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"Heidegger's disinterest in us as embodied creatures has always seemed to me to be a weird and obvious flaw in his thinking."

I was surprised by this statement. I don't know definitively about Heidegger and embodiment, but this seems to go against the regular interpretation of Heidegger. Doesn't Heidegger go on about "the hand" and embodied (not conscious) use of tools. At least that's what I get from reading Dreyfus. BTW, the latest Dreyfus lectures on Heidegger are posted in MP3 here: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/185_s04/html/lectures_185_s04.html

Furthermore, I just got a book by Paul Dourish (ex-Apple, ex-Xerox PARC) from the library: Where the Action Is. It has a chapter entitled "Being-in-the-World": Embodied Interaction. Therein is stated: "Dasein is embodied being."

Are they all wrong? Wouldn't be the first time in Heidegger studies...

Perhaps this a difference between the phenomenological Heidegger of B&T and the later Heidegger of Beyng?

Heidegger was iconoclastically practice-focused. He turned our attention to the commonplaces of life - broken hammers, for lord's sake - on purpose. Yet, in listing what is inescapable about Dasein, he never mentions that we have a body. He sort of covers it when he talks about death, but even there he tries to separate death the way animals die from our knowledge of our impending death. That we have skin, that we shit once a day, that we really really like to fuck just doesn't show up. Not even that having two eyes facing forward means that we have a visual perspective. So, H is more aware of bodies than most classical philosophers, but he doesn't consider it worth focusing on.

The later H is, if anything, more abstract and mystical.

>H is more aware of bodies than most classical
>philosophers, but he doesn't consider it worth
>focusing on.

true. nevertheless, the H of, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" does seem fixated on dwelling (an embodied pursuit if ever there was one) as a response to the Unheil, the sickness (a body metaphor), contracted during our prolonged affair with metaphysics.

we need not forget the turning, the guardianship and the dwelling of an older Heidegger trying to locate an embodiment of philosophy after metaphysics in the local lived spaces of being-in-the-world: which, ostensibly, would include our daily defecation and coital fixation.

i think H, and most Continental thinkers even today, do not take seriously enough the human as animal (i was having this very conversion with Jack Caputo a couple of weeks ago). i think the poetics of the late H is a rich commentary on the younger and more earnest H and may provide an interesting framework within which a more detailed thinking about embodied dwelling can take place.

i agree with you on the big, big It, btw.

cheers.

oh, hey, one more thing: i wanted to ask if you are saying that thinking the body is somehow in opposition to the abstract or mystical ("The later H is, if anything, more abstract and mystical.")?

Dan, I agree that later H is more dwelling-focused, and that's a good point. And yet he never manages to get notice that our hands are dirty. When he discusses dirt, in fact, it's a painting of dirt.

His idea of dwelling on the earth comes across (to me) as an agrarian myth, full of sun-ripened grapes and blue skies and graceful gods. Now, it's impressive that a philosopher actually noticed that there's a sky and an earth. But Surely the fact that we can only look in one direction at a time, are designed to walk in the direction we're looking, and can close our eyes but not our ears has something deep to do with how we dwell and how we are in the world. I'm not saying he has to be Merleau-Ponty, but it seems to me that the failure to even address our bodily nature is a weakness.

And, yes, I was sloppily opposing bodies with the abstract and mystical. My bad. Thanks.

Caputo was the outside reviewer on my dissertation. I haven't spoken with him in about 20 years. Please give him my best the next time you see him. (And don't make him pretend to remember me :) He is a lovely man.

>he never manages to get notice that our hands are
>dirty. When he discusses dirt, in fact, it's a
>painting of dirt.

Good point.

I quite agree with you on this, but part of me wants not to expect Heidegger to address himself to my sensibilities.

Given his situation, especially his blundering politics, it fascinates me that he is able to articulate an embodied caring-for the fourfold at all; despite that being the limited to his getting his hands dirty.

Caputo is a lovely man, yes. He just took a semi-retirement at Syracuse. Villanova's loss, but perhaps our gain should he be freed up to write more in his final years.

After having read Wolin, at your suggestion (two books), and Safranski, I can no longer take Heidegger seriously. His contribution to philosophy was romantic--steering us back to the historical roots of the Greeks, where his good instinct was best applied, but his resultant analyses reached into the fair and questionable. Fortunately for me, your suggestions broke my spell over him, and I was able to move on in a new direction. It is crucial for philosophy students today to free themselves from becoming trapped in any one philosopher or philosophical tendency.

As for H. and disembodiment, in his defence I must say that no philosopher has concerned himself much with shiting and fucking in the literature. This is because of the historical emphasis, dating back as far as one can go, on devaluing the body as significant for the journey of the soul. Modern cynics such as yourself criticize this aspect of the tradition, and with good reason, but I don't think this is a significant issue in H. one way or the other. What is important here is his good instinct toward the tradition, and not the hub-bub world, as holding the best view of truth to be had, and the other, of his bad instinct, of his forgetting his good instinct, and rushing headlong into it.

I'm not sure that any of what I've said here makes any sense, because it's early in the morning, and I am not concentrating much on my rant. Let's call it poetry, and not hermeneutics.

Hi, sorry to interrupt the discussion a bit...but does anyone still have the Dreyfus Heidegger MP3's? I had them but accidentally deleted them. Can anyone help me out? I can paypal shipping and whatever charges (i.e. CD, packaging, etc.) that you may need to send them to me. Thanks!
Brennan
mosch@mail.com

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