Heidegger
INTRODUCTION
For our task of examining the question of the animal in the context of contemporary Continental philosophy, Martin Heidegger is an essential reference and ideal point of departure. He has set the agenda for numerous areas of research in Continental thought, and his influence on contemporary phenomenological, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic approaches to philosophy is immeasurable. For issues having to do with animals, Heidegger’s work contains a number of important (albeit contentious) reflections on the nature of animal life and the status of the human-animal distinction. Despite my respect for Heidegger’s thought and for the originality of his thinking in so many areas of philosophical inquiry, my reading of his work in this chapter will be deeply and, at times, harshly critical. It is my contention that his work has served primarily to marginalize the animal question in contemporary thought, and I approach his work with the aim of uncovering where and how it derails the kind of approach to animal issues that I am advocating here. As critical as my reading will be, it should be evident that the questions and theses pursued in presenting my position are fundamentally indebted to the horizon of thought opened up by Heidegger. In a certain sense, one could read this chapter and each of the following chapters as an attempt to deepen and extend certain lines of Heidegger’s thought while simultaneously holding open other lines of inquiry that his work brushes up against but ultimately forecloses.
ANIMAL BEING: REGROUNDING THE HUMAN AND ZOOLOGICAL SCIENCES
I begin here with Heidegger’s early texts on animals, specifically his magnum opus Being and Time.1 Discussion of animals is, for the most part, conspicuously absent from this text. The being of other animals nowhere commands Heidegger’s sustained attention within the context of his existential analytic of Dasein, and in those few places where animals are discussed explicitly in the text, the larger philosophical stakes of the human-animal distinction go unmentioned. Thus, for instance, we find in Heidegger’s discussion of Zuhandenheit in part 1, chapter 3, a brief discussion of the role that animal skins play as materials that are “referred” to in the production of leather shoes. These skins are “taken from animals, which someone else has raised,”2 as Heidegger notes (and, it should be remarked, the skins are taken from animals that someone else has slaughtered—a fact that Heidegger does not note). And yet, despite animals having the status of little more than mere material in the production of leather shoes in this context, Heidegger notes that animals as such do not appear phenomenologically simply as human-produced material for use in human products. For not only do we encounter animals in contexts completely outside the scope of human domestication (for example, in “nature”), but even when we do encounter animals that have been subjected to human domestication and reared with humans ends in mind, we seem to be encountering beings that are something more than human artifacts. Animals are not fully reducible to the status of human creations but rather are beings that “produce themselves.”3 However, this unique manner of animal existence is quickly set aside by Heidegger, and its implications for understanding the respective differences between human and animal modes of Being (differences that, as I shall discuss momentarily, lie at the very heart of the existential analytic of Dasein) are not pursued.
Later in Being and Time , in part 2, chapter 1, when Heidegger turns to a discussion of Dasein’s unique mode of being-toward-death, animals reappear briefly in order to highlight a contrast between animal death and Dasein’s specific modality of finitude.4 Here Heidegger explains that, starting from the viewpoint of the life sciences, Dasein’s death can be studied in precisely the same ways that one might study an animal’s death. In doing so, one could analyze the cause of Dasein’s death, its longevity, propagation, and so forth. But such an analysis would miss the ontological characteristics specific to human Dasein’s finitude, which is to say, the unique manner in which Dasein dies (or, more strictly in Heidegger’s terms, demises) and has its being only in relation to its finitude (a modality of finitude that Heidegger calls dying). Inasmuch as Dasein has a relation to death as such and to death in terms of its own finitude, it never simply perishes or comes to an end. By contrast, animals (as instances of the kind of beings that merely have life but have no relation to finitude) never properly die or demise; they can only perish. Demise and dying are modalities of finitude to which animals simply do not have access on Heidegger’s account.
As Jacques Derrida has argued, the distinctions that Heidegger tries to maintain between human and animal modes of death in this analysis are rather dogmatic and lack sufficient scientific and ontological grounding.5 But even acknowledging the weight of Derrida’s critique, it is not at all clear that the discussion of animal modes of death or the analysis of how animals appear within the average everyday world of Dasein is intended by Heidegger to constitute a fundamental ontology of animality. Any effort to develop a fundamental ontological analysis of the Being of animals would, on Heidegger’s account, be premature without first having reraised the question of the meaning of Being. Heidegger’s argument in the opening sections of Being and Time aims to establish that the Seinsfrage is best pursued in view of determining the meaning of the Being of human Dasein. Whatever the merits of the argument for the ontic priority of Dasein as the focal entity in the posing of the Seinsfrage, it is clear that the only charitable way to read Heidegger’s brief discussion of animals in Being and Time is as a mere fragment of a more complete ontology of life, and completion of such an ontology would be subsidiary to and contingent upon a genuine engagement with the Seinsfrage. Even Heidegger’s extensive existential analytic of Dasein should be seen as incomplete and preparatory inasmuch as the analytic is undertaken only with the posing of the Seinsfrage in mind. Consequently, if one looks to Being and Time to uncover what Heidegger takes to be the fundamental being of animals, one can only be disappointed.
But this is not to suggest that Heidegger does not have the question of the being of animal life in view in this text. Twice in Being and Time Heidegger refers to the importance of the project of determining the meaning of the Being of life (which presumably includes both plant and animal forms) and argues that this project would have to take the form of a “privative interpretation,” starting from the “life” of Dasein and showing how nonhuman life is “deprived” of certain aspects of Dasein’s unique mode of Being. Although one could take issue with Heidegger’s inclination toward a privative interpretation of animal life (and this is something I will examine in more detail shortly), it is at least clear that the animal question and the larger question of the Being of life is not outside the scope of Heidegger’s thought at the time of the composition of Being and Time, even if the possibility of examining this question in detail is outside the scope of that particular text.
Furthermore, it is important to recall that although Heidegger’s focus in Being and Time is primarily on the Being of human Dasein, the aim of the book is not simply to provide the ontological grounding for a philosophical anthropology or for research in the human sciences. One of the primary stakes of the book is, in fact, a revitalization of science as such, a revitalization that can only occur by placing science on fundamental ontological grounds. It is with this project in mind that Heidegger speaks of a productive logic of the Being of beings, a saying of beings that allows beings to manifest themselves in their Being. This sort of “productive logic” leaps ahead of the sciences, rather than “limping along” behind them and collecting and analyzing their results.6 And it is in this context that Heidegger speaks of the crisis in the foundations of the science of biology, a science that has animal and other forms of life as its object of inquiry. Presumably, Heidegger’s aim in returning to the Seinsfrage is to reorient biology and the other sciences along fundamental ontological lines, much as he hoped to do with the human sciences. Thus, once again we can see that despite Heidegger’s anthropocentric (or, more precisely, Dasein-centric) orientation, questions concerning human and nonhuman life lie at the very heart of his philosophical project.
Although Heidegger never carried through on this project of developing a productive logic for the sciences that he proposed in Being and Time, there are a handful of texts where he takes up elements of such a project. With regard to the Being of life and animals, in particular, Heidegger offers a lengthy and intricate analysis in his lecture course of 1929 and 1930, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.7 Here he also addresses the complicated relationship between science and philosophy and the role philosophy might play in determining the Being of animal life—a task that is often reserved solely for the sciences. Now, if Heidegger’s remarks on animal death in Being and Time displayed a notable failure to engage with the relevant scientific literature on animals, the same certainly cannot be said for the lecture course. What we find in this text is a deep familiarity with the biological and zoological debates of the day and an attempt to develop a more reciprocal and mutually informing relationship between the sciences and philosophy. Heidegger envisions a mature form of “communal cooperation” (FCM, 190) between the sciences and philosophy, where the different modes of inquiry are engaged in two aspects of the same task: investigating the Being of beings as they show themselves in and of themselves. As such, the aim of the lecture course is not to demonstrate that philosophy has privileged access to the Being of specific entities (e.g., animals) over and above science but rather to show that the philosophical task of determining the essence of animals, their animality, is something that can only be done by way of a thinking confrontation with concrete scientific research and a reorientation of scientific inquiry along those lines.
Consequently, Heidegger’s remarks on animals here need to be seen against this backdrop. They derive from a certain orientation toward zoology and biology and cannot be elucidated independently of this orientation. To be specific, Heidegger here sees himself as entering the fray of a debate within the sciences over the nature of life and the proper methodological and interpretive tools for understanding it. He aligns himself with contemporary zoologists and biologists who reject the attempt to analyze life by reducing it to physics and chemistry. The other dominant approaches to understanding animal life (vitalism and variations on human psychology) are similarly rejected inasmuch as they impose categories on animal life that derive from and are appropriate to other regions of beings besides animals. Heidegger believes that the zoology and biology of his day are engaged in essential thinking inasmuch as they resist the “tyranny of physics and chemistry” (FCM, 188) and try to determine life autonomously and with an eye toward the way in which living beings manifest themselves on their own terms. At the same time, as the lecture course unfolds, Heidegger distances himself from these same biologists when they try to bring human beings wholly within the scope of their discipline. This so-called biologistic analysis of human beings commits the same “sin” of reductionism that he associates with the tyranny of physics and chemistry in the sciences. Human existence cannot, on Heidegger’s account, be understood in terms borrowed from biology and zoology inasmuch as animal life and human life represent two distinct and essentially different regions of beings. The aim, then, is to have a cofounding relationship between the sciences and metaphysics, where the positive researches of the sciences inform and are informed by fundamental concepts drawn from careful metaphysical and phenomenological analysis of the Being of specific regions of entities. For Heidegger, this entails not reducing one kind of being to another, on the one hand, and not conflating one kind of being with another, on the other hand. In the case of undertaking a properly biological and zoological analysis of animals, the risk for Heidegger would be either reducing animals to mechanistic entities or conflating them with human beings.
It is with this double risk in mind that Heidegger focuses upon the concept of “world” in the second portion of his lecture course. This concept allows him both to distinguish human beings (who are “world-forming”) from animals (that are “poor in world”) and to uncover their respective, essential modes of Being. Of course, the overarching aim here is not uncovering the animality of animals but rather trying to determine the unique relation to world characteristic of human Dasein, such that this unique relation poses a genuine question and problem for metaphysical research. As such, the lecture course is centered on human existence, not animal life. And yet, despite this anthropocentric focus, Heidegger gives serious attention to a phenomenological and metaphysical analysis of the Being of animals, and tries to do so on the animal’s own terms. It is this orientation—that of trying to think through animal Being in nonanthropocentric terms—that constitutes the most radical aspect of the lecture course and makes Heidegger’s thought an important starting point for my posing of the question of the animal in the chapters that follow. Although the results of his investigations are ambiguous and deeply problematic, Heidegger’s false starts in posing the question of the animal will nevertheless be useful for providing the coordinates for my readings of Levinas, Agamben, and Derrida and for thinking through the difficulties of doing philosophy in a nonanthropocentric manner.
Heidegger initially arrives at his much-discussed theses on world (the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, and man is world-forming) through the anthropocentric avenues of commonsense notions and Christian ideas about the place of human beings among other “created” beings. In this commonsense and religious notion of “world,” human beings are part of the world but also stand over and against it to a certain extent, and in a way that animals and nonliving beings that are fully immersed in the world cannot. Now, were Heidegger to content himself with these commonsense ideas, there would be little of interest in his analysis. What makes his discussion useful for my purposes is that he takes these dominant ideas and immediately subjects them to a thoroughgoing critical examination. Unlike much of the philosophical tradition that precedes him, Heidegger does not take it as philosophically evident that there is a straightforward distinction to be drawn between human being and animal, or between living beings and nonliving beings. Furthermore, he poses as a question the proper means of getting at the Being and world relations characteristic of nonhuman entities, which is to say, he does not take for granted the idea that our anthropocentric commonsense or even scientific approaches to understanding nonhuman beings will provide the best means of access.
In order to guard against slipping back into these dominant ways of thinking about nonhuman beings, Heidegger stresses that standard hierarchical evaluations of the human-animal distinction are highly suspect (FCM, 194). If, for instance, we were to follow common sense in saying that humans have a “richer” world than animals—that is to say, that humans have a broader and more complex range of experiences and entities available to them in comparison with animals—then we would miss the specificity of the relations that obtain between animals and the beings they encounter in their environments. It would be counterproductive, according to Heidegger’s analysis, to undertake a comparative examination of the respective world relations of human beings and animals if one were to proceed under the seemingly obvious assumption that animals are somehow “lower” or “simpler” than human beings. Such hierarchical evaluations imply that the differences between human beings and animals can be figured in terms of differences of degree, differences that indicate that human beings possess a range of abilities and relations that are of a higher rank than animals.
Heidegger finds these dominant ideas about animals suspect, first of all, for the obvious reason that they are empirically false. In many ways, various species of animals have extremely complex and rich relations to other beings in their environment—relations that often equal and even surpass the complexity of human relations in certain ways (consider, for example, a bird’s sense of sight or a dog’s sense of smell). But he also rejects this degree-of-difference manner of making comparisons and distinctions because it presupposes that human-world relations and animal-world relations can, in fact, be compared in terms of shared similarities and dissimilarities. Strictly speaking, Heidegger’s comparative examination is meant to highlight the abyssal differences between human and animal relations to world. There is no difference in degree or quantity between human and animal, Heidegger insists, but rather a difference in kind, and this difference in kind is meant to be understood in the most fundamental and radical way possible. The difference between the Being of human beings and that of animals marks a gap and a rupture that is utterly untraversable. In this sense, the animal’s world can never be compared with the human world, only to the human world (and vice versa). In insisting on ruptures and abysses, Heidegger is also clearly seeking to distance himself from any attempt to reduce the Being of human Dasein to biological (i.e., Darwinian) terms. Whatever usefulness a Darwinian analysis of human nature might have from a scientific perspective or for scientific purposes, such an analysis would only miss the specific nature of human Dasein inasmuch as it seeks to understand human beings in terms that are drawn from animal life and the rest of the natural world. Heidegger’s aim, then, is to determine the respective world relations of human beings and animals by choosing terms and a mode of access that are appropriate to each kind of being. In regard to animals, this would mean examining them not through ideas borrowed from common sense or through notions acquired from human psychology but rather “by taking a look at animality itself” (FCM, 195) and by finding out what being “poor in world” means on animality’s own terms.
It is precisely at this juncture of the text that the most promising and provocative elements, along with the most dogmatic and problematic assumptions, of Heidegger’s thought on animals emerge. The effort to examine the specific mode of Being of animals and their specific world relations on their own terms is, when viewed in contrast with much of the previous philosophical tradition, a remarkably progressive and important advance. All too often, animals are viewed by philosophers strictly through a human lens and found to be lacking in one or several traits or capacities that are supposedly unique to human beings. That Heidegger is at pains throughout the lecture course to avoid this same mistake renders his text one of the more important signposts for indicating a path beyond the anthropocentric limits of the philosophical tradition. At the same time, the overarching aim of Heidegger’s project—that of determining the world relations of human beings and animals by demarcating a difference in kind between the two groups—is itself one of the most classical and dogmatic of philosophical prejudices. Even though Heidegger initially acknowledges that “it is difficult to determine … the distinction between man and animal”—an acknowledgment that helps to prevent his discussion from falling back into commonsense presuppositions about the human-animal distinction—the question concerning whether such a distinction between human beings and animals can or even should be drawn is never raised for serious discussion.
Even if we are convinced by Heidegger that hierarchical versions of the human-animal distinction are deeply suspect, it does not follow that the distinction itself should continue to stand or that it should serve as a guide for further thought in philosophy or the sciences. If our aim is to examine the specific mode of Being of what we call “animals” on the animals’ own terms, isn’t one of the risks of this project that the human-animal distinction may fall by the wayside? How can we be assured at the outset of the analysis that the difference between human Dasein and animal life is definitive and abyssal, especially if the most refined bodies of knowledge we have from the empirical and social sciences strongly suggest otherwise? Given that one of the respective “regions” of beings—viz., animal life, which for Heidegger, would include a range of beings extending from mammals, birds, and fish through insects and single-celled beings such as amoebae (FCM, 186)—under discussion here includes literally billions of species, is it not rather imprudent and naïve to assume that a sharp distinction can be drawn between animals as such and human Dasein as such? From what perspective does one make such assumptions? And how does empirical research figure in the drawing of these metaphysical distinctions between human beings and animals? If, as Heidegger suggests, there should be a robust “communal cooperation” between the sciences and metaphysics in determining the fundamental concepts that guide a science, we will certainly want to know if empirical evidence confirms the distinctions and concepts he is proposing and also whether the concepts are productive in the accumulation of further empirical evidence. More important, as we look at Heidegger’s text in more detail, we will have to examine carefully whether the distinction between human Dasein and animals is actually drawn from “looking at animality itself” and looking at Dasein itself, or whether the distinction is simply imposed from the outside in a dogmatic fashion.
The flip side of the risk that attends Heidegger’s efforts to draw a sharp distinction between the world relations of human Dasein and animals is that animals will be seen as “merely” material, mechanistic beings, something like the Cartesian version of animal automatons. In other words, if animals, in being “poor in world,” are deprived of world, how do animals differ from the “worldless” stone? Aren’t the stone and animal alike in lacking world altogether? What else could the animal’s being deprived of world mean? Heidegger insists that animals should not be strictly identified with material entities such as stones; reductionist-style scientific projects that do so would, on his account, miss the specific Being of animals. The world relations of the stone and the animal are, for Heidegger, completely different, as different in kind as the world relations of human and animal are. If “world” means something like the space in which beings are accessible to and dealt with by a given entity, then, according to Heidegger, the stone has no world at all. It cannot be deprived of world because it has no opening to the beings that surround it. A stone “crops up” among a whole host of other beings but has no affective or relational structure that would grant it access to those other beings. By contrast, the animal does have access to those beings among and with which it lives. Heidegger writes that “every animal as animal has a specific set of relationships to its sources of nourishment, its prey, its enemies, its sexual mates, and so on. These relationships, which are infinitely difficult for us to grasp and require a high degree of cautious methodological foresight on our part, have a peculiar fundamental character of their own” (FCM, 198). Consequently, the animal is fundamentally different from the stone in having a series of relationships with and access to other beings in its environment. In this sense, the animal does have world.
