86


ZOLLIKON SEMINARS


the "here" is this one. I am always at some particular "here," but I am not always at this particular place.

In each case the body always participates in the being-here, but how? Does the volume of my body determine the being-here? Do the limits of me as a corporeal thing coincide with myself as a body? One could understand the living body as a corporeal thing. I am seated here at the table, and fill this space enclosed by my epidermis. But then we are not speaking about my being-here, but only about the presence of a corporeal thing in this place. Perhaps one comes closer to the phenomenon of the body by distinguishing between the different limits of a corporeal thing [Körper] and those of the body [Leib].

The corporeal thing stops with the skin. When we are here, we are always in relationship to something else. Therefore, one might say we are beyond the corporeal limits. Yet, this statement is only apparently correct. It does not really capture the phenomenon. For I cannot determine the phenomenon of the body in relation to its corporeality.

The difference between the limits of the corporeal thing and the body, then, consists in the fact that the bodily limit is extended beyond the corporeal limit Thus, the difference between the limits is a quantitative one. But if we look at the matter in this way, we will misunderstand the very phenomenon of the body and of bodily limit. The bodily limit and the corporeal limit are not quantitatively but rather qualitatively different from each other. The corporeal thing, as corporeal, cannot have a limit which is similar to the body at all. Of course, one could assume in an imaginative way that my body qua corporeal thing extends to the perceived window, so that the bodily limit and the corporeal limit coincide. But just then the qualitative difference between the two limits becomes clear. The corporeal limit, by apparently coinciding with the bodily limit, cannot ever become a bodily limit itself. When pointing with my finger toward the crossbar of the window over there, I [as body] do not end at my fingertips. Where then is the limit of the body? "Each body is my body." As such, the proposition is nonsensical. More properly, it should say: "The body is in each case my body." This belongs to the phenomenon of the body. The "my" refers to myself. By "my," I refer to me. Is the body in the "I," or is the "F in the body? In any case, the body is not a thing, nor is it a corporeal thing, but each body, that is, the body as body, is in each case my body. The bodying forth* [Leiben] of the body is determined by the way of my being. The bodying forth of the body, therefore, is a


* See M. Boss, Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, trans. Stephen Conway and Anne Cleaves (New York: J. Aronson, 1979), pp. 102-4.—TRANSLATORS


Zollikon Seminars by Martin Heidegger