We Have Never Been Animals.

Heidegger’s Posthumanism

Abstract – The relation between Dasein and the human being was never
adequately characterized in Being and Time. In the decade following that pub-
lication, Heidegger explored this relation as he tried to work out a phenome-
nologically based metaphysics. A key moment in this attempt is found in his
discussion of the animal in his 1929/30 lecture course, The Fundamental
­Concepts of Metaphysics. This paper explores Heidegger’s treatment of the dif-
ference between the animal (including homo sapiens) and the “Dasein in us.”
It does so in dialogue with a recent example of what I call “bio-posthumanism,”
the view that there is no normatively meaningful distinction to be drawn
between human beings and other animals. A picture of Heidegger’s phenome-
nological post-humanism emerges.
Keywords: Heidegger, phenomenology, systems theory, posthumanism, nor-
mativity

In his 1946 “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger walks a rhetorical line

between rejecting and adopting “humanism” as a label for his own think-
ing. On the one hand, the term belongs to a tradition (dubbed “meta-
physics”) in which “man is the measure of all things,” a tradition by then
anathema to Heidegger. On the other hand, unlike traditional humanism
(which “still does not realize the proper dignity of man”), Heidegger’s
non-metaphysical “thought of being” purports to do justice to the human
being’s unique status as the “shepherd of being” (1993, 225, 233, 234).
The present essay aims to unpack some of the reasons for this rhetorical
aporia. That it does so under the title, Heidegger’s “posthumanism,”
rather than Heidegger’s “humanism,” has to do with the path that sub-
sequent continental thought has taken. Appealing to the familiar treatises
by Foucault (1973) and Derrida (1982), such thinking rejects phenom-
enological “subjectivism” and tends to see Heidegger as simply another
humanist. Despite his attempts to break with phenomenology’s “tran-
scendental-empirical doublet” – so the argument goes – Heidegger rein-
forces metaphysical humanism when, for instance, he emphasizes the
“abyss” that separates us from “the animal” (das Tier) and instead extols
our proximity to the “essence of divinity” (Heidegger 1993, 230).

Études phénoménologiques – Phenomenological Studies 1 (2017) 217-240.

© 2017 by Peeters Publishers. All rights reserved. doi : 10.2143/EPH.1.0.3188849

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 218 Steven Crowell

The normative distinction that this sort of abyssal difference seems to

entail is the target of a certain posthumanism which acknowledges many
differences between kinds of living beings but grants none of them the
sort of normative status that would support talk of an abyss. In his recent
book, What is Posthumanism?, for instance, Cary Wolfe argues that
whatever the proper path for a “bioethics” may be, “no matter how such
policies are drawn, the distinction between human and animal should
be of no use in drawing them” (Wolfe 2010, 98). With respect to the
first of what he calls “two kinds of finitude” to which we are delivered
over – namely, the finitude of flesh (“physical vulnerability, embodi-
ment, and eventually death”) – there is purportedly no distinction to be
drawn.1 Thus this posthumanism is not “transhumanism,” which models
itself on the cyborg and heralds prosthetic technologies that will lift the
human being out of its contingent biological form, an “engineered evo-
lution” that promises our “triumphant disembodiment” (xiii, xv). It is,
rather, a kind of bio-posthumanism that moves in the opposite direction,
opposing “the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from
humanism itself” (xv). For Wolfe, who draws upon deconstruction and
second-order systems theory – Derrida and Luhmann – the “spirit” of
the Enlightenment entails a posthumanist turn, a rejection of the “dog-
mas” and “anthropological universals” borrowed from “religion, science,
and politics,” the “cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical
protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenome-
non” (2010, xvi). In particular, it requires rejecting the “kind of norma-
tive subjectivity” with which philosophy (and by this Wolfe means phi-
losophy as such, as opposed to “theory”2) seeks to address issues in, for

1
 The whole passage defining these two finitudes should be cited here, since we will
deal with the first in §3, while taking up the second in §4. Commenting on the work
of Cora Diamond, Wolfe writes that “there are two kinds of finitude here, two kinds of
passivity and vulnerability. The first type (physical vulnerability, embodiment, and even-
tually death) is paradoxically made unavailable, inappropriable, to us by the very thing
that makes it available – namely, a second type of ‘passivity’ or ‘not being able,’ which
is the finitude we experience in our subjection to a radically ahuman technicity or mech-
anicity of language, a technicity that has profound consequences, of course, for what we
too hastily think of as ‘our’ concepts, which are therefore in an important sense not ‘ours’
at all” (2010, 88).
2
 “Theory” is the answer to “the question in the wake of skepticism” as analyzed by
Stanley Cavell, namely, “what can it mean to (continue to) do philosophy after philoso-
phy, in a certain sense, has become impossible?” (Wolfe 2010, 70).

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 219

instance, bioethics. This means “that the nature of thought itself must
change if it is to be posthumanist” (xvi).
Readers of Heidegger will find such gestures familiar. With essays like
“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” in mind, we might
be forgiven for believing that Heidegger’s thought counts as “posthu-
manist” in Wolfe’s sense.3 And indeed, as we shall see, there is consid-
erable overlap between Heideggerian phenomenology and bio-posthu-
manism when it comes to the question of the animal. Yet Heidegger’s
posthumanism (if it is that) is excluded from this canon on what appear
to be somewhat dubious grounds, namely, that Heidegger rejects
the idea (central to bio-posthumanism) that life or animality provides
something like an ethico-theoretical touchstone.4 If cyborg transhuman-
ism might be summed up in the slogan “we are animals no more,”
Heidegger’s posthumanism should be understood to entail that we have
never been animals. This paradox is extensively addressed in Heidegger’s
lecture course of 1929-30, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. In
this mature fruit of his metaphysical decade,5 Heidegger defends a form
of phenomenological posthumanism, one that is as consistent with
the position of Being and Time as it is with the thinking that leads
Heidegger, in “Letter on Humanism,” to adopt his rhetorical gambit.
But as Heidegger insists throughout this lecture course, phenomenology
can only lead us to a point where we see what is at stake; it cannot bring
about the decision that arises between thinking that we have always
been animals and that we have never been (1995, 296, 359).

