of ourselves being able to go along with the other being while remaining other with respect to it. There can be no going-along-with if the one who wishes and is meant to go along with the other relinquishes himself in advance. 'Transposing oneself into ...' means neither an actual transference nor a mere thought-experiment that supposes such transference has been achieved.
Yet the question remains: What does it mean to say here that we bring about the possibility of going along with the other by our being ourselves? What does 'going-along-with' mean? What is it that we are going along with and how do we do so? If we understand self-transposition into another being as a way of going along with this being, then it is obvious that the expression 'self-transposition' is still liable to be misunderstood in certain respects and indeed is quite inadequate with respect to the decisive aspect of the issue. The same is true of the term 'empathy' which suggests that we must first 'feel our way into' the other being in order to reach it. And this implies that we are 'outside' in the first place. The term 'empathy' has provided a guiding thread for a whole range of fundamentally mistaken theories concerning man's relationship to other human beings and to other beings in general, theories that we are only gradually beginning to overcome today. Yet just as the coining of a new word and its elevation to a key expression indicates the emergence of a new insight, so too the disappearance of such expressions from our language often marks a change in understanding and the renunciation of a former error. It is no mere willfulness or eccentricity if in philosophy today we no longer speak of 'lived experiences', 'lived experiences of consciousness' or 'consciousness' itself. On the contrary, we find ourselves forced to adopt another language because of a fundamental transformation of existence. Or to put it more precisely, this change transpires along with this new language. If today we give up using the term 'empathy', if we regard this talk of self-transposition into another being in a purely provisional and conditional manner and prefer a different way of talking instead, then it is not simply a matter of choosing a better expression to express the same opinion or the same thing. On the contrary, both the opinion and the matter in question have changed into something else. On the other hand, it is no accident either that expressions like 'self-transposition' and 'empathy' have come to play such a dominant role in describing man's fundamental relationships to beings. We cannot pursue the reasons for this here. Instead, after this provisional elucidation of what we properly mean by 'self-transposition', namely a going-along-with, we will proceed to elucidate the three questions: Can we transpose ourselves into an animal? Can we transpose ourselves into a stone? Can we transpose ourselves into another human being?
When we pose this first question: Can we transpose ourselves into an animal?, what is it that is actually in question here? Nothing other than this: whether or not we can succeed in going along with the animal in the way in