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In the middle ages and in Greek philosophy, the whole man was still seen; the apprehension of inner psychic life, what we now so readily call consciousness, was enacted in a natural experience which was not regarded as an inner perception and so set off from an outer one.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER REJECTS the traditional definition of human being as the rational animal. More pointedly, he thinks that obscuring openness to being as distinctively human closes us to the difference between entities and their being. Hence the failure to understand the human is also and more importantly a failure to understand being. Some thinkers have criticized Heidegger's rejection of the traditional definition. Hans Jonas thinks the rejection makes the human a stranger in the cosmos, and Alasdair MacIntyre thinks the rejection leaves virtue without a home in human nature.2 Elsewhere I have defended Heidegger's belief that humans do in fact differ in kind from animals.3 One puzzle, given this difference in kind, is how to construe the undeniable kinship of the human and the animal. And it is here that I think Heidegger's rejection of the traditional definition of the human as the rational animal becomes problematic. For though we differ in kind from other animals, we remain yet animals, and our animality is not foreign to our openness to being. In this paper, I aim to solve the theoretical problems that led Heidegger to this position and to show how their solution proves fruitful for Heidegger's question concerning the meaning of being.
Thomas Aquinas shares many of Heidegger's concerns regarding human uniqueness and yet makes his own the traditional definition of the human being as the rational animal. He does this by reconfiguring animality in view of the specifically human power of understanding being. At the same time, Aquinas does not make explicit the role of the animate body in making metaphysics possible; he does not develop the problematic that Heidegger calls "fundamental ontology." He does not lay bare the condition for the possibility of ontology in terms of the openness of the human and the temporality or truth of being. He also does not adequately consider the methodological difficulties involved in targeting the person as such, an issue that Heidegger engages more penetratingly....