Abstract
This article offers an excursus on the evolution of Heidegger’s thinking on the animal, tracing the development of the philosopher’s thought from his early phenomenology of life and more mature ontology of existence to his later work that focused on the phenomenology of world. Following this trajectory, the article will discriminate between two distinct Heideggerian approaches to the experiencing, naming, and thinking of the animal. The first, which is tied to metaphysics and ontology, underdetermines the animal by interpreting it privatively with respect to the human, and as a living entity that is poor in world. The second expresses a phenomenology without ontology, and reinterprets the animal in light of a notion of world that is both pre- and post-metaphysical, thus characterizing it as a thing which gathers the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. for example, the passage from Seneca (Epistles 124: 14) cited in § 42 of Being and Time: “Quattuor hae naturae sunt, arboris, animalis, hominis, dei: haec duo, quae rationalia sunt, eandem naturam habent, illo diversa sunt quod alterum inmortale, alterum mortale est”.
- 2.
- 3.
Heidegger (2010, 3). Please note that the translations cited in this article may reflect slight lexical modifications with respect to the original text.
- 4.
Heidegger (2010, 60).
- 5.
Heidegger (2010, 182) (cf. also 183).
- 6.
Heidegger (2010, 275).
- 7.
Heidegger (2010, 7).
- 8.
Heidegger (2010, 10).
- 9.
Heidegger (2010, 54).
- 10.
Heidegger (2010, 46).
- 11.
Heidegger (2010, 43–44).
- 12.
Heidegger (2010, 194).
- 13.
Heidegger (2010, 229).
- 14.
Heidegger (2010, 224).
- 15.
Heidegger (2010, 229).
- 16.
Heidegger (2010, 229).
- 17.
Heidegger (2010, 230).
- 18.
Cf. Heidegger (2010, 233).
- 19.
Cf. Heidegger (2010, 221): “Even the objectively present corpse is, viewed theoretically, still a possible object for pathological anatomy whose understanding is oriented toward the idea of life. Merely-being-objectively-present is ‘more’ than a lifeless, material thing. In it we encounter something unliving which has lost its life”.
- 20.
Cf. Heidegger (2010, 39).
- 21.
- 22.
Heidegger (2010, 52).
- 23.
- 24.
Heidegger (2010, 245).
- 25.
Cf. Heidegger (1996, 71–72): “Animals and plants live. Material things – ‘nature’ in a certain sense – are objectively present [vorhanden], useful things are at hand [zuhanden]. From the terminological point of view, a paradox results in which man does not live, but exists […]. Unlike the way of being of things such as, for example, stones and debris, things such as chalk, sponge, blackboard, door, window have a totally different way of being, which we designate as their handiness. Moreover, there are ‘realities’ like space and numbers, which are nothing, and that, to the extent that they are also something, we say that they persist [bestehen], that they have duration [Bestand]. Thus, with regard to the different modes of being, we distinguish: the existing: humans; the living: plants, animals; the objectively present: material things; the present at hand: things of use in the widest sense; the persisting [Bestehende]: numbers and space. According to these basic modes of being, we can mark domains [Bereiche], although this regional aspect is not primary or essential. The existing, the living, the objectively present, the present at hand [and the persisting] are not regions juxtaposed next to each other but rather only methodological concepts-of-grasping”. Cf. again Heidegger (2006, 17), where the place of the stone is held by a planetary cluster: “A table, a mountain, the moon, but also a dog, a lark, a rose do not exist, but they certainly are […]. They possess their specific being: table – present at hand, moon – objectively present, lark and rose live, number and point persist. The human exists. This being that exists, we call it Dasein”. Cf. Ardovino (2018).
- 26.
Cf. Heidegger (1995, 62).
- 27.
Cf. Heidegger (1995, 188, 191).
- 28.
Heidegger (1995, 179).
- 29.
Heidegger (1995, 225).
- 30.
Heidegger (1995, 235).
- 31.
Heidegger (1995, 189).
- 32.
Heidegger (1995, 235).
- 33.
Heidegger (1995, 178).
- 34.
Heidegger (1995, 177).
- 35.
On this point, see, among others, Illetterati (2002).
- 36.
