Heidegger versus a bat
What does it mean to understand the animal?
Between 1929 and 1930, Heidegger delivered a lecture series which was later published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Some of the lectures are dedicated to understanding the animal, and in particular how it differs from the human. For these lectures to go anywhere useful, Heidegger needs to show that we (the humans) have some possibility of understanding what it is like to be an animal.
People who are familiar with philosophy of mind are probably now thinking about bats. Bats will come to mind because Nagel wrote a paper called What Is It Like to Be a Bat1 in which he attempted to show that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, because we can never experience what the bat experienced (for we are not bats). The experience of echolocation, for example, is simply out of reach for the human. One may worry, therefore, that Heidegger’s project of understanding the animal hits a dead-end before it begins.
This section (§49, p201-209) of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics is quite short, and the secondary literature does not dwell on it. But for me it is a nice example of how Heidegger’s thinking smashes through the apparently insurmountable problems of analytical philosophy, instead examining how things really appear to us in the world.
Rather than worrying about bat minds, Heidegger, will ask what we really mean when we say we want to understand what it is like to be an animal. If I (a human) want to understand what it is like to be a bat then I must do so as a human. Were I to be able to somehow perfectly transpose myself onto the bat, in order to experience the bat’s experience exactly as a bat experiences its own experience, then I would at this point be (to all intents and purposes) a bat. Understanding the bat as a human instead requires me to remain a human whilst allowing the bat to be something other.
When Heidegger seeks to understand what it is like to be an animal, he instead wants to “go along” with the animal, and by this he means understanding “how things are” for the animal. Analytical philosophers of mind will object that Heidegger is not being clear; how can I know if I am “going along with” an animal unless Heidegger defines this more precisely? But with a couple of quick comparisons Heidegger shows that the concept is in fact clear to us.
“Can we transpose ourselves into an animal?...succeed in going along with the animal in the way in which it sees and hears, the way in which it seizes its prey or evades its predators, the way in which is builds its nest and so forth…The question…does not represent an intrinsically nonsensical undertaking. We do not question that the animal as such carries around with it, as it were, a sphere offering the possibility of transposition.”2
“Can we transpose ourselves into a stone?...No, we reply, we cannot transpose ourselves into the stone. And this is impossible for us not because we lack the appropriate means to accomplish something that is possible in principle. It is impossible because the stone as such does not admit of this possibility at all, offers no sphere intrinsically belonging to its being such that we could transpose ourselves into the stone.”3
“Can we as human beings transpose ourselves into another human being?...it appears much less questionable to us, indeed as not questionable at all…it appears that it is possible, accordingly, to go along with others in their access to things and in their dealings with those things. This is a fundamental feature of man’s own immediate experience of existence.”4
The second question makes no sense – of course we cannot go along with a stone. The third question seems rather meaningless and redundant, because “going along with” another human is part of what it means to be human. The second question therefore shows us that were it impossible to go along with the animal, the first question would make as little sense as the second question about the stone. Comparison with the third question shows us that going along with the animal is possible in principle, but transposition is only possible in accordance with the animal’s own animality.
Whether or not we are convinced5 that “going along with” is a sufficient basis for understanding the animal, Heidegger’s questioning shows that there is something that the human has in common with the animal. The human and the animal share something that (as a minimum) gives us the sense that we have some understanding of each other. Were this not the case the animal would feel as different to us as a stone. What exactly this commonality is will form the basis of the lectures.
Nagel, T. (1974) ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review, 83(4), p. 435
Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. p203-4
Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. p204
Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. p205
It might be obvious that I am convinced, given the name of my Substack is “Going Along with Heidegger”.
Information theory and computation clarify what Heidegger intimated: categories like stone, animal, and human are thresholds in informational organization rather than a taxonomy of natural kinds. They mark transitions in the relation to world. To see this it helps to distinguish computation, cognition, and intelligence. Computation is universal: any system capable of physical interaction can, in principle, instantiate it. What matters is not whether computation occurs but how it is organized. When matter organizes itself around pattern recognition, computation becomes cognition: the capacity of a system to register and act upon patterns in its environment. Intelligence develops in phases as higher layers of pattern recognition emerge, each phase representing a new organizational inflection of informational form. Stone, plant, animal, and human can thus be read as phase transitions in the architecture of intelligence.
From this perspective the human is not a privileged kind but a contingent configuration within a spectrum of intelligences. The capacity to go along with others, animal, machine, or human, arises wherever patterns constitute a relation to world that can be recognized and inhabited. In this sense the human has no ontological primacy. To treat the human as an endpoint is to mistake a phase transition for a terminus.
This raises an interesting issue although perhaps you will not have yet 'convinced' anyone of anything only because you are merely laying the ground work for that. Nevertheless the opportunity to convince is there. Certainly Nagel’s ‘bat’ appears to be a fact on the ground but needs contesting on the lines that you seem to be developing.
The question is whether 'going along' with the animal is a process arising out of what it is to be human ‘tout court’ or is part of what it is to be a human that arises from the human also being partly an animal itself. This latter raises neuro-biological issues about the evolution of ‘feeling’ and empathy.
If the former, we have the issue that there is little evidence of humans 'going along' with animals until quite late in human intellectual development. In general, the animal would largely be seen as much the same as the stone to nearly everyone for most of history and will still be to many people. There is also the problem of sociopathic treatment of humans as stones/tables as (say) Fritz Stangl would come to do at Treblinka. The animal becomes something to be 'going along with' as a human choice so the further question arises as to how this choice arises.
If the latter (and it could be both) then we might adduce evidence (albeit with little definite justification) of animal identification in early human art and hunting performance and amongst some aboriginal peoples so that the 'going along-ness' existed, was lost because of new social conditions (agriculture and urbanisation) and then got rediscovered with 'sentiment' in the eighteenth century or possibly amongst privileged elites who chose 'pets'.
In other words, 'going along with-ness' might be highly contingent on the condition of the judging human. Is Heidegger not saying (in the context of both animal and human) that we can imagine a reality outside ourself which is more or less coherent to the degree that it is consonant with observable facts?
If so, it is both real and not-real - real because it emerges under certain social conditions as an act of empathy with the animal (even if the act of empathy is perhaps in danger of being an illusion if not thought through honestly) and not real because of its contingency and the fact that it not necessarily normal to think along these lines.
My own intuition is that thinking such questions of both animals (at least mammals and higher forms of life) and humans leads us to think that we know other humans less than we think we know, that we can know animals more than we might think and that both animals and other humans belong to the same not-stone/not-table category of things into which we can contingently transpose ourselves either reasonably or fantastically.
Indeed, it could be argued that we can transpose into a loved pet through constant observation and care more than we can transpose into most human beings who we do not know and do not care for (especially if we care for them only abstractly as liberals do). Abstract care (universalism) strikes me as a barrier to the sort of empathetic engagement implied above.