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Anthropocentrism
Human-Animal Studies
Editor
Kenneth Shapiro
Animals & Society Institute
Editorial Board
Ralph Acampora
Hofstra University
Clifton Flynn
University of South Carolina
Hilda Kean
Ruskin College, Oxford
Randy Malamud
Georgia State University
Gail Melson
Purdue University
VOLUME 12
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/has
Anthropocentrism
Humans, Animals, Environments
Edited by
Rob Boddice
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2011
Cover illustrations:
Top/bottom left: Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice
(1485-90).
Bottom right: T.H. Huxley, ‘Evidence as to man’s place in nature’ (New York: D. Appleton, 1879)
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anthropocentrism : human, animals, environments / edited by Rob Boddice.
â•…â•… p. cm. — (Human-animal studies, 1573-4226 ; 12)
â•… Includes bibliographical references and index.
â•… ISBN 978-90-04-18794-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
╇ 1.╇ Speciesism.╇ 2.╇ Human beings.╇ 3.╇ Animal rights.╇ 4.╇ Human-animal relationships.╇ I.
Boddice, Rob.
â•… HV4708.A595 2011
â•… 179’.3—dc23
2011022567
ISSN 1573-4226
ISBN 978 90 04 18794 8
Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
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provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center,
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Fees are subject to change.
preface
For Stéphanie
v
contents
vii
Contents
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
List of Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
Introduction. The End of Anthropocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rob Boddice
1
part one
Epistemological and ontological investigations
What is this Quintessence of Dust? The Concept of the ‘Human’
and its Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Boria Sax
The View from Somewhere: Anthropocentrism in .Metaethics
Kevin DeLapp
The Making of the Human: Anthropocentrism in Modern
Social Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richie Nimmo
Toward a Non-Anthropocentric Cosmopolitanism . . . . . . . . . Gary Steiner
21
37
59
81
part two
religion, society, culture
Anthropocentrism and the Medieval Problem of Religious
�Language .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Eric J. Silverman
viii
contents
Vitruvian Man is a Pterosaur: Notes on the Transformation
of an Architectural Ideal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Paula Young Lee
Modernity as Anthropolarity: The Human Economy of
�Frankenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Ben Dawson
Anthropocentrism and the Definition of ‘Culture’ as a Marker
of the Human/Animal Divide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Sabrina Tonutti
part three
Speciesism And The Status Of Animals
Are Animals Poor in the World? A Critique of Heidegger’s
Anthropocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
Philip Tonner
Speciesism as a Variety of Anthropocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Tony Milligan
The Instrumentalisation of Horses in Nineteenth-Century
Paris .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Peter Soppelsa
Anthropomorphism and the Animal Subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Nik Taylor
part four
human and non-human environments
Social History, Religion and Technology: An InterdisciÂ�plinary Investigation into White’s ‘Roots’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Robin Attfield
contents
ix
An Alternative to Anthropocentrism: Deep Ecology and the
Metaphysical Turn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307
Eccy de Jonge
Anthropocentrism and Reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Environmental Crisis and Animal Subject. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
André Krebber
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
list of illustrations
xi
list of illustrations
Fig. 1. The Sanctuary of the Temple in Jerusalem, from HieroNymous Pradus and Ioannes Baptista Villalpandus . . . 142
Fig. 2.E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc, ‘Application des jointures des os
à la mécanique’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Fig. 3.E.-E, Viollet le Duc, ‘Pterodactyl’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
preface
xiii
FOREWORD
In these post-everything days, all the ‘-centrisms’ take a knocking as
all centres are suspect and ripe for decentring. More generally, the
recent surge in studies of the animal issue in the Humanities challenges the discreteness of all categories, replacing them with blurred,
situated, and moving boundaries. Anthropocentrism, the subject of
this edited volume, is particularly vulnerable to this post-structuralist critique for it valorises anthropos or human being as against other
animals at a time when animal protection and environmentalism
have emerged as well-established social justice movements. One
would have expected this volume to jump on one or more of these
category bashing bandwagons. However, the volume is a surprisingly
balanced historical and conceptual critique of both the concept and
the charges against anthropocentrism. In his introduction, Boddice
indicates that the essays will examine the concept as ‘for good as well
as for evil’. In the volume, the reader will find intelligent discussions
of (1) the origins of the idea; (2) the argument that, epistemologically,
we are inherently anthropocentric; and (3) alternative world-views.
Kenneth Shapiro, Series Editor
Animals and Society Institute, Inc., Washington Grove MD
acknowledgements
xv
acknowledgements
The production of books, if not an anthropocentric endeavour, is
usually a self-centred one. I am fortunate to have had so much support during the process of planning and editing this one. I owe a
debt to Boria Sax, who encouraged me from the first, and from whose
correspondence I have greatly benefited over the years. The delegates
at the ‘Animals Past, Present and Future’ conference at Michigan
State University in 2009 responded actively to my argument about
the historical ethical implications of the concept of the human as
animal. Thanks to them, and to Georgina Montgomery for having
me there.
I have had the luxury of the run of two academic libraries,
the facilities of which allowed me the necessary comfort and
quiet (most�ly) to put the collection together. Thanks to the staff at
McLennan Library, McGill University and at Widener Library,
Harvard University. I also wish to acknowledge the Department of
the History of Science at Harvard and the Sonderforschungsbereich
640 at Humboldt University for giving me institutional homes from
which to co-ordinate the many authors involved in this book.
To the authors I reserve the greatest thanks. They have proven to
be generous with their time, and most congenial responders to my
editorial criticism, so far as it went. I am truly humbled to have had
the pleasure of marshalling such an extraordinary ensemble of intellects. A nod also to Ken Shapiro for recognising the potential of this
book to fit within Brill’s Human-Animal Studies series, and to the
two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and positive criticisms of
the collection.
Robin Attfield’s essay, ‘Social History, Religion and Technology:
An Interdisciplinary Investigation into White’s “Roots”’ was first
published in Environmental History, 31:1, 2009: 31–50. Thank you to
the journal, and its editor, Eugene Hargrove, for permission to
republish it here.
The idea for this book originated at the summit of Mount Royal,
Montreal, surveying the city from on high in its context of rivers,
agricultural land and open country. Present on that occasion, and
with me at every step, listening with tireless patience, was my wife,
xvi
acknowledgements
Stéphanie Olsen. Her superior scholarly mind, in addition to her significant editorial skills, have saved me from many a glaring intellectual, not to mention typographical error. I extend to her my heartfelt
gratitude.
preface
xvii
List of contributors
Rob Boddice (editor) is a member of the Sonderforschungsbereich
640, Humboldt University, Berlin, having previously been Post�doc�
toral Fellow in the Department of History of Science, Harvard
University. He has a Ph.D in History from the University of York,
and has since taught at McGill University in Montreal, and held a
postdoctoral fellowship at the European College of Liberal Arts in
Berlin. He is the author of A History of Attitudes and Behaviours
toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain:
Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals (Lewiston, N.Y.,
2009), as well as several articles in the history of science, animal
studies, and the history of masculinity.
Boria Sax holds a doctorate from SUNY Buffalo, and currently works
as an independent scholar and educator. He has published several
books including Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the
Holocaust (Continuum, 2000), The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of
Animals in Myth, Legend, and Literature (ABC-CLIO, 2002), Crow
(Reaktion Books 2003), and City of Ravens (Duckworth, 2011), and
his writing has been translated into several languages. He is also
founder of the non-profit organisation ‘Nature in Legend and Story’,
dedicated to ‘promote understanding of traditional bonds between
human beings and the natural world’. His memoir of growing up in
the shadow of atomic weapons entitled Stealing Fire is forthcoming
with Ad Infinitum Press. He teaches in the Mercy College programme
at Sing Sing Prison and online for the University of Illinois at
Springfield.
Kevin M. DeLapp is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Converse
College (South Carolina, USA) where he holds the Harold E. Fleming
Chair of Philosophy, after having completed his doctoral degree at
Duke University (North Carolina, USA). Kevin’s published research
has mainly focused on issues in metaethics, comparative philosophy,
and moral psychology and he has defended positions on topics such
as moral realism, supererogation, moral epistemology and cultural
pluralism.
xviii
list of contributors
Richie Nimmo is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester.
His research is interdisciplinary in nature and explores the ambiguous status of non-humans in the social sciences and other modern
knowledge-practices. This often leads him to focus on exploring the
constitution of ‘the social’ within material, ecological and interspecies
relations, networks and flows. His first research monograph, Milk,
Modernity and the Making of the Human: Purifying the Social, was
published by Routledge in 2010. It comprised a non-anthropocentric
socio-material history of the UK milk industry. He has also published
articles in Historical Sociology and Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal
of Social Theory. He teaches courses in environmental sociology and
human-animal relations.
Gary Steiner is John Howard Harris Professor of Philosophy at
Bucknell University. He received his Ph.D in Philosophy from Yale
University in 1992, and he has written three books: Animals and the
Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship (Columbia
University Press, 2008); Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The
Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); Descartes as a Moral Thinker:
Christianity, Technology, Nihilism (Journal of the History of
Philosophy Book Series: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2004). He is
a major contributor to the field of animal studies and philosophy
and is the co-editor (with Gary Francione) of the book series Critical
Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law at
Columbia University Press.
Eric J. Silverman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious
Studies at Christopher Newport University. His Ph.D. is from St.
