2.11
In such encounters, stones become stonier, trees hover beside us, and non-human animals come more into their own.
Different kinds of animals encounter beings in different ways. This is, I think, what Jakob von Uexküll was getting at with his notion of Umwelten and the tones associated with these lived environments:[1] while, for us, the chair and floor can (usually) be distinguished by their sitting and standing tones, both have sitting tones for a dog. Tones are rooted in perceptual, bodily, sexual, and social differences. Thus, the things we find ourselves surrounded by are encountered in different ways by different kinds of animals.
Animals live in different worlds — different from one kind of animal to another. But this thesis isn’t without difficulties. For instance, Derrida traces out the immense machinery of the Western philosophical tradition that works to deny that non-human animals are open to something like a Heideggerian world (§2.4); or even that non-human animals can respond as opposed to react.[2] All this bleeds into the immense machinery of factory farms, agribusiness, scientific experiments, and so on.
As example, Heidegger famously declared that “the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man [sic] is world-forming.”[3] He wants to say that animals (all animals equally, yet not humans) are deprived of the ‘as such’: while they encounter beings, they never encounter beings as beings, beings as such.[4] This subtle point means that a dog encounters its food, but not as food, not as a being that stands out over there against the dog.
In Heidegger’s account, the dog is an organism encircled by a ring of drives. When it encounters a disinhibitor, a particular drive is disinhibited, and so the dog is driven until the drive is satisfied and re-inhibited. The animal is always being-driven and is never open to encountering beings as such. In this way, Heidegger provides ontological grounds that can underpin stimulus accounts of non-human organisms.[5]
For Heidegger, non-human animals encounter disinhibitors. But which precise beings are disinhibitors for an organism are always enfolded within and pre-determined by the organism itself. The organism is a totalization of possible encounters. It needs a disinhibitor to drive behaviour (i.e., to be disinhibited), yet it never encounters the disinhibitor itself (i.e., as such); the non-human animal is merely driven.
But is it possible for something to open to an other without being open to an other as such, i.e., to an other as an other? Are non-human animal responses prescribed like knee jerk reactions? For a drive to eat to be disinhibited, mustn’t the organism first recognize the food as food?[6] Otherwise, how does the drive encircling a non-human animal ‘know’ to loosen itself for this being? How do drive and being connect? Mustn’t there be an openness on the part of a non-human animal to the being? ‘There’s a connection, but the animal’s never aware of it.’ – What’s our evidence for this claim?
Lumping all animals but humans together is untenable: it both treats vastly disparate animals the same (the honeybee, the red-eyed tree frog, the lantern fish, Rothschild’s emu, the Asian elephant) while treating humans as somehow entirely distinct, and it disregards overlapping categorizations that depend on the attribute or relations in question[7] (e.g., ‘animals that use tools’ may overlap with ‘animals that pass the mirror test’).
Furthermore, considering the role of adaptation, which Heidegger discusses,[8] how could an animal adapt to its environment if there’s only an openness to what’s given by its disinhibiting ring, as pre-programmed and pre-enfolded?[9] It seems to me that adaptation should be understood as part of a dialogic encounter with an environment. That is, animals are beings that struggle with and interact with a shifting and changing environment in an openness beyond predelineation.
Another way to put this is that, for Heidegger, a disinhibitor is always paired with a drive, which matches with what he calls a “capability” of the organism.[10] But how could the organism be originarily capable (i.e., how could it come to acquire the capabilities it has/starts with) or how could its capabilities change (i.e., presumably in response to environmental shifts, for example), if it is not open beyond prescription? Capability must refer to and be directed to and by an environment—a particular capability has to ‘fit’ ‘between’ an organism and an environment—and so it must come to be, or to change, through an openness to an environment.
In short, I find Heidegger’s account unsatisfying. And yet it, or something like it, is at play throughout our society for non-human animals. We challenge these cultural attitudes and practices when we turn to the onto-ethical level. That is: we question the move that lumps all animals except humans together (which includes the subsequent move to extract certain animals from the animal-lump based on similarity to humans—‘intelligence,’ for instance—for this uses humans as the yardstick for others). We see all animals (including humans) as a dialogic result of environment and beings interacting and co-responding. We see non-human animals as open to their own world that is not the same world to which we’re open (due to social and bodily differences and unique dialogic histories). We deny Heidegger’s implicit distinction between ‘as such’ and ‘not as such’ and instead see a plethora of modes and ways that beings appear, even for us[11] (e.g., when we’re driven compared to when we’re calm, or when things move at different speeds or with different intensities, and so on). And we deny the hierarchy of organisms, reaching from us on one end to something like single-cellular organisms on the other.
Heidegger’s account is strangely reductionist. Strange, because he’s careful to argue against reductionisms (when they pertain to humans). Just because we can talk about human or non-human animals in terms of stimuli doesn’t mean that this is ontologically primary, for there’s a holism to phenomena. And just as we surmount the problem of other human minds through sensing meaningful gestures, so too, barring speciesism, we sense this of non-human animals. The approach I’m taking here is to ask, through observation, how is it for particular animals to be in the world, in their world? We do not inhabit the same world; and yet, we’re in a dialogic encounter with animals, open to each other.
Why do I use the word ‘world’ with non-human animals? Because world is the network of meaningful relations and possible involvements (§2.4). Animals move within such networks. This seems patently obvious to me.
[1] Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
[2] Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). On Western machinery in and alongside the tradition, see in particular p. 25 and 101; on reaction/response, see p. 122–6.
[3] Heidegger, FCM, p. 185.
[4] ibid, e.g., p. 193, 197–8, 210, 241, 247–8, 287.
[5] ibid, p. 254, 256–7.
[6] Ka-wing Leung, “Heidegger on Animal and World,” New Yearbook for Phenomenology & Phenomenological Philosophy 10.1 (2010): p. 248–9.
[7] Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 29–31.
[8] Heidegger, FCM, p. 264.
[9] ibid, p. 242, 256.
[10] ibid, for example, see p. 221, 231–2.
[11] Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 156, 159–60.