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Heidegger's Neglect of the Body (S U N Y Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)
Posted: March 1st, 2010, 5:47pm CET

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It has been over fi fty years since French philosophers began criticizing the “starting-point” (Ausgang) of Being and Time (1927)—specifi cally Heidegger’s account of everyday practices, practices that initially give us “access” (Zugang) to the question of the meaning of being. Alphonse de Waelhens, for example, argued that Heidegger’s phenomenology completely overlooks the fundamental role played by perception in particular and the body in general in our everyday understanding of things. “[In] Being and Time,” says Waelhens, “one does not fi nd thirty lines concerning the problem of perception; one does not fi nd ten concerning that of the body.”1 Jean-Paul Sartre amplifi ed this line of criticism when he emphasized the importance of the body as the fi rst point of contact that a human being has with its world, a contact that is prior to detached theorizing about objects.