3
 For instance, already in the first paragraph Heidegger writes: “The title designates
the attempt at a reflection which persists in questioning. The questions are paths to an
answer. If the answer could be given, the answer would consist in a transformation of
thinking, not in a propositional statement about a matter at stake” (Heidegger 1972, 55.
My emphasis).
4
 For some phenomenological relatives of bio-posthumanism see Weigelt 2002,
­Barbaras 2006, Lawlor 2006, Toadvine 2009, and Figal 2010. Already in 1929­
Heidegger warned against this ever-present temptation, criticizing Max Scheler’s attempt
to develop a “biological worldview” that interprets “the human being” from “the perspec-
tive of life” (Heidegger 1995, 192).
5
 On the designation “metaphysical decade,” see Crowell 2001, ch. 12, where it is
also explained why Heidegger gave up the metaphysical approach that ill-consorts with
his phenomenological convictions.

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 220 Steven Crowell

§1.  Phenomenology, life, and the problem of world

Let us start with the method Heidegger employs in the text. Heidegger
wants to lead his students to an understanding of “world,” and to that end
he floats a distinction between entities that are “without world” (such as
the stone), entities that are “world poor” (which he calls “animals”), and
entities that are “world-forming” – here given the name “human being”
(Mensch), which is misleading since the subsequent argument shows that
it is not the human being, but the Dasein in the human being, that is
world-forming. What does the “world-poverty” of animals mean? Heide-
gger reminds his hearers that he will answer by practicing “phenomenol-
ogy” – a “kind of seeing and comprehending which is alien and burden-
some for the ordinary understanding,” a “questioning and comprehending
[…] before all argumentation” that was “brought back to life – and that
always means radicalized – through Husserl” (Heidegger 1995, 232).
Heidegger takes up the essence of the animal in order to understand
human being (1995, 169-73), and he applauds contemporary biology for
resisting reduction to the “regional ontological” categories of physics
(188). But what sort of regional ontological categories pertain to life?
Though “we cannot separate metaphysics and positive research” (189), a
metaphysics of life must nevertheless not abdicate its own stakes by
becoming a biological (or zoological) worldview. Heideggerian phenom-
enology approaches the question of life through the idea of “transposi-
tion,” which he explains by contrast with “empathy” (202-6). If empathy
is meant to bridge a certain distance between my consciousness and that
of my fellow human being, empathy itself already rests on transposition,
our “being able to go along with the other being while remaining other
with respect to it” (203). As Mitsein, my being in the world always already
includes transposition “into” others with whom I am. Does the same hold
for non-human animals? Does the fact that we are already transposed into
other human beings, together with the fact that human beings are living
beings, mean that “transposedness into animals, into living beings gener-
ally,” belongs “to the essence of the human being” (209)?
Yes and no. On the basis of “life” the “animal […] allows and invites
human transposedness into it, even while refusing human being the pos-
sibility of going along with” it. This refusal is the animal’s “poverty” of
world, its “having and yet not having” (Heidegger 1995, 210). If, as
Heidegger admits, we can “grasp this poverty only if we first know what
world is” – thus, in a privative way that is “tacitly oriented toward

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 221

human being” – this should not preclude a certain phenomenological

attempt to elucidate the “essence of poverty in world” positively “by clar-
ifying animality itself” (211). By exploring what it means to say that the
animal both invites and refuses our transposedness, then, Heidegger’s
phenomenology poses the question of whether the categories of life are
adequate for understanding world.6
Heidegger approaches the concept of life through the concept of
organism and the concept of organism through the concept of organ.7
An organ, which has a “capacity” (Fähigkeit) for serving some function,
differs from a tool, which is available to serve some function. A pen’s
being “ready” for writing is not a capacity for writing since in order to
function the pen must be employed according to a “prescription” (Hei-
degger 1995, 228) that derives from a Bewandtnisganzheit or “world”
(215). An organ, in contrast, requires no such Bewandtnisganzheit; rather,
its function is prescribed – and thus its very being as an organ is consti-
tuted – through its incorporation in an organism. It is “the organism
which has capacities,” while the organ itself “is possessed by a capacity”
(221-2). Heidegger illustrates this with reference to unicellular organisms
whose organs are “temporary,” the same “aperture” serving first as a
“mouth, then a stomach, then an intestine and finally an anus” (234).
The basis for this differentiation of capacities in an organ resides in
the organism’s being governed by a “drive” or instinct (Trieb), which
“has always already anticipated its possible range of achievements” (Hei-
degger 1995, 228). The prescriptive character of the organism’s drive is
the essence of the organism and, more generally, the essence of “life”
(235); an organism’s “selfhood” consists in this sort of being-a-capacity
of a certain kind. This point is fundamental for Heidegger’s account of
life, and before going further it will be useful to translate it into the
language of bio-posthumanist systems theory, thereby bringing into
sharper relief the phenomenological character of Heidegger’s posthuman-
ism. According to bio-posthumanism, what Heidegger calls the animal’s
capacity is best understood as a recursive code that operates to reduce
the overwhelming complexity of the animal’s environment. This, so the
argument goes, yields a “world.”
6
 For a general treatment of the ambiguity of the concept of life as it appears within
transcendental phenomenology and also in some of the latter’s critics, see Crowell 2014.
7
 The details of Heidegger’s discussion of animal life in the 1929/30 lecture course
are insightfully and reliably laid out in McNeill 1999. I shall note a few interpretive
disagreements with McNeill below.

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 222 Steven Crowell

§2.  Cary Wolfe’s bio-posthumanistic account of world

Bio-posthumanism does not begin as a direct imposition of biological
categories onto philosophy but as a theory-form that dispenses with phi-
losophy’s supposed foundationalist aspirations – whether rationalist or
empiricist – in favor of a governing distinction between “system” and
“environment.” The environment is not some given realm specified in
advance (e.g., nature) but is, paradoxically, the environment of a given
system (Wolfe 2010, xiv). Its “difference” from the system lies in its over-
whelming complexity relative to the conditions that define the system.
These conditions lie in the system’s internal code, its manner of reducing
that complexity through “selectivity” (14). What makes a system a system
is its self-reflexivity or recursivity – the way its outputs become, in turn,
inputs that provide the basis for new outputs (111). In this way, the
system can be called “autopoietic” or self-reproducing (xxiii).8 In addi-
tion, the code’s recursive character entails that such a system produces a
kind of openness to ever-new configurations, an “openness through closure”
(xxi). Since the environment is not a neutral given but includes the out-
puts of the system itself, the environment “enters” the system in the form
of an inner complexification that in turn provides the basis for new
modalities of the system – for learning, evolution, and development.
At the root of all this, however, is a paradox that has brought the
charge of solipsism upon systems theory: the distinction between system
and environment is one that is made within the system. To use one of
Wolfe’s examples: it is the legal system that establishes the distinction
between the “legal” and its environment (i.e., what is “other than” legal).
Its code ramifies into a system-immanent form of complexity (the various
sub-categories of the legal), but it cannot empirically determine the legit-
imacy of its initial coded distinction. Nor can it establish that legitimacy
internally, through a self-reflexive grasp of its own code.9 For Wolfe, this

