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Spirit of the Flesh: Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne, and Alice Neel
(Alice Neel: People Come First, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through August 1, 2021)
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §25
1
Does Dasein have a body?
One would think so: Heidegger’s Dasein has a world — or more precisely, it is in the world, in its world, as a “thrown project.” The world shows itself as a phenomenon to a Dasein that projects itself into the world through its aims, goals, and ends. But, nevertheless, the world also impinges on Dasein by the latter being immersed in its beings-ready-to-hand and beings-present-at-hand, which constrain and condition, and perhaps even constitute the projects that make Dasein the unique being it is.
Heidegger’s phenomenology starts, in Being and Time Division 1, with a detailed description of how beings show themselves to us and how this gives us a clue about the Being of beings — what lets them be and be the things that they are. It attempts to return to phenomena without the encrustations of thought that do more to obscure phenomena than reveal them.
It is unsurprising, then, that the chief culprit of traditional Western philosophy for Heidegger is René Descartes. In the…
