The Incarnality of Being: The Earth, Animals, and the Body in Heidegger's Thought

Introduction

Introduction In recent years, contemporary continental philosophy has increasingly come to appreciate the importance of the problem of embodiment. And yet among those thinkers who have had the greatest influence on shaping this tradition, Martin Heidegger stands out as having neglected this problematic, even though he devotes considerable attention to the importance of humanity’s “dwelling” upon the earth and develops a radical concept thereof.1 This tension between emphasizing the earth and downplaying the body becomes never more evident than when we reflect upon a single parenthetical statement from the first division of Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927). Upon addressing the lived character of our spatial comportment, directionality, and orientation, he remarks: “This ‘bodily nature’ hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here.”2 Can we, by drawing upon the entirety of Heidegger’s thought, recover the body as an explicit concern of his phenomenology ? In this book, I will attempt to answer this question affirmatively, and, in the process, show the environmental, ecological, and ethical implications of transposing the issue of embodiment into the forefront of Heidegger’s thinking. To develop this problematic, it will be necessary to address the omissions in Heidegger’s earlier thought, which his discussion of the earth in the “Origin of the Work of Art” (1935) begins to make apparent.3 Specifically we must counter a trend in Being and Time that he attempts to rectify in Contributions to Philosophy (1938), namely, the tendency to overplay the importance of temporality at the expense of addressing the corollary occurrence of spatiality.4 While in the late 1920s Heidegger appeals to time as the key to uncovering the meaning of being, in Contributions he more concretely addresses the dynamic of temporality by considering its occurrence in conjunction with spatiality , that is, as the interdependence of “time-space” (Zeit-Raum). Space reemerges as the place (Ort) where being discloses itself within the scope of human existence’s (Dasein’s) historical sojourn on the earth. In his 1962 lecture , “Time and Being,” Heidegger reflects upon the importance of addressing his earlier omission: “The attempt in Being and Time, section 70, to derive spatiality from temporality is untenable.”5 1 In the following, I will observe Heidegger’s self-testimonials and develop the clues that he leaves, by his hermeneutics of facticity, that embodiment constitutes an important permutation in how being becomes manifest to us. By developing this theme of the incarnality of being, I will open up a range of pivotal topics whose exploration will bring Heidegger’s thinking to bear on various provocative questions of contemporary philosophy: sexuality, the intersection of human and animal life, the precarious future of the earth we inhabit,6 and the implications that reclaiming our embodiment has upon an ethics and a politics that take into consideration the current ecological crisis. Because sexuality is among those issues that Heidegger seems to have neglected , my appeal to our embodiment and tie to nature (physis) assumes a provocative character. In chapter 1, I undertake the task of “repeating” Heidegger’s analysis of everydayness within the context provided by the facticity of our contemporary existence. I expand this analysis to include the way that the computer age has altered the concept of the everyday work world, as well as the ubiquitous problems that bring our own “embodied” condition into question (e.g., the plight of addiction from “substance abuse” to Internet gambling). In chapter 2, I bring the issue of embodiment into the foreground by addressing that aspect of human existence that perhaps most epitomizes it—but that Heidegger ignores—the predisposition toward sex. I thereby take the initial steps to confront objections to Heidegger’s tendency to discount the problem of embodiment , as advanced by such critics as Hans Jonas and David Krell.7 In chapter 3, I raise the question of what ethics means for Heidegger at the historical crossroads where we balance the prospect of the earth’s destruction with the possibility of safeguarding it for future generations. In the oblique form of a series of questions from Contributions, Heidegger expresses concern about the problem of exploiting nature for the purpose of our leisure and diversion. As a prelude to his influential critique of technology in the early 1950s, he emphasizes for the first time the danger of machination and the corollary prospect of destroying the earth: And finally what was left [of nature] was only “scenery” and recreational opportunity and even...