With all eyes the creature sees
the open. Only our eyes
do not see the open, not immediately. Man sees the open so little that he is in need of the animal in order to see it. The fifth and sixth verses say clearly:
What is outside we know from the animal's
visage alone ...
What Rilke means by the open cannot be understood or even properly questioned unless we see clearly that the poet is making a distinction between the animal or a-rational living being on the one side and man on the other. Guardini, on the contrary, interprets this elegy as if, on the basis of the relation of the "creature"—we should say ens creatum—to the "open," the poem is a sort of proof for the existence of a creating God.
The opposition of animal and man, a-rational and rational living being, is a distinction whose primordial form is to be sought among the Greeks. We are already familiar with this distinction from our previous remarks. Man is accordingly τὸ ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, that which emerges out of itself and in this emerging, and for its relation to the emerged, "has the word." The "animal," on the contrary, is that self-emergent to which the word is denied—ζῷον ἄ-λόγον. The essence of speech, however, is for the Greeks and still for Plato and Aristotle τὸ ἀποφαίνεσθαι—the letting appear of the unconcealed as such, which both philosophers express as τὸ δηλοῦν, the revealing of the open. Because he has the word, man, and he alone, is the being that looks into the open and sees the open in the sense of the ἀληθές. The animaL on the contrary, does not see the open, never does, not with a single one of all its eyes. Now the start of Rilke's eighth elegy says exactly the opposite. Does Rilke thereby bring about a reversal of the Western metaphysical determination of man and animal in their relation to the open?
The problem is that, as a fundamental condition of the essence of a reversal ("revolution"), whatever it is with respect to which the reversal takes place must remain the same and must be held fast as the same. And in the present case this condition does not obtain. For the open meant by Rilke is not the open in the sense of the unconcealed. Rilke knows and suspects nothing of ἀλήθεια, no more than Nietzsche does. Accordingly, Rilke is bound within the limits of the traditional metaphysical determination of man and animal. Specifically, Rilke takes over the form of this determination that arose in the modern age and