This essay presents an existential-phenomenological perspective of the body, having Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as reference authors. In the traditional conceptions, the body has been understood as a biological mechanism in opposition to a supersensible instance (ration, mind or soul), as source of erotic and impersonal pleasure, and most recently, as a ‘visit card’, submitted to fashion, health and good shape tendencies. Would those conceptions be absolute or expression of a certain way of life of the contemporaneous society? Which implications do those conceptions have? Would there be something still unthought? In the first place - we think - there is a lot to consider about the body under theoretical and thematic obliquities. Reflecting on this based on the heideggerian view, this essay intents to show one of the possible ways to rethink the body, according to some approximations to Merleau-Ponty’s view. We will see how the present body conception is linked to a certain conception of man and being and that we have a kind of “original intimacy” with the world that the body conception defended in this essay points out. We should recover this intimacy in order to raise a more human, close and intimate way of being in the world and with other people.
Body; Contemporary time; Existential phenomenology; Being