Suffering Dasein: A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Meaning of Suffering, Possibility, and Leiben (Bodying) Through Heidegger's Being and Time

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas calls suffering "the very bond of human subjectivity," that by which we are most fundamentally connected. Albeit irrefutable in its own right, properly accounting for human suffering and pain resists explanation almost as much as accounts of the nature of the human body do, and it is the opacity of the latter, I hope to show, that belies the clarity of the former. Undoubtedly, there is hardly a more consequential subject than one's understanding of the human body, for it (in)forms one's understanding of the world, one's Weltverständthnism from the most "theoretic" and far-ranging human beliefs, such as those in religion, philosophy, and the sciences, to the most "mundane" and everyday beliefs, such as one's attitude towards bodily consumption. In an effort to address these topics, this thesis begins with Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and the compelling account it gives of human being-in-the-world. Then, on the way to a phenomenology of suffering, it both critiques and augments Heidegger's treatment of the body, eventually working towards an interpretation which understands the body as leiben, as the body -ing of Dasein. I will argue that bodying is an existential—that is, a constitutive factor of Dasein's ontological structure. This means, in turn, that the bodying of Dasein is ontologically definitive for, is an existential structuring of, the being of every being encountered by it, including itself. Lastly, the phenomenology of suffering presented will, where successful, substantiate and extend the arguments given within the context of Heidegger's work, with the final suggestion that the conception of the bodying developed herein has extensive implications for medicine, ethics, and politics.