encirclement of the animal within the interrelated drivenness of its instinctual drives is intrinsically open for that which disinhibits it. Thus the intrinsic self-encirclement [Sich-Einringen] of the animal is not a kind of encapsulation. On the contrary, the encirclement is precisely drawn about the animal in such a way that it opens up a sphere within which whatever disinhibits can do so in this or that manner. The behaviour of the animal, contrary to how it might appear, does not and never can relate to present-at-hand things singly or collectively. Rather, the animal surrounds itself with a disinhibiting ring which prescribes what can affect or occasion its behaviour. Since this self-encirclement belongs to the animal, it always intrinsically bears its disinhibiting ring along with it and does so as long as it is alive. Or more precisely-the life of the animal is precisely the struggle [Ringen] to maintain this encircling ring or sphere within which a quite specifically articulated manifold of disinhibitions can arise. Every animal surrounds itself with this disinhibiting ring, and not merely subsequently once the animal has already been living for a certain period of time, because this encircling belongs to the innermost organization of the animal and its fundamental morphological structure. The way in which the animal is in each case taken by the whole is directed by the range of possible disinhibitions within its encirclement. Such being taken is open for manifold forms of disinhibition, but this openness is precisely not the manifestness of anything that behaviour could relate to as beings. This open being taken intrinsically involves the withholding of any possibility of apprehending beings. This self-encircling entails an open absorption in it-not in the so-called 'interior' of the animal, but in the ring of the interrelated drivenness of instinctual drives as they open themselves up.
This question now leads us toward the distinction we tried to express by talking of man's world-forming and the animal's poverty in world, a poverty which, roughly put, is nonetheless a kind of wealth. The difficulty of the problem lies in the fact that in our questioning we always and inevitably interpret the poverty in world and the peculiar encirclement proper to the animal in such a way that we end up talking as if that which the animal relates to and the manner in which it does so were some being, and as if the relation involved were an ontological relation that is manifest to the animal. The fact that this is not the case forces us to claim that the essence of life can become accessible only if we consider it in a deconstructive [abbauenden] fashion. But this does not mean that life represents something inferior or some kind of lower level in comparison with human Dasein. On the contrary, life is a domain which possesses a wealth of openness with which the human world may have nothing to compare.
In its instinctual relatedness to . . . , behaviour is open for. . . . But as instinctual activity it can at the same time only be touched or affected by something that brings the instinctual relatedness into play, i.e., by something that can disinhibit it. That which disinhibits and releases the inhibitedness of the instinctual drive, that which allows the instinctual activity to respond to