Louis University, where he wrote his dissertation under the guidance
of Eleonore Stump. His interests include medieval philosophy, ethics,
and philosophy of religion. He typically uses medieval insights to
address contemporary philosophical issues. His first€monograph, The
Prudence of Love: How Possessing the Virtue of Love Benefits the
Lover, was published in 2010. It presents a contemporary neoThomistic account of the virtue of love and argues that possessing it
advances the lover’s well-being on all major contemporary models
of well-being.
list of contributors
xix
Paula Young Lee holds a doctorate in Art and Architectural History
from the University of Chicago. Her books include Meat, Modernity
and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, ed. (UPNE, 2008); Gorgeous
Beasts: Animals in Art and Culture, ed., with Joan Landes and Paul
Youngquist (forthcoming), and Aristocrats and Other Animals:
Political Death and Animal Life at the Revolutionary Ménagerie in
Paris (forthcoming).
Ben Dawson is a Ph.D candidate at the London Consortium (Birkbeck,
UL) and is a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin.
The dissertation he is currently completing is a culturally and philosophically oriented genealogy of the ‘organism’ in the 1790s. He has
diverse research interests in scientific paradigms within the history
of systems of thought. He has an essay on Hegel’s early writings
forthcoming in a collection published by de Gruyter.
Sabrina Tonutti received her Ph.D in Cultural Anthropology in 2006
and is currently working at the Department of Economics, Society
and Territory (University of Udine, Italy). Her studies focus on
anthrozoology, new social movements, biodiversity, anthropology of
food, and epistemological reflections on the nature-culture and
human-animal divides in anthropology. She has carried out ethnographic research in Italy, Switzerland, and Great Britain. She is the
author of about thirty publications, which include: Diritti Animali.
Storia e antropologia di un movimento (Forum 2007); Water and
Anthropology (EMI 2007); Manuale di zooantropologia (Meltemi
2007, with R. Marchesini); Animali magici (De Vecchi 2000, with R.
Marchesini). Dr Tonutti is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal
Ethics.
Philip Tonner holds a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of
Glasgow. His current research borders on philosophy, archaeology
and material culture studies. He is the author of Heidegger,
Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being, (Continuum, 2010). Philip
is Research Support Officer for Glasgow Museums and an Associate
Lecturer with The Open University, where he teaches philosophy and
religious studies. Philip is also an Honorary Research Fellow in the
School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow.
xx
list of contributors
Tony Milligan undertook his Ph.D in Philosophy at Glasgow. He
works on ethics, and has published in various leading philosophy
journals such as Philosophical Investigations, Ratio, Philosophy, and
the Journal of Applied Philosophy. For the past two-and-a-half years
he has been working as a Teaching Fellow at the University of
Aberdeen, lecturing on Environmental Ethics, the Emotions, Theories
of Love, Truth and Berkeley. Current projects include a short book
entitled Beyond Animal Rights, which is due for completion in 2010
and will be published by Continuum.
Peter Soppelsa holds a BA in Philosophy from Oberlin College (2000)
and a Ph.D in History from the University of Michigan (2009). He
works in modern European history, urban history and the history of
science and technology. His dissertation The Fragility of Modernity:
Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Paris, 1870–1914 examined the
modernisation of Paris’ water supply, sewage system, transportation
networks and housing stock, as well as the unexpected fragility and
controversy this brought to city life. He is currently a Lecturer in the
History of Science Department and Managing Editor of Technology
and Culture at the University of Oklahoma.
Nik Taylor received her Ph.D in Sociology from Manchester
Metropolitan University in 1999 where she addressed the sociology
of human-animal interaction. She argued that sociology could, and
should, take account of human-animal interactions in a thesis entitled ‘Human-Animal Relations: A Sociological Respecification’. Now
a Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University, Dr Taylor currently
researches human-animal interactions and is an editorial board
member of Anthrozoos and Sociological Research Online and an honorary member of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal
Studies.
Robin Attfield is Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University, where
he has taught philosophy since 1968. He has also served as Visiting
Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Ife, Nigeria (1972–3), InterUniversity Council Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy, University of
Nairobi, Kenya, 1975, and National Research Council (Republic of
South Africa) Visiting Research Fellow (July/August 1999). He has
written the following books: God and The Secular: A Philosophical
Assessment of Secular Reasoning from Bacon to Kant (1978 and 1993);
list of contributors
xxi
The Ethics of Environmental Concern (1983 and 1991); A Theory of
Value and Obligation (1987); Environmental Philosophy: Principles
and Prospects (1994); Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics (1995); The
Ethics of the Global Environment (1999); Environmental Ethics: An
Overview for the Twenty-First Century (2003); Creation, Evolution
and Meaning (2006). He is the joint editor of Values, Conflict and
the Environment (1989 and 1996), of International Justice and the
Third World (1992), and of Philosophy and the Natural Environment
(1994), and the editor of The Ethics of the Environment (2008).
Eccy de Jonge received her Ph.D in Philosophy in 2001 from the
University of Essex. She is a freelance writer and philosopher. She is
the author of Spinoza and Deep Ecology: challenging traditional
approaches to environmentalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) and
Reinstating the Infinite: Arne Naess and the Misappropriation of
Spinoza’s God (Delft: Eburon, 2003) for which she was awarded the
Spinoza medal€from Het Spinozahuis. She is currently writing a book
on the Philosophy of Acting as related to performance.
André Krebber graduated in Environmental Studies from the
University of Lueneburg, with a thesis on the nature researcher and
artist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717). He is interested in classical
Critical Theory, the history and theory of science, aesthetics, and
human-animal and human-nature relationships. Currently, André is
working on his Ph.D at the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal
Studies, analysing the role played by the human-animal relationship
in societal-nature relations. This research is based on a critique of
civilisation delivered by the Frankfurt School, as a possible response
to the socio-ecological problems of the twenty-first century.
introduction
1
introduction
The End of Anthropocentrism
Rob Boddice
The ambiguity in the title of this introduction is intended. This book
is about the termination of anthropocentrism in ethics, politics, and
throughout a range of academic disciplines. It is also, paradoxically
and unapologetically, about the point of anthropocentrism, its ineluctability, and its usefulness. The tension is necessary. The tension begs
the primary question: what is anthropocentrism?
Anthropocentrism is expressed either as a charge of human chauvinism, or as an acknowledgement of human ontological boundaries.
It is in tension with nature, the environment and non-human animals (as well as non-humans per se). It is in apparent contrast to
other-worldly cosmologies, religions and philosophies. Anthro�
pocentrism has provided order and structure to humans’ understanding of the world, while unavoidably expressing the limits of that
understanding. It influences our ethics, our politics, and the moral
status of Others.1 Yet these expressions leave some doubt about the
extent to which the concept and its history are understood.
This collection of essays explores the assumptions behind the label
‘anthropocentrism’, specifically aiming critically to enquire into presuppositions about the meaning of ‘human’. The book looks fundamentally to understand what is anthropos in anthropocentrism. How
is the human defined through or against animal and objectified
Others, abstract environments and ecologies, and constructed cosmologies? The collection will address the epistemological and ontological problems of charges of anthropocentrism, tackling the
ques�tion of whether all human views are inherently anthropocentric.
In addition, and in contrast, the collection examines the potential
scope for objective, empathetic, relational, or ‘other’ views that
1
╇ I refer, in this introduction, to both ‘others’ and ‘Others’, thereby distinguishing
between rhetorical shades of difference and more emphatic separations and distinctions. The animal, depending on the context, is here both ‘other’ and ‘Other’.
2
rob boddice
�genuinely, and not merely rhetorically, trump anthropocentrism.
Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines, this book
explores the intellectual history and philosophy of anthropocentric
ideas and their relation to issues of pressing contemporary concern.
With a principal focus on ethical questions concerning animals, the
environment and the social (or more broadly, questions of the
nature/culture dichotomy), the essays ultimately cohere around the
question of the non-human, be it an animal, an ecosystem, a god, or
a machine.
The Human and the Political
Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan has asked if there is ‘a qualitative difference between a canonical practice of anthropocentrism and a selfreflexive practice; and who or what sanctions such a difference?’2 This
collection in some ways begins to construct a framework for answering those questions. My own blueprint follows. My specific focus
here is on the question of the animal, but in its place any ‘Other’
would beg similar questions of the human.
Drawing on Linnaeus, Giorgio Agamben ponders the definition of
the human as something defined only by what it is not:
Homo sapiens… is… a machine or device for producing the recognition
of the human… It is an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always
already deformed in the features of an ape. Homo is a constitutively
‘anthropomorphous’ animal… who must recognize himself in a nonman in order to be human.3
The imperative in Linnaeus’ Homo nosce te ipsum, human know thyself—only later changed to Homo sapiens, which likely was meant to
connote the same thing—suggests that the human defies anatomical
classification, but exists solely in the human capacity to distinguish
itself from apes.4 It is the je ne sais quoi of the capacity to self-reflect,
and thereby self-distinguish, that blights attempts to bypass anthropocentrism; for in denials of human distinctiveness one loses the
╇Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, History, the Human, and the World Between
(�Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 184.
3
╇Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 26–7.
4
╇ Agamben, The Open, 26–7.
2
introduction
3
capacity to classify ‘Others’. In this sense, rhetorical attempts to make
non-anthropocentric departures by reference to ‘Others’, or to ‘nonhumans’, implicitly retain the distinction of the reflexive human ego,
and orientate their egalitarian ambitions around distinctly human
political and ideological goals. Admonitions of ‘speciesism’, for
example, as Tony Milligan points out in this volume, contain implicit
recognitions of species distinction that cannot annihilate the distinctly human agency inherent in the charge: ‘You are or are not a
speciesist’; ‘I am or am not a speciesist’; ‘They are or are not speciesists’. Unless it can be shown that the respective pronouns can be
anything other than human, it seems clear that even the most ardent
campaigner against speciesism retains the capacity to know himself
as human and as distinctly capable—uniquely among animals—of
advocating and following a politics of species egalitarianism.
It follows that if rigorously non-anthropocentric theories, or histories, are desirable and to be attempted, they must first be apolitical.