8
 As used in contemporary debates, the term “autopoiesis” goes back to the work of
Humberto Maturana, especially through his collaboration with Francisco Varela. See,
for instance, Maturana and Varela 1992.
9
 “What this means is not only that all systems and all observations are self-referen-
tial; it also means that, paradoxically, the difference between self-reference and external
reference (or ‘hetero-reference’) is itself a product of self-reference, in the same way that
the ‘outside’ of the environment is always the outside of a specific ‘inside.’ This fact,
however, cannot be observed by the system that, at the same time, wants to use that
distinction to carry out its operations. That observation can only be made by a second-
order observer, using a different code […], which likewise must remain ‘blind’ to the

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 223

is what renders systems theory a theory rather than “philosophy,” which

imagines itself able to justify the initial distinction between what is
included and what is excluded through something like a rational grasp of
its own conditions of possibility (Wolfe 2010, xx-xxi). It is also the point
where systems theory joins forces with its “complement,” deconstruction,
which arrives at the same “impossibility” of self-grounding through its
notion of “iterability.” What is iterable (e.g., the recursive code) must
involve “the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and the event,”
an event that is heterogeneous to, “rather than simply opposed to, the
order of the ideal, the calculable, the pure, and so on” (12).
We need to move from these general considerations to something that
will bring us closer to Heidegger’s treatment of the animal, and the
bridge is provided by the concept of meaning. How is meaning under-
stood systems-theoretically? To begin with, one must recognize a “strict
separation of psychic and social systems as discrete autopoietic entities”
(Wolfe 2010, 19). The psychic system (mind, individual consciousness)
involves a code for reducing the complexity of the environment, thus
turning it into “information.” Information differs from mere stimulation
because, having been produced by the code, its environmental status has
been “virtualized” (18) – that is, it now includes “the simultaneous pres-
entation […] of actuality and possibility.” With this, it has become
“meaning” (16). Luhmann writes: “the totality of references presented
by any meaningfully intended object offers more to hand than can in
fact be actualized at any moment” (Quoted in Wolfe 2010, 16). But
meaning stultifies unless it remains open to the actualization of (some
of) those references, in the course of which it again becomes “informa-
tion,” something new. Crucially here, meaning is not limited to the
human mind. Not every system produces meaning, Luhman writes, “but
for those that do, it is the only possibility [for processing complexity].
Meaning becomes for them the form of the world and consequently
overlaps the difference between system and environment” (Quoted in
Wolfe 2010, 19).
But if meaning pertains to the psychic system, it also arises within the
social system in accord with the imperatives of the latter’s own autopoi-
etic code. That code is circumscribed by the concept of communication.

paradoxical nature of its constitutive distinction, which can only be disclosed by another
observer, and so on and so forth” (Wolfe 2010, 113). I shall argue for a different,
Heideggerian, account of what self-reflexivity involves in the final section of this paper.

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 224 Steven Crowell

Two psychic systems do not communicate with one another; rather,

there is a system (the social) in which meaning is a function of the way
that certain environmental events (say, gestures and noises) are coded
according to a tripartite scheme: information (“content”), utterance
(“behavior”), and understanding (“processing” the difference between
information and utterance) (Wolfe 2010, 22). Like meaning in the psy-
chic system, meaning in the social system involves virtuality, the demand
for the actualization of potentialities implicit in the communicative
event. These facts allow Luhmann to treat meaning as “the true ‘sub-
stance’ of this emergent evolutionary level.” Meaning is grounded nei-
ther in the psychic nor the social system – “it is impossible to find a
‘supporting substance’ for meaning” (20).
Thus the psychic and social systems are each internal complexifica-
tions of the autopoietic system of meaning itself, much as tax law and
immigration law are complexifications within the autopoietic legal sys-
tem: “Meaning supports itself in that it enables its own self-referential
reproduction. And only the forms of this reproduction differentiate psy-
chic and social structures” (Wolfe 2010, 20). Indeed, “meaning enables
psychic and social systems to interpenetrate, while protecting their auto-
poiesis” (21). It accomplishes this trick through language – something
that is neither psychical nor social but is “a second-order phenomenon
– a ‘type of symbolically generalized communication media’” – which
those systems use in the service of the first-order processes of meaning
(22). But this in turn entails a decision. The previously discussed differ-
ence between information and meaning within a system involves a cer-
tain sort of pragmatically determined “undecidability” (90) – namely,
the fact that for meaning to produce information it must carry, beyond
the actualization of an utterance, the horizon of possibility that belongs
to meaning’s virtuality. But this means that “the system must decide,”
i.e., “selectively process the difference between information and utter-
ance,” which is to say, understand (23).
At this point we find a further convergence between systems theory
and deconstruction, since language is not governed by any (social or
psychic) process. For Luhmann, the technology of writing, as opposed
to oral speech, “enforces the clear distinction between information and
utterance.” But Derrida’s reflections on “the trace-structure of writing/
communication” shows that the distinction between information and
utterance is “not limited to the domain of the human and linguistic
alone” but characterizes the “recursive, iterative dynamics of meaning”

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 225

as such (Wolfe 2010, 24, 25). All communication, including language,

and so also all thought, is thus bound up with the autopoietic system of
meaning that has emerged through biological evolution. And it is just
for this reason that thinking in terms of meaning must become “post-
humanist” in the precise sense that bio-posthumanism gives to this term:
an appeal to specifically linguistic forms of communication developed in
homo sapiens does not suffice to provide a “cut” between meaning-pro-
ducing and non-meaning-producing systems. And if that is so, then
there is no basis within the theory of meaning for distinguishing between
an animal’s “environment” and a human “world.” All is world.
From here it is but a small step to bio-posthumanism’s particular
application of deconstructive systems theory. For while systems theory
acknowledges no “nature or any other given anteriority” (Wolfe 2010,
xxiv), the removal of “meaning from the ontologically closed domain of
consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on” means that we (theorists)
can “recontextualize” our tired humanist conceptions of perception,
affectivity, and the like “in terms of the entire sensorium of other living
beings and their own autopoietic ways of ‘bringing forth a world’ – ways
that are, since we ourselves are human animals, part of the evolutionary
history and psychological and behavioral repertoire of the human itself”
(xxv). This assumption – that if we are not sovereigns within the “onto-
logically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on,”
then “world” can only be understood as one animal autopoietic code
among others – is precisely what Heidegger’s phenomenological posthu-
manism puts into question. For it should be clear by now that systems
theory and deconstruction can converge only because they attribute to
philosophy the sins of a certain Cartesian/Kantian (individualist) or
Hegelian (social) foundationalism, a project that is then easy to
“de-center,” since these two options neutralize each other. But are they
the only options available for grasping meaning philosophically?
The stumbling block for both Derrida and Luhmann is, as I will
argue, Heidegger’s phenomenology of care (Sorge), which Wolfe assim-
ilates to the “idealism” of Descartes (Wolfe 2010, 41). Doing so allows
him to dismiss Heidegger’s posthumanism and introduce bio-posthu-
manism’s omnibus concept of “subject of a life” (66). But while Heide-
gger would agree that meaning is anchored neither in the psychic system
nor in the social system as systems theory understands these, and while
Heidegger would also agree that meaning is “virtual” – i.e., the partly
determined but open-ended stakes of a decision – this does not mean

