was solidified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: from the Greek ζῷον λόγον ἔχον to the animal rationale. This essential determination of man as the "rational living being" is just as distant from the Greek one as veritas and certitudo are from ἀλήθεια. As animal rationale, man is the "animal" that calculates, plans, turns to beings as objects, represents what is objective and orders it. Man comports himself everywhere to objects, i.e., to what stands over and against him. This implies man himself is the "subject," the being that, positing itself on itself, disposes of its objects and in that way secures them for itself. Rilke always thinks of man in this modern metaphysical sense. That current metaphysical conception of man is the presupposition for Rilke's poetic attempt to interpret the essence of man in the sense of modern biological metaphysics. Man is the living being that, by way of representation, fastens upon objects and thus looks upon what is objective, and, in looking, orders objects, and in this ordering posits back upon himself the ordered as something mastered, as his possession.
The concluding part of the elegy expresses all this unequivocally, and thereby attests that the distinction between man and animal, or more precisely the interpretation of the human being on the basis of the animal, is the all-encompassing theme of the poem:
And we spectators always and everywhere,
to whom all is turned and never out there!
We are flooded with it. We order it. It breaks down
We order it again and we break down ourselves.
The decisive words of these verses resound: "... and never out there!"—i.e., never into the "open" the "creatures" "see with all their eyes," for we can know about the "out there" and about what is "outside" "from the animal's visage alone." What does Rilke then mean by the "open"? According to the obvious meaning, when we think of the "open," we think of something opened versus something closed. And what is open and opened is "a space." The open refers to the essential domain of space even if we think of it as what has been brought into the light, in the sense of the disclosed and unconcealed. On the path of the thinking that thinks ἀλήθεια in its essence we will arrive at the point at which we will have to ask about the relation between the unconcealed and space. Must we think the unconcealed on the basis of the essence of what is spatial, or is what is spatial and all space founded in the essence of ἀλήθεια as primordially experienced? In any case, the open refers to what is spatial. Rilke's talk about the "never out there" and the "what is outside" also refers to this domain. Moreover, the elegy says: