the thesis has led us to our destination in a practical fashion. In spite of everything it has brought us closer to an elucidation of the concept of world. It is true that positively speaking we have still learned very little about the essence of world, and have only learned about the animal and its not-having of world, about its captivation. Consequently we have merely acquainted ourselves with the negative side of the matter. And yet we should consider the fact that we ourselves are the positive side, that we ourselves exist in the having of world. That is why, through that apparently purely negative characterization of world in our examination of the animal's not-having of world, our own proper essence has constantly emerged in contrast, even if not in any explicit interpretation. For we ourselves have also been in view all the time, whether we wanted to be or not, although not in the form of some arbitrary and contingent self-observation or in the form of some traditional definition of man. On the contrary, in all our investigations, which from an external perspective seemed to get lost in specialist questions, we enjoyed the constant possibility of recalling the Dasein within us as brought to light in a fundamental attunement. Or have we already forgotten this fundamental attunement in the meantime? Does it simply lie behind us like an episode, as something completely different that has not the slightest thing to do with unicellular living beings or the self-orienting behaviour of bees? Or does this fundamental attunement still attune us so that we constantly already question concerning the essence of world from out of this attunement; so that we looked into this fundamental attunement as we developed our question, i.e., in this context as we compared the animal's not-having o f world with our own having of world, with that ' as a whole' which profound boredom itself manifests to us? Perhaps, then, the supposedly purely negative characterization--our examination of the not-having of world-will only begin to exercise its full effect once we prepare to bring out the essence of world with respect to the world-formation of man.
Up till now we have only learned a little about the essence of world and nothing at all about the ground of its possibility; and certainly nothing whatsoever about the significance of the phenomenon of world in metaphysics. If that is the case then we have no right now, or at least as yet no right to alter our thesis that the animal is poor in world or to level it down to the indifferent statement that the animal has no world, whereby not having is taken as a mere not-having rather than as deprivation. Rather we must leave open the possibility that the proper and explicit metaphysical understanding of the essence of world compels us to understand the animal's not-having of world as a deprivation after all, and to discover poverty in the animal's specific manner of being as such. The fact that biology recogni zes nothing of the sort is no counter-argument against metaphysics. That perhaps only poets occasionally speak in this way is an argument that dare not be allowed to cast metaphysics to the winds. In the end we do not first require the Christian faith in order to