Heidegger’s worry is that if we examine the animal world from this perspective and fail to note the difficulty and caution required to understand it on the animal’s own terms, we will be tempted to assimilate it once again to the human relation to world and interpret the human-animal distinction in terms of a difference of degree of having-world. Even if the animal has a relation with and access to the entities in its environment, this does not mean, Heidegger argues, that the animal and the human Dasein have the same relational and affective structure. In particular, no matter how rich and complex a given animal’s world might be, that world never grants it access to another being as such, that is, to the Being of an entity. Only human Dasein is capable of relating to beings as beings—a tree as a tree, a dog as a dog. This “as” structure, which marks the uniquely human opening to world and Being, is something forever barred from animal life. And it is this “as” structure that the animal is deprived of, that the animal lacks, and that renders the animal poor in world.
Heidegger insists, somewhat contentiously, that this structure of lack attributed to animals is not an anthropocentric projection but rather emerges out of a careful analysis of animality itself. He arrives at this conclusion through consideration of the possibility of phenomenologically “transposing” oneself into another animal, by which he means going along with another animal in the specific manner in which it lives. The aim of transposition in this instance is not to be another animal but rather to go along with it in its unique mode of Being and its specific manner of relating to its environment. Heidegger suggests that much as we are always already transposed into other human Daseins (inasmuch as being-with is one of the existentialia of human Dasein), we are always already transposed into other animals. We think and view things, at least to some extent, from their perspective; we live in view of and alongside other animals. They form part of our world, and we form part of their world. But what kind of “world,” precisely, do animals have? Heidegger uses the case of domestic animals to illustrate the different worlds of human Dasein and the animal. He writes that domestic animals
belong to the house, i.e., they serve the house in a certain sense. Yet they do not belong to the house in the way in which the roof belongs to the house as protection against storms. We keep domestic pets in the house with us, they ‘live ’ with us. But we do not live with them if living means: being in an animal kind of way. Yet we are with them nonetheless. But this being-with is not an existing-with, because a dog does not exist but merely lives. Through this being with animals we enable them to move within our world. We say that the dog is lying underneath the table or is running up the stairs and so on. Yet when we consider the dog itself—does it comport itself toward the table as table, toward the stair as stairs? All the same, it does go up the stairs with us. It feeds with us—and yet, we do not really ‘feed’. It eats with us—and yet, it does not really ‘eat’. Nevertheless, it is with us! A going along with …, a transposedness, and yet not.
(FCM, 210)
The conclusion to be drawn here, from Heidegger’s perspective, is that transposition into another animal is possible to some extent but is ultimately limited by the fact that the Being of animals is simply and fundamentally different from the Being of human Dasein—so much so that entirely different terms should be used in describing what might appear to be identical activities (human Dasein exists, the animal merely lives; human Dasein eats, the animal merely feeds; and so forth). Whereas human Dasein relates to beings in their Being, to beings as beings, animals simply have no “world” to speak of inasmuch as they have no access to the Being of beings in their environment.
But, surely, another analysis is possible. On the one hand, it is not at all clear that human Dasein is always already transposed into other animals. The choice of domestic animals as an example here is particularly problematic because it is precisely domestic animals that human beings are typically most capable of “going along with,” of being-with. The Being of other, nondomesticated animal species remains, in many instances, completely shrouded in mystery, and we rely on scientists and experts who live with such animals for many years to provide us with even the slightest glimpse of what being-with these animals might entail. Consequently, the possibility and extent of transposition varies with the given “species” of animal and the individual animal under discussion. To draw any general conclusions about “animality” or the world relation of animals per se based on the example of domestic animals is, to say the least, a questionable way of proceeding. Likewise, to reverse the procedure and suggest that the example of a domestic animal is not just an example but a statement of essence concerning animality, as Heidegger does, is to beg the question at hand. There can be no guarantee at the outset of the investigation of the world relations of animals that all beings labeled “animal” share some essential relational structure; at the very least, this claim needs to be informed by careful empirical examination and be useful for further scientific investigation. Given Heidegger’s remarks about the “communal cooperation” that should ideally occur between the sciences and metaphysics, we have further reason for doubting the validity of the conclusions drawn here. For what ethologist, whether in Heidegger’s time or our own, would be willing to make statements about the world relations of animals as such when such structures have yet to be investigated empirically in most animal species? Is Heidegger drawing his conclusions about animal essence from evidence gained through a careful and charitable communal cooperation between metaphysics and the sciences? Or is he, rather, simply making dogmatic claims that derive from an anxious guarding of the propriety of human Dasein’s supposedly unique relation to the Being of beings? What would motivate one to make claims about sharp distinctions, indeed abyssal differences, between two groups of beings without sufficient evidence?
Moreover, although Heidegger does acknowledge that domestic animals themselves “live” with human beings, that they transpose themselves into our lives, much more could be said about this overlapping of worlds. In what ways do certain animals adapt to and go along with human beings? And what does this adaptability and capacity for transposition say about the world relation of these animals? At the very least, the varied and complicated world relations among various animal species and individual animals should give us pause in attempting to draw any hasty conclusions about animals as such or about any differences that might be drawn between human beings and animals. Indeed, we might—for this cannot be ruled out a priori—be led upon further examination to the conclusion that the phenomenological notion of “world” cannot provide the ground for drawing any kind of meaningful or rigorous human-animal distinction at all, inasmuch as some animals appear to be quite “rich” in world formation.
Heidegger seems to recognize, or at least appreciate, the force of such questions and criticisms toward the end of his analysis of animality in the lecture course of 1929 and 1930. Not only does he admit that his discussion of the essence of animality is incomplete (inasmuch as it focuses primarily on the holistic and relational structure of the animal organism while ignoring the animal’s “motility” [FCM, 265]), but he also acknowledges that the very manner in which his entire discussion has been framed is, at bottom, anthropocentric. The point here is quite simple but also symptomatic of much of philosophical discourse about animals. Heidegger’s discussion of animality sets out to understand the animal’s relation to world on the animal’s own terms but acknowledges that this very project gains a sense and direction only from an anthropocentric perspective. This anthropocentrism takes two forms. On the one hand, Heidegger looks at the world relation of animals primarily as a means of delimiting the Being of animals as a distinct group, something that is of concern (on Heidegger’s reading) only to human beings and philosophical inquiry. On the other hand, this analysis is undertaken, despite his best efforts to take the animal’s perspective as a point of departure, solely in view of uncovering the essence of human Dasein and its unique relational structure. And this overarching aim of getting at Dasein’s Being necessarily inflects and directs Heidegger’s analysis. Of course, such anthropocentrism might be irreducible, and it could even be desirable in certain contexts. But there are more or less dogmatic ways of being anthropocentric, and each way has more or less problematic consequences, especially when considering the putative differences between human beings and animals.
The consequences of Heidegger’s discourse on animals on later Continental thought have been significant, and I will be examining this heritage in the subsequent chapters at some length. But we also need to consider the effects of Heidegger’s remarks on animals in his key early writings on his own later writings on animality. Heidegger’s discussions of animality after The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics become increasingly questionable and dogmatic. Despite its flaws, the analysis that Heidegger began in that lecture course is remarkably progressive in certain ways. First, his resolute refusal of a hierarchical human-animal distinction goes a long way toward challenging dominant philosophical notions of animality. That Heidegger does not place less value on animals and that he challenges the standard notion that animals lead an impoverished existence when compared with human beings both help point the way toward a more critical, less anthropocentric way of thinking about animals. Second, his attempt to work through the question of animal relation and world from the animal’s perspective is also helpful for turning philosophy away from its dogmatic anthropocentrism. Even though Heidegger fails to carry through on this task, his philosophical alliance with ethologists such as Jakob von Uexküll signals one way in which philosophical reflection could inform and be informed by a zoocentric ethology.
But why, precisely, does Heidegger fail in his task to determine the essence of animality from a nonanthropocentric perspective? As I just noted, it is not simply because Heidegger’s analysis of animal Being is one-dimensional in its focus on world relations. Rather, it is primarily because determining the Being of animals is never considered, in itself, a pressing task. Nearly all of Heidegger’s remarks on animals in his early work are made with an eye toward understanding what he considers to be the unique essence of human Dasein. It is this focus and this priority that forms the chief limit of Heidegger’s thought, and this same limit will most heavily influence the philosophers examined in this book who work within the orbit of his thought. Consequently, if our aim is to reorient post-Heideggerian Continental thought along new lines, it will be this limit that must be called into question.
