John Gray's Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, was published four years ago to wide acclaim. "[A] devasting critique of liberal humanism, and all of it set out in easy-to-digest (although hard-to-swallow) aperçus," said Will Self; i.e. readable yet no quite right. Here's an excerpt.

Heidegger's Humanism

Heidegger tells us that, by comparison with man, animals are 'world-poor'. Animals merely exist, reacting to the things they encounter around them; whereas humans are makers of the worlds they inhabit. Why does Heidegger believe this? Because he cannot rid himself of the prejudice that humans are necessary in the scheme of things, whereas animals are not.

The scheme of things (or beings), or the first question one needs to ask, for an ontologist like Heidegger is "Why is their something rather than nothing?". In that scheme of things, beings that ask the question are privileged, and all other beings fall in the other category, be they pandas, photons, or the Pedra da Gávea.

In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger claims to reject the man-centered thinking that has prevailed -- ever since the pre-Socratics, he tells us -- in Western philosophy. In the past, philosophers were concerned only with the human, now they should put the human on one side and concern themselves with 'Being'. But Heidegger turns to 'Being' for the same reason that Christians turn to God -- to affirm the unique place of humans in the world.

This is Gray's main thesis: humans aren't special. Sure, we're just another variation in the Higgs field, but it's one that's meaningful to me.

Like Nietzsche, Heidegger was a postmonotheist -- an unbeliever who could not give up Christian hopes. In his great first book Being and Time, he sets out a view of the human existence that is supposed to depend at no point on religion. Yet every one of the categories of thought he deploys -- 'throwness' (Dasein), 'uncanniness' (unheimlichkeit), 'guilt' (Schuld) -- is a secular version of a Christian idea. We are 'thrown' into the world, which remains always foreign or 'uncanny' to us, and in which we can never be truly at home. Again, whatever we do, we cannot escape guilt; we are condemned to chose without having any ground for our choices, which will always be somehow mysteriously at fault. Obviously, these are the Christian ideas of the Fall of Man and Original Sin, recycled by Heidegger with an existential-sounding twist.

It's surprising that Sartre is never referred to in this book, because this is a Sartrian reading of Heidegger, through Christian lenses. I has a teacher that could reasonably demonstrate that ultimately everything was about sex. And after two millenium of Christianity dominating the West, one can pretty much trace anything back to some Christian idea. But postmonotheists have more fun.

In his later writings, Heidegger declared that he had abandoned humanism in order to concern himself with 'Being'. In fact, since he sought in Being what Christians believe they find in God, he no more gave up humanism than Nietzsche did. Admittedly he is never clear what Being signifies. Often he writes as if it is altogether indefinable. But whatever Being may be, there can be doubt that for Heidegger it gives humans a unique standing in the world.

Heidegger is quite clear (certain) of what Being is in his own original sense. The problem lies in his originality, so that one cannot facilely say: Being means blah, where blah is some word we are all familiar with. There are critics that have taken the time and effort to understand Heidegger, and they are worth reading. And then there are the others, who--no matter how easy they are to digest--can't say anything meaningful.

For Heidegger, humans are the site in which Being is disclosed. Without humans, Being would be silent. Meister Eckardt and Angelus Silesius, German mystics whose writings Heidegger seems to have studied closely, said much of the same: God needs man as much as man needs God. For these mystics, humans stand at the centre of the world, everything else is marginal. Other animals are deaf-mutes; only through humans can God speak and be heard.

We need to turn this premise around. For Heidegger, Being is the site where beings are disclosed to humans. Or better: Being discloses beings to humans. That's the crux. Being is not a thing. And neither is God to mystics like Eckardt.

Heidegger sees everything that lives solely from the standpoint of its relations with humans. The differences between living creatures count for nothing in comparison with their difference from humans. Molluscs and mice are the same as bats and gorillas, badgers and wolves are no different from crabs and gnats. All are 'world-poor', none has the power to 'disclose Being'. This only the old anthropocentric conceit, rendered anew in the idiom of a secular Gnostic.

In the auxiliary notes in the back of the book, Gray refers the reader to Hans Jonas's The Gnostic Religion for more on the comparison between Gnosticism and Heidegger. Jonas may have been a student of Heidegger's, but his book only refers to his teacher once, noting an affinity in the notion of 'throwness' into this world.

Continued.  ¶ 5:21 AM