Within the history of philosophy the appearance of the animal does not occur by chance. Hence, as has been intimated in the opening chapter, what matters is not the animal's appearance as though appearances simply occur. The contrary is the case. Centrality needs to be given to the concept and categories that regulate that appearance and which are thus already at work in the animal's figured presence. What is of continual concern therefore is the appearance of the animal within a juxta-position within which that positioning is assumed to be productive. The animal is for the most part juxtaposed with what is taken to be proper to human being. What is produced as a result, or at least this is the intention, is the properly human. The result of the juxtaposition therefore is that the propriety of human being can only arise in its differentiation from the animal. As will emerge this differentiation involves an already given relation between the animal and the body (the latter as the site where there is an already present meld between human and non-human animals). The body is the continual register of human animality.
The attempted act of differentiation between that which pertains to human propriety and the body (incorporating human animality) is not unique to any one philosophical position. At work within it are a series of organising moves that produce both the properly human and the figure of the animal. The reciprocity is clear. While philosophical positions may often differ significantly in relation to each other, there are at times important moments of intersection concerning the way both the animal and the body figure within them. In order, therefore, to prepare the way for Heidegger's staged encounter with a specific animal – the dog in §50 of his Basic Concepts of Metaphysics – a connection will be drawn with one of Descartes’ attempts to plot the relationship between human being and the animal. While Descartes has a radically different sense of what counts as human being – for Descartes human being is explicable in terms of a ‘res cogitans’ (a ‘thinking thing’), a position taken up and analysed by Heidegger – what is of interest in Descartes’ formulation is the way in which the animal and the human are juxtaposed in terms of a relationship between ‘thinking’ (for Descartes this is existing) on one side and both ‘life’ and ‘feeling’ on the other.1 The link between Heidegger and Descartes concerns how the distinction between existence and life, which is itself present as a posited distinction, is operative in what are otherwise two importantly distinct philosophical positions.
Throughout his correspondence Descartes mentions that he had been working on a ‘Treatise on Animals’. This occurs, for example, twice in 1645 in a letter to Princess Elizabeth and once in a letter to the Marquis of Newcastle (October 1645). While the treatise was not published it is clear that the question of the animal preoccupied Descartes. While there are numerous references to, if not discussions of, animals throughout Descartes, corpus, the contention to be made here is that it is in his letter to More, written on 5 February 1649, that the philosophical distinction underpinning the difference between humans and animals is given one of its most acute philosophical formulations. The introduction of the animal, however, is not to be understood in terms of the addition of an optional and therefore extraneous element within the overall argumentation. The animal is introduced at what might be described as a pivotal moment within the general argumentation of the Letter. That moment concerns what is initially present as the relationship between the infinite and the finite. The point to be noted is that the relation between them cannot be separated effectively from the without relation that divides human and non-human animals. The direct consequence of this original interconnection is that the development of the figure of the animal, as a consequence, cannot be disassociated from the question of particularity insofar as a form of particularity is already present within the terms set by the without relation. Particularity and finitude – in the version of their presence constructed by the without relation – are given an original complementarity. In sum, what this means is that ostensibly metaphysical concerns and those that relate to the animal's figured presence do not comprise two separate positions. Indeed, rather than being separate they are interarticulated from the start. This is the position that will come to be developed by concentrating on a number of fundamental moments within the Letter to More.
The problem of the relationship between the finite and the infinite (a relationship in which the question of the animal is already present) occurs within the reiteration of Descartes’ attempt within the Letter, though it is an attempt that is commensurate with his overall philosophical project to formulate the relationship between the particular physical object and physical substance itself. In regard to the latter the position is presented in the following terms – note that within it the animal appears. After arguing that ‘extension’ is that which is essential to the body he continues:
… as one does not define man as a laughing animal (animal risible), but rational (rationale) one must also not define the body by its impenetrability but by extension. Even more so the faculty of touch and impenetrability have a relation to part and presuppose in our mind the idea of a divided body and a body with terminations. In its place we can strongly conceive a continuous body (corpus continuum) of indeterminate or indefinite size, in which only extension is considered.2
Opposed then to the definition of ‘man’ in terms of the rational is human animality. The latter position is identified in the Letter in the formulation, ‘man as a laughing animal’. What is at stake here is not mere corporeality but the evocation and then subsequent dismissal of the possibility of human animality as in any sense essential to human being. And yet this is the position that will be called into question by Descartes’ introduction of ‘animal spirits’ (a questioning occurring within the formulation of Descartes’ own position3). Nonetheless, at this stage in the development of the overall argument, just as there cannot be a move from ‘laughing animal’ to rational being, there cannot be one from a finite bodily presence to extension. If the relationship between rationality and animality is refracted through the distinction between the divided body, the body that can be touched on one side, and the ‘corpus continuum’ on the other, then the former is the site of the animal and human animality. Human animality, even though in the end human animality and the animality of animals will be marked by forms of confluence rather than genuine difference, still stands as radically distinct from what Descartes designates as ‘substantia sensibilis’. The force of this distinction means that finitude is as much particularity as it is animality. Finitude will always pertain both to a specific body occupying an identifiable time and place as well as to that body's animal presence (where that body can be defined in those terms). Animal being is of necessity determinate and as such can be touched. The state of being always determined, and therefore because in existing in parts it is able to be touched, means that once these parts are taken as comprising a whole – a whole comprised of finite parts – then animal being (animality) will only ever exist in its radical differentiation from the infinite.
Animal being is finitude. Once finitude is explicable in terms of a body composed of parts, what this then opens up is the possibility of an affinity with a type of Aristotelianism in that each part could then be defined as having its own telos.4 To allow for that possibility is of course to allow for science. However, to introduce the soul as that which defines the human in its differentiation from the body sanctions both a functional biological conception of human being while still locating that which is essential to human being as existing independently of bodily concerns. (As will be noted, however, once the human is taken as the locus of both the body and the soul then the problem of separation – or rather the assumption of separation – has to encounter the necessity for a form of connection.) The soul's necessity, in its differentiation from the body, lends itself to a redescription in terms of that which accounts for the continual elimination of the threat of the animal. The soul has a twofold presence. In the first instance it enacts the without relation. In the second it is integral to the construction of the figure of the animal. The animal is without a soul. The animal is finitude. Animals die.
