Being_and_Body_Martin_Heidegger_and_Maur.pdf

Being and BodyHeidegger 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 Dasein’sBeing.”

(from Being and Time)

•Some bio: https://youtu.be/r8YTD51lGFg?t=30s

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 ‘world’—a world with which he provides himself occasionally... Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, 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)

• “Heidegger’s ‘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)


“[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)


• “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 ‘own-self-ness’ and no one else's.” (Boss, 2000)


• “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)


“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’ (Being-there) 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 ‘Da-sein’ – 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.”



• “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 Da-sein. 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.”



• “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)

• “Heidegger’s ‘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)


• “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 with-world. […] 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-with-each-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 one’s 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-each-other in the same room.” (from Zollikon Seminars)


• 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.”



• “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)


• 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.”



• “What these pronouncements [by Heidegger on time] emphasize is the experience of time’s three-dimensionality. 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)

Present

Past

Future


“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.”



• “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’”



• “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)


World

Situation

Feelings

Attunement

Dasein

Martin Heidegger: Being-there in body

“Embodiment is always an aspect of Being-in-the-world. It always co-determines 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 unobjectifiableinvisible capacity to perceive the meaning of what we encounter. Our Daseinis basically this capacity of perception.”


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 Dasein’s very existence occurs within the ‘between’, between birth and death… Heidegger’s 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-Ponty’s philosophy: • https://youtu.be/wv-34w8kGPM

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 universal-constituting 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)


• “[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 one’s body to the rejected domains of emotional experience.” (Keat, 2013)


“To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance-and 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)


• “Our embodied consciousness is the in-between, 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.”


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

• Touching boiling pan means burn

Knowledge• I see a boiling

pan. I ain’ttouching 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.”


Time

Ideologies

SituationMateriality

Morals

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 youFor questions, comments and/or references, please email: [email protected]

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Being_and_Body_Martin_Heidegger_and_Maur.pdf

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