Dasein Must Move

Ecstatic temporality, being-in-movement, and the lived body
 

Martin Heidegger’s account of Dasein gives us a way to speak about human existence without reducing it to the properties of a human organism. Dasein is not another entity discovered within the world. It names the kind of being for whom Being is an issue—the being whose existence is always already situated, relational, and directed toward possibilities.

In Being and Time, Heidegger finds the primordial ontological ground of Dasein’s being in temporality. Dasein does not exist as a succession of isolated present moments. Its existence is an ecstatic unity: always already having-been, finding itself being-there, and projecting itself toward possibilities(being-towards).

Yet Dasein is not merely a "Temporalizing stretch” of existence. Dasein handles, approaches, withdraws, navigates, builds, dwells, responds, and takes a stand. Its being-in-the-world is continually described through forms of practical involvement that seem impossible without an animate, moving body.

This creates a striking absence at the center of Heidegger’s existential analytic. Temporality is explicitly developed as an ontological structure of Dasein, while movement and the lived body remain largely implicit. Heidegger’s account appears to require them, but it does not fully bring them into view.

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s philosophy of movement confronts this omission directly. Her argument that Dasein must be understood as a being-in-movement reveals why Heidegger’s temporality cannot be separated from animation and bodily life. But this need not lead us to replace the primacy of temporality with the primacy of movement.

A different possibility emerges: temporality, movement, and lived form may be equiprimordial structures that become intelligible only through one another.
 

Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality
 

Ordinary time is often imagined as a sequence of moments: the past is no longer, the present exists now, and the future has not yet arrived. Heidegger’s account of temporality is more primordial than this succession of “now's.”

Dasein exists ecstatically—literally, standing out beyond itself. It is thrown from a past it did not choose, engaged within a present situation, and projected toward possibilities that have not yet been realized. These dimensions do not occur independently. They form a differentiated yet unified stretch of existence.

The past therefore survives as more than a collection of memories. It is Dasein’s having-been: the inherited conditions, practices, relationships, possibilities, and facticity from which it already lives. The future is not merely a later moment; it is Dasein’s being-toward its possibilities. The present is not a dimensionless instant but the situated making-present through which Dasein encounters what matters within its world.

Dasein is always already having-been, being-there, and being-toward.

This structure is relational. Dasein is not first a self-contained subject that subsequently enters time. It exists by being stretched across relations—to what it inherits, what it presently encounters, and what it may become. Temporality is the condition through which a world can matter and possibilities can show themselves as possibilities.

But can such a stretch of existence be understood without movement?
 

The moving body implicit in being-in-the-world
 

Heidegger’s descriptions of being-in-the-world constantly presuppose practical comportment. Dasein uses equipment, finds its way, reaches for what is ready-to-hand, draws near, avoids, builds, cares, and dwells. Its space is not originally the abstract extension of geometry but a lived spatiality organized by involvement and concern.

Something is near not simply because it occupies a small measurable distance from the body. It is near because it is available within a context of practical significance. Something physically close may be experientially remote, while something geographically distant may be brought near through concern.

Yet nearness, orientation, availability, and practical involvement are lived by a being capable of movement. A hammer can be ready-to-hand because a bodily being can take it up. A doorway matters as an opening because a bodily being can pass through it. A path appears as leading somewhere because a mover can follow it.

The lived body is therefore not merely one more object encountered inside Dasein’s world. It belongs to how there is a navigable and practically meaningful world at all.

Heidegger acknowledges that the body presents a distinctive problem, but he does not develop the body and movement as central existential structures in Being and Time. Presumably his understandable concern is to prevent the existential analytic from collapsing into biology, psychology, or anthropology. Dasein’s ontological structures cannot be reduced to empirical nor metaphysical properties of the human animal.

But this may have concealed another possibility: movement and lived form need not be treated as merely ontic properties. Like care and temporality, they may belong to the ontological constitution of being-in-the-world and Dasein. 
 

Sheets-Johnstone: Dasein as being-in-movement
 

In her article “Being-in-Movement: A Phenomenological Ontology of Movement,” Maxine Sheets-Johnstone argues that a full account of Dasein must begin from its animation. Dasein is not simply temporal; it is an animate organism whose existence is lived through movement.