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 226 Steven Crowell

that the phenomenological specificity of meaning is adequately acknowl-

edged by the systems-theoretical approach. And if this is so, then we
cannot simply follow bio-posthumanism in its assumption that we who
are in a meaningful world are human animals.
To make this case we must return to Heidegger, and specifically to
his account of the animal as world-poor. In so doing we shall be exam-
ining the first of what Wolfe calls the “two finitudes” we share with
“other” animals – namely, the finitude of flesh, embodiment, and death.

§3.  The first finitude: life as captivation

Heidegger’s account of the animal contains something similar to the
idea of an autopoietic code. An animal’s “behavior” (Benehmen) is a
function of a species-specific autopoiesis – in Heidegger’s language, the
“capacities” that are set by its “instinctual drivenness” (Heidegger 1995,
237) – and such “driven performing” makes possible a certain openness,
a “being related to…” or “reaching out toward…” (240). This openness
or access is not to be understood as though the animal’s environment
(Umwelt) were a totality of things present-at-hand to which it would
have to adapt, a totality that would be equally available to other animal
species. Rather the environment belongs to the drive or code itself as its
specific “openness through closure” (Wolfe 2010, xxi). Following von
Uexküll, Heidegger holds that the “Darwinian” concept of adaptation
fundamentally misses the “essence of animality” (260, 277). Instead, the
animal’s driven behavior, which constitutes its “openness for…”, holds
it within a species-specific sphere or “ring” (Umring) – one is tempted
to call it a kind of being-in-the-world10 – and the “life of the animal is
precisely the struggle to maintain this encircling ring” (255, 257). Let us
examine these claims a bit more closely.
Heidegger’s term, borrowed from Max Scheler, for the “totality of
instinctual behavior” that belongs to the autopoietic code of a given spe-
cies is “captivation” (Benommenheit). Captivation describes the animal’s

10
 But one must not call it that. When Heidegger writes things like “The animal has
world. Thus absolute deprivation of world does not belong to the animal after all” (1995,
199), the context makes clear that he is proposing an interpretation (namely, that world
consists in “the acessibility of beings” [198]) which he will challenge and reject in the rest
of the text. In contrast, his considered view is expressed in the claim that “captivation is
the condition of possibility for the fact that, in accordance with its essence, the animal
behaves within an environment but never within a world” (239).

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 227

specific way of being open. In Heidegger’s terms, the animal does not
“apprehend” what is but is “taken by things” (1995, 242). The bee, for
instance, is not drawn to the flower’s nectar as such; rather, its instinctu-
ally driven capacity provides it with the “leeway” (Spielraum) in which it
can be “taken” by nectar. Instinctual capacities do this (in the language
of systems theory) through a reduction of complexity, allowing the animal
to receive information. In Heidegger’s terms, animal drive has an “elim-
inative” character (250): it excludes what is not relevant to the capacity,
thereby allowing the animal to be stimulated by what it is open to. “Stim-
ulus” is not a free-floating environmental cause but the correlate of the
animal’s drive, something that dis-inhibits the eliminative character of the
drive in question and thus calls forth a certain mode of the animal’s
behavior, the capacity that defines the functioning of its organs (253).
On this analysis, then, each animal species consists in the “ring” consti-
tuted by captivation in a drive-specific behavior that manages over­
whelming environmental complexity while allowing for a species-specific
“openness to…”. The bee does not occupy the same environment as the
earthworm, antelope, or homo sapiens; it is its surrounding-world and it
can communicate with other such surrounding-worlds only to the extent
that its drive structure or code allows for precisely such dis-inhibition.
Thus the animal cannot be identified with the organism in the narrow
sense at all – that is, with its body conceived as a discrete entity among
entities. Rather, the animal body, too, belongs to its “ring” as an organ of
its capacity, belongs within the animal’s being as a “unity of captivation”
(Heidegger 1995, 258). So the bio-posthumanistic idea that “embodi-
ment,” the “finitude of flesh,” has a single meaning across the biosphere
that can provide a touchstone for theory seems simplistic. What our
“scarcely conceivable bodily kinship with the beasts” (Heidegger 1993,
230) portends must be approached differently.
Heidegger engages in his lengthy account of the animal in order to
clarify the thesis that the animal is world-poor, but he is aware that his
account might suggest the opposite conclusion. For in recognizing the
unique sort of being of the animal – namely, the autopoietic ring and
its varied forms of “openness to…” – Heidegger notes that what he calls
“poverty of world” must not be understood in a “merely” negative sense:
“human beings may have nothing to compare” with the kinds of open-
ness available, say, to a bee or a dolphin (Heidegger 1995, 255). Yet
Heidegger refuses to say that each of these species occupies a world, and
he takes von Uexküll to task for believing that the human world can be

