Být na způsob těla - Pokus o rekonstrukci Heideggerova pojetí tělesnosti – Novák Aleš (2025)

This Czech-language book addresses the research desideratum concerning Heidegger’s allegedly insufficient treatment of the question of the body and embodiment, a criticism directed at him from the publication of Being and Time onwards. Heidegger did not deal with the body because his interest lay in the question of Being, not in any privileged being. For him, the body is not philosophically worthy of examination as an “object” because it can only be described, not explained, making a serious attempt to develop anything like a “theory” of the body impossible. To demand a “phenomenology of the body” from Heidegger therefore misunderstands his philosophical intention. This attempt to reconstruct Heidegger’s presumed conception of the body and embodiment is based on two lectures on Nietzsche from the 1930s and two of the so-called Zollikon Seminars from 1965, which Heidegger led together with the Swiss psychologist Medard Boss. In these texts, embodiment appears as a mode of human being in a shared world whose significance is to “express gestures of facial expression”. From the perspective of the existential analysis in Being and Time, the body would therefore fall under the existential category of “attunement”.