “implicit” acceptance, in general, in the Zollikon seminars, Heidegger rejects Sartre’s criticism, for it is based on a misunderstanding of his philosophy. With regard to this, see Richard Askay, “Heidegger, the body, and the French philosophers,” 29-35.
92 Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraklit Seminar Wentersemester 1966/67 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970). English: Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67, trans. Charles H. Seibert (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1979). Hereafter cited with reference first to the German, then to the English translation. 93 Heidegger’s silence in regard to the problem of the body has been widely discussed. For a general outline of the literature on the topic see Patrick Baur, Phänomenologie der Gebärden (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2013),11-19.
94 Daniela Vallega-Neu elaborates on this point in The Bodily Dimension in Thinking (Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2005), Chapter Five.
95 Regarding the first question, Vallega-Neu responds the following: “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 thoughtis exactly what, according to Heidegger, has prevented Western thought from asking the more fundamental question of being itself.” Ibid., 83.
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the key to respond to the second one. Although these questions have been repeatedly examined in scholarly works on Heidegger and the problem of the body,96 I still need to reformulate them in order to set the basis for understanding the relation between gesture and art, as well as potential correspondences with the work of Merleau-Ponty. Heidegger’s position in relation to the problem of the body is ambiguous, and in some cases his explorations of the topic come close to those of Merleau-Ponty, yet in a way that remains unthought, more implicit than explicit.
The Body: The “Most Difficult” Problem?
In order to gain clarity regarding this first question I shall consider the intercrossings between the problem of the body and other eminent philosophical problems. In the context of the Zollikon seminars Heidegger refers to two of these philosophical problems. First, in one of the introductory sessions of the Seminar, he affirms the following: “Since being is not the same as beings, the difference between beings and being is the most fundamental and difficult [problem].”97 Second, in the context of a reference to Socrates as the “West’s greatest thinker,” Heidegger recalls Socrates words approvingly, according to which “To say the same thing about the same thing is the most difficult.”98
The first statement is part of a discussion on the irreducibility of our understanding of being to the ontic level of our relations to things, and an examination of the way one must
96 See, for instance, Kevin Aho, Heidegger's Neglect of the Body, 22; Baur, Phänomenologie der Gerbärden, 106-17; Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Vers une ontologie indirecte (Paris: Vrin, 2006), 197-202; Vallega-Neu, The Bodily
Dimension in Thinking, 83-87.
97 Zollikon Seminars, 20-21/17. “Sofern Sein nicht seiendes ist, ist die Unterscheidung des Seienden vom Sein die fundamentalste und schwerste.”
approach ontological questions.99 On this occasion, Heidegger remarks that catching a glimpse of being requires “proper readiness to receive-perceive” [eigene Bereitschaft des
Vernehmens], a “distinctive act” [ausgezeichnete Handlung] that carries out a “transformation of
existence [eine Wandlung der Existenz].”100 Accordingly, he suggessts, the distinction between being and beings hinges on a fundamental receptivity or openness to being, that is, a certain disposition. It is worth noting that here such “glimpse” of being is qualified as a sort of perception or apprehension, vernehmen, and that vernehmen is not sheer receptivity but a mode of action, Handlung.101 One can see, then, that the problematic of the ontological difference
contains from the outset a reference to the problems of perception and action and, in this way, a reference to the question of embodied agency.
With regard to the second statement, Heidegger explains that the difficulty in saying the same about the same has to do with a proper way, a proper method, to access phenomena, considering the presuppositions that in each case determine this access.102 Furthermore, Heidegger points out that Socrates’ greatness resides in his having written nothing, indicating that his silence implies an effort to remain within the orbit of things themselves, preserving a saying that is tautological, which says always the same about the same in order to say nothing, revealing what is unsaid or presupposed in each case. In this way, Socrates’ greatness is assessed by his capacity to relate what is said to what is unsaid, to
99 For an analysis of the difficulty inherent to the problem of the body in Heidegger, and its relation to the problem of the ontological difference see Vallega-Neu, The Bodily Dimension in Thinking, 83-86. Our examination of these questions is to some extent supported by her analysis.
