The Genesis of Existentials in Animals – Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s De Anima

Conférence présentée au Heidegger Circle 2011 (Milwaukee, 2011).

“Life” refers to a mode of being, indeed a mode of being-in-a-world. A living thing is not simply at hand (vorhanden), but is in a world in that it has its world. An animal is not simply moving down the road, pushed along by some mechanism. It is in the world in the sense of having it.

Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie

Although Aristotle’s influence on young Heidegger’s thought has been studied at length, such studies have almost exclusively focused on his interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics, physics and metaphysics. I will rather address Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s ontology of life presented in the De Anima and the De Motu Animalium. Focusing on recently published or recently translated courses of the mid 20’s (mainly SS 1924, WS 1925-26 and SS 1926), I will show that Being and Time’s existential structures – Befindlichkeit, Understanding and being-with-one-another through language – arose from his close reading of Aristotle’s ontology of life. As Heidegger insists, the De Anima has nothing to do with psychology or anthropology, but is a general ontology of life, it is “the first phenomenological grasp of life which led to the interpretation of movement and made possible the radicalization of ontology”.[2] By showing what this statement means, I will uncover an important aspect of young Heidegger’s thought left unconsidered: namely, that Dasein‘s existential structures originate in Aristotle’s ontology of animal life.

§1. Reading Befindlichkeit as diathesis and Sorge as desire

The first existential structure—Befindlichkeit—translates Aristotle’s notion of diathesis, disposition or “disposedness” and comes from Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s analysis of the passions: “The affects (pathe) are not mental states, but refer to the disposition of the living in his world [Befindlichkeit des Lebenden in seiner Welt], how he stands to something, how he lets something affect or concern [angehen] him” (GA 18, 122). Thus, although rarely highlighted, Befindlichkeit isn’t a structure proper to human beings, but belongs to any being endowed with perception: it refers to the fact that a living being always finds itself [befindet sich] pleasantly or unpleasantly disposed toward what it perceives in the world. Heidegger obtained this crucial point from reading Aristotle: perception is not only openness to the world, but also to ourselves. In finding-oneself well or badly disposed, there is disclosedness of both the world and oneself:

“By the very fact that a living being discloses a world, the Being of this being is also disclosed to it. It knows about itself even if only in the dullest way and the broadest sense. Along with the disclosure of the world, it is disclosed to itself.” (GA 22, 208)

Following Aristotle, Heidegger will say that “where there is perception of something, self-orientation in a world, there is lupe te kai hedone (pain and pleasure), feeling oneself attuned in such and such a way, feeling well or ill, and thus also being open to, being on the lookout for: orexis [desire] (cf. DA, 413b23)” (GA 22, 185-6). Desire belongs even to the most primitive animal because perception and appetite are equiprimordial powers: “Where there are feelings of pleasure and pain, there must be desire” (DA, 434a1).[3]

As we know, Heidegger renders orexis as Sorge, care.[4] This puzzling translation makes sense only if we understand living beings in their intentional character. Intentionality must not be understood as the structure of consciousness or reason, but as the basic structure of life itself, it is a “volitional being-out-for-something and going toward it: orexis (desire)” (GA 63, 70). Life is always related to something, striving for something, oriented toward something.

That “toward-which” life is oriented is never a mere object, but always something that has some sort of significance, of importance for the living being – since, as Aristotle says, no animal moves by itself toward or away from something unless he has the desire to (DA, 432b17-29). It is precisely this idea that made possible Heidegger’s radicalization of ontology: life’s mobility is always a concerned mobility; Lebensbewegtheit is always a Besorgensbewegtheit (NB, 44). The movement of a living being is always the movement of desire, or in Heidegger’s language, the movement of care. In order to explain this intentionality of living beings, Heidegger will, in his SS 1925 lecture course, give the example of the snail:

“We can say that the snail at times crawls out of its shell and at the same time keeps it on hand; it stretches itself out to something, to food, to some things which it finds on the ground. Does the snail thereby first enter into a relationship of being to the world? Not at all! Its act of crawling out is but a local modification of its already-being-in-the-world. Even when it is in its shell, its being is a being-outside, rightly understood. It is not in his shell like water in the glass, for it has the inside of its shell as a world which it pushes against and touches, in which it warms itself and the like. […] The snail is not at the outset only in its shell and not yet in the world, a world described as standing over against it, an opposition which it broaches by first crawling out. It crawls out only insofar as its being is already to be in a world. It does not first add a world to itself by touching. Rather, it touches because its being means nothing other than to ben in a world.” (GA 20, 223)

In his comment on this passage, Jean Greisch will describe the ascription of a world to the snail as a “lame analogy” for the snail does not exist, but merely lives.[5] Obviously, Greisch is reading Heidegger in the light of his later work. However, in the context of SS 1925, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that existence is, in one way or another, the condition of possibility of having a world.[6] Quite the contrary! Heidegger clearly states that, from the moment this world-relationship is manifest in a being, we must attribute to it the structure of Dasein: if water were in the glass in such a way that it could have a relationship to the glass – that it could, for example, find it too hot or feel too cramped in it – then we would “have to say even of water that it has the mode of being of Dasein, it is such that it has a world” (GA 20, 223).

Since Existenz was not a condition of possibility of facticity, but only a possibility that arises from factical life itself,[7] there is no reason to read the attribution of a being-in-the-world to animals as a mere metaphor. Moreover, in the same lecture course, Heidegger will say that all animals have a form of Befindlichkeit, however obscure:

“A stone never finds itself [ein Stein befindet sich nie] but is simply on hand [vorhanden]. A very primitive unicellular form of life, on the contrary, will already find itself, where this disposition can be the greatest and darkest dullness [wobei diese Befindlichkeit die größtmögliche und dunkelste Dumpfheit sein kann], but all that it is in its structure of being essentially distinct from merely being on hand like a thing.” (GA 20, 352)

Is this really surprising? Any being endowed with perception will not only be open to a world around itself, but to itself as well in the sense that in perceiving
the world as pleasing and unpleasing, “it finds itself (befindet sich) in this or that way” (GA 20, 352), pleasantly or unpleasantly disposed toward what it perceives. Life is given as “mine” in the simple fact of experiencing pleasure and pain: “The affective as such already has the character of having-itself” (GA 18, 247). To neglect this “mineness” of life in animals under the assumption that it is so vague and general that it appears as a dumbness or bewilderment is to omit the fact that Heidegger chose precisely the expression “sich befinden” to avoid any self-reflexivity (GA 20, 352) and the fact that, even in the case of human Dasein, openness to oneself is essentially characterized by non-transparency, it is precisely this Diesigkeit which makes a hermeneutics of factical life necessary (GA 61, 88).

As will argue Heidegger, “aesthanesthai should not be understood in the narrow sense of perception, but as awareness in the sense of having-there the world” (GA 18, 198). Animals are open to the world in the sense that they “have” a world.[8] Having a world means being involved in it, caring about it, being concerned by it. This world is nothing like an objective reality: “The world, in the character of hedu and luperon, is non-objective; animals do not have the world there as objects. Rather, the world is encountered in the mode of the uplifting and the upsetting” (GA 18, 48). The way in which the world is there for animals depends on the degree in which an animal is awake or closed up in itself, but regardless of degree, “the possibility that the world matters to a being depends on this peculiar openness” (GA 18, 52). Even if this Erschlossenheit of the lives of animals can be so dim and obscure that it appears, in lower animals, as a Dumpfheit, the fact remains that all animals participate in what will become the first existential structure of Dasein—Befindlichkeit.[9] But what about the second key component of Being-in-the-world?

