Metontology and the Body-Problem in Being and Time

It has been over fifty years since French philosophers began criticizing the "starting point" (Ausgang) of Being and Time— specifically Heidegger's account of average everyday practices, practices that initially give us "access" (Zugang) to the question of the meaning of being. In his essay, "The Philosophy of the Ambiguous," Alphonse de Waehlens argued Heidegger's phenomenological descriptions completely overlook the fundamental role that perception in particular and the body in general plays in our everyday practices. He says, "[In] Being and Time one does not find thirty lines concerning the problem of perception; one does not find ten concerning that of the body." Jean-Paul Sartre amplified this line of criticism when he emphasized the importance of the body as the first point of contact that a human being has with its world, a contact that is prior to detached theorizing about worldly objects. And Maurice Merleau-Ponty was indirectly critical of Heidegger insofar as he acknowledged the primacy of bodily perception, particularly in terms of our spatial directionality and orientation, an orientation that makes it possible for us handle worldly equipment in the first place. These early criticisms have since been developed and refined by English-speaking commentators such as Hubert Dreyfus, David Cerbone, and David Krell. Krell formulates the problem this way: