The lark (this symbol, in our poetic tradition, of the purest amorous impulse—one thinks, for example, of Bernart de Ventadorn’s lauzeta) does not see the open, because even at the moment in which it rushes toward the sun with the greatest abandon, it is blind to it; the lark can never disconceal the sun as a being, nor can it comport itself in any way toward the sun’s concealedness (just like Uexküll’s tick with respect to its disinhibitors). And precisely because the “essential border between the mystery of the living being (plant or animal) and the mystery of what is historical”6 is neither experienced nor thematized in Rilke’s poetry, the poetic word here falls short of a “decision capable of founding history,” and is constantly exposed to the risk of “an unlimited and groundless anthropomorphization of the animal,” which even places the animal above man and in a certain way makes a “super-man”7 of it.
If the problem then is one of defining the border—at once the separation and proximity—between animal and man, perhaps the moment has come to attempt to pin down the paradoxical ontological status of the animal environment as it appears in the 1929–30 course. The animal is at once open and not open—or, better, it is neither one nor the other: it is open in a nondisconcealment that, on the one hand, captivates and dislocates it in its disinhibitor with unmatched vehemence, and, on the other, does not in any way disconceal as a being that thing that holds it so taken and absorbed. Heidegger seems here to oscillate between two opposite poles, which in some ways recall the paradoxes of mystical knowledge—or, rather, nonknowledge. On the one hand, captivation is a more spellbinding and intense openness than any kind of human knowledge; on the other, insofar as it is not capable of disconcealing its own disinhibitor, it is closed in a total opacity. Animal captivation and the openness of the world thus seem related to one another as are negative and positive theology, and their relationship is as ambiguous as the one which simultaneously opposes and binds in a secret complicity the dark night of the mystic and the clarity of rational knowledge. And it
6. Ibid.; original, 239.
7. Ibid., 160–61; original, 239.