§2. Understanding: aisthesis as alétheuein and krinein

“Understanding,” insists Heidegger, must be taken “not in a specific theoretical sense, but in a practical one: to understand doesn’t mean to know something, but to know your way around something, to know how to do something” (GA 22, 207). Only if we recognize that orientation within the world, dealing with something, coping with something is already a form of understanding can we grasp why Heidegger, in his early works, also granted a form of understanding to animals:

“Understanding belongs to the mode of Being of animals. To say that something is understood means that it is manifest in its being such and such: it is no longer concealed. In understanding, there is something like truth, aletheia: that which is unconcealed, not covered over, but on the contrary, uncovered.” (GA 22, 207-8)

Understanding is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Aristotle identifies several degrees or modalities of understanding at the very beginning of Metaphysics: aisthesis, mneme, emperia, techne, episteme, sophia (GA 22, 25). If aisthesis is named as the first level of understanding, it is because perception is the basic form of disclosing upon which all the other forms of understanding are based: “being perceived seems to be the most immediate way of uncovering something, the most obvious and manifest truth” (GA 34, 165). Aisthesis is the most primitive form of aletheuien, “because it discloses the world, though indeed not in speech and assertion” (GA 22, 186), it is a form of uncovering that lets something be “known” in a certain sense.

This cognitive dimension of perception, this discrimination (krinein), explains why Aristotle will say that perception cannot easily be classified as either irrational or rational (DA, 432a30): “the aisthesis of the animal already has the character of krisis, even in aisthesis, in normal perception, something is highlighted in relation to something else” (GA 19, 39). In natural perception, we do not perceive a multiplicity of sensory qualities, but rather things: “Originally, one does not hear noises, but the creaking wagon, the tram, the motorcycle, the north wind. To ‘hear’ something like a ‘pure noise’ already requires a very artificial and sophisticated attitude” (GA 20, 368). Because of the synthetic nature of perception, we always perceive something as something. What we perceive is already significant: it makes sense (GA 21, 121).

“We always see the world in an as. If I see something in the distance then I do not see something indeterminate there. Instead we take it initially and mostly as something. This determinate, basic character of the world becomes accessible only on the basis of a definite manner of perceiving, krinein” (GA 17, 294).

This synthetic nature of perception is what the young Heidegger called “the ‘as’ of significance” (GA 58, 114) or “critical-as,” (GA 17, 31) which will later be renamed “hermeneutical-as” (SZ, 158). [10]

§3. Memory, experience and phronesis

Because perception is by itself a form of synthesis and krinein, Heidegger will attribute, following Aristotle, a form of understanding to animals. But not all animals are confined to mere aisthesis, many are also endowed with memory. This decisive faculty allows animals to retain past images or representations (phantasia) and remember that what appears good may well be only apparently good. Memory-driven experience (emperia) makes animals more intelligent and more cautious (phronimoteron) and therefore more difficult to trap and deceive (MP, I, 1). Animals endowed with memory are more able to anticipate what’s coming, “more capable of circumspection (Umsicht)”:

“What is characteristic in aisthesis is that the beings which are disclosed are there in the present along with the living thing. If the living being were determined by aisthesis alone, then its world would extend only insofar as it sees, smells, etc. at any given moment. The living thing would be restricted to the sphere of what is immediately present-at-hand. Once it has mneme, however, the living thing becomes, in certain sense, free, no longer bound to the beings currently given in perception. In this way, the living being dominates a broader scope of the world. Its being-in-the-world no longer requires ever new perceptions; on the contrary, when it finds itself within the same position in a world-nexus, it already knows how matters are arranged. The living beings that have mneme are phronimotera, “more prudent,” they are “more able to see around [Umsichtiger]”: they do not live in the moment anymore, but in a whole which they dominate. As phronimotera, they are also mathetikera, able to learn, they are “more teachable.” They thereby increase the scope of what they understand and know” (GA 22, 209).

This description of the gradual transition from a primitive life to a life endowed with memory and anticipation is the description of the transformation of a life entangled in the immediate moment into a life possessing a real temporal dimension: an animal with memory lives in a totality it “owns” in a certain sense.