No a priori political agenda or system of ethics can inform such a
narrative. Were this to be the case, then regardless of its claims to
non-anthropocentrism, or anti-anthropocentrism, it could not escape
the inherent and irredeemable humanness of all politics and all ethics. Anti-anthropocentrism in this mode would be merely anthropocentrism re-expressed. Self-effacing it might be, but self-reflexive it
would not be.
How then does one construct a non-anthropocentric (apolitical)
narrative? Dominick LaCapra’s most recent book’s major significance, according to the author’s own testimony, is in its broaching of
‘how to think and act relationally in a nonanthropocentric way that
is not entirely within… the grid of victimisation with its historically
predetermined, to some extent inevitable yet gridlocked, roles’.5
LaCapra lays down a controversial challenge: the importance of situating the human and the animal ‘in a broader but differentiated ecological perspective or wide-ranging network of relations’.6 He notes
that:
the questioning of a decisive criterion separating the human from the
animal or even from the rest of nature has widespread ramifications,
indicating the need for a major paradigm shift in the relations of the
5
╇Dominick LaCapra, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2009), 223.
6
╇ LaCapra, History and its Limits, 189.
4
rob boddice
human, the animal, and nature in general. Such a shift would not only
mark a turn away from anthropocentrism but also point to the inadequacies of ‘rights’ discourse, both human and animal. Without simply
taking one back to traditional ideas of natural law, it would lead to a
notion of basic claims of beings in an interactive network of relations
that places sovereignty in question, including state (or divine) sovereignty, and requires complex, mutual negotiations among claims as
well as limits on various forms of assertiveness.7
It is with this in mind that this volume sets out, though its findings
are necessarily merely a beginning. While many of the authors in
this collection are pushing heftily at the paradigm LaCapra identifies,
the work begins by begging the question of the very thing that
LaCapra wishes to turn from. Anthropocentrism, he effectively demonstrates, is not so easy to avoid, in the main because it is so difficult
to isolate. I have, in my previous writings, also pointed to the historical cases where, at the moment the animal (or nature) seems to
loom largest, the human overshadows it.8 Binary, or centre/periphery
oppositions are reified precisely where they are questioned, setting a
framework for discussion that merely shifts the discursive register,
leaving the opposition intact. What anthropocentrism is, therefore,
begs the question of what the human is. In the spirit of LaCapra’s
observation that ‘Assumptions set limits to enquiry that may remain
unexamined, especially when they are embedded in a habitus or what
goes without saying’,9 the preliminary essays in this collection demonstrate that once one starts to conceptualise ‘human’, a slipperiness
ensues. Anthropocentrism, whether evoked as an accusation, an
explanation, or an apology, typically rests on the givenness of the
meaning of ‘human’, which gives way to complexity, contradiction
and uncertainty only once that givenness is no longer assumed.
Explicating assumptions is a beginning. In doing this, the book takes
an initial, but necessarily uncertain, step towards LaCapra’s vision
of relationality.
The question remains as to whether an apolitical narrative is possible, or even desirable, and of course the temptation to anthropomorphise lurks in the background of any attempt to think this
╇ LaCapra, History and its Limits, 189.
╇Rob Boddice, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2009).
9
╇ LaCapra, History and its Limits, 2.
7
8
introduction
5
through (although, as Nik Taylor points out in this volume, that
might be something to work with, rather than against). Still, when
LaCapra talks about pointing out the inadequacies of human and animal rights discourses, and placing concepts of sovereignty in question, he at least begs the question: what would ‘a notion of basic
claims of beings [including humans] in an interactive network of
relations’ look like? How would one write an historical account of
these beings, their claims, and their interactions? I am resisting asking ‘And to what end?’, since its utterance seems to cycle us back to
politics; on the contrary, the account would have to be an end in
itself, of intrinsic value for its having pulled the rug from under
anthropocentrism expressed in any way. I do not, in this introduction, propose to offer an answer to these questions, for as yet the
scope of what needs to be asked is only just being revealed. It has
been the mistake of many decriers of anthropocentrism to set about
attacking it before they have really understood what it is. The primary
task, therefore, is to lay bare the forms, sites and contradictions of
anthropocentrism. Only once equipped with the awareness of its
omnipresence, even and perhaps most disconcertingly in its denials,
can the possibilities for an alternative even begin to be sketched. I am
conscious of the paradox here. If, to proceed, we must lay bare the
ways in which anthropocentrism holds us captive, we may, in becoming aware of the captivity, see the impossibility of transcending it. We
may observe, with Derrida, how the ‘centre’ makes discourse cohere,
but at the same time remains analytically elusive. Its centrality causes
it paradoxically to play a role in disavowals of it.10 To cite Agamben,
the ‘awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this
anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human’.11 In other
words, what may lie at the end of this process is the human itself,
which, ironically, is what those disenchanted with anthropocentrism
seek to avoid by their investigations. But it will be a self-reflexive
human stripped of rhetorical pretensions to exceptionalism or its
opposite, even if it turns out that the human is after all intrinsically
political: a human who might simply be there, and who might be
relatable to its environment and the other beings that share its apolitical ecological system.
10
╇ Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge
Classics, 2001), 352–3.
11
╇ Agamben, The Open, 70.
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Relation and Network
How do we begin to conceptualise, let alone comprehend, the relations of which humans are a part? Bruno Latour sounds a stark warning: ‘oikos, logos, phusis, and polis remain real enigmas so long as the
four concepts are not put into play at the same time’.12 Kinship and
nature cannot readily be abstracted from the history of human ideas
and the influence of culture (and its politics). To do so is to make a
rhetorical convenience, but not one that will endure critical scrutiny.
Latour points out that political ecologists, and I would add animal
advocates
have supposed that they could dispense with this conceptual work,
without noticing that the notions of nature and politics had been developed over centuries in such a way as to make any juxtaposition, any
synthesis, any combination of the two terms impossible. And, even
more seriously, they have claimed, in the enthusiasm of an ecumenical
vision, to have ‘gotten beyond’ the old distinction between humans and
things, subjects of law and objects of science—without observing that
these entities had been shaped, profiled, and sculpted in such a way
that they had gradually become incompatible.13
This is essentially the problem within environmental studies and
within animal studies. There is a great urgency abroad to ‘fix’ human
relations with these ‘Others’, to make them into mere ‘others’. But
in the urgency, it goes largely unnoticed that dichotomies are preserved intact. When accusations of anthropocentrism are levelled, it
is not often that we are convinced that the prosecutor has a less
anthropocentric perspective, although we may assume it to be benevolent. Save the environment! So goes the rallying cry. But for whom?
Why, precisely, should the environment be saved? Most people
would answer this question in anthropocentric terms. The same can
be said of any advocate for the rights of this or that person, animal
or thing. Rights according to nature (phusis) are established through
a conception of analogy of species, or kinship (oikos), and are apprehended only through a distinct form of reasoning (logos) that is
ineluctably embedded within the history of human culture, or, to put
it in Latour’s terms, the polis.
12
╇ Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 2.
13
╇ Latour, Politics of Nature, 2–3.
introduction
7
Since rights—and their moral and legal underpinnings—are inescapably a human concept, the recognition of rights in, or for, things
non-human bespeaks the kind of well-intentioned anthropocentrism
to which I allude. The same goes for those who advocate intrinsic
value, since value is again an inescapably human concept. The sanctity of life, or of nature, entails a knowledge of the sacred, which too
cannot escape the confines of human construction. In short, any ethical, value-based, law-based, or society-based view of the world is
inherently and irredeemably anthropocentric. This seems implausible
because the process of acquiring these world perspectives is to us
invisible, and we therefore operate with and within them, unaware
that we overlay cosmology with ideology at every step. We are alienated from our categories of analysis precisely because, as Latour says,
‘the notions of nature and politics had been developed over centuries’. They are fundamentally ours, and we make good use of them;
but we should not expect the outcomes of analyses so carried out to
be anything other than human.14
This should not be taken to imply a form of hierarchical distinction. Humans’ superiority and the notion of human exceptionalism
have too often been bound up together, confusing a valuational politics with an ontological fact. Actually, anthropocentrism might be
emptied of its overtones of dominion, while retaining something of
the exceptional. This is to distinguish the anthropocentrist from the
anthropocentric, the former being a political orientation, the latter
being an ontological condition. As Latour states, ‘A snail can block a
dam; the Gulf Stream can turn up missing; a slag heap can become a
biological preserve; an earthworm can transform the land in the
14
╇ Latour follows up (Politics of Nature, 20) with his list of what militant political
ecology thinks it does, and what it actually does. It is, in the main, applicable also to
animal studies scholars who are motivated principally by activism:
‘1. Political ecology claims to speak about nature, but it actually speaks of countless imbroglios that always presuppose human participation.
2. It claims to protect nature and shelter it from mankind, but in every case this
amounts to including humans increasingly, bringing them in more and more often,
in a finer, more intimate fashion and with a still more invasive scientific apparatus.
3. It claims to defend nature for nature’s sake—and not as a substitute for human
egotism—but in every instance, the mission it has assigned itself is carried out by
humans and is justified by the well-being, the pleasure, or the good conscience of a
small number of carefully selected humans—usually American, male, rich, educated,
and white’.
8
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Amazon region into concrete. Nothing can line up beings any longer
by order of importance’.15
Animal Kin, Animal Other
Doing away with hierarchy does not solve the ‘problem’ of anthropocentrism; it merely brings the ontological problem of the anthropocentric to the foreground. As Agamben eloquently puts it, ‘If
animal life and human life could be superimposed perfectly, then
neither man nor animal—and, perhaps, not even the divine—would
any longer be thinkable’.16
To exemplify this point, let us examine the essential paradox on
both sides of human-animal ethical debates, taking one strand of
arguments for and against vegetarianism. Within the claim that
humans should not eat other sentient life, since sentience is a basic
marker of the commonality of life on earth, is an implicit claim that
human beings have a distinctive quality that makes us uncommon.
