to us only indirectly, in the strangeness of the fact of the world and its worlding.
Let me put the point in the vocabulary of alētheia. Lēthē is the positive term presupposed by the privative phenomenon of alētheuein, the happening of unconcealing. Unconcealing takes place as a struggle with lēthē, in which lēthē is overcome. Heidegger’s analysis of angst claims that there is a mode of unconcealing in which that unconcealing turns back towards the overcome lēthē. But, rather than uncovering that lēthē—which, after all, it cannot do without destroying it—unconcealing encounters it indirectly in the surprise and wonder at its own victory over lēthē. Disclosing’s attempt to access its other yields only marvelling at itself.
The second best access to lēthē is through the animal, which dwells in lēthē. As we saw in §12, we cannot access lēthē directly through the animal but can reach it through a ‘privative interpretation’ (SZ: 50): we try to subtract our own disclosing from ourselves in order to encounter the lēthē that the animal dwells in.3 (This lēthē is qualitatively the same as, but not numerically identical to, the lēthē that precedes disclosing, as I argued in §12.) In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger calls his method for accessing the animal’s being ‘transposition’. Transposing ourselves into the animal is possible because we have a world and the animal both ‘has and yet does not have world’ (FCM: 210/GA29/30: 309). This is to say, as I have put it, that the animal has a world-analogue. This world-analogue allows us to transpose ourselves into the animal—yet only within limits. ‘The animal displays a sphere of transposability or, more precisely, the animal itself is this sphere, one which nonetheless refuses any going along with’ (FCM: 211/GA29/30: 309). We can transpose ourselves into the animal’s world-analogue and experience the sense in which it has something like an access to entities, but we cannot transpose ourselves into the animal’s not having of world, its lēthē. Like the nothing, this refuses and repels us.
3 Strictly, the passage at SZ: 50, like that at SZ: 194, discusses not the animal specifically but life more generally. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger makes the same point in relation to the animal specifically (BPP: 191/GA24: 271).