Living, Being, Thinging: Remarks on the Fate of the Animal in Heidegger’s Thought

This article offers an excursus on the evolution of Heidegger’s thinking on the animal, tracing the development of the philosopher’s thought from his early phenomenology of life and more mature ontology of existence to his later work that focused on the phenomenology of world. Following this trajectory, the article will discriminate between two distinct Heideggerian approaches to the experiencing, naming, and thinking of the animal. The first, which is tied to metaphysics and ontology, underdetermines the animal by interpreting it privatively with respect to the human, and as a living entity that is poor in world. The second expresses a phenomenology without ontology, and reinterprets the animal in light of a notion of world that is both pre- and post-metaphysical, thus characterizing it as a thing which gathers the world.