To describe the body, we must first distinguish the living body (Leib) from the dead anatomical object, the physical body (Körper). The living body is that which we do not possess. It is that which, in the words of Nietzsche in Also sprach Zarathustra / Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), in the section Von den Verächtern des Leibes / On the Despisers of the Living Body, lies behind all things and events without our being able to master it and which, on the other hand, completely masters us. We can devote all our attention to the physical body, as in conventional medicine, and still forget its needs and deficiencies. The living body is the dimension that unites us to the Earth, since the Earth can never be grasped, because it is, as Husserl states in his 1934 manuscript Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum phänomenologischen Ursprung der Körperlichkeit, der Räumlichkeit der Natur im ersten naturwissenschaftlichen Sinne / Fundamental Investigations into the Phenomenological Origin of Corporeality and the Spatiality of Nature in the Primordial Sense of the Natural Sciences, the intangible foundation of all earthly existence. The Earth is always there, even if we, as human beings in our daily activities, do not recognize it and even think that it does not interfere with the scope of our actions. We think of material, present, and situated existence and exclude the all-encompassing existence of the Earth.
The living body is something like the sound space of an instrument on which we play the cacophony or melody of our time. It is neither the instrument itself, nor the physical body, nor the beat with which we mistreat the sides of the instrument. The living body is always there, even if we are no longer ourselves; that is, it is always present with its memory and, at the same time, in those who share that memory. The living body cannot be divided. It accompanies our day and night, our delirium in the space of reality, and our reason and clarity in dreams. It is the physical body that speaks, with a desire for thirst and satisfaction. But the memory—or rather, the inscription—of what we experience here and there takes place in the living body. It is the placeless place of the Earth’s universal stratigraphy, where all events are deposited and which is only released when necessary. Unexpectedly, the richness of the living body explodes, like a flow of magma, when some moment in a dream or in reality triggers it. However, we can accompany it, not through gymnastic exercises, but through the unforeseen and everyday natural inscriptions of our way of life. What matters most is an unpredictable attention, which is in fact uncontrollable, like the living body itself.
How we care for the living body and how it has responded to us, how it has managed to shape our lives together with us, is the ultimate of all answers, and it does not accumulate only at the moment of our last breath. This is evident in the characteristics of our writing, in the children we have managed to bring into the world, and also in the actions we leave behind. The living body is the direct reflection of what the Earth means to all living beings. The indisputable reason for existence, which we can enliven and which we transform into a desert or a place worthy of being lived in. It exists and is nonexistent at the same time, for every living body is connected to all other living bodies, yet is never interchangeable. No living body has the capacity to feel or act at the same time as another or others, and each living body acts in its own way and within its own sphere of aspiration and satisfaction in its own time. But within every living body there exist all manner of forms of impression and expression, even if they have been supplanted by some incapacity. Even the one who does not hear because their ear can no longer hear, hears. Even the one who does not love because their heart is no longer capable of loving, loves. This is the indisputable existence of the living body.
The body that can give as a body must give; the body that has been prevented from giving as a body in its capacity to receive can receive. This is the ethics of the Earth, which is realized in the living body. The landscape is the ground and the starting point, for, on the one hand, it represents the concrete experience of the world, in its respective materiality, but at the same time it goes beyond pure materiality, pure objectivity; it is not simply a territory, a piece of land, or a certain delimited area. Just as the idea of pure materiality, of passive matter, of pure res extensa, is unsustainable, it is not possible to speak of a merely aesthetic landscape, a landscape given only in the imagination. Landscapes are corporeal and alive and, therefore, possess the same phenomenal content as the body. The body is a living landscape interwoven with atmospheres. Landscapes are bodies permeated by atmospheres.
Dirk Michael Hennrich