Le sens de l'interprétation privative, jusqu'en 1925, consistait clairement à poser que les animaux ont bel et bien un monde, mais que nous ne pouvons comprendre cette structure de la mondanéité animale qu'une fois que nous avons d'abord reconnue celle-ci comme étant la nôtre.
« We arrive at the biological basis – that is, the basic structure of the being that we call, in a narrow sense, biological – only if beforehand we have already understood this structure as a structure of Dasein. It does not work in reverse. We cannot derive this determination from biology; it must be acquired philosophically. That is, even biology itself, so long as it remains biology, does not have the possibility of seeing these structures in its specific objects, for qua biology it already presupposes these structures when it speaks of plants and animals. Biology can establish and define these structures only by transgressing its own limits and becoming philosophy. And in fact more than once in the course of the development of modern biology, especially in the nineteenth century, reference has been made to this structure (granted, only in quite general characterizations and with very vague concepts), to the fact that animals above all, and plants in a certain sense, have a world. To my knowledge the first person to have run across these matters again (Aristotle had already seen them) was the biologist K. E. von Baer, who referred to these structures in his various lectures, but only in passing, never really thematically. More recently his suggestions have been taken up by von Uexküll, who now deals with this problem thematically, not, however, in a philosophical sense but in connection with specifically biological research.
Logik : Die Frage nach der Wahrheit [1925 : GA 21, 215-216] (tr. Thomas Sheehan, à paraître)
