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D i F F e r e N C e :  
o N  t h e  i N t u i t i o N s 
o F  h y M e N o P t e r a
t e d  t o a d v i n e *
insects have long fascinated philosophers, whose pages are peppered 
with metaphors and examples drawn from the diminutive lives of flies 
and beetles, locusts and moths. The figure of the insect continues to ex-
ert a chthonic influence on conceptions of ontology and subjectivity, 
offering, from Darwin to Kafka, lacan to e. o. Wilson, a complex and 
often morbid analogue of human sensibility and society. Within this 
philosophical Kunstkammer, a special place has always been reserved for 
the social Hymenoptera—ants, bees, and wasps—who serve as potent 
emblems of the human capacity for intersubjectivity and ontological 
disclosure. our fascination with social insects is no doubt inspired by 
the long human association with Apis mellifica, the honeybee, in partic-
ular. epipaleolithic paintings in the araña Caves, near Valencia, spain, 
depict gathering of honey from wild hives, and systematic apiculture 
has been practiced in egypt and Greece since antiquity. yet, beyond 
this cultural association, honeybees have attracted philosophical inter-
est because of the apparent perfection of their communal life, including 
their complex social structure and division of labor, the mathematically 
ideal engineering of their hives, and their inscrutable methods of com-
munication. since at least the time of Plato, the hive has explicitly been 
imagined as a miniature monarchy, and the devotion of the bee to the 
hive and its queen exemplifies, in our own eyes, a kind of moral duty, 
privileging the good of the whole over the freedom of the individual 
and elevating preparation for the morrow above gratification today.1 
* university of oregon
1 in The Statesman, Plato notes that “kings do not arise in cities in the natural course of things 
in the way the royal born is born in the beehive—one individual obviously outstanding in body 
and mind and capable of taking charge of things at once.” see Plato, The Statesman, in Plato 
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Bees have attracted so much attention from philosophers precisely be-
cause of the unmistakable ideal they offer as a contrast with our own 
individual morality and political arrangements, an ideal that challenges 
us to defend our apparent faults and to guard zealously for ourselves 
the definition of genuine intelligence and intersubjectivity. our defense 
against this unflattering comparison has typically followed the line of 
reasoning that Derrida identifies concerning the human-animal relation 
more generally: it is the very perfection of bees that is simultaneously 
the evidence of their limitation, of their merely instinctive nature, while 
the fatal flaw of the human being, its “original sin,” opens it to genuine 
freedom, consciousness, language, and community.2
at stake in this appropriation of the hive as an ambivalent double 
of human society is less the nature of insects than the contestation of 
our own nature, and especially our relation with nature writ large. This 
tradition, already apparent in classical authors such as aristotle and 
Vergil, finds its twentieth-century continuation in the writings of Mau-
rice Maeterlinck, henri Bergson, Jakob von uexküll, Max scheler, and 
Martin heidegger. While aristotle inserts the bee into a serial hierarchy 
of relations, all of which are incorporated into the being of the human, 
Vergil emphasizes the incompossibility of the farmer’s perspective with 
that of the bees themselves. Vergil’s efforts to reconcile these perspectives 
frames the legacy of philosophical interpretations of the human-bee re-
lation into the twentieth century. in Bergson’s Creative Evolution, for 
(1961), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (e. hamilton and h. Cairns, editors). New york: ran-
dom house, p. 1072 (301e). aristotle notes that honeybees are “thrifty and disposed to lay by 
for their future sustenance,” and refers to the “so-called kings” of the hive. see aristotle (1984), 
The Complete Works of Aristotle, (v. 1. J. Barnes, ed.). Princeton: Princeton university Press, pp. 
970-71 (623b22, 623b34). The gender of the “monarch” was assumed to be masculine until the 
Dutch biologist Jan swammerdam demonstrated otherwise in Historia Insectorum Generalis 
(1669). Concerning the thriftiness of bees, aristotle’s remarks echo a fragment from Democritus: 
“Misers have the fate of bees: they work as if they were going to live forever” (fragment 227, in 
Freeman, K. (tr.) (1957), Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Cambridge: harvard university 
Press, p. 112.)
2 Derrida develops this analysis at length in Derrida, J. (2006), L’animal que donc je suis. 
Paris: Galilée; The animal that Therefore i am, (translated by D. Wills). New york: Fordham 
university Press, 2008. see also leonard lawlor’s commentary in lawlor, l. (2007), This is Not 
Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida. New york: Columbia university 
Press, e.g., pp. 66-70.
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example, Hymenoptera represent the culmination of instinct, manifest 
in unreflective sympathy and tracing an evolutionary trajectory paral-
lel with human intelligence. The instinct directing a wasp to paralyze 
without killing its victim demonstrates an intuition directed toward 
life, while intelligence focuses on inert matter. The “double form of 
consciousness,” instinct and intelligence, are therefore made necessary 
by the “double form of the real,” the dehiscence of being into matter 
and life, and philosophical intuition becomes the task of taking up the 
insect’s sympathy for life as a conscious human intention. Bergson’s 
contemporary Maurice Maeterlinck, in The Life of the Bee, shares the 
former’s views on the limits of the intellect and its common source 
with instinct, yet he resists the temptation to bring the “hive mind” 
to self-consciousness as a moment of human intuition, insisting rather 
on our inescapably alien remove from the intelligence of the bee. We 
cannot dissolve again into the ocean of life or subsume its tendencies 
into a becoming-bee of philosophical thinking, and consequently the 
ambivalent juxtaposition of our world alongside the bee’s own remains 
insurmountable.
accounting for this ambivalence, the contiguity of perspectives that 
touch only across a distance, invites us to consider in what sense it is 
meaningful to attribute a “world” or “perspective” to the bee at all. Ja-
kob von uexküll’s rich descriptions of the bee’s Umwelt initially appear 
to confirm this attribution, yet the subjectivism and functionalism of 
his method requires strict agnosticism about the bee’s own experiences 
or inner life. Martin heidegger, whose account of the animal’s “world-
poverty” develops in dialogue with uexküll, has famously denied that 
the animal relates to its environment “as such,” remaining instead “cap-
tivated” by the stimuli that disinhibit its drives, as experiments with 
bees putatively demonstrate. The bee has no Umwelt, no world, and 
nothing that might be called a “perspective” in the subjective sense, for 
heidegger. yet heidegger’s account of the animal’s resistance to our ef-
forts to transpose ourselves into its world, and his failure to consider the 
implications of symbolic communication among bees, raises doubts for 
us about his conclusions. a phenomenology of this resistance returns us 
to the Janus-faced character of our openness to the bee, to the complex 
valences of invitation and refusal that constitute our inter-animality. We 
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P o l i G r a F i
suggest, therefore, an apian phenomenology that gathers scientific and 
poetic resources for a becoming-bee and celebrates the heterogeneous 
multiplicity of the real, yet without nostalgia for either mutual recogni-
tion or a translation of their “unintelligible syllables” into the language 
of reflection.
i. intuitions of the hive Mind
to trace the bee’s rich tradition in Western thought, even among the 
ancient Greeks alone, would require at least a volume in its own right. 
But two moments of the classical tradition deserve particular attention 
here, as they frame the continued appropriation of the figure of the bee 
in our own time. The first is the ambivalence of our identification with 
the bee and the hive. Whereas socrates can compare his own philosophi-
cal interrogations, in their dogged pursuit of truth, with the sting of a 
bee, aristotle emphasizes the sharp contrast between human and animal 
precisely on the point of orientation toward the good, taking the bee as 
his example.3 as he writes in the first book of Politics, “it is clear why a 
human being is more of a political animal than a bee or any other gregar-
ious animal. Nature makes nothing pointlessly, as we say, and no animal 
has speech except a human being.” While a voice is sufficient to convey 
pleasure or pain, speech is peculiar to human beings since “they alone 
have perception of what is good or bad, just or unjust, and the rest. 
and it is community in these that makes a household and a city-state.”4 
The beehive, lacking the specifically human dimension of community, 
is therefore not a polis, precisely because the bee lacks genuine language 
and the orientation toward the good that makes language necessary. 
aristotle holds to this distinction despite his own careful description of 
the habits of the hive in History of Animals, which offer much to suggest 
3 Plato, Phaedo, in Plato, op.cit., p. 71 (91c). Derrida notes the parallel between this passage 
and socrates’s self-description as a gadfly in apology. see: Derrida, J. (1981), “Plato’s Pharmacy.” 
in Dissemination (translated by B. Johnson). Chicago: university of Chicago Press, p. 119 n. 52.
