Philosopher Martin Heidegger famously used the lizard’s relationship to the rock on which it suns and cools itself as an example of the basic difference between humans and animals. For Heidegger, the lizard has a relation to the rock via sensation: it seeks out its warmth and establishes it as its territory, but the rock is never experienced AS rock, that is, as something apart from itself that can be named.
Although human ways of knowing through language may exceed that of lizards, these photographs suggest how the lizard’s knowledge of the rock through sensation exceeds that of humans.
