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8. Humanity as Shepherd of Being: Heidegger’s Philosophy and the Animal Other

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Heidegger and the Earth
This chapter is in the book Heidegger and the Earth
8 Humanity as Shepherd of Being: Heidegger’s Philosophy and the Animal Otherdonald turnerI. IntroductionA major debate in environmental philosophy concerns the question of how to think about the ontological and ethical status of non-human animals.1 This is a problem because, like us, non-human animals are sentient beings; in other words, they have subjective lives – a fact that would seem to require granting them special ethical status. Yet at the same time, the radical differences between their form of subjectivity and ours, especially in cognitive ability, leads some thinkers to regard non-human animals as mere tools, clothes, or foodstuffs. Martin Heidegger himself contributes to the confusion in his writing on non-human ani-mals; at times he describes animals as ‘poor in world,’ yet elsewhere he provides conceptual tools that help justify granting them more ethical status than this designation might seem to warrant.Nevertheless, these questions can be fruitfully regarded in light of Heidegger’s philosophy, which illuminates them in two fundamental ways. First, he provides new ways to think about the ontological status of non-human animals. Heidegger devoted more text than any other gi-ant of twentieth-century Continental philosophy to questions about the ontological status of non-humans, and his writings help ‘recover’ ap-proaches to these questions from their situation in most modern philos-ophy, both by rescuing these questions from the confi nes of dominant Western philosophical assessment and by ‘re-covering’ them with the cloak of mystery that has been stripped away by modern philosophy.Whereas modern philosophy assumes that it has completely exposed these questions with the clear light of objective reason, Heidegger in-sists that the answers such thinking provides are fundamentally lim-
© 2016 University of Toronto Press, Toronto

8 Humanity as Shepherd of Being: Heidegger’s Philosophy and the Animal Otherdonald turnerI. IntroductionA major debate in environmental philosophy concerns the question of how to think about the ontological and ethical status of non-human animals.1 This is a problem because, like us, non-human animals are sentient beings; in other words, they have subjective lives – a fact that would seem to require granting them special ethical status. Yet at the same time, the radical differences between their form of subjectivity and ours, especially in cognitive ability, leads some thinkers to regard non-human animals as mere tools, clothes, or foodstuffs. Martin Heidegger himself contributes to the confusion in his writing on non-human ani-mals; at times he describes animals as ‘poor in world,’ yet elsewhere he provides conceptual tools that help justify granting them more ethical status than this designation might seem to warrant.Nevertheless, these questions can be fruitfully regarded in light of Heidegger’s philosophy, which illuminates them in two fundamental ways. First, he provides new ways to think about the ontological status of non-human animals. Heidegger devoted more text than any other gi-ant of twentieth-century Continental philosophy to questions about the ontological status of non-humans, and his writings help ‘recover’ ap-proaches to these questions from their situation in most modern philos-ophy, both by rescuing these questions from the confi nes of dominant Western philosophical assessment and by ‘re-covering’ them with the cloak of mystery that has been stripped away by modern philosophy.Whereas modern philosophy assumes that it has completely exposed these questions with the clear light of objective reason, Heidegger in-sists that the answers such thinking provides are fundamentally lim-
© 2016 University of Toronto Press, Toronto
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