Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Animate being: an inquiry into Being in Heidegger’s Being and Time

  • Published:
Continental Philosophy Review Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper questions the ontological integrity of Dasein as Heidegger specifies Being in Being and Time. It does so with reference to the real-life, real-time realities of Being-in-the-world and Being-toward-Death, thus with entering into the world in the first place and with ensuing developmental realities anchored essentially in bodily change and movement and with ensuing knowledge of the world and of death. Basic Husserlian insights validate answers to Dasein’s ontological deficiencies, raising questions as to Heidegger’s reading of Husserl texts, for example, of a hereness in relation to a thereness in Dasein’s use of “equipment,” hence of Dasein’s “zero point of orientation” with respect to the world. The question of whether Dasein can be a Being-toward-death without Being-a-Body discloses additional insights into Dasein’s ontological deficiencies by clarifying the nature of physical and lived bodies and by drawing on Husserl’s descriptive analyses of Leib, the lived body. The paper ends by detailing an epistemological irony with respect to Heidegger’s subjective account of Dasein’s knowledge of Being-toward-death.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Heidegger (1962, p. 32).

  2. Heidegger (1962, p. 32).

  3. Heidegger (1962, p. 32).

  4. Heidegger (1962, p. 32; italics in original).

  5. Heidegger (1962, p. 88).

  6. Heidegger (1962, p. 88). Earlier, Heidegger has claimed that if “Being-in-the-world is a basic state of Dasein, and one in which Dasein operates not only in general but pre-eminently in the mode of everydayness, then it must also be something which has always been experienced ontically.” Heidegger (1962, p. 86).

  7. Heidegger (1962, p. 87).

  8. Heidegger (1962, p. 90).

  9. Heidegger (1962, p. 135; see also further below).

  10. Heidegger (1962, p. 138).

  11. Heidegger (1962, p. 140).

  12. Heidegger (1962, e.g., pp. 98, 100, 103).

  13. One could of course argue that a nipple, whether a matter of breast or bottle, is present-at-hand for an infant, and that that singular object constitutes “the world,” but one could so argue only in a beginning developmental sense, not in Heidegger’s sense of being something that simply “is.”

  14. It is also tethered to seeing when in fact, tactility is the primary sensory modality of infancy. See further in text.

  15. Heidegger (1962, p. 143).

  16. Heidegger (1962, p. 82).

  17. Heidegger (1962, p. 82).

  18. Husserl (1989, p. 252).

  19. Caplan (1973, p. 30).

  20. Spitz (1983, p. 149).

  21. Robeck (1978, p. 120).

  22. Heidegger (1962, p. 135).

  23. Heidegger (1962, p. 138).

  24. Husserl (1989, p. 252).

  25. Heidegger (1962, pp. 139–140).

  26. Heidegger (1962, p. 95).

  27. Heidegger (1962, p. 98).

  28. Husserl (1989).

  29. Heidegger (1962, p. 138).

  30. Aristotle (On the Heaven 284b7).

  31. Aristotle (On the Heavens 284b11–22).

  32. Aristotle (On the Heavens 284b30–33).

  33. Aristotle (On the Heavens285a10–12).

  34. Aristotle (On the Heavens 285a29–30).

  35. Aristotle (Physics 200b12–14).

  36. Husserl (1989, e.g., p. 267).

  37. Husserl (1989, p. 273).

  38. 4. We may furthermore ask, When exactly did our human ancestors begin to understand themselves in their Being? That is, when was Dasein’s human “birth” in terms of evolution? Insofar as Neandertals buried their dead, we can in fact pointedly and straightforwardly ask, is Dasein not an evolutionary as well as ontogenetic phenomenon?

  39. Heidegger (1962, p. 32).

  40. It is not only notable that Darwin wrote in detail about individual variability (Darwin 1968 [1859], Chapter Two; see also Darwin 1981 [1871]), but also edifying to read what he wrote regarding variation among animals of the same species. Variation is in fact the first principle specifying the nature of “descent with modification” in Darwin’s exposition of natural selection.

