Being and Body

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty

Remy Low
Existential Psychoanalysis: Philosophical foundations
Sydney School of Continental Philosophy
2015

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

Dasein is an entity, which does
not just occur among other
entities. Rather, it is distinguished
by the fact that, in its very Being,
that Being is an issue for it
Understanding of Being is itself a
definite characteristic of Daseins
Being.
(from Being and Time)
Some bio:
https://youtu.be/r8YTD51lGFg?t=30s

Martin Heidegger: What is being?

Dasein= Da (there) + Sein (being)= Being There
Being-in is not a property which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not
have, and without which it could just be just as well as it could be with it. It is not the
case that man is and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards
the worlda world with which he provides himself occasionally... Taking up
relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-theworld, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some entity is
present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can meet up
with Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world.
(from Being and Time)
It is just because human beings can be aware of their Being, and always already have some
understanding of it, however vague, that they are also able to forget it. This is hardly true of
rocks and roses (Cohn, 2002)
Heideggers there is that place of openness in which we encounter other beings as well as
our own involvement with the world. (Cohn, 2002)

Martin Heidegger: What is being?

Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence in terms of a

possibility of itself... The question of existing never gets straightened out except
through existing itself. (from Being and Time)
For Heidegger human beings found themselves always thrown into a world
from which they are not separable. The world cannot be bracketed [contra
Husserl]. Existence is always a Being-in-the-world. The world is our context.
(Cohn, 2002)
Without the light of human existence no being can be and, likewise, without
something to encounter and reveal there can be no human existence. (Boss,
2000)

Martin Heidegger: What is being?

[H]uman existence is essentially never just an object that is

somewhere present, least of all an object closed in on itself. Rather this
existence consists of mere potentialities neither visible nor tangible
to perceive and be aware of all that encounters and addresses us.
(from Zollikon Seminars)

Martin Heidegger: What is being?

Dasein is not static it has possibilities. It either finds itself thrown
into them, or it has chosen them, but in either case it can realize
them or put them aside Dasein alone has possibility and choice: this
is the radical difference between human beings and other beings
The emphasis is on fluidity, potentiality and openness of existence, its
basic incompleteness (Cohn, 2002)
Every Da-sein is an existence with its own specific and unique
assemblage of human possibilities. You are a very distinct bundle of
possibilities or capacities which now come together in this particular
way. There is no one in the world just like you and this unique
particularity belongs to you alone. This is your mine-ness, your ownself-ness and no one else's. (Boss, 2000)

Martin Heidegger: What is being?

The human realm of world-openness is what we in the West call mind.

In India they do not call this mind but instead they use the Sanskrit
word, Atman which simply means light or realm of light. So as I now
understand it, the Indian term, Atman, may be used, at least roughly, as
the equivalent of Da-sein. In using the term Atman, the Indians were
guided by the same fundamental insight into the nature of human
existence, as Heidegger was in coining the term Da-sein. (Boss, 2000)

Martin Heidegger: What is being?

Imagine that you are a light with the potential to illuminate all
the different aspects of your world:

Which aspects of your world do you tend towards

illuminating?
Which aspects of your world do you tend towards leaving in
darkness?
As an example, you may feel that you tend towards illuminating
the chaotic and unpredictable aspects of your world, but rarely
illuminate the more ordered, safe and trustworthy elements.
You may also find it useful to think about this question in
relation to your clients: which aspects of their world are they
open to, and which aspects do they tend to be closed to?
(Cooper, 2003)

Martin Heidegger: What is being?

All the capsule-like representations (common at present in psychology and
psychopathology) of a psyche, a subject, a person, an ego, a consciousness
have in an existential approach to be relinquished and give way to a
fundamentally different understanding.
The new ground of human existence should be called Da-sein (Beingthere) or Being-in-the-world existence as Da-sein means the opening up
of a sphere where the sense of what is given can be perceived. Human Dasein as a sphere of potentiality of perception and awareness is never an
object that is just present. It is, on the contrary, under no circumstances
something that can be objectified.