Heidegger (1995, 264).
- 37.
Heidegger (1995, 199, 210, 269).
- 38.
Heidegger (1995, 270).
- 39.
Heidegger (1995, 270).
- 40.
Heidegger (1995, 274).
- 41.
Heidegger (1995, 248). Cf. also Heidegger (1982, 190–191 and above all 319): “Since it exists, the Dasein understands being and comports itself toward beings. The distinction between being and beings is there, latent in the Dasein and its existence, even if not in explicit awareness. The distinction is there [i.e. exists]; that is to say, it has the mode of being of the Dasein: it belongs to existence. Existence means, as it were, ‘to be in the performance of this distinction.’ Only a soul that can make this distinction has the aptitude, going beyond the animal’s soul, to become the soul of a human being”.
- 42.
Heidegger (1995, 268).
- 43.
Heidegger (1995, 353).
- 44.
Heidegger (1995, 264. Cf. 282).
- 45.
Heidegger (1995, 264).
- 46.
It is interesting to note, in this regard, that this term was already used in Being and Time in reference to Dasein itself, whose “Being-in-the-world, as taking care of things, is taken in by (benommen) the world which it takes care of” (Heidegger 2010, 57), such that “[i]nitially and for the most part, Dasein is taken in by its world” (Heidegger 2010, 107). Yet this being absorbed by the world is not only inauthentic – for “[i]n this familiarity Dasein can lose itself in what it encounters within the world and be numbed by (benommen) it” (Heidegger 2010, 71)–, but, if referring to the experience of the Angst, it can also be a prelude to a possible authenticity: “In it [the Angst], Dasein is taken back fully to its naked uncanniness and benumbed by it. But this numbness (Benommenheit) not only takes Dasein back from its ‘worldly’ possibilities, but at the same time gives it the possibility of an authentic potentiality-of-being” (Heidegger 2010, 316).
- 47.
Heidegger (1995, 198).
- 48.
Heidegger (1995, 255).
- 49.
Heidegger (1995, 259).
- 50.
Heidegger (1995, 259).
- 51.
Heidegger (1995, 267).
- 52.
Heidegger (1995, 272).
- 53.
- 54.
Heidegger (1995, 248).
- 55.
Heidegger (1995, 270).
- 56.
Heidegger (1995, 271).
- 57.
Heidegger (1995, 210).
- 58.
Heidegger (1995, 255).
- 59.
Heidegger (1995, 259).
- 60.
Heidegger (1995, 272). Significantly, Heidegger does not cite Novalis, Hölderlin, or Rilke but chooses Saint Paul (Romans 8:19).
- 61.
Heidegger (1995, 276).
- 62.
Heidegger (1995, 278).
- 63.
Heidegger (1995, 278).
- 64.
Heidegger (1995, 278).
- 65.
Heidegger (1995, 25).
- 66.
On this point, cf. Ardovino (2017).
- 67.
Cf. Heidegger (1984, 74–77).
- 68.
Heidegger (1998, 246).
- 69.
Heidegger (1998, 246).
- 70.
Heidegger (1998, 247).
- 71.
Heidegger (1998, 248).
- 72.
Cf. Heidegger (1998, 248): “Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and on the other they are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss. However, it might also seem as though the essence of divinity is closer to us than what is so alien in other living creatures, closer, namely, in an essential distance that, however distant, is nonetheless more familiar to our ek-sistent essence than is our scarcely conceivable, abysmal bodily kinship with the beast”.
- 73.
Heidegger (1998, 248).
- 74.
Heidegger (1984, 176)
- 75.
Heidegger (1984, 164–165).
- 76.
Heidegger (2002, 23): “The stone is world-less. Similarly, plants and animals have no world; they belong, rather, to the hidden throng of an environment into which they have been put. The peasant woman, by contrast, possesses a world, since she stays in the openness of beings”.
- 77.
Heidegger (2002, 21).
- 78.
Heidegger (2002, 25).
- 79.
Heidegger (2002, 43).
- 80.
Heidegger (2002, 12).
- 81.
- 82.
Heidegger (2003, 80).
- 83.
Heidegger (1972, 41).
- 84.
- 85.
Heidegger (2018, 68).