There are, of course, various ways in which one could defend Heidegger’s primary focus on human Dasein and his concomitant marginalization of animals against the criticism I have just made. One could, for instance, argue that if thought is a thought of the event, and that if a renewal of animal ethics has its origins in such an event, then it is only by way of a recovery of one’s Dasein that a rethinking of animal ethics could ever take place. As such, Heidegger’s thought of human Dasein and Ereignis is actually the condition of possibility for the kind of thought and ethico-political practice I am arguing for in this book. Or, to put things in the briefest possible terms, the argument might be made that Heidegger’s path of thought is what clears the way for a renewal of thought and practice involving animals (and other nonhuman beings), one that proceeds from the event of encountering other animals. And this kind of event of other animals is possible only in and through the appropriation of one’s singular “site” of expropriation, that is, by being one’s own Dasein. Heidegger’s preponderant focus on human Dasein is, from this perspective, not anthropocentric, but Dasein-centric and, as such, event-centric. At stake for Heidegger is not human chauvinism but maintaining the unique ek-static, event-al structure characteristic of the Dasein within the human.8
What can be said of this kind of defense of Heidegger? I would suggest that even if one concedes that Heidegger is not simply a human chauvinist and could actually be read as clearing the way for a nonanthropocentric mode of thought (and I would readily concede both points), the argument does not come to an end with this concession. For the remnants of Heidegger’s anthropocentrism are more subtle and much more difficult to uncover and contest than most of his defenders suspect. The problem here is not that Heidegger places a higher value on human beings than animals; he is deeply critical of this ontotheological thesis regarding animals. The problem is rather that Heidegger uncritically accepts two basic tenets of ontotheological anthropocentrism: that human beings and animals can be clearly and cleanly distinguished in their essence; and that such a distinction between human beings and animals even needs to be drawn. The first thesis about the precise content of the human-animal distinction can be contested on various grounds, and this is something to which I will return in my examination of Heidegger and of others authors in the following chapters. Heidegger’s attempt to draw the distinction in terms of human ex-posure (Da-sein, ek-stasis) and his couching of this distinction in terms of “abyssal” differences between human beings and animals is one of the most problematic and questionable aspects of his writings. In the following two sections of this chapter, I will examine later writings by Heidegger where he draws and redraws the human-animal distinction over and against efforts to efface the distinction and create a kind of human-animal homogeneity. I have suggested thus far that Heidegger’s earlier works, while promising in certain respects, are ultimately unsuccessful in elaborating a thought of animality that escapes or significantly challenges the ontotheological tradition. But beyond this criticism, the second thesis that guides Heidegger’s thought—the thesis that a distinction between human beings and animals is needed and should be elaborated—is the more subtle aspect of his thought that ties (irreducibly, as I shall argue) his work to the ontotheological tradition. That a human-animal distinction should even be made and that it should form a kind of guideline for thought are metaphysical assumptions that guide Heidegger’s discourse—and these assumptions are deeply questionable. To be sure, such assumptions govern so many discourses and institutions today that to call them into question is to face ridicule and charges of absurdity. What could be more obvious than the notion that there is a clear distinction between human beings and animals? And that this distinction is essential for contemporary and future philosophical reflection? I shall argue throughout this chapter and the rest of this book that nothing today is less obvious. Whether there is a salient way to draw a distinction between human beings and animals and whether this should even be a task for future philosophical thought are wide-open questions. And it is only by working in and through the critical space opened up by this question that a genuinely nonanthropocentric thought might emerge.
BECOMING-ANIMAL
Heidegger’s early writings on animals and animality reflect his larger philosophical and cultural concerns of that period, namely, developing a fundamental ontology that would serve to reground and reorient the human and biological sciences, as well as the university as a whole. The dual insistence that human beings and animals are essentially different and that there is an abyss that separates human existence from animal life is, then, but one plank in the development of a more general fundamental ontological thought of the essence of the human and what gives rise to Being in human existence. The catastrophic political events preceding, surrounding, and following Heidegger’s efforts to realize this thought within the context of the university are well known, and I will not rehearse the details here.9 What I would like to examine in this section, rather, is what happens to Heidegger’s discourse on animality after this period in his philosophical and political activity. As is well known, during the period immediately following his resignation of the rectorship at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger engaged in an extended “confrontation” with the writings of Nietzsche. And he did so in view of at least two major critical theses. First, he sought to free Nietzsche from a simplistic racial and biologistic reading (a reading that he associated with a certain strain of Nazism, a strain from which Heidegger was keen to distance himself); second, he aimed to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s thinking, despite its apparent iconoclasm, remained firmly within the confines of the orbit of Western metaphysical thought.
In fact, it is by making the second argument—that Nietzsche’s thinking is essentially metaphysical and brings Western metaphysics to its fulfillment and conclusion—that Heidegger hopes to defend the first thesis that Nietzsche is not to be read biologically. That Nietzsche uses biological language and presents his philosophy as an affirmation and recovery of “life” over and against the decadence and nihilism of Western metaphysics and ethics is, according to Heidegger’s reading, not to be taken as the ultimate stake of Nietzsche’s thought. This language is to be understood as a sign system situated at the foreground of Nietzsche’s philosophy, and it is only by penetrating beneath this rhetorical surface layer, Heidegger argues, that we can catch sight of Nietzsche’s inner relationship to and complicity with the metaphysical tradition that precedes him.
What, then, ties Nietzsche to the metaphysical tradition on Heidegger’s reading? It is in Nietzsche’s concept of will to power that the link is to be found. The will to power should be read, according to Heidegger’s controversial thesis, as both a quintessential and ultimate manifestation of the metaphysics of subjectivity that has determined the unfolding of the Western metaphysical tradition since its inception.10 Within the Heideggerian interpretive framework, Nietzsche’s will to power is transformed into an “absolute,” domineering mode of subjectivity, one directly tied to and emanating from the human animal’s “body” and “drives and affects.”11 In line with all postclassical philosophical thought, the human subject is determined by Nietzsche as being an animal rationale. Of course, Nietzsche differs from the philosophical tradition that precedes him inasmuch as the tradition has tended prioritize and absolutize the rationalist aspects of the animal rationale. Indeed, by arguing for the salience of the animal and bodily traits in understanding the human “subject,” Nietzsche would appear to be mounting a direct challenge to the metaphysical tradition. But, according to Heidegger, despite the obvious differences between Nietzsche and his predecessors, Nietzsche thinks the “same” thought as the dominant metaphysical tradition: the human is nothing other than an animal rationale. His reversal of the privileging of rationality over animality does nothing to displace the tradition that precedes him but only reinforces its guiding thought and framework, placing the accent on human animality and downplaying or criticizing human rationality. It is in this sense that Nietzsche’s thought marks, for Heidegger, the “end” of metaphysics rather than a pathway or passage “beyond” it. Nietzsche’s reversal of the metaphysical determination of the human as animal rationale is simply the exhaustion of the possibilities offered by the metaphysical tradition. The reversal does not provide us an alternative understanding of the human but simply inverts the classical metaphysical definition—or so Heidegger would have us believe.
I want to suggest that Nietzsche’s reversal of classically metaphysical ideas about animals is more complicated and has more critical promise than Heidegger recognizes and that this reversal is actually an important initial step in the larger project of displacing the anthropocentric bias of classical metaphysics. It is because Heidegger believes that the guiding thread of metaphysics is to be found in the determination and unfolding of a certain conception of subjectivity that he reads Nietzsche in the manner that he does, that is, as leading to the culmination of the metaphysical tradition. But what if the, or one of the, guiding threads of Western metaphysics is not just a specific determination of subjectivity but rather human subjectivity, or anthropocentrism, as such? If we were to read Heidegger from this angle, then his efforts to think in postmetaphysical terms would be foreclosed a priori inasmuch as he fails to think the anthropocentric ground of metaphysics and the concept of subjectivity that flows from out of this ground. And if we read Nietzsche from this same angle, then perhaps his concept of will to power and his reversal of metaphysical anthropocentrism and human chauvinism could be read as a direct challenge to and exit point from this tradition—and something other than a sign of the “end” of metaphysics.
We can approach this alternative reading of Nietzsche, somewhat obliquely but profitably, through Heidegger’s analysis of Rilke in his lecture course of 1942 and 1943.12 The reasons for taking this path are simply that Heidegger’s remarks on Rilke constitute one of Heidegger’s most substantial texts on animals and that Heidegger reads Rilke as providing a poetic version of Nietzsche’s “basic position” (P, 148). This will provide the context for demonstrating the manner in which I believe Nietzsche’s thought escapes the Heideggerian reading, while at the same time helping better to delimit the anthropocentrism of Heidegger’s project. Furthermore, Rilke’s well-known reversal of human chauvinism will allow us another means of approaching the issue of whether such a reversal is ultimately just another metaphysical gesture or instead constitutes the opening to a postanthropocentric thought of animals.
Heidegger’s reading of Rilke and Nietzsche in the Parmenides lecture course occurs toward the very end of the lectures, following an extended argument concerning the development of the concept of truth from its inception in early Greek thought up through its Latinization in Christian theology and modernization in philosophers such as Descartes and Kant. Heidegger’s narrative stresses the successive unfolding of various concepts of truth that conceal ever more fully the “essence” of the occurrence of truth in human judgment and speech. The name that Heidegger gives to the essence of truth is “the open,” a term that recalls thought to the unconcealment of the Being of beings by way of human disclosure. The open names the “site” in which the event of Being occurs, and it is precisely this event that the Greek term for truth (a-lētheia, understood as un- or dis-concealment) recalls and that subsequent notions of truth leave in oblivion. The open, which is the precondition for the human word, which is in turn the precondition for human judgment, is the ground upon which philosophy comes into being. But, according to Heidegger, philosophy in the Western metaphysical tradition has proceeded without attention to its essential grounding in the open and the “dis-closive” nature of the human.