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 228 Steven Crowell

understood in terms of animality’s ring structure (263). But why? Obvi-

ously, if we take “world” to mean the sort of ring to which Heidegger,
in Being and Time, gave the name “being-in-the-world,” we can say that
animals lack certain aspects of that; but by the same token, human
beings lack the sort of world constituted by the drive structure of the bee
or dolphin. Heidegger himself notes that we can call the animal’s “dif-
ference,” its own form of “captivated openness,” a poverty of world only
“by comparison to the human being” (270), and he asks why on earth
we should treat that as the standard. Is man the measure of all things?
Here we find the pivot in Heidegger’s decision between humanism and
posthumanism.
Is there anything more to the distinction between Welt and Umwelt
or animal Umring than a difference among rings themselves? Heidegger’s
lecture course marks this transition in questioning by suggesting that a
proper analysis of world may itself “compel” us to see the animal’s “not
having” of world as “deprivation or poverty” after all (Heidegger 1995,
270). The parts of the text which subsequently carry out this analysis
might thus be construed as re-establishing a kind of humanism in which
a distinction within the general category of life accords a normatively
relevant priority to the human being. But this is not in fact how the
argument proceeds.
This is because Heidegger grants one of the premises of bio-posthu-
manism, namely, that homo sapiens is “transposed into the circle ring of
living things” (Heidegger 1995, 278). The regional ontology of nature
or life that emerges from Heidegger’s account of the organism includes
human beings. Nature is neither the “sum total of things present at
hand,” nor is it “the ‘basis’ upon which ‘humanity’ is raised up” as in
theological and traditional humanisms (278). Human life belongs to
nature; like the bee and the dolphin, homo sapiens has its own ring –
“living nature holds us ourselves captive as human beings” – and, like
them, we are transposed into these other rings in a way that refuses the
sort of “going along with” them that is available within our own spe-
cies-ring (278). And yet, Heidegger does not embrace bio-posthumanism
but insists on the “metaphysical” importance of a distinction between
world and ring. If world is not something by which “we” human beings
are “raised up” over life and nature, then being-in-the-world cannot be
ontologically equivalent to human being.11 As Heidegger begins to

 It is for this reason that I cannot agree entirely with the conclusions reached by
11

Chad Engelland in his excellent study of the 1929/30 lecture course, “Heidegger and

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 229

phrase it in this lecture course, being-in-the-world is the “Dasein in us,”

and the Dasein in us cannot be conceived as part of our instinctual drive
structure or autopoietic code. We who are in the world have never been
animals. There is an ontological distinction that “transcends” (308) the
ring-like openness of living things and so also the categories of life. But
for that very reason it is not something that could support the human-
istic trope of “man” as the measure.

§4.  The second finitude: comportment, meaning, and language

The previous discussion of the animal has suppressed the passages in
which Heidegger anticipates the decisive difference between the animal’s
ring and Dasein’s world. As Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes, the animal
has access to things, but it does not have access to them as what they are
(Heidegger 1995, 198). This is what it means to say that animals don’t
“apprehend” things but are “taken by” them. The form of openness that
animal captivation enables, its behavior, does not let the thing “stand”
or be “present” (252, 242). In contrast, human comportment (Verhalten)
– or rather, Dasein’s comportment – allows for encountering something
as something. To put it schematically, Dasein can encounter the rock as
a rock (that is, in the rock’s own being), whereas the lizard’s ring is
allowed access only to “lizard-rock” and the beetle’s ring is allowed access
only to “beetle-path” (198).12 The obvious question is: why on earth

the Human Difference” (Engelland 2015). If, as we saw Heidegger insist above, phe-
nomenology can only lead us to the point where the stakes of a decision become clear,
then Engelland opts for the view that we have always been animals, not that we have
never been: “As a condition for being open to being, Dasein must be an animal, even
though being open to being changes the meaning of animality” (2015, 189). However,
this does not seem to be Heidegger’s view in the text-passages we are examining. Engel-
land seems drawn to his choice in part because otherwise we seem faced, in thinking
about the entities that we ourselves are, with a dualism. Noting that Heidegger “briefly
flirts with dualism according to which the human body is part of nature while Dasein
transcends nature” (2015, 186), Engelland nevertheless concludes that “there is no hint
of substance dualism in Heidegger’s mature thinking on these topics” (190). That is true,
but there are other kinds of dualism besides substance dualism, and it is far from clear
that Heidegger’s thinking in his metaphysical decade is free from all of them. Showing
this, however, would require examining a number of other texts from this period, which
must be left for another occasion.
12
 McNeill (1999, 240) speculates that animals must be able to encounter things as
“something” (e.g., as food) but not as “beings.” I don’t think that this is Heidegger’s
view, but part of the issue may be merely terminological. If the “as” signifies that animals
occupy what systems theory calls the “virtuality” of meaning, then since this involves a
responsiveness to possibility as possibility, and since this seems not to be within the

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isn’t it just the same with the human being, who would have access only
to “human-rock” or “human-path”?
Our answer to this key question will turn on grasping the way that a
phenomenology of meaning requires a distinction that cannot be drawn
within the conceptual horizon of a metaphysics of life. At the same time,
we should recall a point noted earlier: Heideggerian phenomenology is
not oriented toward proving anything but toward bringing us into a
situation in which it is possible to decide (krinein) what is at stake in the
question (Heidegger 1995, 351).
Here we shall limit ourselves to three theses that govern Heidegger’s
reflection: (1) the as-structure or meaning is not grounded in language
(logos) but grounds language; (2) the “as,” expressed in the copula (a is
b), formally indicates the “dimension” in which this structure must be
grasped phenomenologically, namely, “the Dasein in us”; and (3) that
dimension is not an autopoietic system or animal ring but a kind of
“fundamental comportment” that makes the manifestation of beings as
such possible, together with a “fundamental attunement” that makes the
manifestation of beings as a whole possible. Together, these theses cir-
cumscribe what it means to say that “man” is “world-forming” (Heide-
gger 1995, 285) and show why, as Heidegger puts it, “consciousness”
(or the animal’s intra-psychic autopoietic system) is “not enough” for
world-formation (361).
Let us begin with Heidegger’s example of the as-structure. When I am
lecturing before a class I may experience the blackboard as badly posi-
tioned. In such an experience I do not merely have access to beings;
rather, beings are manifest as something – as a blackboard and as badly
positioned. If I express this now as “The blackboard is badly positioned,”
the assertion does not first establish the “as” but presupposes it: “The
statement ‘a is b’ would not be possible […] if it could not emerge from
an underlying experience of ‘a as b’” (Heidegger 1995, 301). The latter is
a kind of “apprehending that forms a unity” (314) which precedes and
enables the characteristic feature of assertion: its ability to be true or
false. Since Heidegger traces these matters back to Aristotle in the lecture
course, he can say that “the logos is grounded in nous” (314).

animal’s capacity, the animal cannot encounter things “as” anything. But if it only means
that the animal’s being “taken” by things involves the expression of differentiated capac-
ities, then certainly animals are open to things as food, as shelter, and so on.

