Abstract
Heidegger’s failure to discuss ‘the body’ in Being
and Time has generated a cottage industry of criticism. In his recently
translated Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger provides a response to the critics
by offering a thematic account of the body that is strikingly similar to
Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception. In this
article, I draw on the parallels between these two texts in order to see how
Heidegger’s neglect of the body affects his early project of fundamental
ontology and to determine whether or not an account of the body is necessary to
complete the project. I defend Heidegger by suggesting that any analysis of the body
is ‘ontic’ or regional and is made possible only on the basis of
Dasein, understood as a public ‘clearing’
(Lichtung) or ‘there’ (Da) of intelligibility
that determines in advance the way things emerge-into-presence as the kinds
of things that they are. Heidegger’s core concern in Being and
Time is to unearth the essential,
‘ontological-existential’, structures of Dasein that
make it possible for us to begin regional investigations into the problem of the
body in the first place.