Heidegger discusses Rilke so as to distinguish this more primordial concept of the open from Rilke’s notion of the open as it appears in his Duino Elegies. In particular, Heidegger is concerned that Rilke’s reflections on the open might, because of their seeming poetic profundity, be taken as saying something important about the nature of human beings when, in fact (according to Heidegger), they miss altogether the essence of the human. So what exactly does Rilke say about the open that raises Heidegger’s critical attention? It is the well-known passage that opens the eighth elegy that catches Heidegger’s attention:
With all eyes the creature sees
the open. Only our eyes are
reversed and placed wholly around creatures
as traps, around their free exit.
What is outside we know from the animal’s
visage alone …
(Rilke, cited in P, 153)
In this passage, we can immediately see two things that would be problematic for Heidegger. First, Rilke’s notion of the open is equated with what “is,” with beings, whereas Heidegger’s thought of the open is meant to distinguish Being from beings and to recall us to the conditions that enable the event of Being in human existence. Second, and of direct relevance to my discussion in this chapter, Rilke’s open is reserved for the animal, the “creature,” rather than the human. This notion of the open is in direct opposition to Heidegger’s, which reserves the space of the open and all that emerges from this site (history, Being, language, truth, and so forth) for the human alone. Both Rilke’s notion of the open and the privileging of the animal’s relation to “what is” are, according to Heidegger, mere expressions of a biologistic and pscyhologistic metaphysics that is grounded on a “complete oblivion of Being” (P, 152). And it is because of this oblivion that modern metaphysics and Rilke’s poetic expression of it are ignorant of “all laws of Being” (P, 152), the most basic of which concerns the inextricable relation between the unconcealment of beings and the dis-closive capacity of the human. To suggest, as Rilke does, that animals have a privileged access to “what is” is to misunderstand profoundly the relation between Being and beings, a relation that can occur and be raised for thought only through human beings who ek-sist in the open. The ultimate consequence of this confusion and reversal of the essence of human and animal, Heidegger suggests, is “an uncanny hominization of the ‘creature,’ i.e., the animal, and a corresponding animalization of man” (P, 152).
What Heidegger means by the “uncanny” hominization of the animal and animalization of the human can be better understood if we recall his characterization of the development of Western metaphysics as a series of determinations of human subjectivity in which the human is figured as an animal rationale. Rilke’s privileging of the animal with regard to access to “what is” inverts the classical determination of human chauvinism that views the human animal’s rationality as the unique source of knowledge of the real. In the eighth elegy, Rilke portrays rationality and human consciousness as flawed means of accessing what is. Human knowledge “mirrors” and “arranges” what is but is never able to see the open in an unmediated manner, a “capacity” that is unique to animals. It is in this sense that the ir- or a-rational animal is “superior” to the rational human animal of Western metaphysics in Rilke’s elegies. The animal takes on human characteristics and gains human privilege (the animal becomes the being with privileged access to what is) while the human is placed in the position of the animal inasmuch as it has a lower rank and is forever barred from the realm of genuine knowledge of what is. This reversal of human rank and ontological and epistemological privilege in Rilke’s poetry is what is uncanny according to Heidegger; for what appears to be a radical reversal of the tradition is in fact deeply indebted to and rooted in that very tradition. In other words, just as with Nietzsche, Rilke’s poetry is but another symptom of the end of metaphysics rather than a postmetaphysical mode of thought.
Heidegger’s contestation of Rilke’s metaphysical reversal of human epistemic privilege is aimed at more than simply recovering the essence of the human in the wake of its concealment in Western metaphysics. Heidegger also believes that reversing the standard metaphysical understanding of the animal—understood as being the entity with ratio or logos—does nothing to help to disclose the unique essence of animality. In fact, viewing the animal as being without logos or rationality, whether this is given a positive or negative valence, does nothing to promote understanding of the specific Being of animals. Even when the traits of being “arational” or “nonspeaking” take on a positive value, as they do in Rilke and Nietzsche, these traits are still nothing more than the negation of supposedly unique human characteristics. To say that the animal lacks them says very little positively about what the animal actually is and how it differs from other entities. It is in this sense that Heidegger can say that the kind of metaphysical thought associated with Rilke and Nietzsche does not heed the “mystery” and “enigmatic character” of the animal and ends up humanizing animals and animalizing humans.
Defenders of Heidegger’s approach to thinking about animality often point to this thread in his work in order to argue that Heidegger does, in fact, respect the alterity of animals and that his thought is not anthropocentric in the metaphysical sense. Similar to what I argued earlier, my response to this defense is that Heidegger’s work is only of a very limited value in contesting metaphysical anthropocentrism and does not have the force his defenders seem to believe. To be sure, as Heidegger points out, it is reductive to think about animals starting from a human-centered perspective and gauging this difference in terms of which human characteristics animals either lack or have. And inasmuch as Heidegger insists on this point, his thinking marks, as it does in so many other ways, an important departure from the tradition and a significant challenge to anthropocentrism. The problem, however, is that Heidegger is unable to maintain rigorously this nonanthropocentric approach to thinking about animals. His discourse on animals constantly falls back into an anthropocentric framework, measuring animals against what he considers to be uniquely human capacities. In doing so, Heidegger hopes to highlight the essential differences between human beings and animals and to show that the comparisons that we typically make between humans and animals and the similarities we notice are not, in fact, similarities at all—at least in terms of essence. Against the logic and approach of comparative assessments and finding similarities between humans and animals, Heidegger draws the line between human beings and animals ever more deeply. As we have seen, he goes so far as to speak of an “abyss” of essence between human beings and animals that cannot be crossed. The question for the defenders of Heidegger’s approach thus becomes: How does this rhetoric of abyssal differences and sharp delimitations between human beings and animals actually contest the anthropocentric tradition? Does it not, quite simply, only take the dominant strand of the logic of anthropocentrism (i.e., the notion that human beings and animals are essentially different) and make it even more entrenched? Furthermore, how can we reconcile this rhetoric and thought of the human-animal distinction with the rigorous research and recent developments in the sciences over this issue? Are we truly to believe that Heidegger’s thought of the human-animal distinction provides a more tenable and fruitful direction for scientific, philosophical, and ethico-political research in this area than that provided by the sciences? Following Heidegger’s approach seems even more questionable when we realize that the standpoint of current thought on the human-animal distinction in evolutionary theory and its associated fields in the sciences and humanities is the byproduct not just of science-as-usual (in the Kuhnian sense) but of a serious engagement with the crises that have run through the biological sciences over the last century. If any science has been forced to have a thoughtful encounter with its own foundations, surely it has been the biological sciences. Perhaps science does think, after all.
There are two additional problems with Heidegger’s discourse in his Parmenides lectures, the first of which concerns the ethico-political effects of the reversal of metaphysical anthropocentrism in Rilke and Nietzsche, and the second of which relates to Heidegger’s ontological commitments. With regard to the first point, Heidegger’s argument pays no attention to what is involved in mounting a challenge to anthropocentric thinking and the role that poetry, art, and alternative modes of thinking might play in this task. Almost all liberatory and revolutionary movements of recent times—and the movement that seeks to displace anthropocentrism is just such a movement—risk this initial gesture of hierarchical reversal of binary distinctions. When a group of beings, such as animals, have been consistently de- or undervalued across a substantial time span, one of the very few ways to challenge such conceptual and institutional prejudices is to grant the devalued group a higher value than the beings to which they were negatively compared. The pitfalls of such “strategic essentialism” are well known, but the value of these kinds of strategic reversals is not wholly negative. They can at least have the effect of desedimenting long-standing ideas about the undervalued and underprivileged group in question. To stick with the example of animals, Rilke’s and Nietzsche’s privileging of animal experience and epistemology, while romantic and untenable in many respects, does have the effect of raising for thought the possibility that we have profoundly misunderstood animal experience and have viewed animals through a reductive, neo-Cartesian lens for too long. One can only agree with Heidegger that Rilke and Nietzsche humanize animals in certain ways and that this humanization is problematic. But it is essential that one acknowledges the limitations of this kind of Rilkean and Nietzschean approach from a genuinely nonanthropocentric perspective . The Heideggerian critique of Rilke and Nietzsche proceeds less from a nonanthropocentric perspective and more from a deep anxiety over the crossing and blurring of boundaries between human and animal and a desire to salvage the unique essence and relational structure proper to human Dasein. Although Heidegger pays lip service to respect for the alterity of animal life, his work does not demonstrate any abiding concern to determine with any rigor the Being of animals or to analyze the ethico-political implications of a renewed understanding of animality. Animals and animality almost always appear in Heidegger’s texts as foils for a positive understanding of human essence and almost never as concepts and life forms to be understood on their own terms. And it is this very approach that makes Heidegger’s thought deeply problematic from the point of view of the argument being developed here.
The other untenable aspect of Heidegger’s reading of Rilke (and the related thinking in Nietzsche and the biological sciences) is found in the underlying ontological commitments of Heidegger’s discourse, especially his essentialism. While his essentialism is rather different from classical philosophical essentialism and the forms of essentialism at work in contemporary identity politics, he does share with these a kind of semantic and ontological realism that involves making sharp distinctions among different beings. And it is difficult to discern what evidence—phenomenological, empirical, or otherwise—he relies on in making such ontological determinations about the essence of various beings, especially in the instance of trying to distinguish between human beings and animals. As we saw in our reading of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger claims to think from and in cooperation with evidence from the sciences, but there is little evidence from the sciences that would support the ontological assumptions that guide his thought.