As such it is important that it is not just the soul that is counter to the body but equally that the body as the locus of the finite is counterposed to the infinite. However, this is no mere counterposition. In order that the infinite be other, there must be an irreducible relation in regard to finitude. The infinite must as a consequence be ontologically distinct. A failure to grasp that distinction means for Descartes to have succumbed to what he describes in the Letter as ‘prejudice’ (praejudicio). The problem of holding the finite apart from the infinite – an instance, as has been indicated, of the without relation - is presented with the Letter in terms of the necessity to overcome ‘prejudice’. (Prejudice, which can be taken as analogically related to the body as the locus of deception and error stands opposed to method.) At this point in the argumentation of the Letter the animal is introduced directly. Descartes continues by claiming that
the greatest of all the prejudices that we have taken from our childhood is that beasts think [bruta animantia cogitare].5
To the extent that another conception of the philosophical defines Descartes, project, a conception putatively freed from ‘prejudice’, Cartesianism can as a consequence be described, inter alia, as the overcoming of prejudice.6 More emphatically, though the argument is yet to be adumbrated fully, it involves doing without animals. This point can, of course, be expanded such that doing without animals and doing without the body coincide. It will, however, be precisely this coincidence that will be troubled by Descartes’ introduction of ‘animal spirits’ as having genuine philosophical necessity within his overall system as these ‘spirits’ account for that which is operational within the body as a totality. The necessity of ‘animal spirits’ will show that the without relation is in fact an after-effect. As such the without relation forms part of the effacing or interrupting of a founding form of relationality. The interruption in question is the elimination of that which had already been judged to be the case, hence the positioning of prejudice as prejudgement. The overcoming of prejudice will always need to be made precise. The prejudice has to be identified and then overcome. To the extent that prejudice is identified what will then be occasioned is a concomitant necessity for a form of forgetting.
Accompanying the overall process is the related need for the elimination of the retained presence – retained through and as memory – of the process itself. In sum, what has to be forgotten – and here the forgetting has a foundational exigency – is the possibility of an identification of the animal with that which thinks and thus the identification of animal activity with thought.7 That the identification of the animal with thought – the animal present as a ‘thinking thing’ – might have been possible would have resulted in the identification of philosophy with prejudice and the essentially human as not being able to be differentiated from animal life. Human being and animal life would then have overlapped. As a result the animal has to be excised and forgotten, a doubled forgetting in which the animal both as content though equally as a presence is forced from view. This double forgetting is necessary if ‘prejudice’ is to be overcome and the other identifications noted above are to ensue. Again, the overcoming of prejudice and thus the emergence of a form of thought that was no longer subject to it, an activity in which ‘thought’ and philosophy would be taken to coincide, is one of the most significant ways in which the without relation structures the argument concerning the relationship between the human and its others. Part of the fragility of Descartes, position hinges, of course, on the possibility that the necessity for forgetting may bring the animal (and animality) with it as a continual reminder. Were this to occur the animal would have returned.
Within the Letter Descartes distinguishes between humans and ‘beasts’ and allows what he terms ‘signification’ to mark the essential difference between them.8 This move needs to be understood as reiterating the position in which the absence and presence of logos becomes the defining moment of separation. After staging the distinction in these terms Descartes then moves on to identify other grounds for holding the two categories apart. What is essential to that project is the precise identification of the place of activity. In this regard he notes that within the argument as a whole the defining locus of activity is ‘thought’. What matters here is the way this position is formulated. Descartes writes:
It should be noted that I speak here of thought and not of life or feeling [me loqui de cogitatione, non de vita vel sensu].9
What is enacted within these lines is the distancing of ‘life’ (‘vita’) and ‘sentiment’ (‘sensu’) from the locus of ‘thought’. This has the effect of staging an emphatic separation of ‘thought’ on the one hand and experience on the other. (Experience has an important relation to both ‘sensu’ and to ‘aisthesis’, both of which in Descartes’ formulations have a relation to finitude and thus need to be held apart from the operation of thought and thought's relation to the infinite.) Reason and life are as a result distinguished philosophically. The separation gives rise to at least two questions. In the first instance the question concerns the relationship between ‘thought’ and ‘life’. The second concerns the nature of ‘thought’ when it is divested of ‘life’. And yet responses that can be given to these questions are not the central issue here. What is actually significant is that they can be posed as questions.
What both questions suggest is not just that life is the province of the body – after all the answer to the second question is the radical division between mind and body at work in the Second Meditation – but that life is equally the domain of the animal. The temptation is to posit a simple equation between the biological and the animal, as though bodies were no more than sites of animality. Such an equation is complicated, however, by the necessity to return to the question of how the relation between the infinite and finitude is to be understood. In the end such a relation opens up into a claim about nature in which nature itself is rational and is thus a claim underpinning the possibility of scientific investigation. Nonetheless, responding to the questions posed above necessitates paying attention in the first instance to the separation of thought and life and in the second to the initial identification of life with the domain of animals, as though it is only the animal that lives. What arises with Descartes, and then endures as the remnant of that specific mode of philosophical activity, is the necessity of having to think the uniquely human in terms of a fundamental division between that which defines the propriety of human being, here thought and life. Moreover, working within the Cartesian framework the only way in which such a thinking can be staged is within the space opened up by the differentiation between life on the one hand and the locus of human being on the other.
Nonetheless, the position in question is not as straightforward as it seems initially. There is a response to the way that the Cartesian formulation of the without relation takes place. To reiterate what has already been noted: within the Letter, and again consistent with the overall philosophical project, is a separation of thought and life and thus the separation of the essentially human from animal life. (Life for Descartes is animal life.) Moreover, it is a separation that needs to be reinforced by the overcoming through forgetting of founding forms of prejudice. The without relation contains therefore two distinct though interrelated realms. And yet both are present in human beings insofar as not only do humans have bodies. As important within the framework of Descartes, philosophical project is the necessity that there be a science of the body. In addition, it would be a science that will have the same methodological structure as the one that incorporates the centrality of clear and distinct ideas and therefore it is a structure that will generate the same certainties as those that are proper to thought itself.10 On the level of thought the distinction between the body and the soul is both announced and then absorbed (absorbed into what will become scientific method). That this division occurs within the human means that the point of separation has to be located in the same domain. At this point the complication emerges since not only must the human be the locus of the separation between the body and the soul, it also needs to be the place in which there are modes of connection. The positioning of the soul must be sustained. The body must be animated. The presence of these two demands will have the effect of beginning to question the extent to which the distinction between ‘life’ and ‘thought’ can in fact be retained beyond the hold of an incipient porosity, a porosity in which the latter would have caused the distinction to come undone, a porosity, moreover, that would have the effect of turning the without relation into a state of affairs that could only have been introduced as an after-effect. Its introduction would result in refusing, through the simple act of positing, an already present form of relationality.
What is described here as an ‘undoing’ would be the result of the way the distinction between the soul and the body, or thought and life, came to be established. This is a possibility that would be there once the detail of the presentation of the body, not simply as that which is given in opposition to the soul, is taken as central but where the body remains the point of departure. (The body is not simply an element within the opposition soul/body but is a locus of activity.) The activity of the body is the body's presence as machine. Indeed, it is the machinic nature of the body that will complicate the overall argument and with it the apparent ease with which prejudice is taken to have been overcome. The complication arises due to what Descartes underlines as fundamental both to the working of the body and the body's relation to the soul, namely ‘animal spirits’.
In The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes makes the important claim that:
I do not recognize any difference between machines made by artisans and the diverse bodies composed by nature on its own.11
The value of this formulation is that the relationship between the machine and the body is not to be understood in terms of a simple analogy. Descartes sees them as the same. Moreover, it is that very sameness that allows as much for a mechanics as it does a science of the body. Were there to be intimations of a Cartesian materialism – and the complications that such a materialism would then introduce – then they are located in this identification of machine and body.