Ethics itself allows humans to transcend the natural, at the very
moment that natural contiguity forms the basis of an ethical argument. On the other hand, those who advocate the eating of meat
since it is natural, and that humans are animals too, are also reluctant
to abandon the marks of distinction that seemingly allow us to make
choices outside of what we may have been naturally selected to do.
After all, the average meat-eating human in the West chooses to partake of this ‘natural’ function with all the trappings and procedures
of modern livestock farming, slaughter, markets, processing, ceremony and culinary skill (or lack thereof) that culture prescribes. The
vegetarian argues for commonality, but contravenes it by pointing
out the human capacity to transcend nature and make ethical choices.
The meat eater argues for commonality, but generally subscribes to
the moral, social and civil conditions that set humans apart from
nature, and would surrender them for a natural life with profound
horror. Both positions, in other words, share a complicated anthropocentrism, hidden under an equally complicated conception of the
natural world. Neither follows Latour’s imperative to put nature and
culture into play at the same time, and in the abstraction the cases are
mutually lost.
╇ Latour, Politics of Nature, 25.
╇ Agamben, The Open, 21.
15
16
introduction
9
An aporetic situation ensues. If one sees the paradox in each position, how does one proceed? It would seem that, contrary to the
typical rhetorical positions, the committed anthropocentrist, who
sees the human cachet as existing in humanity’s moral agency, should
be the one more likely to advocate vegetarianism. The acknowledgement that humans are categorically distinct from animals because of
their ability, even compulsion, to construe ethics, allows for the possibility to choose not to eat meat (although some further premises
would be required to proceed on this path). By contrast, the advocate
of anti-anthropocentrism who claims that humans are just other animals, and that by no means should we accentuate exceptionalism, is
left with the stark view of an amoral nature in which food chains
operate, as it were, naturally.
There are historical precedents for this kind of thinking. The high
point of animal activism in the nineteenth century coincided with
increasingly tightly defined notions of civilisation and civility: with
explicit expressions of denial that there was room for animality in
humanity. The concern was not so much with the objectification of
animals and the material uses to which they were put—not for animals in their own right—as it was with the ways in which humans
ought to behave, both privately and publicly.17 The humane movement foregrounded the human, stressed its exceptional status, reinforced what Richard Bulliet brilliantly shows to be erroneous notions
of dominion, and benefited animals only in proportion to the effectiveness of the civilising whip on the back of the unrefined man-inthe-shape-of-a-brute.
Bulliet identifies both the efficient industrial meat business and
the animal rights movement alike as part of the burgeoning postdomestic moment.18 If they are borne of the same phenomena, I see no
reason why these polar opposites should be expected to differ in kind.
They are merely different expressions of the postdomestic moment.
The animal rights movement only reformulates the human exceptionalism witnessed by the mass slaughter of animals; it does not,
save for rhetorical overtures, contradict it. A major factor in this is
17
╇ It was precisely the glimpse into the amorality of nature that horrified the likes
of Frances Power Cobbe, for example. She campaigned for animal welfare, principally against vivisection, on the basis of human eminence, and saw no contradiction
in her continued consumption of flesh.
18
╇Richard W. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of
Human-Animal Relationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
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the �impenetrability of the culture of anthropocentrism that animal
advocates decry. The label ‘non-human’ implicitly points to, and
unintentionally reinforces, the human-animal binary opposition. The
reaction against traditional Western expressions of dominion tends
to hinder historical investigations into the circumstances that gave
rise to this successful rhetorical device, even though Bulliet effectively
demonstrates that the process of domestication was more historical
accident than anthropocentric conceit.19 The notions of rights, suffering, personhood, citizenship—all of which have been applied to animal ethics in an attempt to unseat anthropocentrism—are borne of
post-Enlightenment ideas specific to human culture in a relatively
fleeting historical moment. What is fundamentally lacking, as Bulliet
laments, is a capacity to conceive of relational dynamics between species that characterised predomestic and early domestic culture. It is
to this kind of thinking that Marc Fellenz has called attention:
With the continuing subsumption of the animal’s world into human
civilization—one face of which is, ironically, extensionist animal advocacy—we are forced to pursue sublimated forms of the Paleolithic
drive. The prey may evoke the hunt from the hunter, but new institutions need to be built around this power of animals to impel us toward
their world. For this process to begin, the preoccupation with rights
and other ethical categories that has characterized so much recent
thinking about animals must be set aside, and something more akin to
the aesthetic must take its place. Such a move is discernible in various
works of contemporary art, including fiction, sculpture, and installation
pieces. There one finds an emerging animal aesthetic in which animality is not revealed as conforming to our standard evaluative categories,
but is instead valued for the challenge it poses to them.20
Essentially, studies that begin with already decided notions of what
the world is, what an animal is, what a human is, and what ethical
implications follow from their interrelation, have bypassed the fundamental question. For to apprehend the relation, the relation must
first be studied following the principal question how? Only when the
how of related actors has been satisfactorily rendered—albeit, not
permanently rendered; relations will always be historical—can any
kind of why or ought be entertained. With regard to the humananimal relation, both poles of the contemporary approach can like╇ Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, ch. 5.
╇Marc Fellenz, The Moral Menagerie: Philosophy and Animal Rights (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 230.
19
20
introduction
11
wise be criticised for failing to unpick a priori assumptions about the
objects of study. Those on the ‘right’ who posit that human-animal
relations should be defined by human rights, interests, and needs
presume an uncritical and universal understanding of ‘rights’, ‘interests’ and ‘needs’, and by no means render their anthropocentrism
(not to mention ethnocentrism and probably Westerncentrism)
understandable, let alone justifiable. Human pre-eminence, in such
discourse, is a given. On the ‘left’ it is posited that animals (and the
environment per se) have rights, or claims on humans through some
principle of utility, or through some sanctity of life. Here human
pre-eminence is not a given, but it is not clear why it is that human
legal and ethical categories should be projected outward. The ‘left’
unquestionably deploys human concepts of the human-animal relation, but it buries its anthropocentrism under the appearance of its
opposite. The movement gains its power by rhetorically rejecting
anthropocentrism and assuming a moral high ground. But morality
is of course an object of inquiry: it is inescapably human, and assumes
things about humanity as distinct from Other beings. Even where
morality is based on simple questions of utility, it begins with human
notions of suffering, which are then projected. Before we can follow
moral edicts we must understand moral origins, and in almost all
cases this entails an investigation into the history of the human
cachet of distinction. For even when that cachet is denied, it would
be unsatisfactory to allow the self-abnegation to pass uncritically.
The same goes for theriophilic approaches. This or that animal has
qualities that are celebrated or lauded, with ethical implications for
its treatment at human hands. What lies behind the celebration of
certain qualities? How is the biological principle of value established,
and on what does it depend? Why should centres form around
notions of intelligence, panience, fidelity, etc? The questions all focus
on human categories of analysis. The mere asking of them strips away
the a priori and normative appreciation of relations, laying bare the
empty objects of study and begging the question of their real relation.
The deepest ecological approach to the question, ‘how to do the best
for the world?’ is to start from the position of the amorality of things.
No categories of analysis or value is given.
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The Human and the Ethical
This leaves us with a choice. We—we humans—either have to accept
that our ethics make us the exceptional being, or we have to call time
on ethics. For most, I think, there will not be a problem with simply
agreeing to the former and ejecting the latter. But for some, especially
those whose work in ecology or animal studies leads them to reject
human exceptionalism, this will present a major problem. For at the
heart of these projects, as varied and as complex as they are, is a
central paradox. It is this: the human is an animal, just like any other,
debarred by the principles of evolutionary biology from any inherent
cachet of distinction that would separate it, hierarchically, from the
rest of life. In the secular cultures that produce the academics who
reproduce this idea, there is no recourse to a distinction of soul. At
the same time, the aforementioned fields of study come equipped
with an arsenal of ethical imperatives about preserving, protecting,
conserving, sanctifying and saving. They come with their notions of
rights, duties, moral status, consciousness, conscience, law, and suffering. These things, in one way or another, in myriad combinations,
they project onto the world and proclaim: this is how things should
be. If we take seriously the former premise about the great equality
of life, this act of volition about being ought either to be denied, or
to be declared a mere phantasm. Either the status of the human
makes prescription a reprehensible conceit, or it makes it an illusion,
for an equal being cannot, in reality, have an unequal effect on the
rest. It seems to me to be an inescapable logic that the denial of
human exceptionalism entails the end of ethical prescription. Unless
we are prepared to welcome this nihilistic turn, we must surely shift
our focus. Anthropocentrism is not the great evil to be denounced
and eliminated, but the great problem to be embraced and directed.
For if there is a continued insistence in certain fields that ethics be
explicitly and rigorously not anthropocentric, I am afraid we shall
produce all the ethical authority of a blank page.
To embrace the anthropocentric means to acknowledge its a priori
presence. Our insights will penetrate all the deeper if we agree that
the writer of an ethical treatise, the composer of a cultural theory, the
proposer of a moral schema, and the architect of an ecological battle
plan, all begin their work because they are human, with unique skill
sets and marks of distinction, in language, in culture, and in a thousand other categories that interweave and interplay. This is not
introduction
13
anthropocentrism as chauvinism, or prejudice (i.e. not anthropocentrist), but anthropocentrism as a non-optional starting point, a necessary cause. A work may convincingly be constructed against an
anthropocentrist world view, but its starting point will be no less
based in the anthropocentric. To realise this will perhaps serve to
clarify our intentions. More importantly, it may serve to improve our
arguments.
Contributions
Until now, works dealing with anthropocentrism have tended to
place it in limited context, as it relates to any one theme. This book’s
importance lies in its bringing together of these different contexts,
which in turn fosters a richer understanding of the meaning(s) of
anthropocentrism. The juxtaposition of diverse disciplinary specialisations makes manifest the protean nature of the concept, leading
to an enriched and deeply critical awareness of contemporary uses
of anthropocentrism.
The first section makes ontological and epistemological enquiries
into the meaning of anthropocentrism. It is an intellectual exploration of the history of an idea. The authors share a common repertoire, although they interpret it from widely different disciplinary and
philosophical perspectives. Boria Sax asks ‘what is the human?’ and
takes us on an etymological, natural and cultural journey from prehistory, through late Antiquity, the Renaissance, and down to the
present. He argues for the historical contingency of the meaning of
‘human’, noting our changing relations to animals, gods, and nature,
finally warning us against any attempt at definitiveness.
Kevin DeLapp then takes us over similar historical ground, but
with an eye much more firmly on the role of anthropocentrism
within the construction of ethics. DeLapp distinguishes between
‘metaethical’ anthropocentrism, which concerns the construction of
moral value, and ‘first-order ethical’ anthropocentrism, which concerns the content and extensions of moral value. Defending the
ineluctability of anthropocentrism at the metaethical level, DeLapp
draws from Daoist texts and argues convincingly for a liveable worldview in which first-order ethical anthropocentrism, with its exclusion
of moral consideration for animals, can be rejected.
This is appropriately followed by Richie Nimmo’s critical essay,
which explains the foundational role of anthropocentrism in modern
14
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social theory and the rise of humanism. Nimmo argues that humanity’s perceived separateness from, and elevation above, the nonhuman world has crucially defined the modern human, to the extent
that human ‘subjects’ are essentialised or ‘purified’ through a denial
of their intrinsic relation to non-human ‘objects’. This denial has
constructed and re-constructed our categories of ‘knowledge’, to the
point that empirical enquiry into anthropocentrism in the social sciences must take place within a closed loop. Nimmo thus calls for a
radical re-thinking in order to ‘grasp the world and ourselves’.
Gary Steiner concludes the section by telling us a way that this
might be accomplished. Coming full circle, Steiner reviews the legacy
of anthropocentrism as a central element in Stoic philosophy, charting its place in the Enlightenment construction of cosmopolitanism.
With one eye firmly on the future, Steiner rebuffs Stoicism with
Porphyry’s understanding of kinship. Porphyry’s ethics in relation to
animals were limited to those who sought a philosophical life, but
Steiner demands that the reader judge whether Porphyry’s limitations can still be justified. Striving for ‘cosmic justice’, Steiner critiques the anthropocentrism of contemporary discussions of
cosmopolitanism.
The first three chapters of Part Two narrow the broad view of the
opening essays, dealing with aspects of anthropocentrism in social
and cultural context. Eric Silverman’s chapter is an important
reminder to those working in animal and environmental studies of
the novelty of their approach. For however much secular ethicists
now wish to extend the moral compass to the non-human, theologians have rejected anthropocentrism for a great deal longer on the
grounds of blasphemy. Silverman works through the theological
devices of Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas as they sought
to avoid anthropocentrism in religious language. His otherworldly
focus concludes in a sharp reminder: just as the unknowable God lay
across an insurmountable barrier wrought by the limits of language,
so too do many animal qualities. Silverman suggests that his theological case study might serve as an example for those whose current
conceptual powers lack reflexivity.
Staying with the religious theme, Paula Young Lee escorts us on an
architectural historical journey in which she argues that the model
‘house of the soul’, namely the human body, crafted by God, has been
‘Â�surreptitiously substituted’ for another body, that of the ‘monstrous
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15
animal’. She traces the process of substitution inside the Western
rationalist tradition, positioning ‘current trends in architectural theory’ in relation to the latest work being carried out in post-humanist
studies.
The monstrous animal, or perhaps, the not-fully human animal, is
Ben Dawson’s particular focus, in his discussion of ‘anthropolarity’
through a critical take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Picking up a
Marxian thread begun by Nimmo, Dawson uses a discussion of the
novel to establish an opposition between two definitions of the
human, between ‘a level that is pertinent for a government’s economic-political action’, or the level of population, and ‘the multiplicity of individuals’. The non-coincidence of these two levels poses a
fraught question for those who resist the former and embrace the
latter (in this case, Frankenstein’s monster), for the dominant level
will merely snub out the ‘internal irritation’. In a stark conclusion
that alerts us to our ownership of the contradiction—the anthropolarity—in Frankenstein, Dawson effectively points us to anthropocentrism’s paradoxical alienation of the human. It is a thesis that
confronts many of the assumptions about anthropocentrism, begging
the human to ask, who, or what, am I?
The section concludes with a necessary step back that attempts to
formulate the place of anthropocentrism within the definition of the
concept of ‘culture’. Sabrina Tonutti applies critical scrutiny to
humanism’s opposition between Humanitas and Feritas, following
with an analysis of the humanistic legacy within Social and Cultural
Anthropology. Touching thematically on Dawson’s argument,
Tonutti demonstrates the extent to which the human-animal divide
has been drawn and redrawn in an attempt to sustain culture as a
‘unique characteristic and essential trait’ of humans. She points a
bold new direction for sociocultural anthropology as a means to
study animal cultures and subjectivities, focusing on ‘ontogeny rather
than phylogeny, and on the individual rather than species’, forecasting ‘the welding of new epistemological bonds’.
The chapters in Part Three follow logically from Tonutti’s broad view,
sharpening the focus of criticism explicitly upon the theoretical question of the animal in its relation to the human. Philip Tonner’s chapter carefully unpacks elements of Heideggerian theory in its relation
to the moral status of animals, making transparency where theory is
often opaque. Tonner’s comprehensive approach to Heidegger’s
16
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�phenomenology, in particular with relation to art, reveals his reasons
for stating that animals are ‘poor in the world’. But the critique demonstrates the weakness of Heidegger’s anthropocentrism, thwarting
his attempts adequately to conceptualise animality. Heidegger is
interpreted as being the heir to the hierarchical great chain of being,
or scala naturae, held back by a faith in the ontological distinction
of the human’s capacity to be there.
Tony Milligan highlights the fact of being human in his challenging piece on speciesism, which he labels a variety of anthropocentrism. Echoing thoughts in this introduction, Milligan suggests that
being human is essentially to know oneself, and also the ability to
recognise other humans. There is in this an ability to recognise a
powerful bond, the breaking of which, he argues, would come only
with important moral consequences. Preserving the anthropocentric
distinction of humans, Milligan proceeds to construct a basis for the
moral treatment of animals that is built upon that distinction, rather
than being based upon a rejection of it.
Peter Soppelsa narrates the story of anthropocentric instru�
mentalisation par excellence. It can be read as an extension of the
Â�argument in Dawson’s chapter, for ‘where humans were often instrumentalised (reduced to means)’ in the modern city, ‘anthropocentric
instrumentalisation of animals and technologies allowed humans to
regain a measure of agency and control’. Parisian horses in the nineteenth century were part of the industrial machine, until a decline in
their usage at the fin de siècle. Gathering theoretical threads from
post-humanism, post-colonial studies and science and technology
studies (sts), Soppelsa offers a compelling case study of the blurring
of the lines between humanity and ecology, unpacking Parisian negotiations of the binary distinctions that are such central themes in this
book, between urban and rural, human and non-human, natural and
social.
The concept of nature and its binary opposition to culture has long
since been critiqued by Actor-Network Theory (ant). Nik Taylor
embraces the embodied materiality of humans, arguing that although
anthropocentrism is thereby unavoidable, it does not prevent humans
from ‘seeing animals’ in a different ‘anthropo-interpretive’ way.
Taylor spotlights the ‘relatings’ among things, rather than focusing
on the ‘relators’ (avoiding the thorny issue in ant about agency),
and suggests an equality of perspectives of all things tied together
in �networks. A space should be cleared, she argues, in which �anthro�-
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17
pomorphism—now largely derided—can be accepted and explicated.
Sociologists will reap the rewards of studying how anthropomorphism operates ‘as a necessary part of the co-constitutive nature of
human-companion animal relationships’. The new epistemological
welding desired by Tonutti is seen here to be emerging.
Part four places the animal (whether human or non) in a broader
environmental or ecological context. Robin Attfield’s critical review
of Lynn White Jr.’s seminal essay, ‘The Historical Roots of Our
Ecologic Crisis’, is timely. In a balanced review, Attfield explores the
essay’s influence (on Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, for example),
and asks the extent to which environmentalists and ethicists should
give credence to White’s explanation of the causes of ecological problems, and the implications for them of so doing. Pointing out historical errors and inconsistencies in White’s work that undermine
his thesis, Attfield nevertheless highlights the ongoing importance of
beliefs, values and attitudes in ‘explaining the past, understanding
contemporary problems, and in generating proposals for solutions’.
Attfield concludes with a note on biocentric values, and it is here
that Eccy de Jonge picks up. Brandishing a distinctive combination
of deep ecology and metaphysics (which serves to answer many of
the criticisms of deep ecology), de Jonge sets about demonstrating
the extent to which anthropocentrism is problematic not only for
non-humans, but also for humanity. The argument posits that
anthropocentrism serves to define only small numbers of humans
who preserve for themselves the power to dominate nature and
humanity alike. Putting forward a ‘metaphysics of nature’, de Jonge
proposes a non-anthropocentrist approach that gives equal weighting
to what are seen as two essentially integrated threads: human rights
and environmental concerns.
