Embodying Da-sein in ethical life: the redeeming of Heidegger’s pre-ontological experience

Abstract Why retrieve the body’s pre-ontological understanding-of-being? This essay is about the process of embodying an appropriately ontological experience and understanding of being. In his Introduction to Being and Time , Heidegger introduces the concept of a pre-ontological understanding-of-being, deploying it as a hermeneutical way to initiate his project. But he makes no further use of this concept; it simply disappears from his thought after that inauguration. It thus has no function in Heidegger’s conception of our potential for self-development in regard to the understanding-of-being and the claim [ Ereignung ] that that understanding makes on our responsibility for taking into our care [ Wächterschaft ] the aletheic truth [ Wahrheit ] of being. But, within just a few years, he unequivocally repudiated his notion of the pre-ontological understanding of being, saying that it perpetuates an interpretation of the Seinsverständnis that thinks of it as inherently conceptual, i.e., as an understanding to be articulated in terms of our common conceptual formations—“the language of Man.” In this essay, I draw on later texts, primarily “The Principle of Identity” (1957) and “Time and Being” (1962), to argue for a radically different interpretation of the pre-ontological Seinsverständnis : a prereflective, pre-objective, pre-subjective mode of simply lived openness: the natural openness of infancy and a promising beginning of a reflectively formed understanding surprisingly adumbrated already in a 1927 lecture course on The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology and implicitly sought-after, I believe, in his 1943 text on “Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16).” In my new interpretation, this pre-ontological experience with being is an ontological potential carried by the body; and it remains available for our retrieval in recollection [ Er-innerung ] and our self-development in ethical life as thrown-open Da-sein.