So, what is “proper”? First of all, the situation presented is “originary”, that is, the beginning or, not diminutively, the ‘childhood’ of human perception AS DETERMINED BY WORDS. But these are the words of other imposed upon the child’s own vision. Secondly, the term itself implies its answer. It is cohesive, integrated community throughout a person’s lifetime, of man as the political animal AND as the zoon logon echon, the animal that has speech. It is being-with where dogs are not allowed. “We keep domestic pets in the house with us, they ‘live’ with us. But we do not live with them if living means: being in an animal kind of way. Yet we are with them nonetheless. But this being-with is not an existing-with, because a dog does not exist but merely lives”, FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS, 210 [308]. This is NOT cited to put down Heidegger or place him in a bad stance. His concept of the animal mood of being “poor in world” is far too complex and shares the same ambiguity as “authen tic” and “inauthentic”, the casual reader automatically assuming the first is more “proper” than the second when it is the second that creates the first. The same with “animal”: we are an animal first and foremost, THEN we speak. We see first, we hear noise, THEN we begin to understand “words”. And having these “ words” is very far from having any guarantee at all that our experience of life is more “proper” and “sufficient”. In fact, again, the exact opposite is the fact of the matter. All of this is precisely relevant to what follows.

“We are an animal first and foremost.” It is ‘natural’ to think that the “world” understands you and grasps you better than you can yourself when you are a child. This goes well with Robert Burn’s

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us’

And foolish notion. To a Louse

(It is interesting in this connection to remember Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov’s ideological passion was not to discover whether he was a mere man or was “superman” but, rather, whether he was a louse or a superman by the ability to arbitrarily murder someone. The gulf is between being a tiny animal and being a ‘divinity’.)

When you are a child, you necessarily live in a real community of the kind Aristotle and Plato believed is basically ideal. This is, in part, how we should think of the REPUBLIC considering that classical scholars are clearly divided whether Plato meant it literally or ironically. Considering Aristotle’s hostile comments, he certainly took it as serious political statement. However, Aristotle also highly prized the cohesiveness of the political community making it a basic concept in the definition of being human as opposed to – “a beast or a god”, POLITICS, Book I, chapter 1, 1253a3-39. But consider how highly Aristotle esteems man through contemplation becoming like a god in the first book of the METAPHYSICS, 1, 982b25-983a11, and all of chapter 7 of Book X of the NICOMACHIAN ETHICS in which both references praise both man’s seeking to be divine through contemplation and also gaining the total self-sufficiency thereof which in the POLITICS throws man out of the community as making him unable or unwilling to be ‘political’ and therefore “either a beast or a god.” Aristotle’s seeming equivocation as to the clearly definite absolute division between political and self-sufficient man as beast/god is the same equivocation between zoon logon echon in Heidegger with the nature of being animal. What Heidegger is doing is trying to set up the visual possibility of seeing the difference between man and animal by showing that the animal viewed THROUGH language is necessarily “poor in world”, that is, language forms HOW we PROPERLY see the animal. Language actually has “privilege” INSCRIBED within its essence. But the Greeks had no word for language, and Aristotle constantly debates the privilege of logos being exclusively given only to man throughout his works. Language as such for Aristotle cannot possess that sense of ‘natural’ superiority so ingrained in “We moderns”.

In his lectures ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS È THETA 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Brogan & Warnek, Indiana, 1995, Heidegger makes it laboriously clear Aristotle thinks some animals possess krinein, “judgment” (chapter 2, all of §13, pages 99-110, “Concerning logos (conversance) and soul. The divisions ‘conversant/without conversance’ and ‘besouled/soulless’). In other works, Aristotle seems to deny this because animals supposedly cannot possess memory, or, at least, linguistic memory.