Embracing the body: oxytocin

The afternoon was spent walking in a bog preserve where horsetails - water horsetails - stood together with rings of gold in their tiny hair-like "leaves" at each joint.

Allow me to say that these are ancient plants: I first knew the dry land variety.

In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger is already confident in his insight into "science" and "technique".

Consider our walk: the varied symmetry of the now rare plants of the sheltered reserve: these have the symmetry of the hand, these others of the eyes and nose. We map plant to body without numbers.  We need not not be "reckoning". Varieties of trillium, so distinct from varieties of ancient ferns.

Unlike Paul Celan, Heidegger offers us little in the way of botany: a stand of "Kiefer" on occasion, or "Eiche".

Consider the body.  We now know the role of oxytocin not only in labor and maternal bonding, but in the male staying around for 18 months to 2 years after childbirth - if not longer.  Why not embrace this hormonal, real embodiment?  Heidegger despised the authority of the Church but was not opposed to the "genuine" assent to the authoring "few".  This hormonal view of a human relationship need not be based on any falsifications and distortions - not the marriage contract or even avowed paternity.  But it is based on the authority of medical science - applied science.

Heidegger could not accept this in his terms because the result is due to a controlled experiment in which experience was "rapt", forced to yield a pre-conceived expectation (Heidegger ignores disconfirmation and refutation.)

Why should not the hormonal body, the endocrine body, be a "ground" from which one might speak of a human relation without the subject-object reifications?  This is the very sort of "basement" of chemistry which Freud had promised Binswanger - but it turns out not to be a "basement" as all.  The metaphor is utterly misleading.

It was Jaspers who was opposed to "magic" in psychiatry - could Jaspers have oppposed hormonal science?  On what grounds?  Why should a human existence which is prey to hormones be less authentic than an existence which acknowledges itself as prey to lightning strikes, influenza or infarctus?

Was Heidegger's own life not rather prey to the action of testosterone?

See: our post and the likelihood that Heidegger fell prey to hypoglycemia and may have exploited the same.