World Poverty: Which Method to Understand Animality?As I will show, due to his belief in the ontological specificity of the human compared to the animal, Heidegger assumes as his own the classical humanistic and anthropogenic strategy according to which an appropriate definition of man's essence can only be attained by comparing man and animal, excluding every element of animality from humanity and vice versa. As is known, Heidegger attempted to describe grounds for the ontological difference between man and animal mainly in his 1929-1930 lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude.The threefold argument put forward by Heidegger in this very context reflects on animality as follows: the stone is weltlos (worldless), the animal is weltarm (poor-in-world) and the human is weltbildend (world-forming). The core concept is that of world (Welt), and it is this concept of metaphysics that Heidegger addresses in his lectures on animality: By means of a comparative examination of our three theses (the stone is worldless, the animal is poor-inworld, man is world-forming) we hope to delimit in a provisional what we should understand by the term world in general, as well as the direction in which we should look for such understanding (Heidegger 1995: 185).What at first glance is clear is Heidegger's emphasis on the centrality of the concept of Welt. Nonetheless, what stands out in relation to this threefold thesis is the ontologically selective nature of Welt. Welt is indeed at the centre of the trinity, acting as a theoretical axis around which the essence of humanity, of the vitalbiological, and of the physical-material are all defined. In other words, Welt is the metaphysical operator that marks the difference in essence between these three spheres of being and their corresponding modes of being. Defining the mode of being of stone, animal, and human in terms of non-relationship, lacking relationship, and relationship-forming, is a way to separate the three into ontologically distinct realms of being. Thus, the mode of being of the human as world-forming is both irreducible to the animal's poor-in-world mode of being (representing biological life) and to the worldlessness of the stone (representing inert matter).The importance of this threefold thesis lies precisely in the theoretical requirement of having to reject any gradualist notion of a ontological continuity between the physical-material, the animal and the human. This fundamental error, according to Heidegger, would be a failure to understand the essential difference that radically separates the human from the animal. A victim of such a dramatic error would have been, incidentally, the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler,1 an author dear to Heidegger, to whom he explicitly attributes the incautious accession to a hierarchic-gradual scheme, according to which one would end up conceiving material beings, life, and in a unified manner on the basis of the conviction that man is the being who unites within himself all the levels of beings-physical being, the being of plants and animal, and the being specific to spirit (Heidegger 1995: 192).The main reason of this threefold thesis is hence to highlight the ontological difference separating the animal's mode of being in the world as biological life on the one hand and that of man as Dasein or temporal and historical existence on the other hand. Indeed, as we will see further on, for Heidegger Dasein's world-setting existence is irreducible to the animal's vital-bodily mode of being, just as the stone's worldless mode of being is irreducible to that of the world poverty characterizing the animal's life. Therefore, it is impossible to conceive an ontological continuity between animal and man, based on a difference of grade within the metaphysical hierarchy of the living forms as it had been understood by Aristotle. …