Descartes pursues the question of the body throughout his writings. In the Treatise on Man, for example, he is able to suppose that the body ‘is nothing other than a statue or a machine made of earth’.12 Much later in The Passions of the Soul, while distinguishing between the body and the soul and in accounting for the death of the body and thus the challenge that death poses for the distinction between the soul and the body, he is able to write of the body that
death never occurs through the absence of the soul, but only because one of the principle parts of the body decays. And let us recognize that the difference between the body of a living man and that of a dead man is just like the difference between, one the one hand a watch or other automaton (that is a self moving machine) when it is wound up and contains in itself the corporeal principle of the movements for which it is deigned, together with everything else required or its operation; and, on the other hand the same watch or machine when it is broken and the principle of its movement ceases to be active.13
For Descartes two elements have to be noted. The first is that the body is always given in opposition to the soul. However, secondly, at work within the body – indeed central to the work of the body – are what he describes as ‘animal spirits’ (‘les esprits animaux’ – in Latin ‘spiritus animales’). Prior to any attempt to take up the details of these ‘spirits’ it is vital to note that they are named in relation to the animal. While on one level this is to do no more than note the obvious, it remains the case that animality or a concern with the animal opens beyond the simple identification of animality with the ‘beast’ (and as a result introduces a tension were the animal to be equated purely with the beast). As such, animality becomes at the same time the name of a dynamic system. Moreover, it is a system that is central to Descartes, conception of the body's role in the possibility of knowledge. ‘Animal spirits’ are integral both to any account of how knowledge of the external world comes about as well as to the causation of bodily movement.
In the First Part of The Passions of the Soul Descartes is concerned to define the particularity of the ‘spirits’. He notes that they are ‘merely bodies’ and that they are ‘small’ and ‘move very quickly’.14 Their location and the quality of their presence can be understood in terms of the flickering elements within the flame. After making these points Descartes then adds that not only is all movement continually functional, it is also the case that ‘they never stop in any place’.15 The significance of defining these spirits in terms of the continuity of movement is that the only way of locating them is as always operative within a system. As a consequence they cannot be located within a conception of place that would be necessitated by the methodological imperatives associated with ‘clear and distinct perception’. In other words, they cannot be represented in both their singularity and exclusivity by a sign. The continuity of movement underscores not just their presence within and as integral to the operation of a dynamic system, in addition they have a form of presence that cannot be defined straightforwardly within the terms given by a Cartesian epistemology. To the extent therefore that they are defined by the continuity of the dynamic, they can be described as having an immaterial presence within a material system. This definition will become significant.
As is evident from the passage cited above from The Passions of the Soul which provides an account of the body's death, what could be called the Cartesian ‘body machine’ is characterised both in its life and that life's cessation by the operation of an internal system of movement. Accounting for that movement necessitates recourse to elements other than the moving elements themselves. Nonetheless, the elements, those that have already been identified as ‘animal spirits’, do not have, within Descartes’ formulation, a status that distinguishes them from the operation of the body itself. Standing in contradistinction to both body and ‘animal spirits’ is, of course, the soul. And yet the soul depends upon the operative quality of ‘animal spirits’ for its connection to the world. ‘Animal spirits’ have a central and indispensable function within Descartes’ philosophical system.
What then of this machine? And thus what type of possible materialism is at work in Descartes? (The second question is the one demanded by the identification of the body with the machine. Machines are material by nature.) The question pertains as much to the specific quality of the machine as it does to the possibility of its being represented. Descartes, development of an optics – a development resulting in 1632 in his work The Optics – contains illustrations in which not only are the anatomical details of the eye provided but, the process of vision is represented. In The Passions of the Soul the movement between the eye and the brain as well as any understanding of the nature of the images involves a description in which the operation of these ‘spirits’ is of fundamental importance. These animating principles have different strengths and operate in different ways. In the illustrations from The Optics it is clear that their differing fields of activity can be assumed to have been marked out by the drawing of lines. These lines which, while not movement itself, trace the introduction of light into the eye and, in addition, the transformation of the external source into an internal image.
The drawn line is the external world being drawn in. Effecting this movement are the ‘animal spirits’. Their activity could always have been noted – a notation understood as a form of representation – by the addition of arrows indicating movement.16 The presence of the soul cannot be drawn. There cannot be a line from the external world to the internal leading to the soul. Descartes, retention of the pineal gland as the point where the body and the soul connect was illustrated. The gland became a point at which the process of representation encountered its negative moment – namely the presence of that which cannot be represented. The space opened up by the presence of the gland – the space of the soul – is refused presence because the line of representation cannot be drawn into it. Here the presentation of the body as machine is vitally important.
The question of the machine in Descartes and thus the presence of a Cartesian materialism both involve working through the relationship between representation, temporal simultaneity and the effective presence of the ‘animal spirits’. The significance of the latter is that they open up the space in which there is a move away from a simple mechanics occurring as the result of the incorporation of an immateriality that plays a determining role within a mechanical universe. It also indicates the way that materialism can depend upon the retention of a form of immateriality to account for its operation. The problem that a Cartesian materialism and, reciprocally, the initially clear distinction between the soul and the body will always have is not found in the presence of these ‘spirits’ nor, moreover, in the retention of immateriality. Rather, what problems there are, as will be noted, can be found in a description of the line, and thus a drawing of a line, which cannot incorporate both the distinction and the fundamental interconnection between the material and the immaterial. The presence of this limit works to complicate the way the body and the soul (thus thought and life) are able to be distinguished.
In Descartes’ The Optics the drawing of lines is given a specific site. They are drawn in and through the eye. While an optics is constrained to include the drawn presentation of the eye and its field of operation, the representations of vision figure within the simultaneity demanded firstly by the temporality of representation and secondly by Descartes’ conception of the singularity of the object of ‘clear and distinct perception’ (the singular nature of the Cartesian ‘idea’17). While this form of perception needs to be distinguished from the object of physical seeing – mere sight – both are connected in that both demand the original simplicity of the object. The process of clear and distinct perception is the movement of individuation in which complexity is effaced in order that the original unity of the object be discovered.18 The coextensivity between the idea and that of which the idea is the idea is not only the expression of a foundational relationship defined by temporal simultaneity thereby positioning time as that which determined representation, what is assumed within the operation is that the unity of the object – here the idea – is an actual unity, present as simplicity itself.