Deep ecologists criticise anthropocentrism as the belief that nonhumans are only of instrumental value. In this collection’s terminal
essay, André Krebber echoes that criticism and identifies it as a
�product of the anthropocentric intellectual foundations of the
Enlightenment, which has left a powerful legacy in contemporary
debates on the environment. Through a critique of Adorno and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment Krebber extends Milligan’s
argument and draws our attention to the powerful bond of interspecies recognition that makes possible the mediation of nature in
the human subject. Exhorting us, much like Marc Fellenz, to look the
18
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animal in the eye, Krebber wrestles with the concept of nature, suggests that humans leave their pre-eminent throne, and posits a nonanthropocentrist way forward. His terminal note, instructing us
through historical example to mediate with, rather than dominate,
the other, is a fitting appeal with which to conclude this volume.
part one
Epistemological and ontological
investigations
the concept of the ‘human’
21
what is this quintessence of dust?
the concept of the ‘human’ and its origins
Boria Sax
What piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how
express and admirable! In action how like an angel!
In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the
world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither…1
Plato in a lecture defined ‘man’ as a ‘two-footed featherless animal’.
The philosopher Diogenes of Sinope appeared the next day at the
Academy carrying a plucked chicken and said, ‘This is Plato’s man’.2
Assuming the plucked chicken was still alive, the poor bird must
have appeared utterly helpless and disoriented. Chickens were a
�common sacrificial offering, and this one was probably destined
shortly for the altar. Taken as a symbol, the plucked chicken suggested a definition of humanity not in terms of physical properties
but in terms of our alienation and fear. Diogenes, in other words,
answered Plato by revealing an emotional core of what it means to
be a human being.
Our understanding of the word ‘human’ changes radically,
not only from one historical era to another but also with context.3 It
is impossible to untangle the biological meanings of the word from
moral, theological, metaphysical, social, poetic, and legal ones.
Humanity has at times been defined, among other ways, in terms of
╇Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2:2.
╇ L. Diogenes, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. C.D. Yonge (London: George
Bell & Sons, 1895), bk xv, 4.
3
╇ Harriet Ritvo, ‘Humans and Humanists (and Scientists)’, http://onthehuman
.org/2010/03/humans-and-humanists-and-scientists/comment-page-1/#comment1013. Accessed, March 22, 2010.
1
2
22
boria sax
the use of fire,4 the taboo against incest,5 �politics,6 the making of
tools,7 the understanding of death,8 and the use of language.9 It would
be a massive task to even inventory all the various definitions of
‘human’, let alone critique them.
If it creates such confusion, why not simply dispense with the
word ‘human’? For one thing, because it is so entirely integrated into
so many facets of our culture, including religion and law, that we
would hardly know what to do without it. Secondly, the meanings of
the word are actually, taken as a whole, far from incoherent. The
development of the concept over millennia follows patterns that can
be identified and analysed. Finally, the concept is confusing not
because it lacks meaning, but rather because it has a vast richness of
meaning. It continually invites us to probe more deeply in hope of
finding some core of wisdom. We continually search for a meaning
that underpins all of the partial and incomplete definitions.
Meanings of the word ‘human’ may have proliferated over the centuries, particularly since the Renaissance. But if we trace the concept
to its roots in etymology and in myth, a surprisingly consistent
understanding does emerge. In the initial stage of this process
‘humanity’ is not so much what we now call a ‘species’ as a sort of
experience, primarily one of transience and vulnerability. Human
beings are seen not as existing in relation to ‘animals’ but, if anything, to deities. In the second stage, starting in late antiquity, animals rather than deities emerge as the major template against which
human beings are defined. In the third stage, starting around the
Renaissance, the understanding of ‘human’ is expanded to embrace
new technologies and cultural products. Humanity, in consequence,
4
╇ Hesiod, Theogony/Works and Days, trans. M.L. West (750 bce; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988); L. Winner, ‘Resistance is Futile: The Posthuman
Condition and its Advocates’, Is Human Nature Obsolete? Genetics, Bioengineering, and the Future of the Human Condition, eds. H.W. Baillie and T.K. Casey
(Â�Cambridge, MA: MIT Press): 385–411.
5
╇ Hesiod, Theogony/Works and Days; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books).
6
╇ Aristotle, Politics, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (323 bce; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).
7
╇ Winner, ‘Resistance is Futile’.
8
╇ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Freedom of the Will’ [from The Social Contract and
Other Discourses], Animal Rights: A Historical Anthology, eds. A. Linzey and P.B.
Clarke (1754; New York, Columbia University Press, 2004): 32–4.
9
╇Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (third edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); René Descartes, Discourse on the Method and the Meditations,
trans. F.E. Sutcliffe (1641; New York: Penguin, 1968).
the concept of the ‘human’
23
becomes less an organism than a sphere of existence, which is
opposed not so much to animals as to ‘nature’. This succession of
ways in which the term ‘human’ is understood is, however, not so
much a matter of replacement so much as accretion. The word has
constantly acquired new meanings without relinquishing the old
ones, becoming increasingly rich, complicated, and elusive.
Humanity and Deities
‘Adam’, the name of the first man according to the Bible, may come
from the Hebrew adamah, meaning ‘soil’, though that is uncertain.10
At any rate, the Biblical God forms Adam of soil and then animates
him with breath.11 Our English word ‘human’ also associates us
closely with soil. It enters the language via the French from the Latin
humanus, which in turn is derived from humus, meaning ‘earth’. We
now traditionally think of human status as exalted, at least in relation
to other animals, but the word ‘human’ is closely related to ‘humble’,
also derived from humus, which can also mean ‘close to the ground’.12
We are, in other words, creatures of the earth. Cognates of the word
‘human’ in other Latin languages such as the Italian uomo, the French
homme, and the Spanish hombre originate from the same root. They
all come ultimately from the Indo—European root ghdhem, meaning
‘of the earth’.13
In Lithuanian, which is closest to the original Indo-European of
any language spoken today, the cognate has a parallel origin. The
word for ‘human’, zmu, is derived from zemz, the word for ‘earth’.14
The etymological association with the earth is a bit less direct in the
Greek word for ‘human being’—anthropos. That comes in part from
the Indo-European root andh, meaning ‘bloom’, suggesting a figure
blossoming from the ground like a plant.15 The idea that humanity
10
╇D.L. Jeffrey, A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand
Rapids, Mi.: William B. Eerdmans, 1992.
11
╇Genesis 2:7.
12
╇ J. Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins: the Histories of more than 8,000 EnglishLanguage Words (New York: Arcade, 1990).
13
╇ J.T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of IndoEuropean Roots (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
14
╇ B. Colonna, Uomo, Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana: L’origine delle
nostre parole (5th edn., Rome: Newton & Compton, 2005).
15
╇Shipley, Origins of English Words.
24
boria sax
was made by deities from earth or clay is also very widespread in
non-Western mythologies, for example the Chinese, the Rwandan,
the Maori, and the Inca.16
Remarkably, these etymological definitions contain little or nothing that could distinguish human beings from animals, which also
may be created from earth. This suggests that very early human
beings did not differentiate very sharply between animals and people.
The line between the two is far from absolute in ancient literatures,
as is demonstrated by the frequent metamorphoses across these
boundaries. Human beings can achieve immortality, like Heracles,
but may also be transformed into beasts, like the lovers of the witch
Circe.
One way of defining humanity is through stories, particularly
those that tell of the creation and early history of human beings. Such
tales place human beings in relation to powers that are both far
greater and more stable than our own, exemplified, for example, in
earthquakes or violent storms. The creation of human beings is rarely
presented without foreboding in mythology and religion, since our
identity consists largely in the fact that we are not gods and goddesses. We are tied to the earth from which we come and are, therefore, fragile and perishable. This is confirmed by incessant laments of
the human condition which have come down to us from the ancient
world, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer to the Book of Job and
the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. Far from celebrating humankind,
old mythologies constantly tell of the human race being victimised.
Humanity is incessantly being cursed, exterminated by flood, and
destroyed by plague or war.
In Works and Days, Hesiod mentions a succession of four failed
creations of human beings by the gods, but the figures in these creations are not individualised. The creation of Pandora, the first
woman, is told in far more detail, and she is at least the first human
being to leave a story and a name. She is made to punish men, after
the titan Prometheus has stolen the fire of heaven and given it to
them. First, Hephaestus, smith to the gods, forms her of earth and
water. Athena gives her skills such as weaving, and Aphrodite bestows
a personality. The gods then give Pandora to Epimetheus, brother of
16
╇R. Willis, ‘Humanity, The Origins of’, Dictionary of World Myth: An A-Z
�
Reference
Guide to Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, Heroines and Fabulous Beasts (London:
Duncan Baird, 2000).
the concept of the ‘human’
25
Prometheus, in marriage as a gift. Heedless of fraternal warnings,
Epimetheus accepts, and Pandora, moved by curiosity, opens a jar
that lets loose disease, toil and all of the ills of the world on humankind.17
There are two Biblical creation myths. In the first, after creation of
the cosmos, vegetation, and animals, God makes human beings last
of all. He creates both male and female after his image, and tells
them: ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters
of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, and all the living animals
on the earth’.18 In the second creation myth, God creates Adam, then
afterwards fashions the birds and beasts from the soil, and brings
them to Adam to be named. Only then does God, who wishes to
make a companion for Adam, take a rib from the first man and fashion it into the first woman or Eve.19 The Biblical stories of creation
have a stately majesty, yet little conflict or drama, at least not until
Adam and Eve disobey God and are expelled from Paradise. These
accounts describe an unequivocally anthropocentric universe, not as
a present reality but as a nostalgic memory.
