In-der-Blog-sein

Noetic Muse explains how To Love the Truth:

Heidegger liked to define man as the being that asks the question of being. We are the only ones in all of nature that poses questions to reality, as if it had some meaning that was hinted at everywhere.

Indeed. Heidegger also calls out other distinctions from animals that make humans unique. In the Letter on Humanism he notes that language is peculiar to humans.

Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are not placed freely in the clearing of Being which alone is "world," they lack language. But in being denied language they are thereby suspended worldlessly in their environment. Still, in this word "environment" converges all that is puzzling about living creatures. In its essence, language is not the utterance of an organism; nor is it the expression of a living thing. Nor can it ever be thought in an essentially correct way in terms of its symbolic character, perhaps not even in terms of the character of signification. Language is the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself.

And in What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger notes that only humans have hands

The hand is a peculiar thing. In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand's essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ that can grasp. Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs--paws, claws, or fangs--different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.

  ¶ 3:17 PM