Beilage X: <World and We. Human and Animal Surrounding World.> (1934)

...[177]

On the basis of our understanding of humankind and its surrounding world, we gradually build up for ourselves an understanding that animals, animal beings, are like us subjects of a conscious life, in which, in a certain way, a "surrounding world" is also given in existential certainty. The subject-being is related to the anima of such entities. Its conscious life, which understands in a purely animal fashion, is centralized, and in the talk of a "subject of consciousness," of conscious having, there lies an analogy or a commonality with the human ego of the cogitationes that correspond to this and that cogitata: for this, we have no adequate words.2 // 2. Generality corresponds to an apperecption that makes things similar (assimilation) - and thereby to a basic mode of intentional modification. // The animal also has something like an I-structure. However, the human being has an I in a special sense in contrast with that of all other animals: its I - the I in the ordinary sense - is a personal I, and with respect to this, the human being is for itself and for other persons. Insofar as he is a person among persons, however, he is, as the word person already indicates, not a person closed in on himself, but a person in the openly endless3 horizon of conscious humanity, a totality, a "we totality." //3. This "openly endless" does not signify a relation to always new co-persons in the sense of absolute iteration, infinity in the pregnant sense. It corresponds to a quantity which for the subject has no indicated final member, and therefore no "completion" (of course, not in the mathematical sense); thus a humanity naturally constituted in this way is for the person not a factually given totality of those with whom one is familiar, but an indeterminately numerous totality. //

Every human being, insofar as he lives in his own world-consciousness, or insofar as he is actually the I-subject for the world as what has certain being for him, is for himself a person in the endlessly open generative connection, in the uniting and branching of generations. He exists therein (as he knows), and indeed as the child of his parents, as he has matured from an upbringing by them and through the communicative co-subjects who mature and have matured for their own part, now themselves functioning as they are brought up along with him, understanding in a common way, their personal being co-determined in a mediate or immediate way with him, eventually becoming fathers or mothers themselves, and so on. The generative connection includes the newborn, or "young children" in general, so called embryos, who exist as the preliminary stages for the understanding of real children. Real children, who are pre-persons as stages for the mature, who signify completion-points for the type "person." They have already become conscious of something of the real surrounding world (with the exception of the embryonic stage), but not the full meaning of a world "for us all," a world related to humankind. It is difficult to express precisely: this personal being, which is still not a completely actual personal being, is rather the first stage in maturation. This remains to be more closely stated.

First, however, we should emphasize: we and our world, what has being-certainty for us, does not refer to the fully concrete (psychophysically understood); excluded therein are children, on the other hand the mentally ill and the ill in general, as long as they live in anomaly...

Now how do we circumscribe the unity of "one" humanity and its surrounding world. How is an always already consciously constituted personal totality as an innerly real personal connection in the form of totality constituted for me as person, and for my co-persons, and how does this total subjectivity for the world contrast itself with the world itself in which all subjects exist as embodied mundane realities, psychophysical realities, in which the personal is localized as soul, is temporalized in the spatio-temporality of nature, of the natural world? How are personal time and real-natural time contrasted? Of course, monadic time as the form of the monad-totality transcendentally corresponds to the time in its constituted world - with its remarkable duality of the personal and the real, whereby however, it is to be noted that correlatively to the connected totality of persons, which still does not encompass all human persons, as divided among various humanities and surrounding worlds as "foreign" to one another, the transcendentally corresponding monad-totality is also a special totality.

However we also see that here that yet to be considered transcendental problematic is opened: thus just as humanity is not a mere being-next-to-one-another, so long as we do not regard it in the orientation toward realities but in the personalistic orientation, just as the relationship between the domestic and the foreign is an intentional relationship of validity which must lead to unification in a supra-nation, so in transcendentality there lies a problematic intentional membership in an (itself already constituted) monad-being, and in each as domestic [heimlich] functioning monad-totality which contains a tendency toward the advancing constitution of one of its alien [totalities] which lies in connection with it in a supra-domestic totality, as a domestic totality of a higher stage. And thereby the constitution that advances from ones own territory to a supra-domestic continuous nature with an organic-animal world. Above all, that concerns the constitution of a total-monadic time and of the one real time, space-time, both in their constitutive infinity. And the ultimate meaning of this infinity and this transcendental as well as human-personal process?