4 aristotle (1998), Politics (translated by C. D. C. reeve). indianapolis: hackett, p. 4, 
1253a7–18.
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collective judgment and orchestrated action.5 on the one hand, in de-
nying any genuine comparison between the hive and the polis, aristotle 
cannot avoid reinscribing this analogy; it is precisely the seductions of 
the analogy that call for thought. But, on the other hand, the degree to 
which a comparison is possible will be based, for aristotle, on our shared 
animality and relative placement within the hierarchy of living things.
The second moment, rather than resolving the ambivalence in the 
direction of hierarchized similarity, respects the inexorable difference 
and juxtaposition of perspectives, as we find in the fourth book of Ver-
gil’s Georgics. Vergil borrows the apian analogy as a commentary on the 
human relationship with nature by juxtaposing the farmer’s perspective 
on the hive with the distinct point of view of the bees themselves. The 
prospects for our unity with nature are figured by the tensions between 
these two perspectives. each perspective culminates in a putative vision 
of harmony, the first centered on our shared mortality:
“among the armies, the kings themselves, with enormous wings,
keep their large souls pulsing in very small breasts,
resolute always not to retreat until a strong victor
has forced one side or another to turn its back in flight.
This tumult of passion and these overwhelming struggles
are brought to rest, checked, by the tossing of a little dust.”6
The handful of dust ties the beekeeper’s dissolution of the battle with 
the mortal interruption of human life, suggesting a parallel between 
our intervention in the world of the bees and the hand of fate opera-
tive within our own. With this image, as stephanie Nelson notes, Vergil 
“unites all mortal nature in an exquisite balance of humor, sorrow, and 
acceptance,” sketching a vision of “the deepest unity of human beings 
and nature.”7 similarly, shifting from the farmer’s perspective to that of 
the bees, we find what Nelson describes as the “purest vision of unity 
5 aristotle, History of Animals, in aristotle (1984), The Complete Works of Aristotle, op.cit., pp. 
97-76 (Bk. iX, 623b5–627b22). a particularly striking example is his description of one bee giv-
ing the indication to the hive that it is time to go to sleep, p. 975 (627a25–30).
6 Vergil (2005), Virgil’s Georgics (translated by J. lembke). New york: yale university Press, 
p. 63, 4.82-4.87.
7 Nelson, s. (1998), God and the Land: The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil. New 
york: oxford university Press, p. 147.
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that the Georgics achieves”8, namely, the overcoming of death in nature’s 
manifestation of the divine soul:
“having followed these signs and these habits, some say
that bees own a share of the divine soul and drink in
the ether of space; for, god invests everything—
earth and the tracts of the sea and deepest heaven;
from him, flocks, herds, men, all species of wild animals—
each one gains for itself at birth its little life;
doubtless, afterward, all return to him and, released, are
made new; death has no place but, alive, they fly up, each
to be counted as a star and ascend into heaven above.”9
yet this vision of unity is rent by a resistance located in the incom-
patibility of the two perspectives. While the farmer recognizes himself 
in the bees, who are farmers after their own manner, the bees cannot 
recognize any benevolence in his care; from their point of view, they 
neither have nor have need of any keeper, so that his removal of their 
stores of honey is met with violent rage. as Nelson notes, “it is nature, 
in the person of the bees, that refuses the harmony.”10
There is, nevertheless, a moment of final reconciliation in bee-human 
interests, made possible precisely by the incongruity of their perspec-
tives. should the beekeeper, after removing the stores of honey, “fear a 
hard winter” and wish to “preserve their future/pitying their bruised 
spirits and broken condition,” he is advised to fumigate with thyme to 
discourage pests and remove empty cells.11 although the bees cannot 
appreciate this action, the loss of their stores serves to stimulate their 
vitality. since their glory is in the making of honey12, the actions of the 
beekeeper, in driving them onward, encourages their own self-fulfill-
ment. The lesson is aptly summarized by Nelson:
“Vergil has found the point of view from which the bees’ sufferings are only 
apparent. to the bees, whose vision is inevitably limited, the farmer’s efforts 
seem to destroy their own. in fact, they further them. The farmer, whom the 
8 ibid.
9 Vergil, op. cit., p. 67, 4.219–227.
10 Nelson, s., op.cit., p. 149.
11 Vergil, op. cit., p. 68, 4.239–242.
12 ibid., p. 67, 4.205.
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bees see as their enemy, is in fact their ally. The two are joined in a single goal. 
There is a vision of the whole which the beekeeper understands but which can-
not be shared by the bees. so also there may be a vision of the cosmos, appar-
ent to God, but not to us.”13
as we are to the bees, so the divine knowledge of nature may be to 
us, suggesting neither omnipotence nor justification for mastery on our 
part, but instead emphasizing a unity-in-difference, the shared finitude 
and limited perspective on the whole.
The tension between these two accounts, between unilinear series 
and complementary juxtaposition, echoes into the twentieth century, as 
we see in Bergson’s description of the relation between instinct and intu-
ition in Creative Evolution. For Bergson, instinct and intellect represent 
the two major, divergent courses of life’s development, reaching their 
apogee in the Hymenoptera and humanity respectively. The evolutionary 
aim of the intellect, Bergson argues, is not speculative knowledge but 
practical action and fabrication, hence its orientation toward discontin-
uous and inert matter. Consequently, intellect in its pure form cannot 
think genuine duration, movement, or evolution. Confronted with the 
effort to think life, the intellect “does what it can, it resolves the orga-
nized into the unorganized, for it cannot, without reversing its natural 
direction and twisting about on itself, think true continuity, real mobil-
ity, reciprocal penetration—in a word, that creative evolution which is 
life.”14 life necessarily retreats before science, as the latter takes its ori-
entation from the intellect. instinct, on the other hand, as an extension 
of the organization of vital processes, knows the unity of life from within 
through a kind of sympathy. This is a knowledge lived rather than rep-
resented. Bergson’s examples include the unity of the beehive, which “is 
really, and not metaphorically, a single organism”15, and the paralyzing 
stings of various wasps, which know the precise means of immobilizing 
without killing their insect victims.16 in its efforts to account for such 
13 Nelson, s., op.cit., p. 150.
14 Bergson, h. (1959), “l’évolution créatrice”. in: Oeuvres. Paris: Presses universitaires de 
France; Creative Evolution. (translated by a. Miller). Mineola, N.y.: Dover Publications, 1998, 
p. 632/162.
15 ibid., p. 636/166.
16 ibid., p. 641/172.
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instinctual sympathy, science can only claim to resolve it into habitu-
ated intellectual actions or pure mechanism. But this is where the role 
of science ends and that of philosophy begins.17
Bergson’s account of instinct and intelligence as distinct yet comple-
mentary tendencies of life may be read as a radicalization of Vergil’s po-
sition over against that of aristotle. This interpretation is encouraged 
by two points: first, Bergson himself contrasts his approach with the 
unilinear serialism of aristotle:
“The cardinal error which, from aristotle onwards, has vitiated most of the 
philosophies of nature, is to see in vegetative, instinctive and rational life, three 
successive degrees of the development of one and the same tendency, whereas 
they are three divergent directions of an activity that has split up as it grew. 
