Chapter Five


Unfolding the Guiding Thesis That 'the Animal Is Poor in World' on the Basis of the Interpretation of the Essence of the Organism at Which We Have Arrived


§62. Being open in captivation as a not-having of world in having that which disinhibits.


For this it is necessary that we now elucidate what poverty in world means. We must take up this question once again at the place where we left off to clarify animality by determining the essence of the organism. We pursued this investigation in order to maintain a concrete connection between our problem and biology. But that did not imply in any way, as the analysis has shown, that we merely wished to collect and present results, but rather to discover, with reference to these results, some fundamental questions in relation to our problem and thus to bring ourselves closer to the essence of animality. For our perplexity with respect to the concept of world and to the thesis that 'the animal is poor in world' necessarily forced us to derive the essence of animality as far as possible from a consideration of the animal itself What did this perplexity with respect to the concept of world consist in?1 Are we now in a position to eliminate this perplexity on the basis of our consideration of the structure of the organism, so that we can now understand the thesis concerning the animal's poverty in world and develop the problem of world in terms of it?

We articulated the problem as follows: if by world we understand beings in their respective accessibility in each case, and if the accessibility of beings is a fundamental characteristic of world, then the animal stands alongside man if it does have access to something other than itself. Then we find a having of world in the case of both man and animal. On the other hand, if our intermediate thesis concerning the animal's poverty in world is justified, and poverty is a deprivation and deprivation a not-having, then the animal stands alongside the stone which, as worldless, has no world. With the animal we find a having of world and a not-having of world. Either this result is intrinsically contradictory and impossible, or we are employing the word 'world'-as the accessibility of beings-in a different sense each time when we formulate the problem in terms of the animal having world and not having world. In that case the concept of world has not yet adequately been elucidated.


1. Cf. above pp. 1 76ff.


Martin Heidegger (GA 29/30) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics page 268