Humanity as the "highest animal species," zoological-subjective.

The generative connection of human beings, like animals, in a species, and then the phylogenetic continuity of all animal species connecting into a generative unity, the unity of a descent, finally that of organic being in general; the biophysical follows, but also the biopsychical.1 // 2. But also the purely psychic, the purely "monadic" - this word is not now understood in a transcendental sense. //

On the other hand, another generativity or "descent," that of humans, of personal beings is specifically excluded. The human as person living among persons, binding itself deliberately with them in personal fashion and always bound as a maturing person of course, personal connections as parts and layers of higher level natural connection, finally culminating in a total connection, that of human folk [Menschenvolk].

Here is the fundamental problem. Regarded in a purely spiritual relationship, animal community, animal psychic life lives in its "surrounding world," each species in its specific surrounding world. Each unique animal has its own "spiritual" development from embryonic beginning to maturity, and in this a world that is consciously given to it, that is existent for it, builds itself up. However, it does not mature into a person, and the surrounding world is not a human surrounding world; in other words, the human is not merely a special kind of animal, only different, so that the usual distinction between lower and higher animals in general obtains. One can only say this much: in the human surrounding world and in the human being as its subject, there is an abstractly distinguishable layer in which it is like the animal, in other words, a layer in which community with the animal can perhaps be brought into relief (which requires further investigation).

Let us briefly compare the animal and the human being (both come forth in the human surrounding world and are understood as subjects of their valid surrounding worlds): the human being as person is the subject of a cultural world, whose correlate is the personal community, in which each person knows, and thereby knows in relation to its humanity, the cultural world in which he lives. The animal does not live in (or know) a cultural world. This obviously implies the following: the human being is an historical being, a history creating being; it is a subjectivity as the bearer of the historical world, an expression which does not mean: the historically living, history-constituting life, but the environmental correlate designated as human surrounding world, surrounding world of human beings, of the total humanity and the spiritual significance that it bears within itself, as the title of an ontic creativity of realities and their ontic historicity, as having their significance from human acts, human interests, purposes, systems of purposes.

Every animal generation in its communalized present repeats its specific surrounding world with the type that belongs to this species. A human cultural world is in continuous development; the culture of every human present is the ground for the new culture-creation of this humanity, we can also say, its premise. Purposeful formations are born creatively in the world as their purposeful sense; in it they understand in their motivations, new purposes on the ground of the old, in other words, as their forms of fulfillment. Although the cultural face of the world has a type which appears concretely repeated or to be repeated in certain ways, it is still true that for human beings tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. In the unitary human time, times are really fulfilled times, fulfilled with realities that are purposefully formed in the present. The concrete typicality transforms itself in repetition; it expresses many concrete types, although these changes proceed in such a fashion that a general total type of the surrounding world and of human social existence remains contained in it.

Human works are thus imagined in advance and are actively brought into existence as actualizations of humanly posited possibilities. The human being has projects, he has choices among posited possibilities and he decides himself in favor of the one that seems to him to be the best. He binds himself with others in communal acts, in a communalization of willing and its goals which are purposes for him, individual (private) and communal purposes, social purposes, etc.

The animal embodies communal "instincts," its act is instinctive, the communalization of striving is instinctive. Bees do not act, bees have no purposes, the bee swarm is no purposive community, it does not exist in the unity of a life, like human purposive life which has its bearers in subjects, which posits its habitual purposes and repeatedly views its goals in functions as these are identified, and so on.

