Why is phenomenology interested in animality?

Abstract

To give meaning to the idea of a description of experience, phenomenology needs to build a concept of it by opposing it to other kinds of possible experiences. The reference to the animal helps us build the field of the «phenomenological» by constructing an otherness in relation to which the idea of a description and characterization of experience can make sense. The question is no longer to characterize the human being in comparison with the animal, or the animal in comparison with the human being, but to move back and forth between provisional concepts that constitute the poles of this dialectic.