In general, Heidegger’s discourse on animality manifests less a communal cooperation with the biological sciences and more a deep anxiety about the confusion of boundaries between human and animal in contemporary scientific, literary, and philosophical culture. This anxiety is particularly evident in a footnote appended to his reading of Rilke in the Parmenides lectures. In explaining that Rilke’s use of the term “creature” in the Duino Elegies should be understood as referring solely to nonhuman animals, Heidegger offers the following gloss and question concerning Rilke’s reversal of the human-animal distinction: “For Rilke, human ‘consciousness,’ reason, logos, is precisely the limitation that makes man less potent than the animal. Are we then supposed to turn into ‘animals’?” (P, 154 n. 1). Even if Rilke’s poetic discourse on animals were meant to urge human beings toward this possibility (which is doubtful), one wonders what the problem with such a becoming-animal of the human might be? What would be lost if human beings were somehow to become “animal” and leave behind their “higher” faculties? One gets the sense that Heidegger believes that the recovery of human essence and the uniquely human capacities that emerge from this essence are things that need to be solemnly and reverently guarded. Is this not further evidence of a dogmatic anthropocentrism in Heidegger’s discourse?
The obvious antidote to such reverential and anxious guarding of human propriety is Nietzsche’s opening paragraph from his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”:
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it.13
The critical delimitation of anthropocentrism and human chauvinism exposed here in Nietzsche, which is reminiscent of certain gestures in Rilke’s poetry, has no exact equivalent in Heidegger precisely because Heidegger takes over the classical metaphysical project of uncovering and analyzing human essence as distinguished from animal life. And if the Nietzschean and Rilkean discourse on animality is read only through a Heideggerian lens, it might appear that their respective metaphysical reversals of the human-animal distinction accomplish little more than privileging irrationality over human rationality, language, and consciousness. But there is more at stake in their discourse than the Heideggerian reading allows us to see, and we can begin to grasp what is at issue only once we have abandoned, or at least held in abeyance, the Heideggerian aim of seeking the proper of the human. Beyond this perspective, thinkers such as Rilke and Nietzsche, and others who contest metaphysical anthropocentrism, can also be viewed as urging the possibility of thinking from other-than-human perspectives and modes of existence. The displacement of human privilege and critique of anthropocentrism in such thinkers is not an end in itself (as Heidegger seems to suggest) but rather serves as the opening onto a larger set of questions that concern the expansion of thought and possibilities of living for human and other-than-human beings alike.
Nietzsche gives explicit voice to such possibilities in book 5 of The Gay Science in a passage entitled “Our new ‘infinite.’” To be sure, as this passage demonstrates, Nietzsche is critical of the possibility of actually moving wholly beyond an anthropocentric epistemological perspective and fully inhabiting an other-than-human viewpoint. He insists that we “cannot look around our own corner: it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be,”14 which is to say that full and genuine access to whatever other-than-human perspectives there might be is forever forbidden to human beings. But this impossibility does not lead Nietzsche to conclude, in line with metaphysical anthropocentrism, that the human perspective is the only possible perspective. Rather, he argues that the hasty conclusion of metaphysical anthropocentrism betrays a dogmatic and immodest attitude. Nietzsche writes:
I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather has the world become “infinite” for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations. Once more we are seized by a great shudder.15
The “shudder” Nietzsche writes of here is the result of glimpsing the abyss opened up by recognition of the perspectival character of human knowledge and the concomitant awareness of the limits and ends of anthropocentrism, both epistemologically and ontologically. Elsewhere, he argues that the ultimate ground of human nihilism stems from being unable to withstand and think through this shudder of the limits of the human and that the immodesty and “hyperbolic naïveté” of anthropocentrism is what is responsible for the collapse of values.16 Thus, far from fulfilling the metaphysics of modern subjectivity in the concept of a domineering human will to power (as Heidegger reads Nietzsche), Nietzsche’s thought seeks to mark clearly the limits of the humanist metaphysical schema. And in distinction from Heidegger, Nietzsche clearly recognizes the conjunction between humanism, anthropocentrism, and nihilism, and understands that the most promising means of contesting this network of concepts and institutions is to be achieved through an “overcoming” of the human.
That such an overcoming of the human must pass through a metaphysical reversal of human chauvinism and a “becoming-animal” of the human is a thought that has been developed at some length by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Following Nietzsche’s lead, and extending various literary and poetic discourses on animals, Deleuze and Guattari view becoming-animal as a necessary moment in the displacement of metaphysical humanism and anthropocentrism. They contrast an ontological and epistemological standpoint anchored in human subjectivity (“being-perceptible”) with the multiple and varied perspectives of non-and inhuman others (“becoming-imperceptible”), and they argue that anthropocentrism is effectively challenged only in encountering and thinking from other-than-human perspectives. Like Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari do not believe that becoming-animal entails actually being an animal. Becoming-animal and challenging anthropocentrism is not a matter, as Heidegger seems to think is the case with Rilke and Nietzsche, of imitating or identifying with animals. Rather, it is a matter of being transformed by an encounter with nonhuman perspectives. Becoming-animal is thus better understood in terms of symbiosis, affect, alliance, and contagion between beings that are usually identified as distinctly “human” and “animal.”
And yet, if such encounters and becomings-animal are to be truly transformational, they must proceed in such a way that animals are not approached in familiar, anthropomorphic terms. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that animals can be seen along three primary lines, the first two of which are anthropomorphic and a third that disrupts human conceptualization: first, as familiar, individual animals who “belong” to us, what they call “Oedipal animals”; second, as beings with characteristics that can be studied in order to uncover “structures” and “models,” or “State animals”; and third, as “demonic” or “pack” animals caught up in a network of machinic becomings that undercut any classificatory or Oedipal schema.17 These three different ways of approaching animals can be applied, they argue, to any animal, even those animals with which we seem to be most familiar (“even the cat, even the dog”). It is the demonic animals that interest Deleuze and Guattari inasmuch as they offer perspectives and possibilities for becoming that displace dominant modes of human subjectivity and open the human to hybrid modes of existence. Demonic animals are not anchored to any “proper” or essential site but live and move in and through transformational becomings that make propriety impossible. By entering into conjunction with such animal-becomings, human beings themselves become-animal and enter on a path or “line of flight” leading away from human subjectivity and human perspectives toward becoming-imperceptible.
But what, precisely, drives human beings to enter into these “assemblages” with demonic animals? Deleuze and Guattari speak of a “fascination” for the animal and other nonhuman perspectives that are at work in becoming-animal; for them, it is this fascination that motivates revolutionary literature and progressive discourses on animals. From this perspective, the discourses on animality we find in such thinkers as Rilke and Nietzsche (and, for Deleuze and Guattari, Franz Kafka would be an important figure to add to this list as well)18 are not to be understood as simplistic metaphysical reversals or invitations for human beings to become “irrational.” Rather, their contestation of anthropocentrism and human chauvinism and the privileging of animality should be taken as evidence of a fascination for something “outside” or other than the human and dominant perspectives (and this “outside” might well lie within human beings, for example, in an inhuman space at the very heart of what we call human). From the theoretical perspective developed by Deleuze and Guattari, authors such as Rilke and Nietzsche can be seen as signposts on the path toward a postanthropocentric and transhumanist thinking rather than, as Heidegger would have it, the mere culmination of the metaphysical tradition that precedes them.
FROM METAPHYSICAL HUMANISM TO METAPHYSICAL ANTHROPOCENTRISM
For all of his critical remarks on Rilke, Nietzsche, and other thinkers who reverse the metaphysical human-animal distinction, it is clear that Heidegger himself at least glimpsed the inner connection between the metaphysical tradition and anthropocentrism that is at issue here. Of course, throughout much of his work, Heidegger stressed that the essential characteristic of metaphysical thought lies in its commitment to developing a specific notion of subjecticity in the form of human subjectivity—not anthropocentrism. But it was not altogether lost on Heidegger that the project of unfolding a specific notion of human subjectivity is, in fact, a matter of focusing on specifically human subjectivity. When the foundation of metaphysics is located by Heidegger in the establishment of a certain conception of truth, being, and subjectivity in Plato, he is aware that this movement is also a simultaneous establishment of anthropocentrism. Thus, with Socrates and Plato, what occurs is not just a shift in the essence of truth; there is also a shift in the ground of philosophy as such toward a locus that is unabashedly anthropocentric.
This coincidence between the establishment of metaphysics and anthropocentrism is noted by Heidegger most explicitly in his essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.” There he suggests that the “beginning of metaphysics in the thought of Plato is at the same time the beginning of ‘humanism.’” 19 In contrast with his analysis of humanism in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (which I will take up at length below), in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” Heidegger understands humanism broadly to involve both the establishment of human subjectivity and a more general anthropocentrism. We are told that the coestablishment of metaphysics and humanism in Plato and its development in subsequent philosophy is a process that moves the human “into a central place among beings,”20 and that what is at stake in this metaphysical project is to take human beings and lead them to their destiny through the shaping of their moral behavior, reason, civic sense, and so on. Although the accent is placed on different aspects of this project depending on which version of humanism is under discussion (Roman, Christian, Marxist, existentialist, and so on), this much remains the same in all humanisms: in each instance there is a “metaphysically determined revolving around the human being, whether in narrower or wider orbits.”21
It might be thought, then, that Heidegger’s subsequent critical engagement with metaphysical humanism would require a thorough sorting through of anthropocentrism and its effects. But Heidegger’s most extended treatment of metaphysical humanism, his much-discussed “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” seems to abandon the critical analysis of anthropocentrism altogether—or so I shall argue in what follows.