Her criticism is not merely that Heidegger neglected to add a discussion of the body. The omission reaches into the structure of the analytic itself. If Dasein is the kind of being that is concerned with its own being, then Dasein must first be alive. To be alive is not an abstract logical condition. It is to breathe, pulse, orient, respond, and move—and to remain vulnerable to the cessation of these activities.

Sheets-Johnstone therefore argues that Dasein is a being-in-movement. Temporality cannot be genuinely understood as though it belonged to a disembodied existence. Temporal life is enacted through animation.

Her point becomes especially strong in relation to Heidegger’s being-toward-death. Death is not only the formal possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there. It is the ending of an animate life. Breath ceases. The pulse stops. A body that once gestured, turned, approached, and responded becomes still.

Being-toward-death must therefore have a bodily and kinetic dimension. The finitude of Dasein is the finitude of a living form who is being-in-movement.
 

Death as the disappearance of animation
 

Sheets-Johnstone’s account asks how death first becomes intelligible on the basis of movement.

Our understanding of death does not necessarily begin with language, a biological definition, or an explicit projection of our own nonexistence. It may begin through an encounter with another animate being that no longer moves.

The Other was previously an ever-changing form: breathing, looking, gesturing, walking, vocalizing, and responding. Now that animate responsiveness is absent. What was once encountered as someone who moves has now become a motionless-body.

The concept of death is therefore, in Sheets-Johnstone’s formulation, “Other-dependent.” It arises through the experienced difference between animation and stillness. Before death is explained conceptually, it is encountered corporeally as the loss of movement in one who once moved.

This gives being-toward-death a ground in animate experience. A living being becomes aware of finitude through a world in which animation can cease. The possibility of death is not disclosed to a timeless intellect but to an animate being whose own movement is vulnerable.

Whether this provides the complete ontological ground of being-toward-death is another question. It nevertheless establishes something indispensable: Heidegger’s existential account of death cannot be fully separated from being a living, bodily mover.
 

Movement before language
 

Sheets-Johnstone’s criticism extends beyond death to the relation between movement, thought, and language.

Heidegger grants language an extraordinary disclosive power. Language brings beings into articulation and allows them to appear as what they are. Sheets-Johnstone does not need to deny this power in order to ask what language itself presupposes.

The infant does not enter an empty world and wait for words to make it meaningful. Before possessing linguistic concepts, the infant inhabits a tactile-kinesthetic world. Through movement, the infant encounters relations such as open and closed, near and far, smooth and abrupt, strong and weak, fast and slow, inside and outside.

These are not initially abstract concepts. They are corporeal discriminations discovered in animation. The infant reaches and withdraws, opens and closes, presses and yields, accelerates and slows. A differentiated world begins to emerge through these movements before it is named.

Conceptual Language therefore enters a world already articulated through bodily movement. It does not break into an undifferentiated world; it enters an ongoing field of animation, perception, affect, and non-verbal sense-making.

Thinking does not begin only when propositions become possible. There is a primordial thinking-in-movement through which living beings discover qualitative and relational structures of their world.
 

Is temporality kinetic?
 

Sheets-Johnstone’s critique leads her toward a stronger conclusion than the one required here. For her, Dasein’s temporality is fundamentally grounded kinetically. Dasein is not primarily an ecstatic-temporal being that also happens to move; Dasein’s historicality is born in movement.

This is a decisive correction to Heidegger that prevents temporality from becoming detached from bodily animation. If temporality is lived, then it is lived by a being that moves. Dasein is not imaginable without movement and the lived body, and Dasein's Temporality is not imaginable as an abstract relation hovering beyond bodily life.

Yet it does not necessarily follow that movement must replace temporality as the single primordial ground.

Sheets-Johnstone shows that temporality entails animation. Heidegger shows that Dasein’s existence is ecstatically stretched. But what if movement is itself intelligible only as a temporal unity that is also differentiated through its phases, then movement cannot simply stand beneath temporality as its ontological ground.

A movement is never contained within an isolated instant. It carries what has already occurred, gathers itself in a present orientation, and unfolds toward what has not yet been completed. A step retains the phase from which the body departs, passes through a present organization, and anticipates a landing. Remove this temporal stretch and the step disintegrates into unrelated positions.

Movement is kinetic, but the kinetic is intrinsically temporal.

Movement has an ecstatic structure
 

Heidegger’s account of ecstatic temporality may therefore help us understand movement more deeply than an opposition between temporal and kinetic grounding would allow.

