Heidegger II

Abstract

Following claims that Being and Time was essentially philosophical anthropology, and questions about the embodiment and mortality of Dasein, and Heidegger recurred to the distinction between humans who, as being-there, create a “world” for themselves and confront their death resolutely, versus animals who are caught up in their natural environments and do not die so much as “perish” biologically. In 1929 he studied the work of gestalt biologists like Jakob von Uexküll to support his arguments for the world-poverty of animals, unable hermeneutically to forge a real “world.” By 1936, nevertheless, his logic faltered when he argued that the age of technology and giganticism had reduced most humans to mere “technicized animals.” Even if this was a rhetorical flourish, it remained that only an anxious few remained among us who could dwell poetically and be free for their death, an idea with significant implications for the metaphysical politics Heidegger developed in response to Nazi politics. By 1949, the technicized animal—poor in world—appeared to perish with no greater resoluteness and dignity than its animal relatives.