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Frank Schalow. The Incarnality of Being: The Earth, Animals, and the Body in Heidegger's Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
DOI: 10.1177/1086026607309401
Schalow puts forth a vast effort to sift through Heidegger's many tomes and correspondences to find the lost threads that weave Being into the greater fabric of nature. These threads are many, through economics, sex, relationships, both intimate and social, and also through our own embodiment. He consistently tears apart what we know as our world today and differentiates it from the world that was present when Heidegger was alive. This volume that Schalow has put forth is an important addition to any library where Heidegger is essential, as it carries Heidegger into the postindustrial era, into the communication age, and beyond to the age of environmentalism and global warming.
The author takes Heidegger and his discussion of technology and expands it to include addiction, as ways in which we hide our own being from that which we truly are, our authentic selves, which we no longer seem to own up to. Instead, the world is filled with other things to distract us and keep us from knowing ourselves at the level of being. Through finding that rootedness in being, we are able to care, and in caring, we embed ourselves in the world and that world expands to include other species. And from this care comes our need to become stewards of the environment, which is in need of our care.
The writer organized the book in such a way that it seems in essence to begin in the everydayness of being, in the middle, in the "Materiality of the World," as the chapter is titled.
Schalow here discusses Heidegger's concept of everydayness and "zuhanden" or the ready at hand, delving into areas of economics and addiction, technology and thrownness of Dasein into the world. Chapter 2 concerns embodiment, in the realms of "The Erotic, Sexuality and Diversity," as the chapter is titled. This chapter has to do with Heidegger's apparent neglect of gender issues and differentiation between the sexes, and the author expands into how Heidegger's "care" interjects into sexuality expressed between self and other, and also how erotic impulse, through creativity and surpassing boundaries of sexual intimacy,...