The fact that forms of prudence and foresight belong to animals has not received sufficient attention in Heidegger scholarship. We take for granted that phronesis is one of the highest possibilities of human life, one animals would be deprived of. Only if we understand phronesis in its broadest sense—as a certainty of orientation [Sicherheit der Orientierung]—can we understand “that animals also have a kind of phronesis” (GA 18, 235). This ability to orient oneself with skill and competence does not imply that these “modes of self-orienting become explicit” (GA 19, 129). Phronesis is not a “practical reasoning,” a deliberation weighing the consequences of action, but rather an Augenblick. For Heidegger, phronesis is closer to aisthesis
than to logos, it is a “glance of the eye,” a “look around” [Um-sicht] that makes possible Umgang, dealing with the surrounding world[11].

             Umgang is the term used by Heidegger to translate Aristotle’s notion of kinesis kata topon, the motion peculiar to animals.[12] As “being-able-to-move-by-themselves from place to place,” animals already have a sense of where they are going (GA 18, 238). Whether they fly, run, swim or crawl, animals move themselves toward something. This “something” they are striving for must therefore be given to them in one way or another as desirable or undesirable because, as Aristotle said, “no animal moves except by compulsion unless it has an impulse toward or away from something” (DA, 432b18). Without desire, the movement of animals would never be a voluntary movement.

“Aristotle shows that what triggers the movement is not mere consideration, the pure observation, of a desirable object. It is not the case that the living being first observes things disinterestedly, merely looks in a neutral attitude, and then moves toward something; on the contrary, orexis is its fundamental mode of being.” (GA 22, 309)

Animal perception is always action-oriented, always imperative or prescriptive. This is precisely the meaning of the practical syllogism used by Aristotle in the De Motu Animalium to explain animal behaviour. What is needed in order to explain animal motion is (1) a desire and (2) something perceived as desirable. From there, the motion of an animal will naturally follow like the conclusion of a logical syllogism from its premises. According to Aristotle’s logic of desire, to perceive something pleasant is to perceive it as desirable, as something to pursue. As soon as an animal desires something and sees it, it will go after it. The fact that animals may be able to remember that what appears good is actually not (that it is just an apparent good, a phainomenon agathon) explains why some animals will be granted a form of phronesis: “Hence, some animals are classified as prudent (phronimos), those which, in all matters relating to their own lives, have a clear ability to predict” (NE, 1141a25-28).

§4. Phone and logos at the basis of being-with [Mitsein]

We have seen that the first two existentials, Befindlichkeit and
understanding, find their origins in animal life. However, Heidegger
adds a third existential: discourse (Rede) or language (Sprache).
This structure is not an independent one, but is equiprimordial with the first
two (SZ, §34). One could wonder why this third structure comes into play since
Heidegger made very clear in the preceding section that understanding doesn’t
need any articulation in speech by showing the derivative nature of statements and
assertions (SZ, §33). So, why suddenly make discourse and language a basic
existential structure? This has always been a puzzling move in Being and
Time. If we assume that language is peculiar to man, we are facing an
awkward alternative: either affection and understanding are not originally
co-extensive with language or animals aren’t ontologically constituted by Befindlichkeit and understanding.

But a closer look at the function of this third existential shows that the translation of “Rede” by “discourse,” can be misleading. To speak is not to make judgements and statements about the world: speaking is basically speaking with one another (Miteinanderreden) (SZ, 165). Only if we understand language as speaking to one another can we understand the justification of this third existential structure: Heidegger’s purpose is to show that Dasein is always Mitdasein, that being-in-the-world is always being-in-the-world-with-another. We can see this more clearly by looking at the first articulation of this structure that we find in the 1924 lecture course on the Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy: Heidegger is here
reinstating the idea that living beings are zoa politika, they live with one another.[13]

As Sheehan and others have shown, semainein and hermeneuien are not, for Aristotle, proper to humans. In Politics, Aristotle says that sounds produced by animals are signs (semeion) of their pleasure and pain and that they use their voice (phone) to communicate these affections to each other (1253a8-14). Aristotle does not only refer to involuntary cries of pain and pleasure—although those are obviously significant in that they express the dispositions of animals—but argues that they can intentionally communicate something to another. With their voices, animals not only communicate feelings of pain and pleasure, but also the coming of a predator or
the location of food. As Aristotle will say in The Parts of Animals, birds use their voice to communicate among themselves (pro hermeneian alloesis) and to teach something to one another (660a17-b2). What they communicate is nothing like a
“propositional content”, but it is still meaning (Sinn), something that can be understood (SZ, 324).

