The Body's Recollection of Being

by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

This is a unique study, contuining the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and using the techniques of phenomenology against the prevailing nihilism of our culture. It expands our understanding of the human potential for spiritual self-realization by interpreting it as the developing of a bodily-felt awareness informing our gestures and movements. The author argues that a psychological focus on our experience of well-being and pathology as embodied beings contributes significantly to a historically relevant critique of ideology. It also provides an essential touchstone in experience for a fruitful individual and collective response to the danger of nihilism.
Dr Levin draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to clarify Heidegger's analytic of human beings through an interpretation that focuses on our experience of being embodied. He reconstructs in modern terms the wisdom implicit in western and semitic forms of religion and philosophy, considering the work of Freud, Jung, Focault and Neitzsche, as well as that of American educational philosophers, including Dewey. In particular, he draws on the psychology of Freud and Jung to clarify our historical experience of gesture and movement and to bring to light its potential in the fulfilment of Selfhood. Throughout the book, the pathologies of the ego and its journey into Selfhood are considered in relation to the conditons of technology and the powers of nihilism.

Genres: Psychology

404 pages, Paperback

First published June 6, 1985

About the author

Dr. David Kleinberg-Levin (known, in earlier years as David Michael Levin) graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover and went on to study philosophy at Harvard University, graduating in 1961. He spent a year as Fulbright Exchange Fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris and undertook research, mostly on Fichte and Schelling, at the university in Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1967, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, writing a dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology under the guidance of Aron Gurwitsch of the New School for Social Research. He taught in the Humanities Department at MIT (1968-1972), and then joined the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University, from which he retired in 2005.

Reviews

[Ioana · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to keep very hard from gagging in reading this (mandatory) book for class. First of all, I have been a devoted fan of Heidegger's phenomenology in the past but am now repulsed by his amorality, Nazism, mysticism-yet-claim-at-universalism, etc. And, Levin's work is, after all, basically a reading of Heidegger's work as it related to the body (or so Levin claims--I find his reading of the body to be racist, sexist, not-conscious of many aspects of being-bodily in the world--race, gender, ethnicity, disabled-ness, etc...) Levin claims to also use Merleau-Ponty but he does not really rely on him, and definitely does not help us see how M-P's work can be put into conversation with Heidegger's.

I was repulsed for many reasons:

(1) Levin's language is an over-the-top-copying-of-Heidegger, it is mystical to the point where his concepts cease to be philosophical and begin to be purely egoistical meditations that have no relevance whatsoever as they do not connect to the larger experience of the body-at-large (i.e., as a dancer, I found many of his descriptions of the "measuring stride" to be problematic--Levin speaks of the "stride" as that which facilitates time's enfolding us into its being without even mentioning the BREATH!, THE essential bodily measuring of time that structures our sense of temporality... this is just one example in which Levin's philosophy is ungrounded from actual practice--he would have a whole chapter on the breath if he actually had ever practiced dance, and not just read what Nietzsche and Heidegger philosophized about dance).

(2) Levin appropriates Heidegger's "gods and mortals, earth and world" and other concepts that are grounded in an ethics Levin never explores... The "earth and world" metaphors Heidegger uses have been linked to the "blood and soil" metaphors of the Nazi party and have been greatly condemned in the Literature for both their political associations and for their mystical/non-philosophical formulation (i.e., there is nothing wrong with mysticism, but it is NOT philosophy and should not be passed on as such; in his philosophy, Heidegger CLAIMS his analytic of Dasein is universal, i.e., can be applied to the study of Being at large and of any particular being... but how can it be so when H. just makes up concepts??? I'm sorry but there is no other explanation for (jargon speak): the earth jutting through the world and the world opening up the possibilities of the earth's beholdenness to the gods. This is a spiritual meditation, not a philosophy, period). Levin appropriates all this Heideggerian self-indulgence and does not critically examine his position ONCE.

(3) To be fair, Levin tries to open up Heidegger by referring to the Talmud and a handful of non-Western writings, but I am not convinced he is not still essentially telling the story of "Western superiority". For example, his whole meditation on the nature of spiritual embodiment that occurs in a religious experience is based on the ritualistic practices of reading and writing... WHAT ABOUT those thousands of worlds religions that have not had a written foundation? ...

(4) Levin also appropriates "primordiality" without thinking it through, and without realizing "primordiality" as essentially transcendental repudiates history (the very thing Levin claims he is trying to access--historical being). Levin's work is contradictory in many ways because he remains essentially transcendental in his orientation yet always claims to be integrating historical understanding.

(5,6,7.... I could go on forever but this is already getting long.)

There are MANY problems with this work, and as I am not at a point in my life where I have much respect for Heidegger and his way of doing phenomenology, my review is skewed from that perspective. If you are a Heidegger lover, in other words, you might really enjoy this work.

[Felix Hayman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This,and its two subsequent books, is the first study of phenomenal psychology that actually presents a new away of corporealising the body in the process of phenomenology.It is also possibly the most awkward book ever written with a 50 page introduction that has very little relevance to the rest of the book.However, bear with it as it is possibly one of the most inspiring pieces of writing in phenomenology ever written