Even if the animal has access to beings in a different way from ourselves and within more narrowly circumscribed limits, it is still not entirely deprived of world. The animal has world. Thus absolute deprivation of world does not belong to the animal after all.
§48. The sense in which the animal has and does not have world: attaining a place from which to begin the elucidation of the concept of world
The preceding comparative examination has already succeeded in clarifying the significance of our three theses, but that only means that our guiding problem, the question concerning the concept of world, has become more acute. Our perplexity about what we should understand by world and the relationship to world has increased. If by world we understand beings in their accessibility in each case, if such accessibility of beings is a fundamental character of the concept of world, and if being a living being means having access to other beings, then the animal stands on the side of man. Man and animals alike have world. On the other hand, if the intermediate thesis concerning the animal's poverty in world is justified and poverty represents deprivation and deprivation in turn means not having something, then the animal stands on the side of the stone. The animal thus reveals itself as a being which both has and does not have world. This is contradictory and thus logically impossible. But metaphysics and everything essential has a logic quite different from that of sound common understanding. If these propositions concerning the having and not-having of world in relation to the animal are legitimate, then we must be employing the ideas of world and accessibility of beings in a different sense in each case. In other words, the concept of world has still not been clarified. We cannot as yet see our way forward on account of the obscurity of this concept. Nevertheless we have found the place where such elucidation must begin and have identified the knot which we must first strive to undo. We shall only be able to do so if we pursue its intricate entanglements and the convolution of the propositions that the animal has and does not have world. For this is where the two extremes of worldlessness and world-formation are, as it were, intertwined with one another. Only in solving this problem in an original fashion will we be able to see what world means and, even more importantly, see whether we really understand the concept and the phenomenon of world or whether all this simply remains an empty phrase for us. This intertwining is expressed in the intermediate position occupied by the thesis concerning the animal. Consequently we must attempt once again to acquire further insight into the essence of the animal and its animality. But we will now no longer be able to proceed with the same naivety as we did before. For