and concealedness. The sign of this essential exclusion is that no animal or plant "has the word."
This reference to the exclusion of the animal from the essential domain of unconcealedness introduces us to the enigmatic character of all living beings. For the animal is related to his circle of food, prey, and sex in a way essentially different from the way the stone is related to the earth upon which it lies In those living things characterized as plant or animal we find the peculiar arousal of excitability, by which the living being is "excited," i.e., stirred to an emerging into a circle of stimulatability on the basis of which it draws other living things into the circle of its activity. No excitability or stimulatability of plants and animals ever brings them into the free in such a way that what is excited could ever let the exciting "be" what it is even merely as exciting, not to mention what it is before the excitation and without it. Plant and animal are suspended in something outside of themselves without ever being able to "see" either the outside or the inside, i.e., to have it stand as an aspect unconcealed in the free of Being. And never would it be possible for a stone, no more than for an airplane, to elevate itself toward the sun in jubilation and to move like a lark, which nevertheless does not see the open. What the lark "sees," and how it sees, and what it is we here call "seeing" on the basis of our observation that the lark has eyes, these questions remain to be asked. In fact, an original poetizing capacity would be needed to surmise what is concealed to the living being, a poetic capacity to which more and higher things are charged, and more essential things (since they are genuinely essential), versus a mere hominization of plants and animals But in metaphysics man too is experienced as a living thing and as an "animal" in a larger sense, on the basis of reasons referring back to the way Being itself primordially reveals itself.
Since, in metaphysics. man is experienced and thought of as the rational animal, animality is then interpreted, against the measuring rod of rationality, as what is irrational and without reason, i.e., interpreted against human intellectuality as what is instinctual. In this way, in metaphysics and in its scientific repercussions, the mystery of the living being goes unheeded, for living beings are either exposed to the assault of chemistry or are transferred to the field of "psychology." Both presume to seek the riddle of life They will never find it; not only because every science adheres only to the penultimate and must presuppose the ultimate as the first, but also because the riddle of life will never be found where the mystery of the living being has already been abandoned.
Since Rilke's poetry, too, neither experiences nor respects the essential limits between the mystery of the living being (plant or animal) and the mystery of the historical being, i.e., man, his poetical words never attain the mountain height of a historically foundational decision. It