As Heidegger insists, however, the language of animals has nothing to do with apophantic statements: by warning his fellows of a predator’s approach, the
crane does not make a statement about the world, but seeks to bring other animals to a particular disposition (fear), in order to encourage certain behaviour (flight). Heidegger will criticize very early the tendency to think language on the basis of statements, insisting that language is not primarily composed of true or false propositions, but essentially aims at doing something or at making others do something. Animal voice “gives no report about the being-at-hand of what is pleasing: but rather this indication and crying out is in itself an enticing or warning. Enticing and warning have in themselves the character of addressing itself to…” (GA 18, 54)

“Enticing and warning as repelling and attracting have in their ground being-with-one-another. Enticing and warning already show that animals are with one another. Being-with-one-another becomes manifest precisely in the specific being-character of animals as phone. It is neither exhibited nor manifested that something as such is there. Animals do not subsequently come along to ascertain that something is present: they only indicate it within the orbit of their animalistic having-to-do. Since animals indicate the threatening, alarming and so on, they signal in this indicating of the being-there of the world, their own being in the world” (GA 18, 54).

This last point is of capital importance: the animal indicates not only that it finds itself in a world, but also how it finds itself in the world. Animals communicate with each other and with us, even if they do not have, strictly speaking, logos.

§5. Conclusion: proairesis as the distinctive feature of human life

If existential structures (affection, understanding and being-with through
language) characterize animal life as such – if, in other words, « the being-possibility of animals has of itself reached this mode of being, having perception of what constitutes well-being and being-upset, being-oriented toward this and indicating this to one another » (GA 18, 46) – what is distinctive about human life? “What, Heidegger asks, is the specifically human mode of Being?” (GA 22, 311[229]). As we know, Heidegger does not agree with Aristotle for human excellence is not located in
contemplative life but in practical life – or, to be exact, in a certain kind of practical life: zoē praktike meta logou (GA 18, 98-105). Man is the only animal with the ability to act in a rational and moral way (GA 22, 187), the only animal capable of decision, of resolute action (proairesis) (GA 18, 99):
“Humans have the possibility of understanding the orekton, the desirable, as the basis of their action and the motive of their decisions” (GA 22, 311).

But why is man the only living being “able-to-resolve-itself” (GA 18, 254-56)? The answer given by Aristotle will be crucial for Heidegger: man is the only living being able of resolute action because he alone has the understanding of time: “Humans because they possess an aisthesis chronou [‘sense of time’], can presentify to mellon [‘the future’] (433b7f.) as the possible and as that for the sake of which they act”
(GA 22, 311). Of course, animals also act, but they cannot not act, not pursue what is given as desirable where man, because he has the peculiar ability of “anticipating
something as the basis of action”, can decide not to pursue what is immediately
pleasant and genuinely decide of the course of his life (GA 22, 311).

To be sure, there will be nothing left in Being and Time of this genesis of existential structures in animal life, as few traces remain of Aristotle’s major influence on Sein und Zeit. If Heidegger will eventually claim that animals have no world, not even an Umwelt (GA 40, 54), the recent publication and translation of earlier lecture courses
shows that this constitutes a reversal in his way of thinking. On his way toward Being and Time, Heidegger thought that “the essential is missed if we do not see that the animal has a world” (GA 80, 179). If, then, Heidegger refused to adequate “Dasein” with “man” in Sein und Zeit, it is not only to dissociate himself from the tradition, but because Dasein did not solely designate human beings: an animal too is “a being for whom living, being-in-itself, matters to it in some way” (GA 18, 51), it is a “being
to which we must attribute, in a formal way, the kind of being which belongs to Dasein” (GA 20, 223).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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