As those readers familiar with the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” will recall, Heidegger traces the concept of humanitas back to the age of the Roman Republic, in which homo humanus was opposed to homo barbarus. He tells us that homo humanus is the name given to Romans who embodied the paideia of the Greeks of the Hellenistic age. Humanitas, the Roman translation of the Greek paideia, came to mean scholarship and training in good conduct. Now, subsequent versions of humanism (from Renaissance humanism, to eighteenth-century German humanism, to the versions we find in Marx and, more recently, in Sartre) differ significantly in the respective modes in which they actualize this humanitas, but there is, in fact, a common core to all manifestations of humanism on Heidegger’s reading. Whereas in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger sought to link all humanisms through reference to their “metaphysically determined revolving around the human being,” here in the “Letter” he suggests that a certain determination of Being as such is at the core of humanism. Thus, humanism in the “Letter” is seen as an effort to define “man” in view of “an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of world, that is of beings as a whole.”22 For Heidegger, it is this preestablished interpretation of the Being of beings as a whole that typifies all previous humanisms as being metaphysical. And it is in posing the question of the truth of Being (which is to say, the question of the conditions that allow for Being to manifest itself) to both metaphysics and humanism simultaneously that Heidegger aims to disclose their common ground. Gone in the “Letter,” then, is the specific and explicit reference in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” to the anthropocentrism of the metaphysical tradition. As we shall see, this setting aside of the question of anthropocentrism leads to dogmatism.
The operative interpretation of the Being of the human presupposed by classical humanism is, as we saw in the Parmenides lecture course, that the human being is an animal rationale. Heidegger finds this determination questionable in several respects. To begin with, animal rationale is not simply a translation of the Greek definition of man, zōon logon echon (the animal having discourse or language), but a metaphysical interpretation of this definition in which ratio is problematically substituted for logos. According to Heidegger, not only do ratio and logos denote two distinct “capacities”, but the names themselves spring from a radically different relation to the Being of beings. By contrast with the Greek logos, the various definitions of ratio (as reason, a faculty of principles or categories, and so on) already presuppose and arise from within a certain preestablished interpretation of the Being of beings, thereby covering over the question of the truth of Being, that is, the question of how Being is given to the human and the essential cobelonging of Being and human beings. The same goes for the animal of the Latin animal rationale, which, according to Heidegger, is always interpreted by humanism in terms of a predetermined conception of the Being of animality. When Heidegger criticizes humanism for being metaphysical in the “Letter,” it is these two dogmatic limits and their common ground that are being addressed.
But beyond this delimitation of the common ground of humanism and metaphysics, there is something else at stake here to which Heidegger will devote a considerable amount of effort in the remainder of the “Letter.” It involves a contestation of the confusion of humanitas with animalitas in the definition of the human as animal rationale. Heidegger’s point here is that not only is metaphysics guilty of failing to raise the question of Being regarding ratio and animalitas, it is also at fault for thinking man more on the basis of animalitas than his humanitas . He wonders if this is the most effective means of uncovering what is essential to man: “it finally remains to ask whether the essence of the human being primordially and most decisively lies in the dimension of animalitas at all” (LH, 246). Should the human be thought of in terms of life, as one “living being” among others, among “plants, beasts, and God,” as Heidegger phrases it? This is how biologism proceeds, and in so doing, it will of course be able to state important things about human beings. Ultimately, however, the biologistic approach fails to uncover the essence of the human—and this is why Heidegger takes his distance from biologism. According to Heidegger, when man is placed alongside other living beings, we “abandon” man’s essence to the realm of animalitas. This occurs even if (as is the case with metaphysical humanism) man is considered different from the animal on the basis of some essential attribute, for example, having a spirit or soul, or being capable of subjectivity or personhood. An analysis of man that starts from the realm of animalitas and then locates the human being’s essential difference from the animal by tacking on a soul or mind still falls short of thinking man’s humanitas (LH, 246–7).
As Derrida recalls in “The Ends of Man,” what Heidegger finds missing in this approach to man is his proper essence and dignity.23 Man’s essence lies in his ek-sistence, and it is in ek-sisting that man finds his dignity and propriety. But Heidegger is not just trying to restore man’s essence and revalorize his dignity; he is doing so within the context of trying to separate decisively the essence of man from the essence of other “living creatures,” especially the animal. In the “Letter,” Heidegger insists not once or twice but three times that ek-sistence is not only man’s proper, but his proper alone. He writes: “Such standing in the clearing of being I call the ek-sistence of human beings. This way of being is proper only to the human being” (LH, 247). And one sentence later, Heidegger asserts two more times that only human beings are characterized by eksistence: “Ek-sistence can be said only of the essence of the human being, that is, only of the human way ‘to be’. For as far as our experience shows, only the human being is [ der Mensch allein ist ] admitted to the destiny of ek-sistence” (LH, 247). Why the insistence of and on the human? Does Heidegger merely wish to drive home the point that metaphysics has time and again overlooked man’s essence as ek-sistence? Certainly, but that is not the only reason. He is also working to separate decisively human propriety from that which does not belong properly or essentially to the human. And, for Heidegger, what does not belong properly to man’s essence is animalitas. The metaphysical definition of man as animal rationale has allowed this essential distinction to become blurred, and this is another reason why it comes under criticism in the “Letter.” Thus, Heidegger’s restoration of man’s essence and dignity is, I would suggest, as much a matter of bringing man back into a thinking relation with Being as it is of driving a wedge between the essence of man and the essence of the animal based on this relation.
This suggestion receives further support when Heidegger turns to a discussion of embodiment (LH, 247 ff.). Heidegger argues here that the human body, in its essence, must be viewed as something other than the body of a living organism. He insists on this point because it is human bodies (which in many ways are so similar to other living being’s bodies—especially animal bodies) that encourage us to understand man’s Being in terms of animalitas. According to Heidegger, however, the human body and the animal body, despite certain anatomical and physiological similarities, are different in essence: “The human body is something essentially other [ wesentlich anderes ] than an animal organism” (LH, 247). That physiology can study the human body as an animal organism and even give us a number of interesting and useful facts in the process is, for Heidegger, no guarantee that the essence of the human being has been properly explained. For this to come about, the human body needs to be examined in light of its grounding in man’s ek-sistence. Man’s bodily interaction with other entities around him is, according to Heidegger, essentially different from the way nonhuman embodied beings relate to other entities, since man moves about in a “world” that grants him access to beings in their Being. Because what is essential to man is ek-sistence, that is, because he stands-out in the clearing of Being, the human body can be understood properly starting only from this essential—and essentially human—ground.
Now, in using the term “ek-sistence” to highlight the ecstatic element of Dasein’s Being, Heidegger seeks as well as to avoid the metaphysical baggage that accompanies the concept of existentia, which signifies actuality in contrast to possibility, essentia. Using the term ek-sistence, Heidegger thus establishes a certain distance between himself and the various metaphysical interpretations of existentia offered by medieval philosophers, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, all of whom fail to characterize accurately man’s Being. Heidegger leaves it an open question whether the Being of beings other than the human is adequately conveyed with the concept of existentia. What Heidegger is able to determine with apparent certainty is that unlike human beings, living creatures (his examples are plants and animals, the stone being his example of a nonliving being) do not ek-sist . It is at this point that we can begin to see more clearly the stakes involved in the “Letter.” If ek-sistence is proper to the human alone, then it follows that no being other than the human can have a share in it, especially those beings we suspect of being the most akin to us. Heidegger’s essentialist logic seeks to make clean, decisive cuts where the possibility of contamination creeps in:
Living creatures are as they are without standing outside of their being as such and within the truth of being, preserving in such standing the essential nature of their being. Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures [ Lebe-wesen ], because on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us [Heidegger will speak a few lines later on of our “abysmal bodily kinship with the beast”], and on the other they are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss.
(LH, 248)
Ultimately, then, not only are “living creatures” different from “us,” they are different in their essence, so essentially different that a gulf opens up wide enough to be labeled an “abyss.” This is not the only time Heidegger will insist on an abyss between ek-sistent man and creatures that merely live.24 But why employ this hyperbolic rhetoric of abysses and essential differences?
On the surface of the text, it is clear that at the very least Heidegger wants to distance his own project from the determination of the Being of man made by previous metaphysical humanisms. The definition of man as animal rationale that humanism takes for granted is not altogether false, but it remains metaphysical. Heidegger thus opposes this metaphysical humanism in order to think man on a nonmetaphysical basis, in terms of the question of the truth of Being. This opposition to humanism does not come down then to merely advocating some form of antihumanism but rather is intended to bring about a more rigorous humanism , what could be called (following David Krell) a “hyperhumanism”:
The highest determinations of the essence of the human being in humanism still do not realize the proper dignity of the human being. To that extent the thinking in Being and Time is against humanism. But this opposition does not mean that such thinking aligns itself against the humane and advocates the inhuman, that it promotes the inhumane and deprecates the dignity of the human being. Humanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas of the human being high enough.
