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Philosophy: Embodiment and Being

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Levin interestingly explores the question of whether human beings are completely determined by history by emphasizing human embodiment. He plays off of Heidegger, who abandoned the “analytic of Dasein” in his later work because he had come to see it as a continuation of the metaphysical tradition he was trying to escape. What Heidegger missed was the notion that “the human body [could be] an organ of Being” or the ”primal medium into which this pre-understanding of Being is always first inscribed.”

“By grace of the ‘flesh,’” he argues, Being is always sensed prior to any clear theoretical ontological understanding. A “felt sense” provides “our pre-ontological attunement.” As a result, “we are never completely ‘in the dark’” as regards Being. This sense is not complete: It “calls for a deep commitment to questioning and exploring its implicit potential: it needs to be recognized, made explicit, conceptually articulate, and clear.” But our embodiment means that we always already have a sense of Being and of transcendent being, and therefore “our pre-ontological understanding . . . is not totally reducible to the understandings imposed by our historical life.” Heidegger could have seen this had he not overlooked “the natural body, the wild body of metaphorical existence.”

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 12:58 pm

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Philosophy: Embodiment and Being

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