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ZOLLIKON SEMINARS
to grasp, to form, and to transform other animate or inanimate "material" things which are encountered?
Then everything we call our bodiliness, down to the last muscle fiber and down to the most hidden molecule of hormones, belongs essentially to existing. Thus, it is basically not inanimate matter but a domain of that nonobjectifiable, optically invisible capacity to receive-perceive the significance of what it encounters, which constitutes the whole Da-sein. This bodily [nature] develops in such away that it can be used in dealing with the inanimate and animate "material things" which are encountered. Yet, in contrast to a tool, the bodily spheres of existing are not set free [entlassen] from being-human. They cannot be cared for in a toolbox. Rather, they remain in the sway of being human, held in it, and belonging to it so long as the human being lives. Of course, in dying this bodily domain changes its way of being into that of an inanimate thing, into the substance of a corpse, which drops out [herausfallen] from existence.
Of course, during its lifetime the bodily [nature] of Da-sein already admits to being seen as a material, inanimate object and as a kind of complicated machine. Of course, for someone who sees it this way, the essential, unfolding character of bodily [nature] has already disappeared from view forever. Perplexed helplessness [Ratlosigkeit] regarding all essential phenomena of the bodily [nature] is the result of such an inadequate view.
Therefore, regarding the whole bodiliness, we must repeat what we have mentioned before about seeing and our bodily eyes: We are not able to "see" because we have eyes; rather, we can only have eyes because, according to our basic nature, we are beings who can see. Thus, we would not be bodily [leiblich] in the way we are unless our being-in-the-world always already fundamentally consisted of a receptive/perceptive relatedness to something which addresses us from out of the openness of our world, from out of that openness as which we exist. Thereby, in this address, we are always already directed toward things disclosing themselves to us. It is only because of our Da-sein's essential direction [Ausrichtung]* that we are able to distinguish between in front of and behind, above and below, left and right. It is due to the same directedness [Ausgerichtetsein] toward something addressing us that we can have a body at all, better: To be of a bodily nature. We are not first of a bodily nature and then from it have what is in front and behind, and so forth. Only one must not confuse our existentiell bodily being [existenzielles Leiblichsein] with
* See Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 135, 143.-TRANSLATORS