Extramundanity beyond the human: an animalist critique of Heidegger’s concept of world

Abstract

The following thought exercise begins with Heidegger's problematization of animality, attempting, based on the criticisms of authors such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, to account for the possible limitations of Heidegger's approach to non-human animals. To do this, it will be necessary to expose and rethink the metaphysical status of the animal in the face of the criticized valorization of the human in its anthropocentrism. The aim is to re-evaluate how the theme of animality was taken into the territory of metaphysical thought, specifically in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The exclusion of animal life has been a fundamental element in the very construction of the idea of man throughout the history of the West. The way in which the notion of the world is grounded in the theses of Heideggerian ontology reveals that Western metaphysics has mainly taught us to live within the spirit as a determination of man's humanity. On the contrary, in this article I argue that we should learn, like animals, to live outside the spirit, potentially qualifying its non-place in fundamental ontology as extramundanity.