Oliver's treatment of the wide variety of thinkers derives from this basic distinction between Herder's policing of the borders between humanity and animality and Rousseau's acknowledgement of the similarities. Thus Heidegger attempts to keep these categories distinct in his 1929/30 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude by designating the animal poor in world (Weltarm) while the human being is world-forming (Weltbildende); for Heidegger there can be no hierarchy of being in which animal life slowly approximates human life. On the contrary, there is an unbridgeable abyss between human and animal, just as there was for Herder.

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