100 Zollikon Seminars, 21/18, modified.
101 For a detailed discussion of the meaning of vernehmen, see Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Vol. Gesamtausgabe Bd.40 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976). English: Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2000), 146-47/ 146-147.
102 See Patrick Baur, Phänomenologie der Gebärden, 86. Here, Patrick Baur alludes to this Socratic “Tautismus” as an essential trait of Heidegger’s phenomenology, according to which the reference to a tautological saying of the same, of being itself, and things themselves, is fundamentally determined as difficult, as something that can only be understood with a sense, or attunement, of difficulty. He says: “Zum Tautismus der heideggerschen
Phänomenologie gehört damit eine Strategie der Aufladung des Selben: Die Sache selbst –und damit immer auch: das Sein –zeigt sich in ihrer Selbigkeit im Pathos der Schwere, in der Übernahme seines Lastens auf dem Dasein.”
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that which remains in silence and antecedes any particular act of showing or saying. And this is precisely what is “most difficult.”103
Thus, in both statements the difficulty of the problem in question is related to a
critical task, that is, to the possibility of disentangling or discriminating what is presupposed
or accepted and what is posited or supposed,104 considering that what is accepted is that which remains essentially unsaid, and invisible, in that which is said or shown. With these premises, I suggest that the unique superlative difficulty that characterizes the problematic of the body is the same, and corresponds to the difficulty of distinguishing between that which is taken as essential to our bodily being, which corresponds to what is presupposed and remains invisible, and the visible, perceptible dimension of the phenomenon. Moreover, taking into account that the body conjoins visibility and invisibility, for it is at the same time a power of vision and thought and a visible thing with visible mechanisms, one might say that when it comes to the problem of the body the “most difficult” relates to the possibility of determining to what extent, or in what sense, the body shelters or preserves that which remains unsaid, that which is presupposed in our implicit understanding of beings.
Thus, among the eminent, “superlative” problems, the problem of the body seems to have a particular status, for the difficulty concerning the body is in principle twofold, it combines two seemingly different problems. On the one hand, the problem consists in determining the existential dimension of the phenomenon of the body without treating the body as a body, without confusing the existential, lived body with the perceptible physical
103 Heidegger discusses the silence of Socrates in different works, and different periods. I will analyze in greater detail the question concerning Socrates’ silence in the last part of the present work.
104 Zollikon Seminars, 7/6. Considering the distinction between ontic and ontological phenomena, Heidegger claims here: “each supposition is always already grounded in a certain kind of acceptio” […jede Supposition gründet
body, the body as “ontic phenomenon.”105 This perspective involves a paradox, for one must presume that to some extent the body is a non-body, a no-thing. On the other hand, the problem consists in assessing to what extent or in what sense our bodily being becomes part of the ground of our ontological understanding of things. There is another paradox here, for one must consider that what one may know about the being of the body presupposes the body; it is the body itself that somehow speaks and thinks when we are thinking and speaking “about” the body. These two interrelated problems reveal the phenomenon of the body as unique and paradoxical. One may say, then, that for Heidegger the body is an ambiguous phenomenon, which in each one of its manifestations as “lived body” involves the totality of our own being, in such a way that it can never be determined as a mere thing, a simply objective body.
The Lived Body
Heidegger elaborates further on this twofold, essential difficulty, in the Seminar on Heraclitus with Eugen Fink. In that seminar, the problem of the body is also qualified as the “most difficult” in the context of a discussion on the topics of sleep and dream, which involve some references to the problem of perception, touch and the darkness that presumably characterizes our relation to sensible being. On this occasion Heidegger claims: “a human is embodied [leibt] only when he lives [lebt],”106 thus suggesting that the “bodying forth” [leiben] of the body coincides with the unfolding of life, granted that life is understood existentially, ontologically, not as the domain of biology, nor as a life that is present to itself
105 Ibid. In this regard, Heidegger explains that ontic phenomena are visible or perceptible, whereas ontological phenomena, such as “the existence of something,” are not.