An animal does not create in the unity of its life a system of spiritual acquisitions, which it experiences as a development; it does not have its unity as one that belongs to the generations that span time as historical time, or the unity that extends through the world; it does not "have" the world consciously. The chain of infinite succession and branching of ant-generations etc. has ontic validity in our world, the world of human being. The animal itself has no generative world in which it lives consciously, no conscious existence in one open infinity of generations and correlatively no existence in one proper surrounding world which we humans attribute to it in humanizing fashion.1 // 1. Of course, there are first of all the indications for the actual clarification of persons and humanity with their human surrounding world. We must attend, then, to the clarification of the finitude of a humankind and to the distinction between domestic and foreign, between our humankind, our folk and that of others (to us foreign humanity), further still to the relatively unified groups in a humanity with we-others.

From there we then proceed further to the anticipation of the linking of surrounding worlds in "infiniteness" and the constitution of supra-nations and values on the ground of "empathetic" values, always from one's own outward; the problem of infinity and the Idea of an infinite world as the Idea of a universal being-in-itself - universal in the infinity of exact nature and the humanity related to it, in the fashion of one humanity and one culture in the infinite. But in opposition to this, actual humanity, earthly humanity, and its fate, its contingency.

a) Science in the first sense; b) science in the second sense related to infinity, as naive construction; c) science in the third sense, absolute science. Just so: a) natural-first finite life; second under direction of first science; third in horizon of infinite nature; fourth in transcendental horizon. //

We find animals in our world by means of an empathy which is an assimilating transformation of empathy with other humans. But the assimilation with human subjects of course concerns first of all the understanding of animal corporeality as such and so in general the fundamental level of empathy in which co-humans are constituted as living with us in a common surrounding world. What the empathizing I must necessarily have as its own in order for empathy in general to occur is precisely this "fundamental level." The assimilation of the foreign bodily organism as living body, which is like mine, the apprehension of the organ-system as a system of perceptual organs and practical organs, through which perceptual surroundings are there for the animal, and as a unitary field of identical things, each a unity of modes of appearance; but equally the recognition that these modes of appearance are only similar to those which I and every human being have and which are communicatively exchanged in the experiencing of fellow humans, and are given in the underlayer of a humanly common nature, a universe of unities of appearance, unities which are not only mine, but are for us all communalized modes of appearance, actual and possible ones. This entire human system and human nature is already presupposed, in which we experience animals as animals, in which we can achieve empathy as perception of animals. The primally generative development of the human being in which he first comes to self-consciousness and consciousness of his surroundings, in which he first awakens to "I and world," produces this first I already as the I of a we and the surrounding world as what is common to this we. The others are not mere reduplications of the I, the assimilation requires continually rectifying modification, and from the beginning the others are understood as analogues in an indeterminate generality with an individually typical core. But the modes of appearance of things themselves belong to that, and the horizons themselves have in certain ways their concrete typicality and are "sketched out" in it. Precisely these are modified in certain ways in the accomplishment of empathy with an animal existent. Therefore what the animal actually experiences (according to its species) is not entirely what we experience. However, they are the same things which are perceived in their ways, which are assimilated; they are appearances of the same things, which are transferred to the active I through the analogous body, and which thereby moreover remain constant in the required analogy and are not eliminated in the modification. For each animal species a modified type of "I and surrounding world," for me indeed "we humans and surrounding world," thus the animal I in us. We humans are already emphasized in the we, that we have the same bodies in concretely typical ways, and in our constitution as I and we, are already able to constitute this generative origin in this typical corporeality: I am already in self-consciousness as the I of this typical corporeality: I am already in self-consciousness as the I of this typical body; I have from the first already my co-human horizon in the typicality of my family, etc. and my body has already the ontological meeting of a general type for us all.

Problem of animals: the animal is a new, a different subject, but different than humans, lions among lions, and so on analogous to the way in which we humans are among humans. In other respects, living in the world, in the lion-world, constitutes itself through appearances in a unified fashion for lions, dwelling, having needs, fulfillments, having hunger and thirst, eating and drinking, having sexual intercourse with one another etc. - this is assimilated without further ado, to general human life in human generativity and surrounding world so far as the analogizing goes, subject to experiential confirmation.