  41. Sheets-Johnstone (2009, p. 76).

  42. Heidegger (1962, pp. 179–182).

  43. Heidegger (1962, p. 419).

  44. Kornfield (2000, p. 195).

  45. Kornfield (2000, pp. 196–197).

  46. Sheets-Johnstone (2009, p. 77; italics added).

  47. Aristotle (Physics 250b15–18).

  48. Aristotle (Physics 250b18–20).

  49. Aristotle (Physics 251a26–27).

  50. Aristotle (Physics 251b12).

  51. Aristotle (Physics 251b12–14).

  52. Aristotle (Physics 218b12–17).

  53. Aristotle (Physics 219a4–9).

  54. Aristotle (Physics 220b15–16).

  55. Husserl (1970, p. 109). As pointed out elsewhere (Sheets-Johnstone 2019), in corollary to Husserl’s observation that “consciousness of the world… is in constant motion,” lived-body consciousness is correlatively in constant motion. It is in constant motion along a gradient of awareness depending on circumstance, all the way from maximal as in making a surgical incision, for example, to minimal as in brushing one’s teeth.

  56. Husserl (1970, p. 109).

  57. Husserl (1964, p. 100).

  58. Denby (2012, 76).

  59. Rich (2016: 233, 235, respectively).

  60. Sweet (2012: 3).

  61. Heidegger (1962, p. 419; italics in original).

  62. Husserl (1989, p. 359).

  63. Husserl (1989, p. 289).

  64. Husserl (1989, p. 289).

  65. Husserl (1989, pp. 344–351).

  66. Husserl (1989, p. 289).

  67. Husserl (1989, p. 344).

  68. Husserl (1989, p. 346).

  69. Husserl (1989, p. 293).

  70. Husserl (1989, p. 293).

  71. Husserl (1973a).

  72. Sartre (1956, p. 545).

  73. Sartre (1956, p. 545).

  74. Sartre (1956, p. 545).

  75. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 204).

  76. (Sheets-Johnstone 1990, p. 204).

  77. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 204).

  78. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 209).

  79. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 213).

  80. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 215).

  81. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 219).

  82. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 221).

  83. Husserl (1973b, p. 111).

  84. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 226).

  85. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 229).

  86. Sheets-Johnstone (1990, p. 230).

References

  • Caplan, Frank. 1973. The First Twelve Months of Life. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

    Google Scholar 

  • Darwin, Charles. 1968 [1859]. The Origin of Species. Middlesex: Penguin Books.

  • Darwin Charles 1981 [1871]. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  • Denby, David. 2012. The Artists: Notes on a Lost Style of Acting. The New Yorker, 27 February 2012, 74–78.

  • Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row.

  • Husserl, Edmund. 1964. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  • Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

  • Husserl, Edmund. 1973a. Experience and Judgement, rev. and ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

  • Husserl, Edmund. 1973b. Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

  • Husserl, Edmund. 1989. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book II (Ideas II), trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

  • Kornfield, Jack. 2000. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. New York: Bantam Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rich, Adrienne. 2016. Cartographies of Silence. Collected Poems, 1950–2012, 232–236. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robeck, Mildred. 1978. Infants and Children. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library.

  • Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1990. On the Conceptual Origin of Death. In The Roots of Thinking, Chapter 8, pp. 203-232. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Originally published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47/1 (September 1986): 31–58.

  • Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2009. Existential Fit and Evolutionary Continuities. In The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader, Chapter III, pp. 64-90. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Originally published in Synthese 66 (1986): 219–248.

  • Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2019. The Lived Body. The Humanistic Psychologist. Online First Publication, August 15, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hum0000150.

  • Spitz, René. 1983. Dialogues from Infancy, ed. Robert N. Emde. New York: International Universities Press.

  • Sweet, Victoria. 2012. God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine. New York: Riverhead Books.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 97403-1295, USA

    Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Authors
  1. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Sheets-Johnstone, M. Animate being: an inquiry into Being in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Cont Philos Rev 53, 121–140 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09500-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09500-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation