Gadamer, as we have seen, aligns the responsibility to understand with an affirmative rehabilitation of motifs from the humanist tradition. Indeed, he encapsulates this responsibility with the entreaty to ‘elevate’ ourselves into our ‘humanity’ through the enactment and cultivation of our ‘capacity for conversation’. Yet, this hermeneutical entreaty concerns much more than our relations with other humans alone. In the previous chapter, for example, we saw that it concerns even our intimate, everyday relations with things. Now, in this chapter, I wish to show that this entreaty moreover concerns our interactions with animals.

Building on important but understated themes in Gadamer, I argue that the responsibility at issue in our interaction with animals comes into focus as a question of belonging (Zugehörigkeit). We have already seen that Gadamer develops the notion of ‘belonging to tradition’, and, further, the hermeneutical experience of language, as part of his attempt to ‘concretise’ Heidegger's early hermeneutics of facticity. Here, Gadamer's notion of belonging will be taken up in the context of his ontological considerations of the human and animal. On the one hand, Gadamer's position indicates that human belonging is distinguished from that of animals by the hermeneutical experience of language. He will, however, describe this distinction as a specific or relative, not an absolute, difference. On the other hand, Gadamer's approach will allow us to suggest that the characteristically human, hermeneutical experience of language is itself based in a mode of enactment that is shared by humans and animals alike. This, as we shall see, is the enactment of play.

Accordingly, the responsibility at issue in our interactions with animals requires us to displace the polarity of two extreme prejudices about animals – which, as extremes, may be called the Scylla and Charybdis of our hermeneutical experiences of animals. First, this responsibility requires that we displace the increasingly common prejudice that humans and animals are, for all relevant intents and purposes, ontologically compatible. As Gadamer's consideration of the hermeneutical experience of language will indicate, the being of human beings is distinguished by participation in historically transmitted language, and, with this, is bound up with the transmission of world-disclosive written texts, paradigmatically religious, juridical and literary texts. Yet, at the same time, our responsibility toward animals likewise requires us to displace the opposite, ‘anthropocentric’ prejudice of an absolute ontological divide between human and animal.