Here it is essential to return to the formulation of the body given in The Passions of the Soul. The analogy of the body with the watch needs to be incorporated into the implicit mode of seeing that this formulation demands.19 The watch contains the source of its own movement. The winding of the watch introduces an energy which dissipates over time and when gone the watch ceases to work. The watch can be observed running and thus running down. Its activity – and here activity must be understood as that which defines what the watch is – not only involves the interrelationship of the constitutive elements, it is also the case that each part is defined in terms of a relationship of interconnection. Moreover, the watch as a totality of interrelated parts defines each part as a simple element of the whole. In addition, all the elements are at work at once. In principle, therefore, all the elements – the parts – of their relationship, which is the activity of the watch, are given and present at one and the same time. The time in which they are given is the temporality of the instant. Given to the eye they combine as an assemblage the representation of which involves the drawing of lines that would interconnect and in so doing would represent the relation of simple parts. From watch to automaton and then to body the differences between them elide when what is demanded is their representation. And yet responding to that demand, the demand for representation noting both its epistemological as well as its methodological implications, cannot then capture that which is fundamental to the operation of the machine itself, namely ‘animal spirits’. All three have a bodily principle of movement. Nonetheless, what occasions movement, the body's animating process, cannot be represented. The consequence is that Cartesian materialism – a materialism that underlies the actuality of a Cartesian science – opens up a series of possibilities that it has, in the end, to deny. Not because of the introduction of the soul but because of a philosophical inability to think as different that which is present – the operation of parts – and that which, while not present as such, determines the nature of presence, i.e. ‘animal spirits’. In Cartesian mechanics there is no space between the body and the soul for a productive immateriality (‘animal spirits’ as an immaterial force). The sign of that refusal is the interplay of simplicity, time and representation. It is the absence of the immaterial that effaces the material. The machine is no more therefore than an already delineated field of activity. It is a field of description.
Within the system therefore there is an immaterial force that cannot be accounted for in representational terms since to do so would be both to remember animality and in so doing recall a founding form of relationality (a relation understood as negotiation rather than one positioned by the without relation). There cannot be a sign or series of signs that could be taken to signify ‘animal spirits’ precisely because they are not defined in terms of location but in terms of movement. What this then means is what the system needed to work without, namely the body, thus animality – what was taken to be the founding without relation – returns. Its return, however, is not in terms of bodily presence per se – the literal body – but in terms of an immaterial force that will resist any straightforward incorporation into the opposition between the body and the soul. And this is because, as has already been suggested, the body is not simply the body; rather – and as the identification of body and machine indicated – it is also a dynamic process.
While it can be argued that the presence of ‘animal spirits’ establishes a point of impossibility within the Cartesian system what is more significant is that the presence of this point indicates that the founding distinction between the soul and the body or thought and life was an effect of an initial relation or threat of relation that once noted had to be overcome. The without relation and thus the figure of the animal within the Cartesian system is an effect of the denial or refusal of an already present relation. Rather than deny the presence of an ‘original’ distinction between life and thought that positions the animal and the body, tracing the work of ‘animal spirits’ has allowed for the identification of that distinction as a posited after-effect. Allowing it to take on the quality of an ‘original’ state of affairs is integral to tracing the construction of the figure of the animal within Descartes’ writings. Responding to Descartes, does not concern therefore a too easily construed overcoming of Cartesianism. Rather, what needs to occur is the recognition of the figure as the figure. What endures with Descartes is therefore a relation of without relation between thought and life – more exactly between a specific thinking of being human and the domain of the animal – in which the distinction while taken to be founding – and thus held to be original – is in fact an after-effect of the elimination of the always already present form of relationality provided by the effective presence of ‘animal spirits’. It is precisely this formulation that opens the way towards Heidegger.
For Heidegger one of the most significant aspects of Nietzsche's thought is to be found in the latter's identification, in the first instance, of the limit of the metaphysical conception of ‘man’, and then, secondly, in Nietzsche's having established the need to overcome or go beyond that specific determination of human being. While the end result may have involved, from Heidegger's perspective, a retention on the part of Nietzsche of a metaphysical conception of human being, what endures as significant is Nietzsche's sense that the possibility of a future and thus of the ‘superman’ depends on the identification of an end point.20 The limit is present therefore as that which will allow for another beginning. In the context of this engagement with the figure of the animal and as part of the process of identifying that which circumscribes the metaphysical conception of human being, Heidegger introduces the example of the dog. The dog is contrasted with a position which is itself limited. In regard to the identification of the human, the essentially human with ‘reason’, an identification that amounts to a fundamentally ‘metaphysical’ conception of human being, Heidegger adds that in such a context
it might be said that Man (homo) is a rational animal: Man is the animal that represents, imagines and performs [das Mensch vor-stellende Tier]. The mere animal, a dog for example, can neither position itself, nor conceive of itself before something [stellet nie etwas vor, er kann nie etwas vor-sich-stellen] for this end it must, the animal must, perceive itself [sich vernehmen]. It cannot say ‘I’, above all it cannot say anything.21
While that which is essential to human being would overcome the limits of the metaphysics of the will, it remains the case that the animal (though it is the animal named ‘dog’, ‘dog’ as perhaps the example standing for all animals) is limited even in relation to that positioning, a position that is reinforced by the dog's inability to say ‘anything’. It cannot position itself, it cannot perceive itself. The animal is no more than its life. Even though it may have a relation to its own death in terms of a continual flight or attempted evasion of that possibility, the animal is defined by the continuity of its own life. The effect of such a definition is that what the animal cannot take on is a conception of its ownmost being as given by a relation to death. If the animal cannot conceive of itself then it cannot anticipate its death as an always yet to be realised possibility. The animal therefore will be necessarily distanced from the realm in which a relation to Being can be authentic. Hence when Heidegger writes in Being and Time that ‘Dasein … can end without authentically dying’, one way of interpreting what Heidegger is suggesting is that what dies, ‘perishes’, is Dasein's animal life.22 In order for Dasein to be defined in terms of its ‘being towards death’ it cannot perish as an animal (though clearly Dasein's animal life will always come to an end). Death and ‘perishing’, precisely because they are the end of life and thus form a continuity with a philosophical position that incorporates the centrality of life, will always be presented in relation to the animal. Animals die. However, Heidegger refers not just to animals but to dogs. This occurs, as has been noted, in What Is Called Thinking? and equally it occurs in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.23 Rather, therefore, than concentrate on the animal per se, the presence of the dog, even if that presence is defined in terms of an ‘example’, will open up the figure of the animal within these texts by Heidegger. What remains of central concern is the identification of the animal with life on the one hand as opposed to that which is proper to human being on the other. (Within that distinction Descartes’ own identification of the properly human with ‘thought’ and thus the effacing of a founding sense of relationality both endure as an echo.)
Instead of beginning either with a supposition or a hypothesis a start will be made with a series of questions, questions working with and through each other. The dog is not being adduced as though noting its presence comprises no more than a gratuitous addition. On the contrary, the dog is already there. As a named presence it already figures in the text. It can thus be asked as a consequence of that presence: what would Heidegger have called his dog? How would he have called his dog? If, and the supposition needs to be maintained if only for a moment, Heidegger had had a dog, how would they have been together? After having called it, and after the dog responded, a response determined by action such that in bounding up the dog – at least for any observer – would have been described as being with Heidegger, if only insofar as they were together, what then would they have been called? Was there anything shared beyond the simple observation that they were together – man and dog? As will emerge it is the possibility of the shared that will arise as a central concern.