106 Heraclitus Seminar, 234/146.“Der Mensch leibt nur, wenn er lebt.” This sentence is difficult to translate because Heidegger uses the verb “Leiben,” which has not a direct correlate in English. Considering Askay’s translation of
Leiben as “bodying forth” in the Zollikon Seminars, we propose to translate this sentence as follows: “The human
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as self-consciousness. He affirms again that “the body phenomenon is the most difficult problem,”107 and suggests that this problem is intrinsically related to the problem of language. He says precisely: “The adequate constitution of the sound of speech also belongs here. Phonetics thinks too physicalistically, when it does not see φωνή [speech] as voice in the correct manner.”108 To conclude this point, Heidegger corroborates that “the bodily in the human is not something animalistic,”109 and that a proper understanding of the bodily has not been reached by metaphysics.
These series of interventions in the seminar on Heraclitus must be read carefully, for there is much that is said between the lines. Heidegger shows here that what determines our essential relation to the body is the fact that we live it, something already indicated in the correlations between life and body that resonate in the verb “leiben.”110 In a sense, one cannot see the body at a distance, for the body is in each case mine, it is myself, and cannot be objectified.111 But as the reference to the verb leiben indicates, the lived body remains open, in movement, in the world: it is not confined to the sphere of subjectivity. Thus, on one hand, the lived body should not be understood in terms of the metaphysical distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, which means that it cannot be identified with the “sensible” skin, with the physical limits of my body.112 With regard to this, in the Zollikon seminars, Heidegger cautiously remarks: “perhaps one comes closer to the phenomenon of the body by distinguishing between the different limits of a corporeal thing [Körper] and those of the
107Ibid.“Das Leibphänomen ist das schwierigste Problem.”
108Ibid. “Hierher gehört auch die adaequate Fassung des Sprachlautes. Die Phonetik denkt zu sehr physikalisch wenn sie φωνή
als Stimme nicht in der rechten Weise sieht.”
109Ibid., 235/146.
110 See the entry corresponding to the term “Leib” in Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, Deutches Wörterbuch.
111 This point is emphasized in the Zollikon Seminars: “The bodying forth [Leiben] of the body is determined by the way of my being. The bodying forth of the body, therefore, is a way of Dasein’s being” (113/86).
body [Leib].”113 On the other hand, the limits of the body change and unfold with my sojourn in the world, and have a poetic –in the sense of disclosive –character. As I shall argue in subsequent sections of the present work, this means that the lived body is intertwined with the world, entangled in things. For, as Heidegger expresses it, the body is primordial spatiality, visibility, and openness, in any case, not self-presence, contrary to what Derrida’s reading of the concept of Leib in Husserl suggests.114 And although the body is, in a sense, expression, what it “expresses” is its very sojourn in the world, which is to say that, considered in this way, the body is primordial language: saying, showing.
In the aforementioned passage from the seminar on Heraclitus, Heidegger alludes in passing to the complex relation between body and speech, both in the sense of the bodily dimension of speech, and the “linguistic” dimension of the body. In both cases what is at stake is our ecstatic involvement in the world. He intimates that just as the voice is not something physical, as phonetics presumes, the lived body in general is not something animalistic, that is, something that could be understood on the basis of “biological” premises. But this does not mean that the voice is something spiritual, animated by a subjective consciousness. In subsequent sections of this work I will examine these indications in greater detail. For now I can anticipate that Heidegger’s brief reference to the relation between body and language may bear special significance, for it suggests that the lived body, the ontological body, is the body that we experience as Stimmung: attunement, tune and voice.115
113Ibid., 112/86.
114 Since Heidegger’s analysis of the body touches on classical problems of Husserlian phenomenology, such as the preeminence of speech, of the voice, as spiritualized expression in contraposition to involuntary gestures, this distinction seems pertinent here. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's
Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 33-37.
115 In The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), Michael Haar claims that “Stimmung maintains a privileged relation with the
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The Body as the Threshold between Being and Beings
Let me recapitulate and emphasize that what is problematic about the body has to do with a proper distinction between the ontological and the ontic levels of the phenomenon, and the fact that the ontological phenomenon of the body is somehow a non-body, an invisible or unperceivable body, an atmosphere, an attuned body. Indeed, in an effort to