Publication Details

Abstract

At the end of his lecture Das Ding Heidegger repeats his radical attempt at thinking of individual beings when he says: Each thing things in its own way. This surely is an extreme position in the context of the metaphysical tradition, which concentrates on the explication of Being as a universal ground of beingness. However, this statement could surprise also when put in the context of Heidegger’s thought, as he is foremost interested in rethinking of Being, or the world and time, that means a kind of wholeness, universality or a frame of all beings. To think the all-encompassing world and at the same time to preserve a unique meaning of each individual thing’s Being – this possibility alone would be interesting enough. It appears even more essential when animals are considered things among other things. Thus the nature of world is complicated twice: the world has to respect and bear the uniqueness of each individual thing’s Being, and as a human world, described from the human (phenomenological) perspective, it has to bear even the pressure of another (non-human, animal) world. In his lecture, Heidegger attempts to think the nature of the world through the optic of nearness. This paper attempts to address both of the abovementioned complications by means of this concept. It is the concept of nearness, which also enables us to explicate the alterity of animals and their world.