The difference between them is not a difference of intensity, nor, more gener-
ally, of degree, but of kind.”18
as Bergson emphasizes, intellect does not develop from instinct and 
cannot be hierarchically ordered with respect to it, since the two orders 
of knowledge are entirely distinct and opposed. Nevertheless, the two 
are complementary thanks to their common origin as divergent tenden-
cies of the élan vital, and consequently neither exists in a pure state but 
is always accompanied by the “vague fringe” of the other. as we will see, 
it is only due to the vague fringe of instinct accompanying our intellect 
that we can claim any access to the insect’s sympathetic unity, the re-
flective recovery of which becomes the goal of philosophical intuition.
Bergson’s account of the divergence of human and insect perspectives 
is anticipated in Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1901 classic, La vie des abeilles 
(The Life of Bees), which provides a second motivation for interpreting 
Bergson’s project as a radicalization of Vergil.19 although Creative Evo-
lution includes no reference to Maeterlinck, who would win the Nobel 
Prize for literature in 1911, the similarity of their arguments suggests 
that Bergson was familiar with and inspired by the playwright’s popular 
essay. Maeterlinck’s literary reconstruction of the habits and life history 
17 ibid., p. 643/174.
18 ibid., p. 609/135; cf. pp. 643/174–75.
19 Maeterlinck cites Vergil’s Georgics in Maeterlinck, M. (1905), La vie des abeilles. Paris: Bib-
liotheque Charpentier. The Life of the Bee, (translated by alfred sutro). Mineola, N.t.: Dover 
Publications, 2006, pp. 6/3, 13/7, and 48/26.
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of the hive tends toward anthropomorphism, but not unreflectively so. 
While he claims not to embellish the facts, he also repeatedly marks 
the limits of human comprehension, which can only reconstruct the 
bee’s world from an alien and external perspective. although Maeter-
linck makes a case for bee intelligence, communication, and judgment 
throughout, rejecting explanations that reduce the hive’s activities to 
instinctual mechanisms, our limited perspective finally cautions agnosti-
cism, not only with regard to the intelligence of the bee, but more gen-
erally concerning any apparent purpose of nature’s evolutionary path.
The life of the bee, for Maeterlinck, is guided by l’esprit de la ruche, 
the “spirit of the hive”—or, in more contemporary translation, the “hive 
mind”—which, while following a path distinct from our own, dem-
onstrates the “highest degree of intellect after that of man.”20 yet na-
ture can achieve the perfection of the collective life of the hive, with its 
singular orientation toward posterity, only through the sacrifice of the 
freedom of the individual. in the “almost perfect but pitiless” society 
of the honeybee, “the individual is entirely merged in the republic, and 
the republic in its turn invariably sacrificed to the abstract and immortal 
city of the future.”21 indeed, “the god of the bees is the future.”22 The 
single-mindedness of the hive, rather than evidence of any mechanical 
impulse, is precisely a kind of sympathetic knowledge of the whole, as 
demonstrated by the communal judgments concerning the rearing of 
new queens, the appropriate times to swarm, and so on. Furthermore, 
Maeterlinck’s descriptions of the juxtaposed limits of different forms of 
intelligence anticipates Bergson’s own account of the opposed but com-
plementary character of instinct and intelligence. “[W]hat we call our 
intellect,” he notes, “has the same origin and mission as what in animals 
we choose to term instinct,” and the sharp distinction drawn between 
the two is ultimately arbitrary.23 yet each form of intelligence is limited, 
concealing as much as it reveals:
20 Maeterlinck, M., op.cit. p. 27/15, 23/12; cf. 86/46.
21 ibid., p. 22/12, cf. 83/44.
22 ibid., p. 46/25.
23 ibid., p. 65/35, 103/55.
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“are we to believe that each form of intellect possesses its own strange limi-
tation, and that the tiny flame which with so much difficulty at last burns its 
way through inert matter and issues forth from the brain, is still so uncertain 
that if it illumine one point more strongly the others are forced into blacker 
darkness? here we find that the bees (or nature acting through them) have or-
ganized work in common, the love and cult of the future, in a manner more 
perfect than can elsewhere be discovered. is it for this reason that they have 
lost sight of all the rest?”24
it is possible, Maeterlinck notes, that nature restricts us from under-
standing or following all of its desires, which must therefore be distrib-
uted into different modes of life. our own unconscious desires, like that 
fringe of instinct described by Bergson, are perhaps the clue to precisely 
such buried alternatives: “We too are aware of unconscious forces within 
us, that would appear to demand the reverse of what our intellect urg-
es. and this intellect of ours, that, as a rule, its own boundary reached, 
knows not whither to go—can it be well that it should join itself to 
these forces, and add to them its unexpected weight?”25 even Bergson’s 
metaphor of the whole of life as a single wave moving through matter26 
is anticipated by Maeterlinck’s description of the “extraordinary fluid we 
call life” that, consciously or unconsciously, “animates us equally with all 
the rest” and “produces the very thoughts that judge it, and the feeble 
voice that attempts to tell its story.”27 although Maeterlinck repeatedly 
grapples with the question of whether this “will” of nature can be at-
tributed a purpose, he does, in the end, suggest the solution that Berg-
son’s own alternative to mechanism and finalism will develop, namely, 
that the unity of life lies in its origin rather than its end: the progress 
of evolution, he writes, “has perhaps no aim beyond its initial impetus, 
and knows not whither it goes.”28
24 ibid., p. 111/59.
25 ibid., p. 199/106.
26 Bergson, h., op.cit., pp. 720/266, 723/269.
27 Maeterlinck, M., op. cit., p. 209/111. see also p. 272/143: “Whoever brings careful attention 
to bear will scarcely deny, even thhhough it be not evident, the presence in nature of a will that 
tend to raise a portion of matter to a subtler and perhaps better condition, and to penetrate its 
substance little by little with a mystery-laden fluid that we at first term life, then instinct, and 
finally intelligence; a will that, for an end we know not, organizes, strengthens, and facilitates 
the existence of all that is.”
28 Maeterlinck, M., op. cit., p. 300/156.
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The difference between Bergson and Materlinck can nevertheless be 
traced from the conclusions that they draw concerning the disclosure 
of the bee’s perspective in its own right. For Bergson, our access to the 
perspective of the bee is made possible precisely by that fringe of instinct 
that always surrounds the bright nucleus of our intellect, to which our 
capacity for aesthetic perception and sympathetic identification attests. 
The philosophical task is to bring this fringe of instinct to reflective 
awareness and thereby to think life from within, that is, to effect the 
passage from instinct to intuition: “it is to the very inwardness of life 
that intuition leads us—by intuition i mean instinct that has become 
disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and 
of enlarging it indefinitely.”29 Philosophy, as intuition, is the effort to 
dissolve once again into the whole “ocean of life.”30 While the scientific 
entomologist knows the insect only “as he knows everything else—from 
the outside, and without having on his part a special or vital interest”31, 
the philosopher can discern its life from within. We may conclude, then, 
that the aim of philosophy is precisely a becoming-bee, a taking up of 
the bee’s own perspective at the level of reflective self-awareness, which 
is a path reserved exclusively for human consciousness. While this be-
coming-bee involves a reciprocal enlargement of instinct and intellect, 
it remains unilinear with respect to bees and humans; the perspective of 
the bee is subsumed into human consciousness, while the limits of the 
bees’ own perspective remain determinately circumscribed.
Maeterlinck, however, remains true to the Georgic perspective by re-
fusing to recognize a subsumption of the bees’ perspective into that of 
the human, and he does so by continually emphasizing our inability to 
exit the point of view of the outside spectator. We can do no more than 
“vaguely survey” the hive “from the height of another world,” just as “an 
inhabitant of Venus or Mars” might observe us from a mountaintop.32 
29 Bergson, h., op.cit., p. 645/176.
30 ibid., p. 657–58/191. Note also Maeterlinck’s invocation of the ocean as a metaphor for na-
ture at Maeterlinck, M., op. cit., p. 207-8/110.
31 Bergson, h., op.cit, p. 642/173.
32 Maeterlinck, M., op. cit., p. 43/23. see the similar remarks at pages 112/59, 262-63/138-39, 
and 301-2/157. The digression describing the author’s walk with a physiologist, surveying the 
town from the summit of a plateau in Normandy, extends this motif of the outside spectator 
with the aim of distinguishing three semblances of truth, the last of which suggests a correspon-
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The outside perspective of divine fate that inscribed the limits of hu-
man knowledge in Georgics has here become the view from a radically 
alien intelligence, and ultimately that of Nature itself. Not only can we 
never claim to have absorbed the inner meanings of the bee’s world, but 
we also can never claim to coincide with the perspective of “the circu-
lar ocean, the tideless water, whereon our boldest and most indepen-
dent thoughts will never be more than mere abject bubbles. We call it 
Nature today; tomorrow, perhaps, we shall give it another name, softer 
or more alarming.”33 While Bergson’s philosopher dissolves again into 
the ocean of life, justifying his unique capacity to channel its emerging 
consciousness, Maeterlinck leaves us stranded as “waifs shipwrecked on 
the ocean of nature.”34 here, the ocean metaphor suggests the unity of 
our common origin in the ultimately mysterious workings of nature, 
but it makes no suggestion that the incompossibility of perspectives 
may be united as facets of a single vision. While we recognize an alien 
intelligence in the life of the hive, we can never coincide with it, never 
breach the externality of our perspective; we both are and are not of the 
same world. By extension, the centrality of our own perspective on the 
world is displaced, its limits perpetually opening it to an alien and in-
commensurable gaze.
The ambivalence of our relationship with the bee is thus reinforced: 
on the one hand, we are inexorably invited to see ourselves reflected in 
its apparent intelligence and social life, while, on the other, its incom-
parable difference forbids our entry into its world. What is the basis 
for this ambivalence, this refused kinship, and on what grounds can we 
claim even this degree of access to a non-human life?
ii. Umwelt and resistance
yet perhaps we have not formulated our problem correctly in imag-
ining that the bee has a perspective of its own, a “world,” to which we 
dence between our intellect and the “eternal intellect” that guides the processes of nature. But, 
for Maeterlinck, this final “semblance” remains speculative and ultimately beyond any certain 
knowledge (ibid., pp. 235-46/125-30).
33 ibid., pp. 207–8/110.
34 ibid., p. 85.
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could, in principle, gain access. Does the bee have a world of its own? 
ethologist Jakob von uexküll imagines just such a world as follows:
“We must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to rep-
resent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When 
we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is 
transformed. Many of its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong 
together but appear in new relationships. a new world comes into being. 
Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, 
or of the field mouse; the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not 
as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world 
[Umwelt] of the animal.”35
Beyond this general description of the animal’s “bubble” world, 
uexküll proceeds to fill out the description of the bee’s own particular 
perceptions, borrowing on Karl von Frisch’s research on the bee’s per-
ception of form:
“The bee is seen in its environment, a blooming field, in which blossoming 
flowers alternate with buds. if we put ourselves in the bee’s place and look at 
the field from the point of view of its Umwelt, the blossoms are changed to stars 
or crosses according to their form, and the buds assume the unbroken shape 
of circles. The biological significance of this newly discovered quality in bees is 
evident. only blossoming flowers have a meaning for them—buds do not.”36
For uexküll, an animal’s behavior cannot be explained mechanisti-
cally because every Umwelt is “subjective,” composed of signs or mean-
ings rather than objective causal relations. The bee’s reactions can only 
be understood relative to the “perceptual signs” (Merkzeichen) and “ef-
fector signs” (Wirkzeichen) that are meaningful for it, since these sketch 
out in advance what it can perceive and what it can do. Consequently 
35 uexküll, J. von (1956), Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen. hamburg: 
rowohlt; “a stroll Through the Worlds of animals and Men”, in: Instinctive Behavior (translated 
by C. schiller). New york: international universities Press, 1957, p. 21/5.
36 ibid., p. 58/40. The research on which uexküll’s description relies is summarized by Karl 
von Frisch in: Frisch, K. von (1950), Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language. ithaca: 
Cornell university Press, pp. 21-24, in lectures prepared for an american audience. This research 
is also reported in: Frisch, K. von (1993), The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees (translated 
by l. Chadwick). Cambridge: harvard university Press, pp. 478-81. see also the brief remarks 
on bees’ perceptions of space and sense of territory in: uexküll, J. von, Streifzüge durch die Um-
welten von Tieren und Menschen, op.cit., pp. 36/17, 76-77/55.
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the features that we assign to the “objective” world—space, time, the 
form and color of external objects, and so on—cannot be assumed to 
have the same structure or significance for the bee. indeed, the “objec-
tive” world of the human being is simply our own soap bubble, our own 
phenomenal world of subjective appearances.37
understanding the structure of the bee’s world does not require that 
we merge these bubbles, projecting ourselves sympathetically into its 
interiority, nor entertain any notions of “what it’s like” to be a bee. as 
uexküll admits, the biologist’s perspective is always that of the external 
spectator, and the events that he observes cannot be transferred outside 
the frame of his own subjectivity: “he is always dealing with events 
that take place in his space and in his time and with his qualities.”38 yet 
the identification of function-rules, as natural factors linking perceptual 
and effector signs, requires no projection into the psyche of the animal, 
nor any claims as to what the animal’s own perceptions might be like. 
Whereas the latter may be of interest to psychology, it is not an issue for 
biology, on uexküll’s understanding.39 The “subjective” world of the bee 
described so poetically by uexküll turns out to be the scientist’s func-
tional reconstruction of the bees’s world from elements of the scientist’s 
own fund of meanings.
it is against the backdrop of uexküll’s descriptions of the animal’s 
Umwelt that Martin heidegger, in his 1929–30 lecture course The Funda-
mental Concepts of Metaphysics, proposes his own well-known thesis that 
the animal is “poor in world”.40 although their proposals are apparently 
37 see: uexküll, J. von, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, op.cit., pp. 
30-31/13-14, 46/29, 101/80.
38 uexküll, J. von (1926), Theoretical Biology (translated by D. l. Mackinnon). New york: 
harcourt, Brace and Company, inc., p. 136.
39 as uexküll puts this, the biologist does not “ask how butyric acid smells or tastes to the 
tick; we merely register the fact that butyric acid, because it is biologically meaningful to the 
tick, becomes a receptor cue for her.” (uexküll, J. von Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren 
und Menschen, op. cit., p. 30/13). This position is elaborated in uexküll, J. von, Theoretical Bi-
ology, op.cit., pp. 131-32, 135-36, 158-59, where he differentiates the task of biology from that of 
psychology in these terms.
40 heidegger, M. (1983), Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt–Endlichkeit–Einsamkeit. 
Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, 
Finitude, Solitude (translated by W. McNeill and N. Walker). Bloomington: indiana university 
Press, Bloomington, 1995, p. 284/192.
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at odds, heidegger draws several examples from uexküll, and he shares 
uexküll’s rejection of mechanistic and vitalist accounts of life as well as 
his refusal to locate the human and animal worlds as degrees along the 
same scale. in fact, for his preliminary description of the world-poverty 
of the animal, heidegger depicts the Umwelt of the bee in terms that 
closely echo uexküll’s own:
“The bee, for example, has its hive, its cells, the blossoms it seeks out, and 
the other bees of the swarm. The bee’s world is limited to a specific domain 
and is strictly circumscribed. and this is also true of the world of the frog, the 
world of the chaffinch, and so on. But it is not merely the world of each par-
ticular animal that is limited in range—the extent and manner in which an 
animal is able to penetrate whatever is accessible is also limited. The worker bee 
is familiar with the blossoms it frequents, along with their color and scent, but 
it does not know the stamens of these blossoms as stamens, it knows nothing 
about the roots of the plant and it cannot know anything about the number 
of stamens or leaves, for example.”41
heidegger presents this description of the bee’s world in a prelimi-
nary way and qualifies it immediately, since it may suggest that the bee’s 
“poverty” is to be understood in terms of its limited extent or range by 
human standards, making poverty a matter of degree. as we know, the 
crux of the issue for heidegger will turn on the bee’s failure to encounter 
the blossoms and stamens as such, that is, as beings.
But even this preliminary description demonstrates a salient depar-
ture of heidegger’s approach from that pursued by uexküll. uexküll 
avoids describing the Umwelt of the animal as derivative from or sub-
sumed within the Umwelt of the human being, which is why we cannot 
assume any common measure of space, time, or perceptual qualities. 
to this extent, uexküll and hedidegger are in agreement that the dif-
ferences between Umwelten are not a matter of degree. But uexküll’s 
functional method restricts him from drawing conclusions about the 
character or quality of the bee’s experiences, and certainly heidegger’s 
claim concerning the “as such” oversteps the biological evidence. in one 
sense, heidegger’s willingness to carry uexküll’s description beyond its 
biological threshold follows from the “inner unity of science and meta-
41 ibid., p. 285/193.
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physics,” insofar as any effort to think the essential nature of life or 
animality requires the mutual understanding and collaboration of both 
modes of inquiry.42 since heidegger’s aim is to disclose the essence of 
the animal, he must necessarily transgress the limits that circumscribe 
the subject matter of biology alone.
But there is a deeper issue at stake concerning the very terms by 
which uexküll has presented the animal’s world, namely, his reliance 
on a Kantian metaphysics of subjectivity. uexküll professes agnosticism 
about the apperceptions of the bee in its own right; what things are like 
for the bee may be a matter for psychological speculation, but we will 
never be able to grant such speculations scientific status. This agnosti-
cism, however, reinforces the very sense of a mysterious “what it’s like” 
that resists our grasp, remaining forever closed to our inquiries. Further-
more, uexküll’s willingness to relativize the human position, describ-
ing our world as one soap bubble alongside the others, suggests that the 
“subjectivity” of the Umwelt is a matter of its phenomenal representa-
tion, whereas noumenal Nature remains an inaccesible ding an sich. 
according to the penultimate sentence of A Stroll Through the Worlds 
of Animals and Men, “and yet all these diverse Umwelten are harbored 
and borne by the one that remains forever barred to all Umwelten.”43 
uexküll’s perspective lends credence to the objection, therefore, that we 
can never know the true experiences of the bee, and that any reconstruc-
tion will simply reduce its alterity to a variation of our own subjective 
phenomena. as William McNeil notes, such objections are “themselves 
historically conditioned by the epoch of subjectivity”:
“What is striking about such objections is that they presuppose that our 
perspective is at once subjective and purely human. They presuppose as un-
questioned that human beings, through the subjectivity of their thinking, are 
undeniably at the center of the world, and that the “world,” here conceived as 
the sum-total of beings (objects) in their being, is merely a result and “func-
tion” of human representation. The said objections presuppose both that we 
42 ibid., p. 279/189.
43 uexküll, J. von, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, op.cit., p. 101/80.
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know what the human being is and that this conception of the world as our 
“representation” is unquestionable.”44
in his critique of the concept of empathy and rejection of the “philo-
sophical dogma that man is initially to be understood as subject and as 
consciousness,” heidegger distances himself from this representation-
alist view.45 The problem of how we understand others is ontological 
rather than epistemic, whether such others are human or not.
The ontological problem of our access to animals does not concern 
whether we have understood an animal correctly in a particular facti-
cal situation. The issue is rather in what sense, if any, we may be said to 
“transpose” ourselves into an animal, to go along with it, and thereby 
to disclose its essential nature.46 any effort to understand an animal in 
a particular situation will presuppose the possibility of such transposi-
tion, which is neither a matter of actually transferring ourselves into the 
animal’s point of view nor merely imagining ourselves to be in its place. 
as the various texts that we have considered concerning the world of 
the bee demonstrate, by their very entertainment of the question of the 
relationship between the bee’s perspective and our own, the possibility 
of this transposition seems at least open to us: “we tacitly assume that 
this possibility of self-transposition and a certain going-along-with [the 
animal] exists in principle, that the very idea makes sense as we say.”47 
yet precisely insofar as transposition into the animal presents itself as 
a mere possibility, such going-along-with differentiates itself from our 
relation to other human beings, on heidegger’s understanding. This is 
because our transposition into our fellow human beings “already and 
originally belongs to man’s own essence” and cannot therefore be raised 
as a genuine question.48 all of our mutual understandings and misun-
44 McNeil, W. (1999), “life Beyond the organism: animal Being in heidegger’s Freiburg lec-
tures, 1929–30”, in: h. Peter steeves (ed.), Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, 
albany: state university of New york Press, p. 213.
45 heidegger, M., op.cit., p. 304-5/208, cf. pp. 298/203 and 302/206. That heidegger reminds 
the reader of the Kantian basis for this misconception may be a response to uexküll’s own ex-
plicitly Kantian inspiration. see, for example, uexküll, J. von, Theoretical Biology, op.cit., pp. 
xiii-xvi.
46 heidegger, M., op.cit., p. 296–7/202.
47 ibid., p. 301/205.
48 ibid.
202
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derstandings attest that our very manner of being is one of primordially 
going-along-with each other. What, then, of the self-evidentness with 
which we immediately embrace the possibility of going-along-with oth-
er living things as well?
heidegger decisively rejects the Bergsonian answer to this question, 
namely, that we relate to the animal through a kind of sympathetic and 
instinctual attunement, as his criticisms of Max scheler demonstrate. 
scheler, in The Nature of Sympathy, takes up Bergson’s descriptions of 
the instinctive knowledge of the wasp paralyzing its prey as an example 
of “identification,” which provides the primitive basis for all givenness 
of “the other”.49 according to scheler, “to be aware of any organism as 
alive, to distinguish even the simplest animate movement from an inani-
mate one, a minimum of undifferentiated identification is necessary.”50 
The capacity for such identification, he argues, has atrophied in the 
modern, “civilized,” adult male as a consequence of over-development 
of the intellect, but a complete realization of human potential requires 
an integration of our instinctual and intellectual dimensions, of life 
and spirit. although heidegger declares scheler’s manner of posing the 
question of the relation between the vital and the spiritual to be “an es-
sential one in many respects and superior to anything yet attempted,” 
he nevertheless considers scheler’s effort to understand the human be-
ing as an integration of these levels of being to be a “fundamental error” 
that “must inevitably deny him any access to metaphysics.”51 While 
heidegger’s descriptions of the poverty of the animal’s world and of 
the human as world-forming draw on scheler’s characterizations of life 
and spirit,52 what heidegger rejects in scheler is precisely the effort to 
integrate these ontological orders, as the notion of “identification”—or 
Bergsonian intuition—would do.
49 scheler, M. (1954), The Nature of Sympathy (translated by P. heath). london: routledge and 
Kegan Paul, p. 28sgg.
50 ibid., p. 31.
51 heidegger, M., op.cit., p. 283/192; cf. 106/70.
52 Compare especially scheler’s contrast between the animal’s umwelt and the human world 
in his last work: scheler, M. (1949), Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. München: Nymphen-
burger; The Human Place in the Cosmos (translated by M. Frings). evanston: Northwestern uni-
versity Press, 2009.
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The possibility of our going-along-with the animal is not consum-
mated in any genuine identification or sympathy, according to hei-
degger, precisely because this going-along-with, while apparently in-
vited, is nevertheless refused. This refusal or failure, Versagen, is the key 
to the animal’s poverty:
“The possibility of not having, of refusing, is only present when in a cer-
tain sense a having and a potentiality for having and for granting is possible. . 
. . and not-having in being able to have is precisely deprivation, is poverty. . . . 
The animal displays a sphere of transposability or, more precisely, the animal 
itself is this sphere, one which necessarily refuses any going along with. The 
animal has a sphere of potential transposability and yet it does not necessarily 
have what we call world.”53
heidegger’s description is undoubtedly correct to draw attention 
both to the invitation to transposition with the animal and to the refusal 
of this transposition. our everyday engagement with animals is charac-
terized by precisely these two moments: on the one hand, our conviction 
that non-human animals present a distinct and alien perspective on the 
world that we should, in principle, be able to take up; and, on the other, 
the resistance we encounter when trying to do so. as we have seen, the 
descriptions of this incompossibility of perspectives in the case of the 
bee may be traced from the Georgics to the present.
But the decisive question for evaluating heidegger’s account con-
cerns whether he has described this moment of refusal adequately. Con-
sider, first, that the refusal is not a structure of Dasein, but is rather ef-
fected on the part of the animal, as an essential aspect of its being. The 
animal both invites and refuses us. to the extent that poverty is to be un-
derstood as a not-having in being able to have, is it not we who remain 
in poverty precisely with respect to the sphere of the animal? Does not 
the animal refuse our access to this sphere, and thereby hold us in this 
deprived suspense? secondly, if it is the case, as heidegger will suggest 
farther on, that captivation is “quite different in the case of each animal 
species”54, is this not just as true for the refusal as well? are there not, in 
fact, many registers and variations on this melody of refusal? it is here 
53 heidegger, M., op.cit., p. 308–9/210–11.
54 ibid., p. 359/247.
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that Derrida’s critique of the very notion of the “animal in general” of-
fers leverage.55 heidegger’s own decision to illustrate our invitation to 
transposition with the example of the household pet but the captivation 
of “the animal” with the bee illustrates the differential quality of refusal 
at work. Neither of these objections would carry weight for heidegger, 
of course, because the animal’s refusal merely reveals that there is noth-
ing to be refused, that the animal lacks a world into which one may be 
transposed, that there is nowhere to which we may go-along together. 
The animal’s refusal, for heidegger, covers the shame of its poverty. But 
insofar as refusal is refusal, insofar as animals, in their disparate man-
ners of being, resist our efforts to lay them bare, must not this refusal 
be given its own ontological due? What is the proper lesson to be drawn 
from the fact that here, as in the Georgics, it is the bees that refuse us?
For heidegger, as is well-known, the animal’s poverty is given a posi-
tive description in terms of captivation, a relating or an opening to-
ward . . . that is nevertheless not an opening toward as such. heidegger 
chooses bees, once again, as the privileged examples of captivation, both 
because their behavior is “more remote” than that of “higher” animals, 
and because “insects have an exemplary function within the problem-
atic of biology” (although he provides no further clarification of either 
point).56 two experiments performed on bees play a key role in hei-
degger’s discussion. The first, drawn from uexküll’s Theoretical Biology 
(1926), concerns a bee that continues to drink honey after its abdomen 
has been severed.57 The second, discussed by emanuel rádl58, concerns 
the bee’s ability to orient itself toward the hive when returning home 
from a long flight. since the bee orients toward the hive according to 
the angle of the sun, it will fly in the wrong direction for home if it is 
transported to another place in a dark box. in each case, heidegger in-
55 see: Derrida, J. L’animal que donc je suis, p. 31sg/40sg.
56 heidegger, M., op.cit., p. 350/240-41. heidegger does not explain why it is preferable to 
choose an example of an animal whose behavior would be less comparable to our own, nor why 
insects, in his view, have such an “exemplary function.”
57 heidegger does not attribute this example to uexküll, but it may be found at uexküll, J. 
von, Theoretical Biology, op. cit., p. 169. heidegger’s discussion of the example closely parallel’s 
uexküll’s own.
58 rádl, e. (1903), Untersuchungen über den Phototropismus der Tiere. leipzig: Wilhelm 
engelmann.
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tends the example to demonstrate that, although the bee relates to the 
honey or the hive, it does not encounter anything in its surrounding as 
such, that is, as the being that it is.
according to heidegger, the first experiment demonstrates that the 
bee has no relationship to the presence of the honey or to its own abdo-
men, since it is “taken by” its food. The bee continues to drink honey 
because it cannot register any “sense of satisfaction” that would inhibit 
its drive.59 heidegger’s interpretation of satiation as an “inhibition” of 
the bee’s drive parallels uexküll’s own interpretation of this experiment 
as an example of the “subjective annihilation [subjektive Vernichtung]” 
of indications [Merkmale].60 For uexküll, the experiment is intended to 
distinguish between the “objective” annihilation of the indication, as in 
a case where the bee has consumed all of the honey, and its “subjective” 
annihilation in the case of satiation. The other example uexküll offers of 
such subjective annihilation, the consumption of the male as prey after 
the ending of copulation, appears later in heidegger’s text to illustrate 
the “eliminative character” of behavior.61
For heidegger, these examples do not illustrate the annihilation of 
an indication, but instead the inhibition of one drive in order to be re-
placed by another. This concept of “drive” is found in scheler, for whom 
drives underlie all sensation in humans as well as animals: “What an 
animal can see and hear is only what is of importance to its instincts. . 
. . even in the human being the drive to see underlies factual seeing.”62 
Whereas animals remain circumscribed by the limits of their drives, 
which prevents them from escaping ecstatic immersion in their envi-
ronments, humans are capable of a “free inhibition” [Hemmung] or a 
“de-inhibition” [Enthemmung] of their drives, which is one aspect of 
their “world-openness”.63 This world-openness is made possible by par-
ticipation in spirit, which inhibits the drives in order to sublimate their 
power toward freely chosen aims. scheler’s description of the world-
openness of humans obviously anticipates heidegger’s account of hu-
59 heidegger, M., op.cit., p. 352–3/242.
60 uexküll, J. von, Theoretical Biology, op. cit., pp. 169–70.
61 heidegger borrows this example at heidegger, M., op.cit., p. 363-4/250.
62 scheler, M., Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, op. cit., p. 22–23/14.
63 ibid., p. 41/28.
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P o l i G r a F i
mans as “world-forming,” and their descriptions of the limitations of 
animals share obvious similarities. But, as we noted above, heidegger 
rejects scheler’s efforts to treat the human being as the cumulative in-
tegration of levels of being, including the drive-bound behavior of the 
animal. This is why, for heidegger, the bee’s eye is determined by the 
bee’s specific capacity for seeing, but that this has no corollary in our 
own potentiality for sight. While animal behavior is founded on drives, 
human comportment is not.64
heidegger’s reliance on these examples to demonstrate the captiva-
tion of the animal in general has already received criticism from several 
angles. in addition to questions of evidence, the examples also raise the 
issue of heidegger’s mode of access to the being of the animal. as we 
have noted, uexküll’s functional approach, by restricting itself to the 
animal’s manifest behavior, risks reliance on a subjectivist interpreta-
tion of the animal’s world. yet heidegger’s alternative, to transpose one-
self into the animal through a going-along-with that would reveal the 
animal’s genuine essence, has already been foreclosed by the animal’s 
resistance. While scheler could rely on the dimension of life shared 
commonly with non-human animals as the basis for our identification 
with them, heidegger has rejected this option. From what standpoint, 
therefore, does heidegger describe the animal’s manner of being? and, 
to the extent that his descriptions rely on scientific experiments that 
presume a subjective account, how does this compromise his approach? 
if heidegger is reduced to approaching the behavior of the bee from a 
functional standpoint, it must be possible to specify the behaviors that 
are indicative of captivation, or at least to identify what behaviors are 
absent. But it is impossible to specify in heidegger’s account what be-
havior would count as evidence against captivation, despite the sugges-
tion that his conclusions have the support of scientific experimentation.
Furthermore, heidegger’s claim that these experiments can serve as 
paradigmatic of the behavior of bees is unconvincing, to say nothing 
of his claims that they may stand in for animal behavior in general. as 
64 heidegger, M., op.cit., pp. 336/230, 345–46/237.
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David Morris65 has noted, heidegger approaches the bee in each case 
as an isolated individual, whereas we have seen that the intelligence of 
the bee has typically been attributed to its communal relationship with 
the hive, and especially its powers of communication. yet, from the per-
spective that heidegger has presented, no genuine community or com-
munication among bees is possible, since bees can never relate to one 
another as such. self-absorbed and enclosed in its encircling ring, the 
bee “has” its hive and fellow bees, but it cannot relate to them other than 
as what activates its drives. any genuine going-along-with, ontologi-
cally and factically, is thereby reserved for Dasein. This encircling ring, 
as the philosophical reinterpretation of uexküll’s Umwelt, also clarifies 
the Darwinian notion of self-preservation. The struggle for survival is 
actually the animal’s struggle with its encircling ring.66 We cannot add, 
for heidegger, that it “struggles alone,” which would suggest a privative 
of being-with ascribable only to Dasein. The solitude of the animal is 
beyond any possibility of factically being alone. however, this descrip-
tion can hardly account for the readiness with which individual worker 
bees, which do not reproduce, sacrifice themselves for the perpetuation 
of the hive. in fact, it is precisely the fact that the “struggle for survival” 
takes place at the level of the hive, rather than the individual, that has 
led evolutionary biologists to formulate a theory of “kin selection” for 
bees and other social insects.67 Would some evidence, then, of bee com-
munication and cooperation count against heidegger’s interpretation of 
their captivation?
iii. transpositional Dances
heidegger himself is already aware of such behaviors, as we know 
from a side remark much earlier in Fundamental Concepts, where hei-
65 Morris, D. (2005), “animals and humans, thinking and nature”. Phenomenology and the 
Cognitive Sciences 4, 49–72.
66 ibid., pp. 383/263, 377/259. Concerning “self-preservation,” see also p. 339/232.
67 see: hamilton, W. (1964), “The genetical evolution of social behavior i and ii”. Journal of 
Theoretical Biology 7, 1–32. Mitchell (Mitchell, s. (2009), Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, 
and Policy. Chicago: university of Chicago Press, pp. 46-48), concisely summarizes the implica-
tions of this research for evolutionary theory.
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P o l i G r a F i
degger is distinguishing between zoology and philosophy: “our thesis 
is a proposition like that which states that the worker bees in the bee 
community communicate information about newly discovered feeding 
places by performing a sort of dance in the hive.”68 (ironically, this pas-
sage introduces a discussion of the failures of “communal cooperation” 
between philosophy and science in the university, a cooperation that 
heidegger’s use of scientific sources in this discussion is apparently in-
tended to exhibit.) heidegger was aware, therefore, of Karl von Frisch’s 
early research on bee dances, although he elected not to discuss the im-
plications of such behavior for his notion of captivation.
Von Fritsch’s early studies from the 1920s documented the so-called 
“round dance” by which bees indicate that food is to be found in the 
near vicinity of the hive.69 only subsequently, in the 1940s, did he 
recognize the symbolic complexity of what have come to be called 
Schwanzeltanzen, “waggle dances,” by which bees communicate the di-
rection, distance, and quality of distant food sources, thereby recruiting 
other foragers to join them in its collection.70 Donald Griffin has called 
this dance language “the most significant example of versatile communi-
cation known in any animals other than our own species”.71 subsequent 
research has confirmed and expanded our knowledge of these dances, 
which occur only when a commodity needed by the colony (e.g., nectar, 
pollen, water, or wax) is in short supply and is difficult to locate. When 
a forager returns from a rich source of this commodity, she seeks out an 
audience of other foragers, then engages in a dance consisting of walk-
ing rapidly in a straight line while moving her abdomen back and forth, 
then circling back (alternating between clockwise and counterclockwise 
circles) to the starting point to repeat this walk. as von Fritsch discov-
ered, the orientation of this walk relative to vertical conveys the rela-
tion between the angle of the sun and the direction of the source. For 
68 heidegger, M., op. cit., p. 274/186.
69 a summary of this research may be found in Frisch, K. von, Bees: Their Vision, Chemical 
Senses, and Language, op. cit. it was discovered much later that round dances, like the waggle 
dances discussed below, also include directional information. see: Griffin, D. (2001), Animal 
Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness. Chicago: university of Chicago Press, p. 195.
70 Frisch, K. von, Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language, op. cit., p. 69sgg.
71 Griffin, D., op. cit., p. 190.
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example, a dance that is oriented straight up indicates that the source 
is directly in the direction of the sun, while 80° to the right of vertical 
indicates that the source is 80° to the right of the sun. The duration of 
the wagging run, and perhaps also its length, indicate the distance to the 
source, while the duration and enthusiasm of the dance communicate 
the desirability of the substance to be gathered.
From the perspective of symbolic communication, waggle dances 
are distinctive in several respects. The dances serve to communicate a 
complex message to other bees within the completely dark hive, where 
the other bees follow the dancing bee’s movement by touch, scent, and 
perhaps also sound. Within this setting, the relation between the angle 
of the dance relative to vertical and the flight direction of the source 
has no “natural” basis; as Griffin notes, this relationship “is more truly 
symbolic than any other known communication by nonhuman animals. 
The direction of the dance stands for the directions of flight out in the 
open air.”72 second, the waggle dances demonstrate “displacement,” in 
that they communicate about a situation that is displaced in space and 
time from the context of the communication, sometimes with a lag of 
several hours.73 Third, the dances are not “fixed” in the sense of being 
invariably produced or closed to spontaneous symbolic innovation. as 
noted, the performance of a dance is dependent on conditions within 
the hive, such as which materials are in short supply, and on the quality 
of the source discovered. a forager who returns to the hive to find that 
the material collected is no longer in need may instead perform a “trem-
ble dance” that interrupts other waggle dances, discouraging the pur-
suit of further supplies of a given resource.74 Furthermore, von Fritsch 
demonstrated in early experiments that bees may spontaneously alter 
their symbolic system to adapt to new constraints. if the comb within 
the hive is laid horizontally, so that the vertical direction of dances is 
not longer possible, foragers are no longer able to communicate food 
sources to others within a dark hive. if, however, any area of the hive is 
open to the sky, so that the polarization of light can provide an orienta-
72 ibid., p. 196.
73 ibid., pp. 196–97.
74 see: Niah, J. (1993), “The stop signal of honey bees: reconsidering its message.” Behavioral 
Ecology and Sociobiology 33, pp. 51–56.
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tion relative to the sun, dancing resumes in such a way that the straight 
portion of the dance points in the actual flight direction of the source.75 
This flexibility in the symbolic structure of the dance ill accords with our 
usual conceptions of the rigidity of instinctive behaviors.
Finally, recent research has focused on the communicative aspects of 
waggle dances employed when a swarm seeks a suitable location for a 
new hive, a phenomenon first documented by Martin lindauer in the 
1950s. When scouts return from potential hive locations, the enthusiasm 
of their dances takes into consideration variables such as the size, dry-
ness, and darkness of the site, as well as its distance from the old colony. 
These scouts recruit other dancers to join them in communicating about 
the potential site, some of whom may then visit the site themselves, but 
many of whom will not. This demonstrates that messages can be passed 
along “second hand,” that is, disseminated by those who have not them-
selves undertaken the flight or inspected the site. individual bees that 
do visit the sites described by others have been observed to revise their 
initial choices accordingly. This process continues for several days until 
a kind of “consensus” is reached, during which nearly all of the dancing 
bees are indicating the same potential hive location as the best option, 
after which the swarm travels en masse to the new location.76
such documentation of the complexities of symbolic communica-
tion among bees does not alone resolve the question of their “captiva-
tion” by drives or their potential for an “inner world” distinct from our 
own, however. adopting an explicitly behavioral approach, Griffin ar-
gues that such studies provide evidence for conscious thought compa-
rable to what we rely on in interactions with other humans:
“The principle basis for our inferences about subjective, conscious thoughts 
and feelings in humans is the communicative behavior of our companions. 
and here we find that certain insects also communicate simple but symbolic 
information about matters that are of crucial importance in their lives, and 
they even reach major group decisions on the basis of such communicative be-
havior. ... [i]t seems both logical and reasonable to apply the same procedure 
75 see: Frisch, K. von, Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language, op. cit, 86-96.
