Gulliver, Heidegger’s Man: Swift’s Satire of Man in Captivation

Abstract

Drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s distinction between man and the animal, which appropriates Jakob von Uexkull’s theory of Umwelt and whereby it is described that man lives in “transition” and “transposition” while the animal in “captivation,” this essay examines how Gulliver conceives the Heideggerean notion of man by distinguishing himself from animals and animal-like humans but ironically ends up becoming captivated by that very notion. As a satire of what might be called “Heidegger’s Man,” whose examples are found not only in Gulliver but in Heidegger and Uexkull, Gulliver’s Travels thus communicates Jonathan Swift’s scathing criticism of the anthropocentric notion of man to today’s world as well as to his own.