(from Zollikon Seminars)

Martin Heidegger: What is being?

Heidegger described the essential nature of Da-sein as a clearing, a realm of
openness, or a a luminating realm thus referring directly to the human capacity for
making room for things, for observing or becoming aware of all that is. Heidegger
never intended to imply, however, that this realm of world illumination was anything
like a container or apparatus which was filled with ideas and images (Boss, 2000)
Since, as human beings, we exist as a being which understands Being, we have a
degree of freedom which does not belong to any other kind of being. Through our own
world-illuminating essence we not only allow things to shine forth and become what
they are but also choose the kind of relationship we will have to that which reveals
itself. Our very existence as perceiving and understanding beings endows us with the
possibility of choosing how we will relate to what encounters us: we can pay attention
to it or ignore it; accept it or reject it; approach it or withdraw from it; love it or fear it.
These are all different possibilities for relating to what shows itself in the light of Dasein. So we can say that our entire existence is made up of possibilities, that we exist as
a bundle of possibilities for relating to the world. (Boss, 2000)

Martin Heidegger: What is being-there?

Dasein is something that has been thrown; it has
been brought into its there, but not of its own
accord. As being, it has taken the definite form of a
potentiality-for-Being, which belongs to itself and
yet has not given itself to itself. As existent it never
comes back behind its thrownness...
Only in that it projects itself upon possibilities into
which it has been thrown. The Self, which as such
has to lay a basis for itself, can never get that basis
into its power; and yet, as existing, it must take over
Being-a-basis It is never existent before its basis,
but only from it and as this basis.
(from Being and Time)

Martin Heidegger: What is being-there?

Every new situation offers new choices what we
are not free to choose is the basis itself. What is
behind this basis, whatever led to its formation, is
out of reach. (Cohn, 2002)
Heideggers thrownness is no trap but a fact, a
present situation with its own possibilities.
Possibilities may imply the presence of choices By
choosing not to choose we choose the situation as it
is. In reality, we cannot avoid choice, but we can
deceive ourselves into believing that we have not
made a choice. However, our capacity to respond,
our responsibility is part of our existence and it
includes our capacity to respond in one way or
another. (Cohn, 2002)

Martin Heidegger: What is being-there?

Obviously, the freedom to choose can only exist if, prior to this, a
number of things, a number of beings and of human possibilities for
relating to these beings, had already appeared and revealed
themselves to you. If nothing or even if only one thing is able to
appear to you at any given moment, then you are unable to exercise
any capacity to choose. Always a multiplicity of things must reveal
themselves to you before you can employ your free will to choose
from among them. Therefore, the primordial basis for freedom is the
openness. (Boss, 2000)

Martin Heidegger: Being-there-with-others

Being-with-others is an inescapable aspect of Being-in-the-world:
the world is always the one I share with others. The world of Dasein is a withworld. [] Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein. (from Being and
Time)
I exist with you in the way of Being in the world, and particularly a being-witheach-other in our relation to whatever encounters us. (from Zollikon Seminars)
So even when you are alone, it is a way of being-with-others:

Sitting on ones own in the restaurant is a privation of being-with-each-other. Here the

existing beings have nothing to do with each other, and this is their way of being-with-eachother in the same room. (from Zollikon Seminars)

Martin Heidegger: Being-there-with-others

Why Being-with is not the same as relating:
Do you relate to human beings as you relate to the glass on the table in front of you?
Such talk of relating, of our relationships with other human beings, or between human
beings, is misleading because it seduces us into imagining two separate subjects who
are assumed to make connections between representations of themselves in their
respective consciousnesses. Seen in this way, the concept of relation tends to
obscure an engagement with how we truly are with others.

As each of us is a Dasein as Being-in-the-world, being-with-each-other cannot mean

anything but a being-with-each-other-in-the-world. Thus I am, first of all, not related
to your presence as an individual but dwell with you in the same Being-here.