While these questions may occasion simple conjectures, or speculations as to a possible state of affairs, perhaps a relationship of sorts, precisely because the questions are not intended to be biographical in orientation, they will be taken as coalescing around §50 of the The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The significance of this section lies in the way the distinction between Dasein and animal is advanced. That there is a distinction – perhaps a grounding difference – between the human and the non-human goes without saying. The philosophical question, however, concerns how that distinction is thought. (Given that there cannot be simple difference – or difference in itself – what then matters is what difference means or entails in such a context. How has that difference been thought?) While the dog is central – introduced under the heading of the ‘domestic animal’, though to use the language of What Is Called Thinking? it also functions as an example of a ‘mere animal’ – the dog would always need to be positioned in relation to philosophy's traditional relation to the animal. That relation and thus the construction of the figure, as has already been suggested, is structured such that the being of being human is defined in its relation to, and thus in its differentiation from, the animal (though with the animal a certain conception of the body – the body as embodied being – will also be brought into play). While philosophy, traditionally, is not concerned with animals, what matters in the case of Heidegger, though this is also true, albeit in different ways for all the philosophers treated in the project, is firstly how that non-relation is presented, and secondly what role it plays within a given mode of philosophical argumentation. The limits of Descartes, and as shall be suggested Heidegger (insofar as the position of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics is taken as central), is that their respective philosophical projects depend upon identifying animals with life and excluding life from that which defines the propriety of human being,24 an exclusion which, as has been intimated, is premised on the effacing of a founding relation.
What follows from this exclusion is that to the extent that a concern with the properly human orientates philosophy, the latter then takes place without relation to the animal. Reciprocally, it also follows that the possibility of an already present relation to the animal is itself systematically refused, a refusal, however, that will be predicated upon having acknowledged the presence of such a relation. An instance in which animal life is both noted then overcome has already emerged in Descartes. As has already been suggested an original relation to the animal was affirmed in the central role of ‘animal spirits’. And yet this was accompanied by the absence of that specific philosophical mode of thinking that would have been demanded by their presence (i.e. thinking the continual interrelation between the material and the immaterial as well as an already present and thus insistent relationality). The limits of Descartes – even though those limits will have a necessary philosophical ubiquity – continue to pose the question of what would happen to philosophy were it to introduce and sustain an affirmative relation to animal life. How would such a concern be thought? (The implicit premise here is that the limit of any philosophical position can be identified in terms of its systematic inability to think that affirmative relation.)
The passage from §50 of Heidegger's The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics with which a start can be made occurs after his having posited a relation to the plant and the animal. Of that relation Heidegger asks what is entailed by ‘our’ already present ‘comportment’ towards both the animal and the plant. ‘Our’ is a central term.25 It already notes the possibility of the shared and therefore of a sense of commonality. As a term therefore ‘our’ already identified both the contents as well as the domain in which it will be possible both to pose and to respond to the question of who ‘we’ are. The locus of this already present state of affairs, i.e. that which delimits this ‘comportment’, is identified by Heidegger as ‘our existence as a whole’ (unserer ganzen Existenz).26 Within that setting what gets to be considered is the ‘domestic animal’ (die Haustiere). It is in relation to this animal – the dog – that Heidegger writes:
We keep domestic pets in the house with us, they ‘live’ with us [‘leben’ mit uns]. But we do not live with them if living means being in an animal kind of way [Sein in der Weise des Tiers]. Yet we are with them [sind wir mit] nonetheless. But this ‘being-with’ [Mitsein] is not an ‘existing-with’ [Mitexistieren] because a dog does not exist but merely lives [ein Hund nicht existiert, sonder nur lebt]. Through this ‘being-with’ animals we enable them to move in our world [in unserer Welt]. We say that the dog is lying under the table or is running up the stairs and so on. Yet when we consider the dog itself – does it comport itself towards the table as table, towards the stairs as stairs? All the same, it does go up the stairs with us. It feeds with us – no we do not feed. It eats with us – it does not eat. Nevertheless, it is with us! A going along with …, a transposedness and yet not.27
Two points in advance. The first is that it should be added straight away that the final formulation of the ‘and yet not’ (und doch nicht) leads to a relation of having and not having and thus, for Heidegger, to the form of ‘poverty’ that defines the animal's relation to the world. However, in this instance the question of the animal's apparent ‘poverty’ is not central. The second point that needs to be made is of greater relevance. Earlier, in §47, Heidegger has identified the ‘animal's way of being’ (seine Art zu sein) with ‘what we call life’ (wir das ‘leben’ kennen). If there is a distancing of life, or even a location of life as at one remove from ‘our’ concerns, then such a positioning will have real significance. This parallels the position advanced by Heidegger in Being and Time in which he argues, after having linked death and life, that the latter
must be understood as a kind of Being [eine Seinsart] to which there belongs a Being-in-the-world. Only if this kind of Being is orientated in a privative way [privativer Orientierung] to Dasein can its character be fixed ontologically.28 (Translation modified)
What this means is that what life (which will become animals and plants) is – is in the sense that it will for Heidegger have genuine ontological import – only exists in its non-relationality (albeit a relation of non-relation) to Dasein. In other words, it will only have this import in its non-relation to that which defines the being of being human. It is thus that what is of interest in the passage from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics is the distinction between ‘being-with’ and ‘existing-with’.
What is at work within that distinction is an attempt to identify a relation. Again, it is not a mere relation, but one which in allowing for a form of difference between human and animal – a difference subordinated to a relation to ‘world’ – allows the essential quality (Wesen) of each to emerge. As such, therefore, there is an inessential ‘being-with’ as opposed to a conception that is necessarily bound up with the essential. To that extent therefore this latter form of ‘being-with’ is accidental. ‘Existing-with’ as used in this passage needs the setting of what was identified earlier as ‘our existence as a whole’. What matters is if course the nature of this ‘our’. The question is straightforward. Who are we such that that ‘we’ may be with animals but not exist with them? What, then, of Heidegger's dog? Another way of putting this question would be to ask – when Heidegger called his dog, who called? In the end it does not matter whether or not Heidegger could have called his dog. As has been suggested this is not a biographical question but one whose concerns are strictly philosophical.
