a complex of instruments nor a bundle of instinctual drives. Positively expressed, we can say that the organism is the capability for behaviour in the unity of captivation. Precisely when the attempt is made to grasp the organization of the organism and of the entire animal form as it were, the body of the animal in the narrow sense, one still goes fundamentally astray in trying to characterize the organism in a fundamental way. For the animal is not first an organism and as such an organism then something more that comes to bind itself to its environment. Rather its being bound to the environment, the self-encircling which is open to disinhibition, belongs to the inner essence of behaviour, i.e., belongs to that for which the capability is there as capability. This self-encircling is the fundamental capability of the animal into which all the other capacities are as it were integrated and from out of which they grow. The organization of the organism does not consist in its morphological, physiological configuration, in the formation and regulation of its forces, but first and foremost precisely in the fundamental capability for self-encirclement, and thus for a quite specific openness for a circumscribed range of possible disinhibition. But in accordance with what we have already said about capability, this fundamental capability is not some concealed propensity that occasionally subsequently shows itself On the contrary, this capability for encirclement is the fundamental characteristic of the animal's actual being in every moment of its life-span. But if we consider the organism as the morphological unity of the [animal] body, which is what usually happens and especially today, then we have still failed to grasp the decisive structure of the organism. Recently many successful attempts have been made to investigate the environment of the animal considered specifically as an animal environment and to emphasize the way in which the animal is bound to its environment. And yet one has failed to take the decisive step toward a first authoritative characterization of the organism as long as one continues to regard matters as the Dutch biologist Buytendijk does in the following sentence: "Thus it is clear that in the animal world as a whole the way in which the animal is bound to its environment is almost as intimate as the unity of the body itsel£"1 Against this we must say that the way in which the animal is bound to its environment is not merely almost as intimate, or even as intimate, as the unity of the body but rather that the unity of the animal's body is grounded as a unified animal body precisely in the unity of captivation. And that now means grounded in the unity of its self-encirclement with a disinhibiting ring within which an environment can first display itself for the animal in each case. Captivation is the fundamental essence of the organism.
We can briefly summarize the characteristic structural moments of captivation in six points:
1. F. J. J. Buytendijk, Zur Untersuchung des Wesensunterschieds von Mensch und Tier. In: Blatter fur Deutsche Philosophie. Vol. 3 (Berlin, 1929-30), p. 47.