On Animals

The beings known as animals hover at the corner of the separation of inside and outside generated by the idea of a world as a self-contained system. Strangely enough, thinking in terms of "world" often excludes animals -- beings who actually live there. For Edmund Husserl, animals are like deaf people, "abnormal." For Heidegger, animals lack of a sense of world (Weltarm). Or, more precisely, their sense of the world is this lack. In contrast, some ecological thinking wants to forget about the differences between humans and other animals, real or imagined, as soon as possible. This inverted speciesism celebrates "the more than human world" (Abram). For Percy Shelly, animals lose their cruelty just as humans begin to live a more pacifist existence. ... For Rilke or Levertov, post-Romantic poets keen to establish an environmental poetics, animals have an access to the "open" that is denied to humans, either entirely or as a result of bad training. It all depends how up close and personal you want to get. Levinas strove to exclude animals from his idea of contact with the "face" of the other as the basis of ethics. But he was haunted by the face of a dog who had looked at him, perhaps with kindness, in a Nazi prison camp.

Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (2007)