Approaching the ‘we’, allowing this ‘we’, the one ‘with’ but not ‘existing-with’ animals, to arise as a question, should not succumb to the all too rapidly posited conclusion that suggests that an answer is already present. And, moreover, such an answer would then be recognised immediately as the answer to the question of who (or what) this ‘we’ is. Indeed, the analysis of ‘boredom’ that figures within the text is in part an attempt to analyse the distance there may be from that recognition. To go further, it is possible to suggest that Heidegger's preoccupation with the orientation provided by moods – or modes of attunement – forms a fundamental part of such an undertaking. There is no pure immediacy and yet ‘we’ are uniquely positioned to take over what it is that is essential. While there may not be an accompanying experience of Dasein's ‘attunement’ with the world – an attunement as opposed to the animal's poverty – it remains the case that such a state of affairs is possible. Towards the end of the section of the text devoted to the animal Heidegger notes that during the ‘investigation’
we enjoyed the constant possibility of recalling the Dasein within us [uns des Daseins in uns zu erinnern] as brought to light in a fundamental attunement [in einer Grundstimmung]. (272)
While it may have been either forgotten (Heidegger writes of a vergessen of this Grundstimmung) or neglected, that ‘constant possibility’ has an unrelenting reality. It directs philosophical thinking. What needs to be noted is the sense of ‘recall’ that this passage identifies. Even if not realised, what endures as a possibility – and it should be noted that it is ‘constant’ (ständige) – is the coming to presence of that which is ‘in us’. While this distinction cannot be automatically assimilated to the details of the philosophical position that is being deployed to substantiate it, it remains the case that what endures is a distinction between Dasein and its having been given a sense of location. The location is identified as ‘in us’ (in uns). What has to be questioned therefore is the distinction between Dasein and its location. What is the nature of this ‘us’ in which Dasein is? Conversely, is it possible to begin to define Dasein, define it in addition to the definition it has already acquired within Heidegger's own attempts to delimit what is essential to Dasein as that which is other than the ‘us’ in which it is? (In this context Dasein needs to be understood as the essential within human being thus as naming the being of being human.) If this is the case, then, is the ‘us’ a mere remainder, a husk without philosophical interest? Perhaps – though this is only a conjecture to which it will be necessary to return – this ‘us’ may have the singular status of a body? Were it to be thus then it would have mere factical existence. Precision is vital here. What is emerging as a possibility is that this ‘in us’, this ‘us’ in which Dasein is, may in the end be the ‘us’ with whom the dog is. Not the Dasein with whom it is not, hence not the ‘is’ of ‘existing-with’ – the dog after all does not exist – rather the ‘we’, the ‘we’ of this ‘us’, is, as it were, with the dog. The ‘us’ may be with the dog; both could live together. However, the dog cannot exist with Dasein. Dasein cannot be with the dog. Again, two questions. What of ‘us’? Who are we?
In addition to these questions there is the process of ‘recall’ (erinnern). How is this as a process to be understood? As an act, is it purely philosophical? Or, is it a philosophical description of a state of affairs that need not be exclusively the province of philosophy? Or, finally, does it locate the limit of philosophy as metaphysics and as such presage the possibility of thinking? While these latter questions are forced in the precise sense that there is a necessity for them to be posed – a necessity residing in what was written, i.e. ‘we enjoyed the constant possibility of recalling the Dasein within us [uns des Daseins in uns zu erinnern]’ – the split demanded by the formulation is such that the problem of the subject of recall – who recalls? to whom (to what) is this recall directed? – acquires its own force.
The passage from §50 giving rise to this constant questioning of the subject contains the ground of a possible response. Note that Heidegger has claimed that, with regard to the animal, ‘being-with’ (Mitsein) is not an ‘existing-with’ (Mitexistieren). Indeed, it is possible to go further and argue that if the former is accidental – in the sense that being with animals is not integral either to the definition of the being of human being (i.e. to Dasein) and thus animals cannot play a defining role in any thinking of ‘our existence as a whole’ [unserer ganzen Existenz]’, then ‘existing-with’ – in the precise sense of Mitexistieren – amounts in fact to an existing without. The animal is inessential to human being hence ‘being-with’, in relation to the animal, has to be more strictly defined as existing without. This is the without relation. The logic is compelling. Hence the essential comes to be circumscribed by the without relation; in this context what this means is that Dasein necessarily exists without animals. If circumscription – understood as a space of definition – delimits the essential then what has to be maintained is this without relation. Of course, the without relation is not linked to factical existence – to the form of existence that is with animals. It is precisely this latter state of affairs that is at work in the distinctions Heidegger draws in order to locate the dog. Two examples: a distinction is drawn, in the first instance, between table and ‘table as table’ (Tisch als Tisch), the latter being that to which the dog cannot comport itself, and secondly, between the dog's eating – eating as no more than the brute consumption of food – and that form of eating that falls beyond the domain of animal consumption. While the dog consumes food it does not eat with us. It eats alongside us. To eat alongside is of course not to eat ‘with’ – the ‘with’ has both a more exclusive as well as excluding register. While this latter instance – the eating that is not an eating – may appear as no more than a contradiction, it is Heidegger's formulation. ‘Er ißt mit uns – nein, er ißt nicht.’
Animals are allowed. However, what is allowed – if allowing is understood as a space of relation – is a locus indifferent to Dasein and thus inessential to the being of being human. Animals are held within the without relation. This is the space therefore in which the preposition ‘with’ is not at work, except to identify the inessential. Furthermore, it is a space in which other determining and locational terms, such as ‘alongside’, operate. What is designated therefore is a space in which the dog cannot comport itself to the ‘table as table’. The ‘table as table’ could not be shared. Human and dogs could not have the ‘table as table’ in common if commonality is bound up with comportment. Two questions arise here. The first is whether it is possible to evince a concern for animals. And secondly, there is the broader question of what it would mean to care for animals. What gives both these questions their acuity is that animals would seem to be located, by definition, outside the realm of the common or the shared. Location does not occur by chance. It has its own essential philosophical construction. This positioning needs to be developed.
As a beginning it is important to note that a similar structure of argument occurs in §26 of Being and Time in an extended discussion of the ‘with’ and the ‘other’ (two terms that recall automatically the question of what is to be understood by commonality and thus the shared). Towards the end of the section in an important treatment of commonality Heidegger begins by contrasting what might be described as pragmatic or instrumental ‘Being-with-another’ as a set-up that ‘thrives on mistrust’ to one that will be defined in terms of authenticity. Having advanced the original position in which he notes the link between a version of commonality and ‘mistrust’ he then goes on to argue that there is a radically different sense of ‘being-with-another’. The latter has the following description:
When they devote themselves to the same affair [Sache] in common their doing so is determined by the manner in which their Dasein, each in its own way, has become attuned. They thus become authentically bound together [eigentliche Verbundenheit] and this makes possible the right kind of relation to the matter of concern [die rechte Sachlichkeit], which frees the Other in his freedom for himself.29
The notion of commonality implicit within what is identified as that which is ‘authentically bound together’ reinforces the position advanced throughout this section of Being and Time concerning what counts as an ‘other’. While that concern is not the central project of section 26 the singularity of Dasein can be taken as the point of departure and thus what emerges as significant is that the encounter is neither a chance occurrence nor is the encountered undetermined. The contrary is the case. The encounter and the encountered are determined in advance. Indeed, the determinations in question provide the conditions allowing for the possibility firstly of an encounter as such and thus secondly what counts as an ‘other’ (the identification of the other as the other). What is encountered is the other's ‘Dasein-with in the world’.30 Hence, the importance of the passage in which Dasein and Dasein's presence as other (and thus implicitly that which counts as other for Dasein) are brought together. Dasein's encounter with the other depends upon the world and the worldly nature of Dasein. Absent therefore is the constituting power of the other's recognition and thus of recognition in general.
The expression ‘Dasein’, however, shows plainly that in the first instance this entity is unrelated to others, and that of course it can still be ‘with’ others afterwards. Yet one must not fail to notice that we use the term ‘Dasein-with’ to designate that Being for which the others are freed within-the-world. This Dasein-with of the others is disclosed within-the-world for a Dasein and so too for those who are Dasein with us, only because Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with.31
Dasein understood as essentially ‘Being-with’ and determined in advance as such brings into play the inevitable question of that with which Dasein is. The immediate answer to the question is of course ‘others’. Heidegger will conclude this section of Being and Time with the important claim that insofar as ‘Dasein is at all, it has Being with-one-another as its kind of being’.32 While what defines the necessity of the ‘with’ in relation to Dasein and thus inscribes a form of commonality as given by the essentiality of the ‘with’, it remains the case that what stands outside that insistence and thus not delimited by the immediacy of response is the question of the quality and thus the nature of this ‘other’.