76 see: lindauer, M. (1971), Communication Among Social Bees. 2nd ed. Cambridge: harvard 
university Press. Griffin (op. cit., p. 203-209), summarizes lindauer’s research and subsequent 
studies concerning communication during swarming.
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that we use with our human companions and infer that . . . honeybees are con-
sciously thinking and feeling something approximating the information they 
are communicating. only by assuming an absolute human-animal dichotomy 
does it make scientific sense to reject this type of inference.” 77
Whatever we may think of Griffin’s conclusions, his argument rests 
on assumptions that the phenomenological tradition has consistently 
rejected as flawed, namely, that the existence of consciousness in others 
is arrived at by a process of logical reasoning rather than being phenom-
enologically or ontologically basic. But then we must return precisely to 
the ambivalence that the bee presents to us in its phenomenological dis-
closure, insofar as it promises us a measure of transposition while, in its 
own differential manner, resisting precisely the kind of going-along-with 
that would yield an essential insight into its nature. such studies of bee 
communication can provide the guiding thread for a phenomenologi-
cal investigation of this ambivalent character of the insect’s givenness.
one promising path for the development of apian phenomenology 
is already suggested by heidegger himself in his consideration of our in-
ability to transpose ourselves into a stone. as heidegger notes, although 
we usually deny the possibility of such transposition, it nevertheless re-
mains a possibility of our comportment to “animate” the stone:
“There are two fundamental ways in which this can happen: first when 
human Dasein is determined in its existence by myth, and second in the case 
of art. But it would be a fundamental mistake to try and dismiss such anima-
tion as an exception or even as a purely metaphorical procedure which does 
not really correspond to the facts, as something phantastical based upon the 
imagination, or as mere illusion. What is at issue here is not the opposition be-
tween actual reality and illusory appearance, but the distinction between quite 
different kinds of possible truth. But for the moment, in accordance with the 
subject under consideration, we shall remain within that dimension of truth 
77 Griffin, D., op. cit., p. 210. Griffin reports a similar conclusion drawn by Carl Jung, reacting 
to the discoveries of von Frisch: “This kind of message is no different in principle from infor-
mation conveyed by a human being. in the latter case we would certainly regard such behavior 
as a conscious and intentional act and can hardly imagine how anyone could prove in a court 
of law that it had taken place unconsciously. . . . We are . . . faced with the fact that the gangli-
onic system apparently achieves exactly the same result as our cerebral cortex. Nor is there any 
proof that bees are unconscious” (Jung, C. (1973), Synchronicity: A Causal Connecting Principle. 
Princeton: Princeton university Press, p. 94); quoted in Griffin, D., op. cit., p. 210-11.
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pertaining to scientific and metaphysical knowledge, which have together long 
since determined the way in which we conceive of truth in our everyday reflec-
tion and judgement, in our ‘natural’ way of knowing.”78
The significance of this remark is that it reveals the theoretical frame 
surrounding heidegger’s analyses of the animal’s poverty just as much 
as of the stone’s lack of world. since, in William McNeil’s words, hei-
degger’s course “problematizes the foundational primacy attributed to 
theoretical contemplation as our originary mode of access to the world,” 
it simultaneously recuperates alternative openings onto the truth of an-
imal being, even if we hesitate to accept heidegger’s own character-
izations of those alternative modes and their limits.79 Consequently, a 
phenomenology of the ambivalent invitation of the insect, if it aims at 
a broader truth than that circumscribed by Western theoretical contem-
plation, must also consider the disclosure of the insect’s mode of being 
through myth, art, and non-Western modes of knowing alongside the 
experiments and observations of Western science.
Within this broader context, the insect’s resistance to our transpo-
sition is neither total, homogenous, nor static, and the many man-
ners and degrees of going-along-with insects are themselves open to 
cultivation. This recognition encourages what David Wood has called 
“biomorphizing,”80 which, like scheler’s notion of identification, founds 
our transpositional encounters on shared and embodied modes of life. 
Furthermore, this concrete engagement with insects already implies the 
possibility of a transformative relation, a “becoming bee,” that, unlike 
Bergsonian intuition, would be operative in both directions. Deleuze 
and Guattari’s reliance on another figure of Hymenoptera to illustrate 
their notion of dual becoming, namely, the wasp in its pollinating pseu-
docopulation with the orchid, is suggestive here.81 as Deleuze and Guat-
tari note, the orchid has appropriated the wasp into its own reproductive 
cycle by borrowing a fragment of its “code,” in some cases going so far as 
78 heidegger, M., op. cit., p. 299–300/204.
79 McNeil, W., op. cit., pp. 230–31.
80 Wood, D. (2006), “on the Way to econstruction”. Environmental Philosophy 3, pp. 41–42.
81 see: Deleuze, G., F. Guattari (1980), Mille Plateaux. Paris: Minuit; A Thousand Plateaus 
(translated by Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 17/10, 291-
92/238, 360/293-4.
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to produce pheromones of the female wasp. such wasp-orchid nuptials 
are paradigmatic of what Deleuze and Guattari term “involutions,” non-
filial blocks of becoming that span kingdoms and lead unlikely partners 
into creative mutual transformation. The account of “becoming-animal” 
that Deleuze and Guattari develop from this example, applied to the 
creative path of phenomenological investigation, returns us to Bergson’s 
insight into the “double form of the real,” only now differentiated into 
what Derrida calls “the heterogeneous multiplicity of the living”.82 as 
we have seen, philosophy is, for Bergson, a means of “becoming-wasp,” 
taking up the insect’s instinct for life in the self-reflective awareness of 
the intellect. yet for Deleuze and Guattari, the becoming is a mutual 
resonance: as the entomological phenomenologist engages in a becom-
ing-bee, the bee is equally caught up in a becoming-philosophical. The 
development of apian phenomenology must nevertheless negotiate the 
temptation to elevate our own poverty, our inability, finally, to disclose 
the as-such of the bee, into the principle of our superiority. in the end, 
it is just as impossible fully to claim the as-such for ourselves as it is to 
withhold it from the bee.83
While the apparent unity of the honeybee hive had led to its use 
as a figure for obedient monarchism and harmonious democracy, any 
becoming-other is a far more fraught and complex event. Deleuze and 
Guattari’s wasp-orchid block plays with the orchid’s deceptions and the 
pollinator’s desires to create a new possibility of relation. This frenetic 
energy animates sylvia Plath’s Bee sequence, a series of five poems in 
her collection Ariel. in “The arrival of the Bee Box,” the speaker of the 
poem finds herself afraid of the “box of maniacs” she has ordered with 
its noise of “unintelligible syllables” and yet is unable to stay away from 
it. she imagines releasing the bees:
82 Derrida, J., L’animal que donc je suis, op. cit., p. 53/31.
83 see: Derrida, J., L’animal que donc je suis, op. cit.; lawlor, l. This is Not Sufficient: An Essay 
on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida, op. cit.
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“i wonder how hungry they are.
i wonder if they would forget me
if i just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
and the petticoats of the cherry.” 84
These lines convey the speaker’s ambivalent but hungry desire: even 
as she hopes the bees will ignore her, she imagines a petticoat of flowers 
that will make her their co-evolutionary sexual partner and invite an in-
timate invasion by the swarm. an apian phenomenology, conjured out 
of the perilous relationship of bees and beekeepers, with its promise of 
honey and stings, suggests that in denying the rich world of the bee we 
close ourselves off from the sweet possibilities of extending our loyalty 
beyond the reaches of humanity.85
84 Plath, s. (1965), Ariel. New york: harper & row, p. 60.
85 i thank Janet Fiskio for suggesting Plath’s poem as the final image for this paper and for her 
generous comments on an earlier draft.