Movement exhibits a structure analogous to having-been, being-there, and being-toward:

• Always-already-moving: every movement arises from a bodily history, prior orientation, acquired capacity, and preceding phase.

• Moving: the mover is presently situated and actively organized within a field of relations.

• Moving-toward: movement opens toward a possibility, destination, resolution, or transformation that is not yet complete.

These are not three separate components assembled into movement. They form a differentiated unity. What has been is retained in what is occurring; what is occurring is organized in relation to what is coming; what is possible draws the movement forward from the situation already inherited.

Movement is existential-stretching across itself.

This does not mean that every movement is consciously planned or directed toward an explicitly represented goal. Moving-toward can be prereflective. The body anticipates support, adjusts to changing balance, and organizes itself toward possibilities without requiring a detached mental calculation.
 
Lived form is also ecstatic
 

Once movement is understood in this way, the lived body can no longer be treated as a static container through which movement passes.

The body is better understood as a lived form: a differentiated whole that persists by continually forming. Its present organization retains an evolutionary, developmental, and personal history. It is actively forming within the current situation and remains open toward possible ways of becoming.

Lived form can therefore be articulated as:

• Always-already-formed: the inherited and acquired organization from which the body presently lives.

• Forming: the body’s ongoing organization and reorganization within its current relations.

• Forming-toward: its openness toward capacities, adaptations, actions, and possibilities not yet realized.

The lived form is neither an unchanging substance nor a collection of momentary states. It holds together across transformation. Its identity is not opposed to change; it is enacted through a patterned continuity of forming.

Movement requires such form. Only a differentiated living form can orient, coordinate, and move as a whole. But lived form also requires movement. A living body develops and maintains its organization through activity, responsiveness, circulation, respiration, adaptation, and engagement with a world.

Neither can be understood in isolation.
Temporality, movement, and lived form as equiprimordial
 

We can now see why it is insufficient to say only that temporality implies movement and the body. Implication does not yet disclose their ontological relation.

Nor should we simply reverse Heidegger and claim that movement grounds temporality, or that the lived form grounds both. Each attempt to establish one as the unilateral foundation renders the others derivative, even though the supposed ground cannot itself be understood without them.

Temporality without movement becomes an abstract stretch belonging to no animate being. Movement without temporality becomes an impossible collection of instantaneous positions. Movement without lived form has no morphologically differentiated mover. Lived form without movement becomes static matter rather than a living form. And lived form without temporality has neither persistence nor becoming.

The three structures co-belong:

• Temporality is the ecstatic relational unity of having-been, being-there, and being-toward.

• Movement is the ecstatic relational unity of always-already-moving, moving, and moving-toward.

• Lived form is the ecstatic relational unity of always-already-formed, forming, and forming-toward.

These are not three entities or independent faculties. They are distinguishable but inseparable modes through which an animate being exists and a world becomes intelligible.

They are equiprimordial: each presupposes the others, each discloses the others, and none can serve as the complete ground of the rest.
 
Extending the existential analytic

Sheets-Johnstone’s criticism matters because it makes visible what Heidegger’s analytic continually enacts without adequately thematizing. Dasein must move. Being-in-the-world is the existence of an animate, vulnerable, temporally stretched, and bodily formed mover.

But the purpose of this inquiry is not simply to choose Sheets-Johnstone over Heidegger. Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality remains indispensable for understanding how movement holds together across its phases. Sheets-Johnstone’s being-in-movement remains indispensable for recognizing that temporality is lived through animation. The lived body, understood as ongoing form rather than material object, prevents either temporality or movement from becoming disembodied abstractions.

The task is therefore synthetic. Heidegger’s existential grammar must be extended through the kinetic and corporeal dimensions it presupposes. Sheets-Johnstone’s philosophy of movement must be brought into relation with the ecstatic structure she challenges. The body must be understood neither as an ontic object added to Dasein nor as a biological foundation standing beneath existence, but as lived form: one of the primordial relational structures through which our existence takes shape.

This gives us a more complete formulation of the being who moves:

We are always already having-been, being-there, and being-toward; always already moving, moving, and moving-toward; always already formed, forming, and forming-toward.

To understand any one of these structures requires the other two. Temporality, movement, and lived form do not seem to be competing candidates for the deepest ground of Dasein's ontological structure.