What is able to be present as an other for Dasein is not an incidental question. The essentiality of ‘Being-with’ in making the ‘with’ an ineliminable aspect of Dasein enacts the centrality of the question of the other. Equally, the claim that there can be a conception of commonality – where the latter is understood as the state of being ‘bound together’ (Verbundeheit) – underscores the need to identify that with which Dasein can be when that Being-with can then be understood as potentially ‘authentic’, (allowing, reciprocally, the necessity of there being inauthentic forms of commonality or being together33). There is, however, a sense in which the other remains unqualified precisely because its qualification is already there insofar as it is, in fact, present as other, i.e. where the entity in question counts as other. The encountering of the other has a specific type of designation, a designation that can be taken as defining the quality of being other. Heidegger writes that the ‘other is encountered in his Dasein-with in the world’.34 While the worldly nature of Dasein becomes the place of the encounter, what enables the other to emerge as such – that is, for it to be present as another for Dasein – is that the other is already understood as Dasein (and thus as a Dasein). As a result what is encountered is the capacity for Dasein to be with (hence the link between authenticity and potentiality.) This is the position that is fundamental to any understanding of Dasein and, more importantly, to the way a conception of the other figures within the re-expression of Dasein as defined essentially by the ‘with’. What needs to be noted in addition is that the already present determination of the other – determined precisely as the other and yet where such a conception of alterity has a necessary form of abstraction – has two important consequences. The first is that this is a conception of the other that cannot allow for the possibility of an intrinsic form of difference as constitutive of otherness. (The otherness in question must always be a version of the same.) The second is that such a conception of the other is one in which bodily difference would always be a secondary and thus an irrelevant aspect of Being-with. What both of these two positions amount to is of course a refusal of an original form of difference, a form that involves bodily presence.
Alterity, the other and thus the ‘with’ are all present in terms of a prevailing and dominating sense of abstraction. Moreover, the reiteration of a position in which Being-with and Dasein are present as abstractions is a position that is itself premised on what has already been noted, namely the elimination of original, and thus bodily, forms of difference. Abstraction is an after-effect. Abstraction works to hold back through their effective elimination the presence of relations that refuse synthesis. Abstraction therefore is integral to the rendering inoperative of relations that were themselves originally differential, i.e. relations where the ‘with’ would need to be understood as marking the site of an original form of complexity.
If the questions to be addressed concern who ‘we’ are and thus what sense of commonality is identified by the use of the term ‘us’ then the first aspect of any answer – the aspect that will be defined in terms of the negative – is that neither ‘we’ nor ‘us’ can be accounted for in terms of bodily difference. The ‘we’ given by the sameness of the ‘matter’ at hand and therefore of the project of the ‘we’ understood as a locus of commonality can only ever be present as an abstraction constructed as an after-effect. (This construction must always be effaced in the name of the originality of Dasein and Dasein's other (or the other as Dasein).) If being other is defined in advance by the reciprocity of Dasein then abstraction can provide a conception of difference though only on the basis that abstraction is present as the after-effect of the elimination of the very differences that would entail the centrality of the body and therefore the primacy of a conception of the being of being human as always already embodied. This is the moment in which there is a significant opening to the animal, an opening that draws the animal and the body into a form of constellation precisely because neither can be directly implicated in what, for Heidegger, will count as the basis of alterity.
And yet, it should not be thought that Heidegger does not allow for the possibility of bodily being.35 In an important formulation of this possibility that occurs in the context of a discussion of Nietzsche and the supposition that ‘rapture’ is an ‘aesthetic state’, he writes the following:
Bodily being does not mean that the soul is burdened by a bulk that we call the body. In feeling oneself to be, the body is already contained in advance in that self, in such a way that the body in its bodily state permeates the self. We do not ‘have’ a body in the way that we carry a knife in a sheaf. Neither is the body a natural body that merely accompanies us and which we can establish, expressly or not, as being also at hand. We do not ‘have’ a body; rather we ‘are’ bodily.36
While the initial significance of this formulation resides initially in the way it complicates any attempt to identify within Heidegger's writing the absence of any consideration of the body, what cannot be overlooked is the retained presence of the ‘we’. Hence the question – who is the ‘we’, the ‘we’ which rather than having a body, in fact, ‘are bodily’? As Heidegger's argumentation unfolds the centrality of the body, or the recognition of Dasein's bodily presence, is repositioned. While part of the argument involves an attempt to delimit ‘feeling’ (Gefühl), and as such to preclude the possibility that it could be accorded a central role within the aesthetic, let alone in determining an account of Dasein, the body becomes assimilated to ‘mood’. It is of course the possible identification of the bodily with feeling that allows this move to occur. ‘Feeling’ for Heidegger occurs beyond the hold of the body. It becomes mood. It is in terms of this identification that he can then go on and write that ‘feeling’ is that
basic mode of our Dasein by force of which and in accordance with which we are always already lifted beyond ourselves into being as a whole, which in this or that way matters to us or does not matter to us. Mood is never merely a way of being determined in our inner being for ourselves. It is above all a way of being attuned and letting ourselves be attuned [Stimmenlassen in der Stimmung]. Mood is precisely the basic way in which we are outside of ourselves. But that is the way we are essentially and constantly.37
The centrality of mood is evidenced in the twofold process of ‘being attuned’ and ‘letting oneself be attuned’. Mood takes us beyond ourselves. Within this being taken beyond ‘we are essentially’. Delimited by mood therefore is the ‘we’ who ‘are bodily’. To be bodily is to have that bodily being as that which lets itself be determined by mood. At the extreme it could be taken as determining bodily being. Mood takes over from the body. More significantly, while mood determines bodily being, bodily being (being as the site of bodily difference) neither determines nor has a mediating effect on the quality of mood. Mood remains untouched. The abstract universality of mood is reinforced by ensuring that what lets itself be determined has the quality of an abstraction. In other words, the operative quality of moods acts on, while at the same time producing, that which is doubly abstract. Central to that abstraction is the presence of the body as the site of that which is impervious to the possibility of the presence of a conception of bodily difference that was itself original.
While a further explication of the relationship between mood and the body would allow the conception of abstraction as an after-effect to be developed what is central is already clear, namely that abstraction delimits the question of the other such that while the other has a body, bodily presence, as was suggested, does not admit of original difference and therefore does not have a determining effect on the quality of Dasein. Hence while bodies figure they do not figure bodily. The body is positioned therefore within a form of relation that is determined by what has already been designated as a without relation. The without relation is to the presence of the body as the site of an original sense of bodily difference. This is, of course, another interpretation of Heidegger's position in which moods take us beyond ‘ourselves’. The ‘ourselves’ would be the site of precisely those bodily differences that do have an effective relation to mood. In sum, this delimitation of the ‘other’ – the other as the continual and thus reiterated presence of the same – works not just to exclude the presence of bodily difference as having a determining effect on alterity, it would at the same time be inextricably bound up with the positioning of the animal such that it could not figure as other.