(from Zollikon Seminars)

Martin Heidegger: Being-there-with-others

It is important to realize that as human beings we are never alone in this calling
to respond to Being. We are always together with other human beings, whether
in a physical or a mental way, and therefore never isolated in this humble but
dignified vocation. Other human beings, who are of the same constitution of
Being as we are, are together-with-us building up this light of the world, allowing
the things of the world to reveal themselves out of primordial darkness. And this
is our fundamental existential togetherness. (Boss, 2000)

Martin Heidegger: Being-there-with-others

Language as an example of being-with:
Communication in which we make statements, for example, giving information,
is a special case of that communication which is grasped in principle existentially.
Here the articulation of being-with-one-another understandingly is constituted.
It brings about the sharing of being attuned together and the understanding of
being with. Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, for
example, opinions and wishes, from the inside of one subject to the inside of
another. Being-there-with-each-other is essentially already manifest in
attunement-with and understanding-with. Being-with is essentially shared in
discourse, that is, it already is. [It is] only unshared as something not grasped and
appropriated. (from Being and Time)

What we call language is thus for Heidegger not restricted to the

spoken word but is an existential [i.e. a universal characteristic of
existence]. As such it is more appropriately called communication
the relation of beings sharing a with-world. (Cohn, 2002)

Martin Heidegger: Being with time

Past, present and future we call dimensions of time All three dimensions
are equally original, for there is none without the other two, and thus all
three are equally open to us, though not uniformly so. At times, one
dimension dominates and becomes the one that engages and perhaps
imprisons us. But this does not mean that other dimensions have
disappeared, they are only modified.

Having time for something, I am directed towards a what-for, towards what

is to be done, what is coming. I am awaiting it but in a way that I still dwell in
what is present, and in addition I also retain (whether I wish to or not) what
occupied me just now and before.
(from Zollikon Seminars)

Martin Heidegger: Being with time

What these pronouncements [by
Heidegger on time] emphasize is the
experience of times threedimensionality. There is no linear move
from past to present to future, as every
moment still contains the past it left
behind while already pointing towards a
future Thus time is not a thread but a
web which refers simultaneously to what
is, what has been and what is to be.
(Cohn, 2002)

Future

Past
Present

Martin Heidegger: Being with time

We started with our everyday
experience of time from what we mean
when we talk of having time, having no
time, to take time, to give up time, to
waste time. All this shows in some way
in our already in possession of time,
that it is granted to us so that we can
use it in one way or another. And
particularly when we have no time, the
time granted to us oppresses us. Time
affects us. Time concerns us.
(from Zollikon Seminars)

Martin Heidegger: Being with time

Existential phenomenology does not try to define what time is as such. It sees
time as an aspect of our experience of existence. What time might mean or be if
we did not live it we cannot know. Time is not something within which our life
unfolds, though it is often how it is seen. Heidegger warns us that talking about
living in time implies a particular difficulty of assuming that time is a kind of
container of space. (Cohn, 2002)
Our experience of time reaches from unchosen limitations to the chosen
realization of our possibilities, whereby the choice is carried by our free
responses. Another way of describing this process is to call it our history. (Cohn,
2002)
Human beings can thus be seen not so much to live in time as to be living it. At
every moment, the past is the soil from which we are already stretching out
towards a future. (Cohn, 2002)

Martin Heidegger: Being with feelings

A feelings assails us. It neither comes from outside nor from inside, but arises out of
Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being.
...
What we indicate ontologically [i.e. fundamentally] by the term attunement is ontically
[i.e. empirically] the most familiar and everyday sort of thing: our feeling

(from Being and Time)

Martin Heidegger: Being with feelings

Feelings cannot be split off from the situations
in which they occur. They cannot be isolated or
repressed, and return later attached to events
to which they did not originally belong. An
unexpressed anger, for instance, is an
unexpressed anger, no more, no less. It is not
an anger clamouring for expression and
excluded from it. The fact that it is unexpressed
is part of what it is. Feelings cannot be revived
in their original purity because they are part of
a context that cannot be recreated. (Cohn,
2002)
Feelings are not only reactive but also
disclosive. (Cohn, 2002)

Martin Heidegger: Being with feelings

World

Situation
Feelings
Attunement

Dasein

Martin Heidegger: Being-there in body

Embodiment is always an aspect of Being-in-the-world. It always codetermines our Being-in-the-world, our being-open, our partaking of the
world.