But there are essential differences. Is the life of bees in their surrounding world generative like ours? We must ask whether, in the process of developing, bees are like us "children," whether they awaken to spiritual maturity in the world in a similar fashion. Or to consider animals that stand in closer analogy with us, mammals which are similar to us in their bodiliness as living corporeality: a fawn and the young of domestic animals, a colt etc., is it a child which a similar development makes like a human child? Biophysically - that presents no great difficulty, but what about psychically? we then happen upon the instinctive, which indeed plays a role with human and not only in childhood development, a constant role. Instinct is at first a name for externally characterized facts, but which has it unintelligibilities when observed from within. Where is the limit? Are bee hives in their "purposiveness" actually purposive formations, intelligible, purposively rational, products of "rational" goal-positing, calculation of means etc? The "bee state," the ant-state, the slave-holding of ants, ant-wars and so on - how do things stand with analogical interpretations, which lie in the use of words?

One can ask here: do animals (domestic excluded) have authentic recollection, intuitively reiterating, and do they have intuitive imaginary objectivations in the same sense as us?

Do they have horizons, which they can make intuitively clear like us? Do they have goal presentations, purpose-presentations, are representing pre-images of the future as one that can themselves be intuitively presented as satisfactions, as ends of a practical path?

Do there not instead enter dark drives with drive-fulfillments, which cannot be brought to presentation, namely in a renewed actualization of drives? In the original temporalization in the period of infancy of humans precisely of this kind, of this animal kind. How does the world-temporalization construct itself in the stream-temporalization, at first as the temporalization of hyletic content? Is there already in infancy an actual temporalization of entities?

Does the animal stratum have "inborn" thing-presentations, a world-presentation, manifold perceptual appearances normally bound together into a harmonious unity, on the other hand occasionally unharmonious, obstructing, where each single goal has the character of something obstructed: intentionality understood as pure driveness, driveness ordered to harmony.

Does the animal thus know nothing of the surrounding world, which we attribute to it in naive empathy? It has the past only as retentionality, and it has the selfhood of things only in the form of primary recognition; there is no return to the past known in recollection (as quasi-re-perception), and no identification of time- and place-positions, which makes possible the individuality of things as existing.

The animal does not have capacities through which it could have a consciousness, a knowledge of one existing world, a world of persisting things, persisting in time, in changes, causality of changes under circumstances etc., thus individual and at the same time unified through universal space-time; identifiability according to time positions and place-positions according to the past and the anticipated past-future. Becoming acquainted, projecting possibilities, willing, producing, effecting, etc; work, purposive formations, communication-formations, made communicable as repeatedly the same, all this is excluded. Animals have no "proposition" in the narrow or the widest sense - and they have no language.

With human beings it is the case that just one constant transformation of passive intentionality into activity is enacted from the capacity for repetition. Is that also real as an abrupt separation? How is it to be understood how the animal has no repeated intuitions as repeated perceptions and with the capacity of the "always again," precisely therewith no constitution of entities in the being-form of temporality? The human has "reason;" is the designation just mentioned the lowest level of "reason?" Man, the animal rationale, at first necessarily interpreted as "blind instinctive" intentionality, the purely drive-like, as constituting a surrounding world: as if the animal was in fact a kind of lesser human being, as if it also had entities, ontological nexuses, genuine purposes directed to entities and the pregiven surrounding world, and presentation of what ought to be; as if instead of its feelings which are mere modi in blind drive-life, it had human values, as if it were directed to values and goods.

But what about domestic animals? Are they not indeed actual analogues of humans, or personalities which actually exist in human form only very primitively, only incapacitated, as human children are in their beginnings before they develop further?

Psychology is therefore principally human psychology as psychology that rests first and authentically on experience. The psychology of animals however is purely reconstructive; it presupposes for the correctness of its constructions a, indeed an actually intentional, human psychology.