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 231

Like Luhmann, Heidegger’s Aristotle sees language (logos) primarily as

communication: “Discourse gives something to be understood and
demands understanding. By its very essence it is turned toward the
free comportment and activity of human beings among one another”
(Heidegger 1995, 306). But for Heidegger, in contrast to Luhmann
(who here follows the tradition that Heidegger is criticizing), communi-
cation is secondary in relation to the original “apprehending which
forms a unity” (nous); that is, it is not an autopoietic social system. Both
systems theory and what Heidegger calls the “logical” tradition that
derives from Aristotle’s analysis of the assertion construe the “as” itself
as a function of the “is” of assertion, the copula. They thereby reduce
the unity involved to a formal relation between terms, and ultimately to
“a radically ahuman technicity or mechanicity” (Wolfe 2010, 88). In so
doing, logic understands the human being’s distinctiveness to lie in rea-
son as the ability to operate with these formal relations. But Heidegger
offers an alternative account in which the “as” becomes the “is” of pred-
ication only in communication, and reason (or nous) precedes logic.
This brings us to our second thesis, concerning the phenomenologi-
cal dimension that is formally indicated by the copula (Heidegger 1995,
291). While it is true that “a as b” is formally a relation, the notion of
relation is philosophically useless because it automatically posits both
“a” and “b” as entities present-at-hand. Phenomenology, in contrast,
will take this formal relatedness between a and b as an indication or
pointer toward “the decisive task of grasping the relation in terms of its
proper dimension” (293). What then is the proper dimension of the “as”
or meaning? In his earliest Freiburg lectures, what Heidegger here calls
“proper dimension” was termed the “evidence situation,” the concrete
first-person experience in which the specific sort of relation in question
could be “intuited in person,” in its genuine being.13 To succeed in
this formally-indicated task – to occupy the appropriate dimension or
evidence situation – is to think philosophically. To think, in this phe-
nomenological sense, is to go along with the kind of apprehending that
belongs to nous. In contrast to the logical tradition, which pays no
attention to the proper dimension and treats the copula as formally
empty, Heideggerian-Aristotelian phenomenology discovers in it an
inner articulation into what-being, that-being, and being “in the sense

13
 See Crowell 2001 (ch. 7) for an account of formal indication in terms of the
Evidenz-situation.

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 232 Steven Crowell

of truth” (326), an articulation whose unity derives from the dimension

of the “as.” Thus if the “logos itself is grounded in nous […] the appre-
hending formation of a unity” (314), thinking that aims to occupy the
dimension in which meaning, the “as,” belongs is thought thinking
itself, a “taking to heart”14 or going along with the way in which mean-
ing happens.
The details here can be controversial, even mysterious. Our concern
is not with them, however, but with Heidegger’s posthumanism, with
understanding the “Dasein in us” that emerges from the discussion. In
that regard it might well appear that Heidegger is merely repeating the
standard gestures of humanism, in which meaning and language are
grounded in nous (reason), which, as going along with the way in which
meaning happens (thinking), has the ability – denied to autopoietic sys-
tems (animals) – to grasp the conditions of possibility of its own func-
tioning. But while the conceptual relations here are indeed daunting, the
phenomenology is relatively straightforward and can be approached by
noting that Heidegger identifies nous with comportment. As an “appre-
hending which forms a unity,” nous belongs to all comportment (Hei-
degger 1995, 342), and it is through the phenomenology of the latter
– which Being and Time called the “for-the-sake-of-which” (Worumwil-
len) – that we come to understand the nature of nous as the dimension
of meaning.15
In contrast to the animal’s vital “behavior,” comportment is an exis-
tential ability that involves being for the sake of something. Let us return
to our example. I can experience the chalkboard as badly positioned
because I cannot do with it what I should do, namely, write on it in such
a way that students can see it. But I can experience the failure of my
ability to use it properly only because I am engaged in a certain kind of
comportment – that is, I am doing what I do for the sake of being a
teacher. This is not a skill or capacity but an existential “possibility,”
something the exercise of which requires that I am aware of myself as
possibly succeeding or failing. Comportment is thus a kind of norm-gov-
erned trying to be. In exercising my ability to be a teacher I am trying
to live up to the standards that constitute what it is or means to be a
14
 Heidegger’s translation of noein in What Is Called Thinking? (Heidegger 1968,
207). The German (Heidegger 1971, 172) reads: “nous bedeutet das Sinnen, das etwas
im Sinn hat und sich zu Herzen nimmt.” On all this, see Crowell 2016.
15
 For a more detailed account of how the for-the-sake-of provides the ontological
ground of intentionality, or the as-structure, see Crowell 2013.

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 233

teacher, and were I not normatively oriented in this way, the board could
not present itself as badly positioned. According to Heidegger, no animal
tries to be a bee, a dolphin, or a “human,” though all three can succeed
or fail at doing what their drive structure provides them with a capacity
to do. Comportment, in contrast, is essentially oriented toward a measure
of success or failure, however indefinite that measure may be – some-
thing that I can try to live up to. And it is only because comportment
involves this normative aspect that beings can be there for me as such –
that is, as beings, as what they are and that they are in truth. Comport-
ment is the origin of the “undifferentiated manifold” expressed in the
copula (Heidegger 1995, 333).
The idea that comportment (nous) grounds meaning (the as) is central
to Heidegger’s distinction between homo sapiens and the “Dasein in us,”
and so also to the difference between bio-posthumanism and phenome-
nological posthumanism. From the phenomenological point of view
assertion, the sort of speech that can be true or false, depends on com-
portment. As a doing that incorporates a norm, assertion is possible only
within the dimension of something we are trying to be. Hence this
ability is not a “capacity” and cannot be conceived as a function of the
human animal’s autopoietic code (Heidegger 1995, 337). Heidegger
marks this distinction with the term “freedom.” Dasein’s comportment
is “being free for beings as such,” precisely because its own being is nor-
matively at issue in what it tries to accomplish.
Bio-posthumanism calls such being-at-issue the “virtuality” of mean-
ing: the fact that any intended object involves a horizon of possibility
and is thus the “simultaneous presentation of actuality and possibility”
(Wolfe 2010, 16). But it traces this phenomenon to an autopoietic code
whose norms (if they are norms) cannot become an issue within the
meaning-system. According to Heidegger, however, if the measures
essential for the sort of horizonal possibilities that attend the presenta-
tion of an object cannot be explicitly at stake for the system itself, then
it cannot be a system of meaning at all. The kind of possibility required
for the experience of something as something demands freedom, a “hold-
ing oneself toward whatever beings are given and a letting oneself be
bound” (Heidegger 1995, 342). Such freedom is not a mysterious faculty
that lifts us out of the causal order; it is “being open for beings” by way
of beholdenness to normative measure as normative. Freedom in Heide-
gger’s sense is always bound, but such binding is altogether different
from the autopoietic captivation of the animal. “World” is the difference