In the Koran, the high status of humankind in spite of lowly origins is an unfathomable decree of God. When God has first made
Adam, he demands that all of the angels bow down before this new
creation. All of them obey except for Satan, who says, ‘I will not bow
to a mortal whom You created of dry clay, of black molded loam’.
God does not reply except to curse Satan for disobedience.20
The word ‘human’ continues to be used in some contexts to
Â�indicate vulnerability. Roget’s International Thesaurus, for example,
gives ‘weakness’ and ‘frailty’ as near synonyms for ‘humanness’.21
Somebody that is ‘very human’ exemplifies a combination of striving
and fragility.
╇ Hesiod, Theogony/Works and Days.
╇Genesis 1.
19
╇Genesis 2.
20
╇Mohammed, The Koran, with Parallel Arabic Text, trans. N.J. Dawood (New
York: Penguin), sura 15: 31–32.
21
╇P.M. Roget, L.V. Berrey and G. Carruth, eds., Roget’s International Thesaurus
(3rd edn., New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962).
17
18
26
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Humanity and Animals
What is the opposite of ‘human being’? Though scientists may now
classify humankind among the animals, we are still very far from
having internalised that idea. To call somebody an ‘animal’ remains
a way to deny that person’s humanity. Animals can serve as a contrast to human beings because they resemble us in a great many
respects, but these similarities are often used to highlight an essential
difference, which may be anything from a taboo against incest to
speech. The category of ‘animal’ lumps together a vast range of beings
that have little in common beyond the fact that they are not, or not
quite, human. Today, people sometimes prefer the phrase ‘nonhuman animal’ on either scientific or humane grounds, but it merely
makes a bit more explicit the meaning of the original concept.
Derrida, among others, has expressed his intense opposition to the
concept of ‘animal’:
Confined within this catch-all concept, within this vast encampment
of the animal, in this general singular, within the strict enclosure of
this definite article (‘the Animal’ and not ‘animals’), as in a virgin forest, a zoo, a hunting or fishing ground, a paddock or an abattoir, a
space of domestication, are all the living things that man does not
recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers. And that is so
in spite of the infinite space that separates the lizard from the dog, the
protozoon from the dolphin, the shark from the lamb, the parrot from
the chimpanzee, the camel from the eagle, the squirrel from the tiger,
the elephant from the cat, the ant from the silkworm, or the hedgehog
from the echidna.22
What I think Derrida recognises intuitively but has not fully managed to articulate is that the notion of an ‘animal’ is only meaningful
in relation to human beings, as a sort of image in a distorting mirror.
Some thinkers visualise the opposite of humanity as a creature of
the imagination, which can incorporate features of many animals as
well as demons and immortals. This is, in other words, a sort of ‘personification’ of the ‘animal’. The French historian Lucian Boia calls
this ‘l’homme différent’ (the human other), which characteristically
resembles a human being in most respects but is radically different in
22
╇ Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. D. Willis (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 34. Despite the reservations expressed in this
�passage, Derrida goes on to use the term animal constantly, almost obsessively in fact
(Sax, 2008).
the concept of the ‘human’
27
a single one. L’homme différent may, for example, be a cannibal, be
ruled by women, or be headless with a face on his chest. He may live
on an island, a remote continent, the centre of the earth, outer space,
or even among us in disguise. The nearly endless manifestations of
this creature include mermaids, satyrs, Patagonian giants, and Yetis. 23
We may add to this list the plucked chicken of Diogenes.
Arguably, the first known instance of l’homme différent may be in
Gilgamesh, the world’s most ancient surviving epic. The gods create
the man Enkidu out of clay, so that the king Gilgamesh may have a
companion. At first he lives in harmony with wild animals, jostles
with the herds at water holes, and upsets the traps of the hunters.
Gilgamesh directs a trapper to send a harlot to Enkidu, and then:
For six days and seven nights they lay together, for Enkidu had forgotten his home in the hills; but when he was satisfied he went back to
the wild beasts. Then, when the gazelle saw him, they bolted away;
when the wild creatures saw him they fled. Enkidu would have followed, but his body was bound as though with a cord, his knees gave
way when he started to run, his swiftness was gone. And now the wild
creatures had all fled away; Enkidu was grown weak, for wisdom was
in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart.24
Enkidu, quite possibly initially inspired by sightings of a great ape,
is arguably the first of countless figures in mythology that straddle
the growing divide between animal and human being. Here, the transition to a human identity is accompanied by alienation, sadness,
and loss of physical abilities.
These ideas become even more explicit in Plato’s dialogue
Protagoras, which contains the first Greek account of the creation of
animals.25 This dialogue also contains, according to the Italian theorist Roberto Marchesini, the earliest known expression of the ‘myth
of incompleteness’ [‘mito dell’incompletezza’].26 Initially, there were
23
╇ L. Boia, Entre l’ange et la bête: Le mythe de l’homme différent de l’Antiquité à
nos jours (Paris: Plon, 1995).
24
╇ Anon., The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. N.K. Sandars (New York: Penguin, 1970),
62–3.
25
╇ Plato, Protagoras, in Protagoras and Meno (New York: Penguin, 2005): 1–80.
Hesiod speaks of animals collectively only once and only in passing. This comes in
Works and Days (lines 276–7), when he writes, ‘For this was the rule that Kronos’
son laid down: whereas fish and beasts and flying birds would eat one another,
because right is not among them, to me he gave Right…’.
26
╇R. Marchesini, Post-human: Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza (Turin: Bollati
Boringhieri, 2002).
28
boria sax
only deities, but the gods moulded human beings, along with the
animals, from earth and fire. Then the deities directed the brothers
Prometheus and Epimetheus to assign abilities to each. Epimetheus
took the task on himself, though the results were subject to the
approval of his fraternal partner:
To some creatures he attributed strength without swiftness, the weaker
ones he endowed with speed. To some he gave weaponry, while for the
ones he’d given a weaponless physique, he devised some other ability
for their survival: to those he’d wrapped in littleness, he gave the power
to escape on wings or live below the ground; while for those he’d
expanded to a great bulk, he made that bulkiness the very thing that
saved them. And he handed out everything else with the same sort of
checks and balances, the aim of these devices being, so far, to ensure
that no species should vanish from the earth…
But when he finally came to human beings, Epimetheus realised that
he had used up all of the gifts. Humans were naked and defenceless,
without fur to protect them from the elements or hooves to shield
their feet, in fact they did not even have a place to sleep. So that
people would be able to survive, Prometheus stole the fire from the
divine forge of the god Hephaestus and the arts of Athena for them,
and was then punished by Zeus.27
The same conception may be found in a passage by Pliny the Elder
in the first century ce, which echoes Plato’s Protagoras:
All other animals know their own natures: some use speed, others swift
flight, and yet others swimming. Man, however, knows nothing unless
by learning—neither how to speak nor how to walk nor how to eat; in
a word, the only thing he knows instinctively is how to weep. And so
there have been many people who judged that it would have been better not to have been born, or to have died as soon as possible. Man
alone of living creatures has been given grief, on him alone has that
luxury been bestowed in countless forms and through every single
limb…28
The drive to dominance, to put it differently, is a product of human
frailty.29
╇Plato, Protagoras, 320d-322a.
╇Pliny, Natural History: A Selection, trans. J.F. Healy (New York: Penguin,
1991), bk vii, 4–5.
29
╇ The level of comfort and security that human beings have achieved through
technology, at least on a day-to-day basis, means that it has become far harder to
claim superiority for man on the basis of a uniquely tragic destiny. If, as many
ancient texts from Gilgamesh to Plato’s dialogue Protagoras suggest, the essential
27
28
the concept of the ‘human’
29
The philosophy of Descartes, which ushered in the modern era,
employs the same basic paradigm of humankind as defined by
incompleteness found in the work of Plato.30 According to Descartes,
animals were automatons, while human beings had immortal souls.
But, since they were made by God, animals were incomparably more
refined than any devices human beings could create.31 By contrast,
Descartes believed that the essence of a human being was imperfection in relation to God.32 Even in the work of Descartes, who is often
regarded as among the most anthropocentric of philosophers, there
is a profound ambivalence about the status of humankind. Unlike
animals, human beings had the ability to err, to sin, and to suffer in
consequence.33 The paradigm has several more recent variants such
as the idea, championed by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz and many
others, that animals act on the basis of instinct while human beings
act on the basis of culture.34
As Europeans explored the globe in early modern times, they
brought back accounts of remote cultures and of apes in distant
lands, and debated which creatures should be considered ‘human’.
Arguably the first attempt to distinguish humanity from animals on
a scientific basis was that of the Amsterdam anatomist Nicolaas Tulp,
who was given the corpse of an orangutan in 1541. After dissecting
it, he concluded this was the satyr of Greco-Roman mythology. Both
scientific and popular culture continued regularly to confuse apes,
black Africans, Amerindians, and mythological creatures into the
twentieth century.35
human experience is one of vulnerability, perhaps some animals may now seem
more ‘human’ than human beings. See Boria Sax, The Serpent and the Swan: Animal
Brides in Folklore and Literature (Knoxville, Tn.: McDonald & Woodward/University of Tennessee Press, 1998).
30
╇Marchesini, Post-human.
31
╇ This is pointed out by E. de Fontenay, Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à
l’épreuve de l’animalité (Paris: Fayard, 1998), who rightly observes that both the
admirers and the critics of Descartes have failed to appreciate the significance of this
distinction between animals and machines.
32
╇Descartes, Discourse on the Method.
33
╇Descartes, Discourse on the Method; Marchesini, Post-human; Derrida, The
Animal that Therefore I Am.
34╇
Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. M.K. Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1966); Marchesini, Post-human.