Whatever we call our bodiliness including the last muscle fibre and the
most hidden molecule is an essential aspect of our existence. It is
fundamentally not lifeless matter but the realm of an unobjectifiable
invisible capacity to perceive the meaning of what we encounter. Our Dasein
is basically this capacity of perception.
(from Zollikon Seminars)

Martin Heidegger: Being-there in body

Whenever we ask the question about the
relation between the body and mind, we have
already entered the dualistic trap. It is as if we
are trying to bring together two entities which,
in fact, we have never seen apart soma and
psyche, body and mind are both parts of a total
situation, they are both aspects of the
phenomenon we perceive, and to look at them
separately misses the full meaning of what we
meet. (Cohn, 2002)

Martin Heidegger: Being-there in body

Heidegger writes that Dasein stretches between
birth and death, that Daseins very existence occurs
within the between, between birth and death
Heideggers use of the active verb stretches equally
demands exploration. In order to stretch between,
we must exist within a physical body, including a
brain. We must inevitably engage in the act of
stretching, reaching, moving, intending. And so the
primordial condition of being in time is to exist in the
ing and not to remain stagnant in the Be our
brainstem allows our heart to beat, our respiration to
fluctuate in tandem with our heart, and our body
temperature to shift as we attempt to regulate our
internal systems in response to our internal and
external environments. We have a deep sense of
being always ahead as we hop and stretch in the
now moments. (Thomson, 2006)

Martin Heidegger: Analytic implications

From freedom or determinism to thrown potentialities
From psyche to with-world
From intrapsychic to basic relatedness
From time as measured to time as lived
From feelings as reactive to feelings as disclosive in situations
From mind/body to embodied being
(see Cohn, 1997; 2002)

Martin Heidegger: From psycho-analysis to Dasein-analysis

Solicitude (from Being and Time) 2 ways of being with a client
that which leaps in and dominates, and that which leaps forth and liberates.
Leaping in

Leaping forth

This kind of solicitude takes over for

the other that with which [the client] is
to concern himself. The [client] is thus
thrown out of his own position; he
steps back so that afterwards, when
the matter has been attended to, he
can either take it over as something
finished and at his disposal, or
disburden himself of it completely.

A kind of solicitude which does not so

much leap in for [the client] as leap
ahead of him in his existential
potentiality for Being, not in order to
take away his care but rather to give it
back to him authentically* for the first
time.

* Authenticity for Heidegger= rare moments where Dasein confronts its Being-there; ready for anxiety

Martin Heidegger: From psycho-analysis to Dasein-analysis

[P]sychological health, from a Daseinsanalytic perspective, is construed as
a state of openness and letting be both mentally and physically and
particularly an openness to loving and trusting others. It is a way of being
in which all that stakes a claim on the beingness of Dasein can be
perceived and responded to in all its richness and complexity: an attitude
of Gelassenheit [release]. This does not mean experiencing everything at
once at any point in time, in any mood, we will always be closed to
certain aspects of our world but it does mean having the openness and
flexibility to move around the whole spectrum of world-relating
possibilities. Metaphorically, then, the psychologically healthy individual is
like a light that can shine itself across the full terrain of its world. (Cooper,
2003)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

My body is a chiasm: it doubles up as
inside hollow, invisible, and outside,
extension, visible. It is ambiguity flesh.
(from The Visible and Invisible)

Exemplary of Merleau-Pontys philosophy:

https://youtu.be/wv-34w8kGPM

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The body-subject

Bodily experience forces us to
acknowledge an imposition of meaning,
which is not the work of a universalconstituting consciousness, a meaning
which clings to certain contents. My body
is the meaningful core which behaves like
a general function, and which,
nevertheless, exists and is susceptible to
disease. (from Phenomenology of
Perception)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The body-subject

