... Because the animals’ activity is an extension of themselves, the results of that activity are also inseparable from themselves: animals can neither set objectives nor infuse their transformation of nature with any significance beyond itself. Moreover, the “decision” to perform this activity belongs not to them but to their species. Animals are, accordingly, fundamentally “beings in themselves.”
Unable to decide for themselves, unable to objectify either themselves or their activity, lacking objectives which they themselves have set, living “submerged” in a world to which they can give no meaning, lacking a “tomorrow” and a “today” because they exist in an overwhelming present, animals are ahistorical. Their ahistorical life does not occur in the “world,” taken in its strict meaning; for the animal, the world does not constitute a “not-I” which could set him apart as an “I.” ... Animals are not challenged by the configuration which confronts them; they are merely stimulated. Their life is not one of risk-taking, for they are not aware of taking risks. Risks are not challenges perceived upon reflection, but merely “noted” by the signs which indicate them; they accordingly do not require decision-making responses.
Consequently, animals cannot commit themselves. Their ahistorical condition does not permit them to “take on” life. Because they do not “take it on,” they cannot construct it; and if they do not construct it, they cannot transform its configuration. Nor can they know themselves to be destroyed by life, for they cannot expand their “prop” world into a meaningful, symbolic world which includes culture and history. ... Even in the forest, they remain “beings-in-themselves,” as animal-like there as in the zoo.
