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Disability: An Embodied Reality (or Space) of Dasein

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Abstract

The ‘body’ has remained the pivotal and essential mechanism for analysis within disability scholarship. Yet while historically conceptualized as an individual’s fundamental feature, the ‘disabled identity’ has been more recently explained as a function of ‘normalcy’ through social, cultural political, and legal discriminations against difference and deviancy. Disability studies’ established tradition of consultation with philosophical endeavour remains apparently unwilling to exploit or utilize Martin Heidegger’s understanding of ‘Being’ and interpretation of Dasein as a possible framework for unravelling the complexities of contemporary discrimination and oppression of those others. This paper in tracing Heidegger’s explanation of humankind, inspired by arguments proposed by Cerbone (Int J Philos Stud 2:209–230, 2000) and in consultation with Levin (The body: classic and contemporary readings, Blackwell, Malden, 1999), Aho (2009), Malpas (Heidegger’s topology: being place, world, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008), and Rae (Hum Stud 33:23–39, 2010) among others, will interpret the ‘embodied’ reality of ‘Being,’ of being-disabled-in-the-world as primarily involved within the practical context and structured according to impersonal, normative social norms, rather than detached, theoretical contemplation or observance.

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Notes

  1. Such Cartesian dualisms deeply embedded in both academic disciplines and everyday thinking crucially sustain oppression and discrimination of disabled people; see Corker and Shakespeare (2004), Snyder et al. (2002), Tremain (2005).

  2. Concentrating on the function, production, and influence of normalcy, abnormality, difference, and oppression.

  3. Campbell (personal communication 20 June 2010).

  4. Examples of other recent approaches to phenomenology and embodied notions of the body include: Hickey-Moody (2009), Scully (2009), Shildrick (2009, 2002), Shildrick and Mykitiuk (2005).

  5. Predominately through discussions in Heidegger (1962).

  6. Heidegger questioning the logic of binary oppositions affords a view of instigating a new non-binary logic (see Rae 2010: 30).

  7. Through the writings of Mairs (1996) and Longmore (2003).

  8. The negative, common failing of the ‘public self,’ of the anybody, in everyday activity. This mode of ‘Being’ allows for the ‘levelling’ of society as the desire for anonymity, need for uniformity, and imposition of conformity provides for only possibility of existence.

  9. While as Aho (2009) argues there is a linking or contact between the writings of Heidegger and Merleau Ponty in relation to space (Leiben) as both look beyond the traditional understanding of ‘container’ and the ‘body’ as a corporeal thing disengaged from its world (Körper), Ponty’s phenomenology remains connected to Cartesian subjectivity and thus less appropriate for the intent of this paper and direction of the new horizon of Disability Studies. As Turner (1984: 54) maintains, “the phenomenology … offered by Merleau-Ponty is an individualist account of embodiment from the point of view of the subject; it is consequently an account largely devoid of historical and sociological content”. Focussed on perceptual connection connecting the ‘now’ of bodily things and the world it privileges the present… “It is always in the present that we are created” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 427). Yet for Heidegger, all perception is already pre-shaped in the past or thrownness (facticity) and the future possibilities (Möglichkeit). Other areas of departure from Heidegger include the fact that Merleau-Ponty:

    1. Is focussed on the pre-reflective bond between the body and world, described as being-towards-the world (perceptually bound to worldly objects) rather than Being-in-the-world. Dasein is the world … as a shared referential … is already there prior to bodily perception.

    2. Is an investigation into the conditions of possibility of meaning itself, explaining the how and why perceptions of the body-subject are intelligible or make sense. Indeed Ponty remains connected to a concept of subjectivity and questions whether meaning is constituted ‘in oneself’. For Heidegger there is no subject or “I” for Dasein is always Being-with-others.

    3. Argues the ‘primacy’ of perception in any meaningful experience thus cultural reality is a function of natural perception and contact with the world and history. Yet for Heidegger the clearing of intelligence is always existing and provides for the ‘hearing’ of worldly realities … perception remains determined by the ‘primacy’ of Dasein (Aho 2009).

  10. Something ready-to-hand.

  11. Longmore: reference to Ten Broek and Matson (1966: 809–840).

  12. In my Doctoral Dissertation, The Consequence of Resistance. Interrogating Heidegger and Butler on the conundrums of ableism, I have examined and scrutinized specific legal judgements relating to disabled individuals using Heidegger’s concepts of disclosive freedom and Language to highlight the limits of formal equality and legal rhetoric respectively.