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 234 Steven Crowell

between a normatively bound apprehension of beings as such and a

captivated “openness to…”.16
The force of this point can be seen if we return to Heidegger’s anal-
ysis of the assertion. The assertion “a is b” is an assertion only if, in
asserting it, I am oriented toward the possibility of truth or falsity – that
is, oriented toward a normative distinction in which things in the world
are acknowledged as measures of what I say. But how is that possible?
How do things become measures? An autopoietic system can encounter
“interference” – or, in Heidegger’s terms, life, as captivation, can be
taken by things in ways that stimulate its capacities – but it lacks the
resources to virtualize its environment by means of measure. Thus it
lacks a condition for meaning (world). Dasein’s comportment provides
the missing condition. The particular ability to make an assertion (a
“pointing out that can be true or false”), for instance, relies on comport-
ment (nous), a “conforming to… and a being bound to…” such that
“what this binding binds itself to, namely beings, are announced in their
binding character.” Comportment thus accomplishes the kind of leeway
(Spielraum) that makes room for assertion’s peculiarly norm-governed
relation to beings as measures of truth or falsity (1995, 339).
This can be illustrated by returning to our example to show how
comportment gives rise to the inner articulation of the copula. We have
already seen that the chalkboard can present itself as badly positioned
only because I am trying to use it for the sake of being a teacher. Trying
to be a teacher requires that I am free, i.e., able to “let myself be bound”
by the measures of teaching (Heidegger 1995, 342). But in letting myself
be bound in this way, this “giving of measure” is necessarily “transferred
to beings in advance in accordance with the comportment [being a
teacher] that lets itself be bound, so that conformity or non-conformity
is regulated according to beings” (342). Thus, the board can show up as
badly positioned because the beings that belong to the leeway of teaching
have a very specific, norm-governed, virtuality or horizon of actuality/
possibility. Blackboards are supposed to be this or that way; their what-be-
ing provides the measure. This one (that-being) fails to live up to that
measure, not through any fault of its own but only because I have let
myself be bound by the measures of teaching. Finally, my assertion that
the board is badly positioned sets the thing’s truly being badly positioned

16
 See the excellent discussion of Heidegger’s concept of freedom in Golob 2014,
esp. ch. 5.

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 235

as its measure: the thing itself (being in the sense of truth) measures my
comportment because in assertion what is at stake is pointing out the
thing as it is in truth; this is part of what is at issue in what I am trying
to be. Since comportment – all comportment – binds itself to a norma-
tive distinction between success and failure, Heidegger can call it a
“pre-predicative manifestness of beings, a pre-logical truth” (341).
Heidegger’s account of meaning thus turns on something that alto-
gether eludes systems theory’s concept of the psychic system, namely, the
first-person orientation toward measure. The “inner possibility of the
as-structure” (Heidegger 1995, 335) rests on comportment. Comport-
ment involves being for the sake of something, in which the human
being “holds himself together with other things in a way that allows him
to come into agreement with them” (308), to apprehend them as what
they are. This agreement is not simply given, however: in holding myself
together with things in my comportment, I can fail to apprehend them
as they are. All this explains why Heidegger can say that “being and
the as have the same origin” (333): the normative beholdenness of com-
portment is the “common root” of both (338), and it constitutes the
ontologically decisive difference between animal ring and world.
Thus in 1929/30 Heidegger does not locate the difference between
human beings and animals in the possession of language. Rather, he
locates it prior to language in a certain norm-governed apprehending
that forms a unity. Meaning, the basic characteristic of world, just is this
kind of apprehending. In contrast to the “indicative” structure of animal
communication, language derives not from a psychic or social autopoi-
etic system but from comportment, “the Dasein in us.” And because the
Dasein in us has never been animal, it is not exposed to the second
finitude that bio-posthumanism claims is ignored by the phenomeno-
logical tradition: meaning’s subjection to the play of iteration and sign,
the “ahuman technicity and mechanicity” of semiotic systems.17 Of
course, Dasein’s communication, its employment of signs, cannot avoid
the constraints of semeiosis; comportment does not serve to “fix the ref-
erent” beyond all play of signifiers. But this does not undermine the
phenomenological point that the orientation toward measure in a being

 In contrast to the phonocentric picture criticized by Derrida, Heideggerian

17

­ henomenology holds that it is not the case that “man has vocal utterance that in addi-
p
tion has a meaning connected to it” – say, by some inner intention of consciousness.
Rather, “it is because our essence is apprehending [nous, i.e., the freedom in comport-
ment] that our utterances have meaning” (Heidegger 1995, 307).

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 236 Steven Crowell

whose own being is an issue for it is the ground of an ontological differ-

ence between animal environment and world.
But if orientation toward a norm features in all comportment – i.e.,
if freedom to (try to) be something belongs to Dasein as such – this still
does not tell the whole story of how the “is” and the “as” arise with such
comportment, since the origin of the undifferentiated unity expressed in
the copula (the meaning of “being”) cannot be traced back to some
specific comportment such as trying to be a father or philosopher.18
Rather, the manifestness of beings “as such” and “as a whole” (world) is
grounded in a fundamental comportment and a fundamental attunement.

§5.  Conclusion: the ontological difference19

In Being and Time Heidegger had analyzed “fundamental comport-
ment” as existential death, Dasein’s radically first-personal ability-to-be
“I-myself” even when its ability-to-be something (teacher, father) breaks
down. In the lecture course he calls this ability to be I-myself “being free
in an originary sense” (Heidegger 1995, 343). Originary freedom is com-
portment guided not by the measures of some specific identity but by
responsibility for measure as measure. Being responsible for being is what
it is for there to be Dasein; it provides the “measure for all measure-
ment” (346). For this reason, it is the basis upon which what is can
appear as beings (beings as such). And to occupy this dimension of the
as, of responsibility, explicitly – the fundamental comportment of orig-
inary freedom – is to “take upon ourselves the effort to transform human
being […] into a more originary existence”: the Dasein in us (350).
Thus phenomenological posthumanism conceives neither human being
nor Dasein as the measure; rather, Dasein is beholden to measure which,
precisely as measure, transcends its “power.”20

18
 In an interesting passage Heidegger mentions what seems to be an implication of
his analysis – namely, that there was no Dasein (understanding of being) before human
beings began to philosophize. But he rejects this (1995, 355).
19
 For further elaboration of the points sketched in this concluding section see
­Crowell 2013 (esp. Part III), and Golob 2014, ch. 6.
20
 See the discussion in Being and Time: “The self, which as such has to lay the basis
for itself, can never get that basis into its power” (Heidegger 1962, 330). Nor can the
measure be equated with being (Sein) itself, since “being and the as have the same
­origin,” i.e., comportment. The measure toward which comportment is oriented and
which transcends its power is thus “beyond being.”