(LH, 251)
It should be noted, though, that Heidegger goes on to argue that man’s humanitas, his unique relation to the saying and truth of Being, should not be mistaken for a kind of mastery or tyranny over Being in which man deigns “to release the beingness of beings into an all too loudly glorified ‘objectivity’” (LH, 252). Instead, the recovery of man’s humanitas is meant to recall the essential finitude of the human being, man’s being-thrown by Being into the truth of Being so that he may guard and shepherd it.
Thus, despite being a hyperhumanism of sorts, Heidegger’s idea of humanism, inasmuch as it is grounded on the finitude of the human and its expropriation by Being, does not appear to be an anthropocentrism in any simple sense. Now, if what were at issue here were only these decentering aspects of Heidegger’s work, I could subscribe to his critique of metaphysical humanism almost without reserve. But when he offers his own determination of man’s proper mode of existence, any adherence to his path of thought must be circumscribed and subsequently brought into question. Even the most minimal determination of propriety presupposes delimitation and cutting, and even when the determination is as equivocal and indeterminate as Heidegger’s “man’s essence is ek-sistence,” where propriety and impropriety are intertwined in such a way that neither can be said to dominate, we nevertheless need to remain vigilant about what kinds of lines are being drawn. Of course, Heidegger’s nonmetaphysical definition of man appears to be so broad as to pose no concerns about exclusion. Ek-sistence is not parceled out unequally along any of the traditional lines that have separated one group of human beings from another (gender, race, class, etc.); it finds its place anterior to such distinctions. But it does institute and is itself instituted along a questionable dividing line separating man from animal. Reading Heidegger’s thought from the perspective of the question of the animal enables us to uncover this oppositional line and to track the axioms that underlie Heidegger’s rhetoric of abysses and essential differences.
Pursuing this thought further, we find that the dividing line between animal and human reappears in Heidegger’s “Letter” when he shifts to an analysis of language. When Heidegger calls into question the metaphysical definition of man as animal rationale, he is, of course, doing so with an eye toward the more primordial Greek understanding of man as zōon logon echon , the animal having language. By interpreting the logos as ratio , metaphysical humanism misses the essential role that language plays in being-human. As I mentioned earlier, this is why for Heidegger animal rationale is not simply a translation of zōon logon echon but a metaphysical interpretation of it, one in which a groundless experience of ratio is substituted for a more primordial experience of the word. But a simple return to the Greek definition of man will not suffice either, since in labeling man “the animal having language” we run the risk of understanding language as something that arises out of, or is added on to, man’s animal existence. To understand man’s proper relation to language, Heidegger argues that we must begin from man’s humanitas and not his animal nature, since animals, strictly speaking, do not have language.
Animals lack man’s specific relation to language, according to Heidegger, because they lack “world.” World here does not simply mean “nature” or the “environment” but signifies instead the place in which the Being of beings comes to unconcealment. “World” thus understood presupposes the capacity for ek-sistence, for standing in the clearing of Being where Being comes into presence and departs, a possibility reserved for man alone. Plants and animals do not ek-sist outside of themselves in the clearing of Being, but simply live within their surrounding environments: “Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are never placed freely into the clearing of being which alone is ‘world,’ they lack language” (LH, 248). We should not infer from this passage that Heidegger is arguing that plants and animals have no access to beings beyond themselves. As is clear from Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger does believe that plants and animals have access to other beings around them; he denies, however, that plants or animals are able to access these other entities in their Being, or as such, in the way that human beings with language and world are able to do. Without language, which simultaneously distances man from his surrounding environment and brings him into proximity with Being, plants and animals remain lodged in their environments and continue “merely” to live without access to the Being of other beings or their own Being.
The metaphysical-animal explanation of man’s essence thus covers over the close relation between being and language posited here, much as it misses man’s ek-sistent essence. For Heidegger, the essence of language needs to be understood as the “clearing-concealing advent of being itself” (LH, 249), or, as he says later in the text, the bringing near of being “occurs [west] essentially as language itself” (LH, 253). This conception of language finds its contrast in the traditional conception of language as a unity of body (a phoneme or written character), soul (melody and rhythm), and spirit (meaning). The definition of man as animal rationale corresponds to this traditional understanding of language insofar as man’s constitution is read in terms of body, soul, and spirit. Man’s body in this account is what belongs to the realm of animalitas, and his capacity for language and reason are the specific marks of his humanitas . The definition of man’s essence as animal rationale thus sets man apart as the single and sole living creature with the capacity for language. Heidegger insists, however, that language cannot be understood as arising from man’s animal nature; language is not just something added on to man’s essence in order to distinguish him from other living creatures: “the human being is not only a living creature [nicht nur ein Lebewesen] who possesses language along with other capacities. Rather, language is the house of being in which the human being ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of being, guarding it” (LH, 254).
As this passage illustrates, Heidegger’s contestation of the metaphysical definition of man as animal rationale is indeed undertaken in order to restore the privilege of being as the matter of thought, but this privilege cannot be separated from an essentialist logic that functions on another level—a logic that grants man, and man alone, a certain dignity in his expropriated proximity to being. It is from this perspective that we can appreciate the implications of Derrida’s statement that “man and the name of man are not displaced in the question of being such as it is put to metaphysics.”25 Heidegger’s thought of the truth of Being is a displacement of metaphysical humanism, but one that occurs in the name of a more exacting and rigorous determination of the human.
But—as you no doubt have been wanting to rejoin for quite a while now—does not such thinking think precisely the humanitas of homo humanus? Does it not think humanitas in a decisive sense, as no metaphysics has thought it or can think it? Is this not a “humanism” in the extreme sense? Certainly. It is a humanism that thinks the humanity of the human being from nearness to being. But at the same time it is a humanism in which not the human being but the human being’s historical essence is at stake in its provenance from the truth of being. But then does not the ek-sistence of the human being also stand or fall in this game of stakes? Indeed it does.
(LH, 261)
Let me, then, sum up the issue with Heidegger as clearly as possible. Where classical humanisms have been content to determine man’s Being in light of a presupposed determination of nature and humanity, Heidegger has boldly raised the question of the ground of these determinations, thereby exposing humanism’s complicity with dogmatic metaphysics and offering a new determination of man’s essence as eksistence. With this critique of humanism and conception of ek-sistence we are given not only the possibility for a clearer understanding of the collapse of value theory and its attendant nihilism but also the possibility for an alternative “ethics,” another thought of responsibility itself, of responsibility qua responsivity or exposure.26 This is Heidegger’s great contribution to contemporary thought and one with which I am largely sympathetic.
The problem arises, though, when Heidegger limits ek-sistence to man alone. And the issue here is not simply that Heidegger offers no analysis or argumentation in support of this claim (although this deficiency does pose certain difficulties); nor is the problem that this claim about ek-sistence is anything but certain. (Is anyone certain, including Heidegger himself, that ek-sistence cannot be found beyond the human? If he is certain and the case is so obvious, what is the status of his constant denegations and disavowals of animal ek-sistence?) The problem lies instead with Heidegger’s uncritical reliance on a logic of opposition in differentiating human beings from animals. Why does Heidegger repeatedly insist that man alone ek-sists? Could one not just as easily speak of ek-sistence without drawing single, insuperable lines between human and animal? Of course a less anthropocentric and more nuanced discussion of ek-sistence might still eventually give rise to certain distinctions and boundaries—but would these differences necessarily be essential, simple, oppositional, binary, and abyssal, and would they necessarily fall along a line dividing human from animal?
Ultimately, despite his profound analysis of the limits of metaphysical humanism, Heidegger offers nothing in the way of critique concerning the metaphysical tradition’s drawing of the oppositional line between human beings and animals; his final concern, rather, is with the way in which this oppositional line has been determined and understood. Heidegger thus says the “Same” as the humanist tradition—he too insists on an oppositional logic separating human from animal. The difference in Heidegger’s repetition of the Same lies in his shifting of the opposition between human and animal onto another register. The essential difference between human and animal for Heidegger lies not merely in having language or reason but in the ground of these capacities: ek-sistence, which is reserved for the human alone. Thus, what we find in Heidegger’s text when read from the perspective of the question of the animal is an effective challenge to metaphysical humanism (where man is determined according to a preestablished interpretation of the Being of beings) but, at the same time, a further sedimentation and reinforcement of the anthropocentrism of this same humanist tradition (in which the animal’s Being is determined in strict binary opposition to and against the measure of the Being of the human). Anthropocentrism is not simply a matter of placing the human being in the center of beings (something Heidegger is keen to avoid); it is also the desire to determine human specificity over and against those beings who/that threaten to undermine that specificity. It is this problematic anthropocentric remnant that Heidegger has bequeathed to contemporary thought. In the following chapters, I will track this remnant of anthropocentrism as it gets taken up, refined, interrogated, and refigured in Levinas, Agamben, and Derrida.