Talk About Hamming It Up...

From the reading I’ve noticed that Heidegger, along with many other Western thinkers of all sorts, really likes and subscribes to the idea that humans are special. Usually really special. The definition of “Da-sein” we used in class was “a being that has its own being as an issue.” It seems very evident to me that Heidegger only includes humans as qualifying in that category. This strikes me as a closed-minded or at least noticeably biased view. We touched on this a little bit in class, but we didn’t expound upon it that much. I see this belief asserted fairly often in one form or another, and I see it as kind of ridiculous. I think that being able to produce as a species iPods, 7-11’s and weapons of mass destruction has little bearing on our ability or lack thereof to contemplate our own existence. Now, I’m sure that trees don’t have much of anything akin to a consciousness, but I think it’s more reasonable to infer that other animals have some kind of cognizance of the fact that they are than that they don’t. We see animals of all kinds communicate in often incredibly complex ways, yet we don’t give much significance to what they might be saying, primarily I think because we have no way in hell of knowing most of the time. And we don’t like to talk about things we don’t know much about. There are plenty of other species that scientists and the like have determined through one method or another that they have a fairly high degree of intelligence—that lady in Africa taught sign-language to chimpanzees and gorillas, dolphins have been observed to play practical jokes on each other. If they are capable of that kind of sophisticated thinking, what precludes them from taking their own state of being into consideration? I would be really excited to talk to a giraffe about life or a goose about das-Man (das-Goose?). Something tells me that an elephant would make a decent philosopher. That would be so cool. I’m sure one of these days some scientist somewhere is going to figure a semi-coherent way to communicate with at least some animals on that level. I don’t know how it would affect my love of steak if a cow told me about having a bovine existential crisis. At very least I would raise an eyebrow and philosophize between bites of ribeye.