flesh, is what I myself am, it is my body [Körper], my lived-body [Leib]. Do I somehow extend my lived-body (as flesh) to the Louvre? No, and this is precisely why the Louvre is only the mere object of a simple “making present” (which, incidentally, nevertheless always includes the possibility of bodily perception, although not accomplished). It is therefore the lived-body that utterly characterizes perception. This lived-body is something like the reach of the human body (last night, the moon was closer than the Louvre).
—The word “body” that just appeared could jeopardize everything. We need to grasp the difference between “lived-body” and “body.” For instance, when we step on a scale, we do not weigh our “lived-body” but merely the weight of our “body.” Or further, the limit of the “lived-body” is not the limit of the “body.” The limit of the body is the skin. The limit of the “lived-body” is more difficult to determine. It is not “world,” but it is perhaps just as little “environment.”
There is only “world” where there is language, that is, understanding of being. From this followed a few reflections on the work of Karl von Frisch, who attempted to determine what the bee sees. What “seeing” here means is in question, if one admits, despite a well-established French tradition, that cows never see trains pass by.58
Everyone then observes that we have taken a certain distance from Hegel, but Heidegger recalls that “phenomenological exercise is more important than reading Hegel,” which does not in any way prevent us from returning to Hegel and from recapturing what has been said until now.
a) The Absolute is supposed to appear for humans—for consciousness.
b) The fundamental character of human consciousness for the Moderns is that of a “positing.”
c) “Positing” (or positio) has several meanings. In contrast with “positing” in the sense of “planting a tree,” there is θέσις in the sense of “to have standing before oneself.”
From this we can understand the second moment of the grasp of the absolute by Reason: “Construction.”
2. The Absolute must be “constructed” for consciousness. This construction is also termed “production.” Let us precisely attend to these two terms.
When Marx says, “Man produces himself, etc. . . . ,”59 it means: “Man is a factory. Man produces himself as he produces his shoes.” But what does “Production” mean for Hegel? By no means that man produces the Absolute. Production is the figure of reflection’s accomplishment.