- 86.
Heidegger (2000a, 76).
- 87.
Heidegger (2018, 277).
- 88.
Heidegger (1975, 117).
- 89.
Cf. Heidegger (1975, 118).
- 90.
Cf. Heidegger (1972, 42). If again, in the lecture on Parmenides, Heidegger states that “[t]he animal is excluded from the essential domain of strife between unconcealedness and concealedness” (Heidegger 1992, 159–160), Heidegger now affirms: “whether and to what extent disclosing and lighting [Entbergung und Lichtung] are the Same, remain to be asked” (Heidegger 1975, 103). And since Entbergung and Verbergung are not thought of “as two different occurrences merely jammed together, but as One and the Same [als Eines und das Selbe]” (Heidegger 1975, 112–113), the animal, at one time excluded from aletheia as truth of being, now reveals a relationship with Lichtung that, however distinct from that of men and gods, it is irreducible to mere exclusion. For its part, Lichtung is an aletheia free from any dualistic (polemical or adversarial) element, because in it the closure is no longer the “counter” (nor the heart nor the background) to the opening, but rather is the highest way of opening, like the Enteignis is for the Ereignis.
- 91.
Heidegger (1975, 116).
- 92.
Heidegger (2012, 16).
- 93.
Heidegger (1971a, 203).
- 94.
Heidegger (2012, 20).
- 95.
Heidegger (1986, 436–437).
- 96.
Heidegger (1992, 160): “In fact, an original poetizing capacity would be needed to surmise this concealed element that is proper to the living being [dieses Verborgene des Lebendigen] [...]”.
- 97.
Heidegger (2002, 4).
- 98.
Heidegger (2012, 46). On the meaning and textual locations of the vanishing of being and on the ontological difference (Heidegger 2003, 366) in the Ereignis, or rather, in the Lichtung of the world as fourfold, cf. Ardovino. For the important analyses of the shift from the distinction Sein/Seiende to the intersection (Unter-Schied) Welt/Ding, as well as of reformulation of the Seiende im Ganzen as “earth and sky”, cf. Harman (2007).
- 99.
Cf. Heidegger (1975, 59–78).
- 100.
Heidegger (2013, 1207): “Gewächs und Getier […]. sind nicht in ihrem Wesen abhängig vom Menschen als dem vorstellenden Subjekt. Aber die Subjektivität ist ein Wesen des Gewächs und Getier enteignenden Ereignisses, worin ihr Anwesen in einer ausgezeichneten Weise im Ereignis preisgegeben wird”.
- 101.
Heidegger (1971b, 134).
- 102.
Cf. the considerations from the lecture on Eraclitus referring to the bird, in which swinging, swaying, hovering, and carrying away, there is a true “free measurement of the open”, and in whose flying, and singing, there is a “preservation of what is closed, for example in mourning” (Heidegger 2018, 72). Leaving aside the considerations of the psyche as the breathing of the zoon and as a word indicating, yet again, the physis, cf. also the difference between this account and the lectures on Parmenides (Heidegger 1992, 80: “the hand is, together with the word, the essential distinction of man [...].The hand exists as hand only where there is disclosure and concealment. No animal has a hand”, and 107: “Animals do not look [blicken nicht] [...] We are always the ones [...] who, on our own, interpret the way animals ‘watch’ us as a looking. On the other hand, where man only experiences Being and the unconcealed sketchily, the animal’s ‘look’ can concentrate in itself a special power of encounter. Looking, in the original sense of emergent self-presenting” is “determined from aletheia [...]”) and the Abendländisches Gespräch (1946–48), in which the hesitating “shy deer, looking [blickend] from the edge of the forest over wide meadows and fields, seems to endure [auszuhalten] the world in its waiting silence” (Heidegger 2000b, 61).
- 103.
Mitchell (2015).
- 104.
- 105.
Mitchell (2015, 114).
- 106.
Mitchell (2015, 113).
- 107.
Cf. Ardovino (2011).
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Ardovino, A. (2021). Living, Being, Thinging. Remarks on the Fate of the Animal in Heidegger’s Thought. In: Di Martino, C. (eds) Heidegger and Contemporary Philosophy. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56566-4_5
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