The Metaphysical Context of Heidegger’s Animal Analysis

This chapter presents a detailed exegesis of the neglected opening passages of the lecture course in which Heidegger clarifies the aims of his project. These passages contain the metaphysical context we need to assess Heidegger’s reflections on animality. We discover from them that Heidegger takes as his primary aim not the production of a comparative account of animal life, but rather the extension of a kind of ‘invitation’ to learn about what philosophy is and to do philosophy for ourselves. It is against the backdrop of this wider project that Heidegger comes to the animal, using the concept of animality to deepen his exploration in the lecture course of metaphysics as a distinctively human activity and its relation to the sciences.

Introduction

The aim of this book is to provide a critical analysis of Heidegger’s reflections on animality. These reflections are presented most extensively in his 1929–30 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (FCM), so this text will be my primary focus. In these lectures Heidegger poses three provocative metaphysical theses: the human, Heidegger claims, is ‘world-forming’ (...

The Outcome, Criticisms and Legacy of Heidegger’s Comparative Examination

This chapter explores how, in the final stages of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger demonstrates the manner in which we can travel upstream from the metaphysical quagmire of our situation in order to access deeper and more essential knowledge of the human, metaphysics, and physis. To facilitate this move, Heidegger considers it necessary to review what has been garnered from the study of our contemporary situation and its expression through the media of Kulturphilosophie and biology. The chapter argues that Heidegger’s hope throughout the lecture course has been that, by coming to know the essential distinctions that arise in these fields in all their superficiality, we will enable ourselves to go deeper into the attunement of profound boredom, and eventually to replace the contemporary opposition between life and spirit with a more primordial understanding of the human and its status within physis.

Conclusion

Heidegger argues in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (FCM) that the world of Dasein is not a neat capsule of entities that are always available; it is ‘ruptured’ by a fundamental finitude that impels it to develop its own anchoring in physis. The temporality of human existence is staged against the backdrop of absolute, geological time, the time of earthly entities, insofar as human beings are finite organisms that are temporally bounded to a particular lifespan. But this ‘terrestrial’ time is discernible only from the perspective of a mode of being that takes time as such into account. Our conceptions of the dawn of time and the timespan of the earth, as Schalow says, always ‘derive their relevance from Dasein’s mode of historicalness, and ultimately, from the history of being itself. To the extent that we can refer to “geological time”, a time of the earth, the ability to do so still hinges upon the possibility of an awareness of such terrestrial origins, of the ...

The Human versus the Animal

This chapter provides an overview of the standard interpretation of Heidegger’s account of animality in order to give the reader a sense of the disquiet that it inspires among commentators. The chapter examines the critics who argue that Heidegger’s comparative exanimation of animality amounts to his own version of a classical valorisation of life, an ordering of beings that places the human at the top. The chapter then proposes a new way of looking at the lectures, one based on the conviction that Heidegger has not simply fallen into the trap of straightforwardly ranking the human above the rest of nature. It concludes that there is a deeper significance to Heidegger’s reflections on animality, one that can be appreciated if we attend to the broader metaphysical context of Heidegger’s claims.

From Life to Spirit

This chapter embarks upon a critical dialogue with The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, focusing on Heidegger’s use of the concept of ‘spirit’. As it is one half of the crucially important life/spirit divide, one would assume that Heidegger would pay as much attention to spirit as he does to life, and, in this vein, analyse anthropology as thoroughly as he does biology. However, Heidegger restricts his comments concerning anthropology to the few cursory remarks in Part One, in which he denounces the discipline as a problematic form of Darstellung. The chapter argues that with these remarks Heidegger ignores the body of work, spearheaded by Max Scheler during the 1920s, known as ‘philosophical anthropology’. Moreover, despite the fact that Heidegger critiques what he sees as deep delusions implicit in anthropology, this German tradition contains insights that resonate with his own project in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.

The Role of ‘Fundamental Attunement’ in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

This chapter proceeds chronologically through the lectures and examines Heidegger’s analysis in Part One of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics of the ‘fundamental attunement’ of ‘profound boredom’, which he regards as the contemporary optic through which all metaphysics occurs, including that of the human/animal distinction. The chapter introduces Heidegger’s argument that the concept of a metaphysical abyss between human and animal is the expression of a deep-seated inherited prejudice concerning a division between ‘life’ and ‘spirit’. This division is crystallised in the work of contemporary philosophers of culture, including Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Klages, Max Scheler, and Leopold Ziegler, all of whom Heidegger regards as ‘spokespeople’ of the contemporary epoch. The chapter examines Heidegger’s engagement with these thinkers, followed by his conclusion that their work signals a profound boredom gripping the age.

A Journey through Boredom

This chapter continues to examine Heidegger’s discussion of boredom and his demand that we ‘open ourselves up’ to this attunement. The chapter analyses Heidegger’s conviction that, if we manage to endure this demand, we discover something about our own contemporary metaphysics and about ourselves as contemporary Dasein. This journey also begins to unveil something of the three titular fundamental concepts of metaphysics—world, finitude, and solitude—so the chapter brings these concepts into greater focus, showing how the ‘forms’ of boredom that Heidegger traces each correspond to one of these concepts, reinforcing our understanding of their conspicuousness in the contemporary epoch. Heidegger hopes, by the end of Part One of the lecture course, to have justified the idea that profound boredom is our fundamental attunement, that it infiltrates the way in which we encounter beings qua contemporary Dasein.

Life and Biology

This chapter examines Heidegger’s understanding of life by analysing his appraisal of early twentieth-century biology. The chapter places this appraisal into the context of Heidegger’s overall aim of identifying the lineage that runs from the ancient conception of the human’s status within physis, through the physis/ēthos division in Plato’s Academy, into modern articulations of the life/spirit opposition. Heidegger pursues this aim in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics by exploring biology, the discipline that explicitly seeks to examine one side of the life/spirit divide, and assessing what the landscape of this discipline looks like in the contemporary situation. The chapter argues that, given the broader context, it is acceptable that Heidegger summarises the contents of life-science research in a way that expresses metaphysical prejudices, for his claim is that we must first understand the delusions of thinking, and how we ourselves came to be deluded, in order to retrieve and rearticulate more essential knowledge.