[The] acquisition of invulnerability is presented as a necessary
element of maturity or adulthood, themselves defined in terms of the
rejection and negation of infancy and childhood, during which the
experience of vulnerability is typically central. And this process has a
bodily dimension: for instance, the muscular and postural
developments involved in the mastery of the kinds of bodily skills
discussed in the preceding section are also, I would suggest, a means
of closing off ones body to the rejected domains of emotional
experience. (Keat, 2013)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The body-subject

To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim
at and what is given, between the intention and the performanceand the body is our anchorage in a world habit has its abode
neither in thought nor in the objective body, but in the body as a
mediator of a world
Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of
knowledge [i.e. intellectualist, theoretical knowledge]; it provides us
with a way of access to the world and the object... which has to be
recognized as original and perhaps as primary
(from Phenomenology of Perception)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The body-subject

Our embodied consciousness is the inbetween, it is neither entirely in me,
nor in my mind, nor is it out there in
the world of objects. Consciousness is a
phenomenon of bringing the world to
light. It hovers between things and
me I am both author and receiver of
my experience Much of our
experience is mediated by the body,
though the cultural world is also part of
the way in which we make sense of our
existence. (van Deurzen, 2010)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Sensation

Sensation as the primary experience before
any meaning-making (e.g. perception or
memory):
Once introduced, the notion of sensation distorts
any analysis of perception.
...
the appeal to memory presupposes what it is
supposed to explain: the patterning of data, the
imposition of meaning on a chaos of sensation. At
the moment the evocation of memories is made
possible, it becomes superfluous, since the work
we put it to is already done.

(from Phenomenology of Perception)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Sensation

We embody the world and, through our senses, make it come to life
in the same way in which we are also brought to life ourselves by
being in the world and by embodying it. There are many different
levels of embodiment and different forms of complexity of being in
the world. (van Deurzen, 2010)
Smart sense

Touch boiling
pan and get
burnt

Sense

Knowledge
Touching
boiling pan
means burn

I see a boiling
pan. I aint
touching it!

Sense

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The intentional arc

Senses taken together Bodily schema= the organisation of our

bodily awareness of the world, our practical ability to anticipate and
incorporate the world in our actions and dispositions (i.e. habits)
[The body] is not an object of I think [but] an ensemble of lived meanings
that finds its equilibrium. (from Phenomenology of Perception)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The intentional arc

Beneath intelligence as beneath
perception, we discover a more
fundamental function [which] makes
objects exist in a more intimate sense for
us. Let us therefore say that the life of
consciousness - cognitive life, the life of
desire or perceptual life - is subtended by
an intentional arc which projects round
about us our past, our future, our human
setting, our physical, ideological and
moral situation, or rather which results in
our being situated in all these respects. It
is this intentional arc which brings about
the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of
sensibility and motility [i.e. orientation].
And it is this which goes limp in illness.
(from Phenomenology of Perception)

Time

Morals

Materiality

Ideologies

Situation

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The intentional arc

The body-world dialectic:

What confuses us about our own senses is that they are all operating at the
same time and that they are so intertwined. The body itself is what gives us
meaning, but it does so in ways that we cannot always grasp We constantly
receive meanings that have been constituted previously and we adapt these
to the way in which we create meaning for ourselves. (Van Deurzen, 2010)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Analytic implications

[The] recognition of the system of our body-world relation leads to the
implication that truth is essentially created by this system in order to make
sense of each and every situation in which we find ourselves. Truth is thus
situational and open to alteration.
We retrieve and receive meanings, but also transform and create them
we are agents of change without being aware of the transformations that
we effect in the world In us, what seemed necessary and determined
becomes free. Psychotherapy must be the moment where a person is
helped to become aware of this intertwining and dialectical relationship
with the world.

(van Deurzen, 2010)

Thank you
For questions, comments and/or references, please email:
remy.low@sydney.edu.au