Heidegger on Animality and Anthropocentrism

ABSTRACT

Throughout his writings, Heidegger's view of animals is ostensibly anthropocentric, defining them as deficient in relation to human beings. His most extensive analysis of animality, found in the 1929–1930 lecture course entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, seems to be a clear example of this anthropocentrism, defining the animal as poor in world in opposition to the human being's world-forming character. Nevertheless, Heidegger is explicitly ambivalent regarding the anthropocentric implications of this conception of animality. This paper examines Heidegger's articulation of the notion of world-poverty as a distinct form of negativity, its implications for the question concerning Heidegger's anthropocentrism, as well as his ambivalence with regard to this question.

Notes

1 For the animal as lacking world, see Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, 248; Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 47; Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, 23; and Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (hereafter referred to as FM in the text), 176ff. For the animal as lacking language, see Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, 248; Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 16; Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, 16; and Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 36f. For the animal as lacking an understanding of being, see Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, 168, and Heidegger, Parmenides, 152f. For the animal as lacking hands, see Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 16; and Heidegger, Parmenides, 80. For the animal as lacking the ability to die, see Heidegger, Being and Time (hereafter referred to as BT in the text), 237–238.

2 Derrida, Of Spirit (hereafter referred to as OS in the text), 55. See also Of Spirit, 12, where Derrida holds that Heidegger “leaves intact, sheltered in obscurity, the axioms of the profoundest metaphysical humanism”, and that this is “particularly manifest in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics”.

3 Calarco, “Heidegger's Zoontology”, 21.

4 Calarco, Zoographies, 20.

5 Calarco, “Heidegger's Zoontology”, 28.

6 Ibid., 29; see also 18.

7 See, for example, Wood, “Comment ne pas manger”, 15–35); Krell, Daimon Life; and Glendinning, “Heidegger and the Question of Animality”, 67–86.

8 As Heidegger puts it, “(p)overty in world implies a deprivation of world. Worldlessness on the other hand is constitutive of the stone in the sense that the stone cannot even be deprived of something like world.” (Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 196.)

9 As Heidegger makes the point, the expression “taking care” is used to describe Dasein's behaviour “not because Dasein is initially economical and ‘practical’ to a large extent, but because Dasein itself is to be made visible as care.” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 57.)

10 Heidegger makes a similar use of this idea of the deficient mode in order to explain how Dasein can be factually alone, although its ontological structure includes its being-with-others. In Heidegger's words, “(t)he other can be lacking only in and for a being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with.” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 117.)

11 Heidegger makes this point explicitly with regard to the possibility of indifference, when he says that, in the case of a present-at-hand entity, “its being is a matter of ‘indifference'; or more precisely, it ‘is’ such a way that its being can be neither indifferent nor non-indifferent to it.” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 42.)

12 In the case of absolute lack, the comparison is between beings of different ontological types. Thus, a stone (whose way of being is presence-at-hand) absolutely lacks access to objects in comparison with a human being (whose way of being is Dasein). In the case of quantitative lack, the comparison is between beings of the same ontological type. Thus, the stream whose low volume of water flow is a merely quantitative deficiency lacks a greater volume of water flow in comparison with itself, i.e. in comparison with a previous or subsequent state of itself. This same quantitative deficiency would obtain if the stream in question were compared with a different stream that had a higher volume of water flow. For a different stream would be of the same ontological type.

13 Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 247. As Heidegger puts it, “such a possibility is ‘not given at all'.” See also, Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 259, where he asserts that “(a)n animal can only behave but can never apprehend something as something”.

14 That is, insofar as the animal has access to beings but does not recognize beings as such, it is captivated (benommen) by them; and such captivation constitutes “the essential structure of the animal” (Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 239). For Heidegger's full discussion of animal captivation, see Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 238–248.

15 See Heidegger, Being and Time, 272: Dasein “exists as thrown, brought into its ‘there,’ but not of its own accord”.

16 As Heidegger puts it, “(e)xisting, it never comes back behind its thrownness” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 272, my italics).

17 See Heidegger, Being and Time, 139, where Heidegger maintains that Dasein is the potentiality for “being as existing”.

18 This is why Heidegger characterizes Dasein as ontologically “ahead of itself”, or “beyond itself” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 185).

19 See Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, 248; Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, 16; and Heidegger, Parmenides, 152.

20 See Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 264: “the animal is separated from man by an abyss”.

21 Derrida also suggests that Heidegger's version of the animality/Dasein division does not amount to an abyss: “can one not say just as legitimately that the having-of-world has for man the signification of some unheimliche privation of world, and that these two values are opposed?” (Derrida, Of Spirit, 50. See also, Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, 159–160). Giorgio Agamben suggests a similar proximity between Heideggerian Dasein and the animal's world-poverty, when he asserts that “(t)he jewel set at the center of the human world and its Lichtung {clearing} is nothing but animal captivation” (Agambon, The Open, 68). In “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject”, Jean-Luc Nancy sees Heidegger's reference to the animals “sadness linked to its ‘lack of world’” (111), as the point at which his attempt to distinguish the human being from the animal breaks down. As Nancy asks, “(h)ow could sadness be non-human? Or rather, how would such a sadness fail to testify to a relation to world?” (111) Neither Derrida, Agamben, nor Nancy, however, link this proximity with Heidegger's misgivings about his own analysis.