  13. The demand for certain body shapes, the passport to success through exercise, diet, and other indignities regulated through memberships to health clubs, spas, and aerobics once considered simply a hobby of the wealthy has become the obsession of the wider abled-bodied. The mass media’s relentless fascination on self-improvement ‘gadgets,’ slogans, the promotion of cosmetic surgery and the emulation of youth have provided distortion and ritual surrounding ‘bodily perfection’.

  14. Rae (2010: 24) comments, “to correct what Heidegger perceives as the fundamental misunderstanding of his thought [the later work turned from] providing an existential analytic of the human being to discern Being [… a discussion of the ek-sistence] of Being itself” (see Heidegger 1977a).

  15. Self-contained.

  16. Cavalier (1998) defines fallenness as being concerned with the present or everyday social commonality and thrownness as embodying all elements of existence, given, not chosen, revealed in moods, notions of the body, one’s finitude, past, present, and general situations. See Tuttle (2005) for further development of these terms.

  17. For an extended discussion on the inadequacies of ‘discourse on the body’ see Levin (1999).

  18. For Heidegger existence (its essence) is not the traditional oppositional position to essence. The definition of the human being is not representative of action but the privileging of Being; it does not exist by what it does but in relation to being that it, and it alone amongst beings, is able to disclose being (Rae 2010: 24).

  19. See Diprose (2003) for discussion on Nancy re-embodiment.

  20. See Heidegger (2001: 117) for similar commentary on Heidegger’s frustration in the relationship between the body and philosophy.

  21. “The philosophic-theoretical corpus of bodies is still supported by the spine of mimesis, of representation and of the sign” (Nancy 1994: 192).

  22. See Heidegger (1977b) for discussion on the chalice, the ‘chaliseness’ (causa formalis) of the chalice.

  23. “The world … a shared world with others[suggests that Dasein] far from being a solipsistic ego requiring an epistemological proof of existence of others … finds itself already always among others” (Caputo 1999: 226).

  24. Indeed “others are not those who are other than the I but those among whom the I is also, by whom Dasein is in fact dominated like an anonymous ‘They’ (das Man) and from which it must learn to differentiate itself into an authentic self” (Caputo 1999: 26).

  25. Between neutrality and its factical concretion.

  26. See Cerbone (2000: 216) for an extended discussion.

  27. This paper will not detail the distinction between the authentic individuated ‘I’ and inauthentic ‘Anyone’.

  28. “The entire protest and especially the burning of the book gave tangible form to the pain they felt … they too felt thwarted by a government that stymies their efforts to work and make a life. They too felt dehumanized by a society that devalues them” (Longmore 2003: 253).

  29. Object, thing, or substance; present-at-hand.

  30. Categories as mentioned in introduction: present-at-hand, ready-to-hand, and organisms dwelling within the world.

  31. See Askay (1999: 32) for useful discussion on a series of Heidegger’s interconnected assertions.

  32. As Dasein itself (for example).

  33. Heidegger fundamentally rejected Cartesian doctrines and idioms.

  34. For example, the raising of arms or a hand as a gesture of waving, calling, or retrieving.

  35. “The kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use … has its own kind of knowledge” (Heidegger 1962: 67).

  36. Cerbone (2000: 218) offered the following example: “[a]n arm is something with which I wave to a friend toward the act of extending a greeting in order to in fact greet the friend for the sake of being a friendly person”.

  37. For extended discussion and analysis of the embodied nature of ‘Space’ see Malpas (2008).

  38. Longmore (2003: 240) in referencing Rasmussen (1991) quotes: “[t]he problems in the … welfare system stem not only from policy ideology that distorts the realities of disability, but … the tenacious exertions of an entrenched and bureaucratic institution to safeguard its prerogatives and powers, no matter what the cost in the lives of ordinary people with disabilities”.

  39. See Greaney (2007) for Heidegger’s discussion of a disabled potter for further explanation and clarification of potentiality and capacity.

  40. Hayles (1999) asserts: “Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical humanism laid the foundation for anti-humanism of structuralist, post-structuralit[,] and deconstructionist thought and more recent debates on posthuman”. See also Hefner (2009).

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    Josephine A. Seguna

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Seguna, J.A. Disability: An Embodied Reality (or Space) of Dasein . Hum Stud 37, 31–56 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9289-6

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