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 237

This is also attested in the “fundamental attunement” that belongs

essentially with the fundamental comportment of responsibility. In the
attunement of Angst, beings as a whole become phenomenologically per-
spicuous in their peculiar “wholeness.”21 This does not mean that the
totality of entities is there for me as present at hand; rather, it means
that what is as a whole matters in some way to me “before taking up any
positions” (Heidegger 1995, 353). In contrast to the eliminative charac-
ter of the animal’s drive structure, fundamental attunement is a kind of
“completion,” the “prevailing” of world (351).
Heidegger makes this point by addressing an objection that genera-
tions of philosophers have since levelled at Heidegger himself. If I trace
the board’s being badly positioned back to my comportment (e.g., my
trying to be a teacher), isn’t this to make me the measure in the sense
that its bad positioning is relative to my own stance? Isn’t it to “subjec-
tivize” the meaning as which the being in question is addressed? Heide-
gger answers that it is not in relation to my location alone that the board
is badly positioned; rather, it is “in itself” badly positioned in relation to
the “whole” room (Heidegger 1995, 344). My trying to be something,
all by itself, does not establish world; rather, it is my trying, together
with the way things as a whole “prevail” or affectively matter that accom-
plishes this. Mattering discloses a sphere into which I am “thrown,” but
because such thrownness is inseparable from comportment, my sphere
or world cannot be seen as a version of the animal’s captivating ring.22
21
 Just as in all comportment beings “as such” are in some way at issue, so in all
attunement beings “as a whole” matter in some way. But this structure becomes evident
for the “system” (Dasein) whose structure it is only in certain distinctive comportments
and moods, which are therefore methodologically privileged. See Heidegger 1962 (228ff)
on the methodological distinctiveness of Angst. In 1929/30, of course, Heidegger traces
a similar, though not identical, theme in the phenomenological analysis of fundamental
“boredom.” Katherine Withy (2013) has provided a fine account of how this section fits
in to the whole “strategy” of the lecture course.
22
 For this reason, I cannot agree with McNeill’s suggestion that our attunement
attests to our own form of (animal) “captivation.” After quoting a passage in which
Heidegger claims that “attunement precisely makes manifest beings as a whole,” not as
an object but as “a way of being borne out into” that manifestness “of Dasein as such, as
it finds itself situated in the midst of this whole in each instance,” McNeill comments:
“The primacy of attunement in the disclosure of our own being entails that living nature,
in holding us captive [my emphasis], is never reducible to an object of theoretical con-
templation. Instead, it is that to which we are always already bound in advance; that
which binds us [my emphasis] prior to all our activities and actions” (1999, 236). But
nowhere in the cited passage (or anywhere else that I know of) does Heidegger say that
nature holds us (“our being,” Dasein as such) captive. He does say that nature holds us

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 238 Steven Crowell

Instead, fundamental attunement signifies that the measures to which

comportment binds itself and for which I-myself am responsible are
neither mere givens (das Man) nor mine simply to invent. They are
rather at issue in what I am doing within the whole that prevails.
The original unity of fundamental comportment and attunement –
the basis for the ontological difference between being and beings (as such
and as a whole) – explains why Dasein is not subject to the objection
that an autopoietic system cannot both operate in accord with its self-re-
flexive code and simultaneously identify the logic of that code’s opera-
tion. For the Dasein in us is not life or animality, operating in accord
with norms but not in light of them. Rather, as comportment, it is the
leeway in which all such coding or measure is at issue. For instance,
acting for the sake of being a teacher just is to try to live up to what it
means to be a teacher, to act in light of standards of teaching that are
“given” as at issue in what I do. Being an issue for itself is Dasein’s
“code,” if one insists on putting it that way. And thus neither the first
finitude of embodiment (death, suffering) nor the second finitude of
semiotic différance can get a grip on the Dasein in us. We Dasein have
never been animals.
What difference does this “ontological difference” make in regard to
the questions (above all, ethical ones) that motivate bio-posthumanism?
In what sense is this difference normatively more important (constituting
an abyss) than all the other differences that separate homo sapiens and
other animal species from one another? In answer, it should be said that
it is only normatively more important given the stakes of philosophy (or
“theory”). If what we had to do was find our way in the dark, then the
bat’s capacity for sonar navigation might well be more important than
the ontological difference. But if what is at stake is what we ought to
understand by ethics – by our responsibility for our behavior toward
others (including other animals) – then we are confronted by a question
of stakes and measures as such. And if Heidegger is right, such a concern

captives “as human beings,” but the relation between human being and Dasein is pre-
cisely the issue. (See my remarks on this matter in note 11 above). The sort of binding
to beings as a whole that belongs to attunement must, no less than the sort of binding
to beings as such that belongs to comportment, be thought in terms of the ontological
difference between homo sapiens and Dasein. We cannot treat what attunement discloses
simply as a kind of given, the mark of our “belonging” to “living nature;” nor can we
contrast this aspect of our being with another, “historical,” aspect. Dasein is not “the
historical animal” any more than it is “the rational animal.”

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 We Have Never Been Animals. Heidegger’s Posthumanism 239

is available only to beings with the structure of Dasein, beings who can
take responsibility for measure because, in their comportment, what it
means to be is (normatively) at issue.
To assert, with bio-posthumanism (following Bentham), that the eth-
ical question is not “can they talk or can they reason, but can they suf-
fer?” (Wolfe 2010, 81), is to take a stand, to decide (krinein) what the
measure of our being should be. It thus already operates within the
ontological difference and sets itself up as exemplary of how it is best to
go on in our treatment of animals. But the concerns that motivate
bio-posthumanism can in no way arise from the systems that it both
theorizes and deconstructs. To take “suffering” as a normatively relevant
consideration (and indeed an overriding one) is possible only for us who
have never been animals; we – the Dasein in us – cannot escape respon-
sibility through the expedient of a theory that would dispense with phi-
losophy altogether in order to pose critical questions to “us” in the name
of the “other animal.” Heidegger’s posthumanism comes both before
and after the human animal, and despite Heidegger’s claim at the end
of the lecture that “transcendental philosophy too must fall” (1995,
359), transcendental phenomenology is the only way to make sense of
these matters.
Department of Philosophy (MS 14) Steven Crowell
Rice University
6100 Main Street
Houston, TX 77005
USA
crowell@rice.edu

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