An affinity emerges therefore. The animal and the body figure within a relation given and sustained by the without relation. In addition, neither the animal nor bodily difference is able to figure as other or to construct a domain of genuine alterity. As such they both construct loci of philosophical indifference. In part this is the consequence of abstraction and in part the result of the necessity inherent in a conception of commonality that is determined by the force of the ‘with’. In both instances a limit is established in which what counts as other is delimited by Dasein, where Dasein is itself delimited by the centrality of a sustained and abstract conception of the being of being human. Abstraction is the after-effect of the without relation and thus integral to the construction of the figure of the animal with Heidegger's philosophical project.
It is thus possible to return to the conjecture concerning Heidegger and the dog. As is clear human and dog could not be ‘authentically bound together’. A space is created in which not only could Dasein not call his dog – ‘we’ could call it but not the ‘Dasein in us’. They, human and dog, could not actually be together. The dog running alongside could not be drawn into the ‘with’. Dasein could not be with the dog. Indifference and the without relation shore up Dasein in its founding separation, ensuring the continuity of what has already been described as ‘existing without’ the animal. As such, the structural excision of the animal – an excision in which what is essential to the animal, i.e. ‘what we call life’ – entails that what occurs to and with animal life must itself be indifferent to Dasein, or at least to the Dasein ‘in us’ and by extension to philosophy. While ‘we’ may take a stand in relation to life – animal life, perhaps life in general, Dasein cannot since Dasein cannot be authentically bound together with that which would be defined in such a way. Were Heidegger to have called his dog what continues to return as the insistent philosophical issue is the impossibility that such a call – a call as an envisaged binding together, a togetherness of response and negotiation – could have, in fact, taken place. Indifference will have become a form of silence. Perhaps, then, for philosophical reasons, Heidegger the philosopher could not have called his dog. Faced with his dog facing his dog, there would have been nothing, silence.
1. All references to Descartes are first to the Adams and Tannery edition, Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1996) and then, where appropriate, to the English translations found in Descartes: Philosophical Writings, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). In both cases the reference will be to volume followed by page number.
2. V.269
3. What this indicates is that while the without relation emerges within Descartes’ argumentation and even though the position taken is original, the refusal of human animality and thus animal is an after-effect of having set up a position in which there was a continuity of relation between human being and human animality.
4. While this position is argued in a number of places in Aristotle one of the most significant occurs in the Generation of Animals. The passage in question is the following:
Clearly those principles whose activity is physical cannot be present without a physical body – there can for example be no walking without feet; and this also rules out the possibility of their entering (the principles) from outside, since it is impossible that they enter by themselves, because they are inseparable from (the physical body) or that they enter transmission in some body, because the semen is a residue of nourishment that is undergoing change. It remains then that reason alone enters in, as an additional factor, from outside and that it alone is divine, because physical activity has nothing whatever to do with the activity of reason. (736b22–30)
The last line needs to be followed carefully. What is being argued is that the ‘principle’ (arche) – where arche needs to be understood as a determining element determining in regard to identity, namely that which makes of something what it is – is a formulation that expresses the capacity of the body to realise that which is proper to it (noting that any entity (hence all entities) will have an end which is proper to it. Moreover, that end is already internal to the entity. Hence the semen delivers the nutritive elements that allows for fetation. Reason, on the other hand, for Aristotle does not originate internally.
5. V.275–6
6. Descartes returns continually to the question and role of ‘prejudice’ as that which stands opposed to the pursuit of truth. For a sustained discussion of this topic in his writings see the Principles of Philosophy, Part 1, sections 71–7 (VIIIA.35–38/I.21–22).
7. Hence the impossibility for Descartes that the formulation ‘ambulo ergo sum’ could function in the same way as the celebrated argument that assumes the centrality of the ‘cogito’. The former pertains uniquely to the body and thus to that which is inessential in relation to human being. To this end see Descartes’ discussion in the 5th Set of Replies VII.352/II.244.
8. VI.59
9. V.278
10. VI.41
11. III.520
12. XI.119/I.99
13. XI.331/I.329–30
14. XI.335/I.331 and XI.335/I.332
15. XI.335/I.331
16. See in this regard Figure 9 in I.171.
17. For an extended treatment of the ‘idea’ see Descartes’ responses to both the First and Second set of Objections to the Meditations; in particular VII.102/II.74–5 and VII.16–17/II.113–14.
18. See the definition and methodological implication inherent in clear and distinct perception in, for example, the Principles of Philosophy (VIII.16–17/I.203).
19. While it is pursued in a different direction for another attempt, firstly to underscore the importance of the machine in Descartes and secondly to complicate the apparent ease with which Descartes is assumed to separate the body from the soul, see Alain Vizier, ‘Descartes et les automates’, Modern Language Notes, vol. 111, no. 4 (1996), pp. 688–708.
20. See in addition the important discussion of this precise point in §31 of M. Heidegger's Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schwer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). In this regard Heidegger writes that:
The greatness of the end consists not only in the essentiality of the closure of the great possibilities but also in the power to prepare a transition to something wholly other. (109)
21. M. Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? Gesamtausgabe Band 8 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), p. 65.
22. M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978) (M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemyer Verlag, 1979)). Subsequent reference is to the English followed by the German preceded by BT. BT 291/247.
23. M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995) (M. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (Frankfurt: Klostermann Seminar, 2004)). Subsequent reference is to the English followed by the German preceded by FM.
24. This is not to suggest that there are not interpretations of Heidegger's The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics that seek to locate within it an argument for the philosophical significance of animals. See in this regard William McNeill, ‘Life Beyond the Organism: Animal Being in Heidegger's Freiburg Lectures, 1929–30’, in H. Peter Steeves (ed.), Animal Others (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 197–249. See also Matthew Calarco, ‘Heidegger's Zoontology’, in Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (eds), Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004).
25. The reiteration of the ‘ourselves’ – a term that already stages as though it were unproblematic the identity of the ‘we’ and thus an implicit conception of abstract commonality – occurs in the following lines from §50: ‘we already comport ourselves … In our existence as a whole we comport ourselves toward animals and in a certain way towards plants.’
26. FM 210/306.
27. Translation modified FM 211/308.
28. BT 290/246.
29. BT 159/122.
30. BT 156/120.
31. BT 156/120.
32. BT 163/125.
33. Potentiality for Heidegger is that which allows for the realisation of authenticity and thus the overcoming of the inauthentic. See Being and Time §§61–66.
34. BT 156/120.
35. For two important different arguments concerning Heidegger on the body and its relation to animality see Didier Franck, ‘L’Être et le vivant’, in his Dramatique des phénomènes (Paris: PUF, 2001), pp. 35–55, and Daniel Vallega-Neu, The Bodily Dimension in Thinking (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005), in particular pp. 83–121.
36. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1991) (M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Erster Band, Gesamtausgabe Band 6.1 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996)). Subsequent reference is to the English followed by the German preceded by HN. HN 98–9/99.
37. HN 99/100.