35
╇M. Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, trans. P. Vincent (New York: Verso,
2005); J. Marks, What it Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and their Genes
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Boria Sax, Animals in the Third
Reich: Pets, Scapegoats and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2000).
30
boria sax
In the later twentieth century, reaction against the racism that had
permeated Western culture, particularly in Nazi Germany, led to
demands for an understanding of humanity that could not be used to
rationalise colonialism, apartheid, or even genocide. For a brief historical moment, the question of what is human even appeared to
have been settled,36 but massive cultural and technological developments now compel us to address it once again. This is a culturally
hazardous undertaking, since any exclusion from that category now
means denial of legal status and protection.37
Strictly speaking, homo sapiens is, like all species, scientifically
defined by reproductive patterns. A species is considered distinct if it
does not habitually reproduce with others outside its boundaries.38
Thus carrion crows [corvus corrone] and American crows [Corvus
brachyrhynchos] are usually considered distinct species even though
they are virtually identical, since they are separated by the Atlantic
Ocean. But this definition is so specific that it will only satisfy the
most narrowly focused scientists.
The most broadly meaningful attempt to distinguish human beings
from animals by a single, unique feature is in terms of language. This
idea comes to us through a long tradition that goes back at least to
Aristotle and was refined by Descartes.39 Noam Chomsky has written,
‘When we study human language, we are approaching what some
might call the “human essence”, the distinctive qualities of mind that
are, so far as we know, unique to man and that are inseparable from
any critical phase of human existence, personal or social’.40 This criterion for human uniqueness may be less arbitrary than, say, the one
attributed to Plato in the anecdote about Diogenes and the chicken,
but it raises many of the same problems. It as well focuses on a single
attribute, inevitably severing that quality from any evolutionary or
philosophical context.
36
╇ F. Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Picador, 2002); Marks, What it Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee;
Ritvo, ‘Humans and Humanists’.
37
╇R.N. Proctor, ‘Human Recency and Race: Molecular Anthropology, the ReÂ�Â�
figured Acheulean, and the UNESCO Response to Auschwitz’, Is Human Nature
Obsolete? Genetics, Bioengineering, and the Future of the Human Condition, eds.
H.W. Baillie and T.K. Casey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press): 235–68.
38
╇Marks, What it Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee.
39
╇ Aristotle, Politics; Descartes, Discourse on the Method.
40
╇ Chomsky, Language and Mind, 88.
the concept of the ‘human’
31
While the boundary between animals and human beings may be
blurred by some recent developments such as interspecies transplants
of organs or genetic material, the distinction is becoming sharper in
other ways. Human beings now spend much of their lives in digital
forums where no animals can participate. While academic writings
may pay increasing attention to animals, they are vanishing from the
planet and from our daily lives. The distinction between animals and
human beings, in summary, is losing none of its relevance yet needs
to be reconceived.
Humanity and Nature
If we consider ‘humanity’ in a more extended sense, its major opposite becomes not ‘animals’ but ‘nature’. The human sphere contains
not only men and women but also domesticated animals (especially
pets), customs, and technologies. In this sense, the word ‘humanity’
is almost a synonym for ‘civilisation’.
In Gilgamesh, what we think of as ‘civilisation’ is the space within
the city walls, while ‘nature’ is the world beyond them. Neil Evernden
dates the modern understanding of the difference between humanity
and nature to the Italian Renaissance, when scientists endeavoured
to expel allegedly ‘human’ qualities such as meaning and purpose
from natural processes. The distinction between humanity and nature
ceased to be primarily a matter of geography, and became one of
philosophy instead. This was, in other words, a rejection of what has
come to be known as ‘anthropomorphism’.41 Animals became a sort
of frontier between nature and humanity, simply because they were
where anthropomorphism was most difficult to avoid.
Emptying nature of purpose facilitated the exploitation of the
environment, thus preparing the way for the Industrial Revolution.
But the use of increasingly sophisticated machines, especially those
powered by steam, quickly began to challenge its foundation.
Machines powered by steam were no longer so directly subject to
such physical laws as gravity, but had their own metabolism. People
regarded factories with a combination of fear and awe, perhaps
41
╇Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
32
boria sax
because they evoked ancestral memories of the great mammals in the
era of cave paintings.42
With the use of electricity and eventually computer technology,
machines started to appear even more anthropomorphic. A major
turning point came in the 1970s and 80s, as the primary use of computers went from calculation to simulation.43 One would no longer
give computers precise commands or know in advance how they
would respond to a stimulus. In some contexts at least, computer
technology has now broken down the boundary between mind and
matter.
Some thinkers predict the end of nature through the expansion of
human technology to remote corners of the globe.44 This, however,
misses an important point, for the expansion of the human realm
does not lead to either a conquest of, or union with, the natural
world. It merely redraws the boundary, which, in any case, has long
ceased to be exclusively geographic. The frontier with nature is the
limit of control by human beings and their technologies.
While our understanding of the word ‘nature’ may arguably be
more complex and elusive than that of our ancestors, the concept
shows no sign of becoming meaningless or irrelevant. Nature remains
a realm where it is commonplace (should we say ‘natural’?) for parents to eat their offspring or even their mates. It is a world that shows
no respect for our hierarchies, our egalitarianism, our rules, or our
values, but that continues to entice us with its overpowering beauty.
Nature is visible most dramatically in the form of natural disasters
such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes. As the realm of the
unknown, it is with us in the form of millions of species that not only
escape our control but, in most cases, have not even been identified.
It remains, in summary, completely ‘uncivilised’.
Conclusions
Briefly to summarise the conclusions so far, the meaning of ‘human’
initially is less a concept than an experience. To the extent that
╇Marchesini, Post-human.
╇ Boria Sax, ‘The Cosmic Spider and Her World-Wide Web: Sacred and Symbolic Animals in the Age of Change’, A Cultural History of Animals in the Modern
Age, ed. R. Malamud (New York: Berg, 2007); S. Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity
in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
44
╇ B. McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
42
43
the concept of the ‘human’
33
human beings are contrasted with anything at all, it is with deities.
The boundaries between people, deities, and animals are, however,
not yet clearly drawn. By late Antiquity, human beings have begun
to define themselves primarily in relation to animals. As with the
gods, people envy the natural abilities of animals, yet men and
women also see themselves elevated above animals by superior
understanding. As we enter the modern period, the understanding
of human beings is broadened to include increasingly intricate technologies, laws, and customs, and people define themselves not only
in relation to animals but to the entire natural world.
But how will the term ‘human’ be understood in the future? And
how would we like it to be understood? In some ways it has, despite
all the intellectual and social upheavals of the last few centuries,
changed surprisingly little. The model that had prevailed in Western
culture since late antiquity has been the ‘great chain of being’,
whereby human beings are placed in a hierarchical continuum
between the angels and the beasts.45 A similar structure is implicit in
most contemporary thinking on the subject, but the angels have been
replaced by computers. There are some who would prefer to dispense
with the concept of ‘human’ entirely, at least as we have thought of it
up till now, due to a perceived collapse of boundaries. Transhumanists
see humankind merging with computers,46 because of technological
advances, while some Posthumanists see humankind as merging with
animals, due to recent research.47 But much of human uniqueness
seems to consist in our ability to blend, and negotiate, both of these
worlds.48
It is easy to forget that the original Humanism of figures such as
Petrarch and Erasmus was a reaction against increasingly virulent
religious conflicts, which culminated in the brutal religious wars of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Humanists sought to emphasise our common humanity, as a means to transcend differences of
belief and ethnicity, in order to bring peace. What they did not realise
45
╇ A.O.€Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
(1936; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).
46
╇R. Kurzweil, ‘The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine’, Scientific American
Reports, 18 (2008): 20–5.
47
╇M. Calacro, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
48
╇Marchesini, Post-human; G.A. Mazis, Humans Animals Machines: Blurring
Boundaries (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008); R. Marchesini, ‘Alterity and the NonHuman’, Humanimalia, 2:1 (2010).
34
boria sax
is that this human solidarity they endeavoured to establish would
eventually be directed against the natural world. But the decay of
Humanism raises the prospects that such conflicts, never more than
precariously held in check, could become even more virulent. They
might take the form of conflicts between, say, Christians against
Muslims, technophiles against luddites, conservatives against liberals,
meat eaters against vegetarians, or even Humanists against
Posthumanists. By developing a sort of human identity that will be
inclusive and accepting yet robust, we may preserve the option of
appealing to our common humanity for the sake of mediation.
This is not the place to critique the various definitions, implicit or
clearly stated, in countless manifestos, prophesies, utopias, dystopias,
novels, treatises, and other works over the past fifty years or so. But
the historical examination of how the concept has developed up to
now suggests four basic guidelines for future attempts at definition.
First of all, humanity cannot be reduced to any single feature such
as language, intellect, use of machines, or genetic code. For one thing,
their simplicity makes such definitions relatively easily subject to
challenge. Far more significantly, they each describe only one facet of
a multifaceted phenomenon. We are not solely our thoughts, bodies,
minds, feelings, behaviour, customs, technologies, words, or dna, but
a combination of all of these and more.
The second guideline, a corollary of the first, is that we are
extremely unlikely to achieve a perfect, final, or even a definitive idea
of what it means to be human. When we attempt to define the word,
we should not romanticise ourselves as revolutionaries placing in
question a centuries-old tradition, for no such tradition exists. The
understanding of what is ‘human’ has always fluctuated dramatically
throughout history, and will no doubt continue to do so for the indefinite future.49
Third, we are profoundly dependent on animals and the natural
world, not only in pragmatic ways but also for our very identity. It is
largely through our interaction with animals that we define ourselves,
both as individuals and as members of the human race. This interdependence is so intimate that it may not make very much sense to
attempt to balance ‘our’ interests against ‘theirs’.
49
╇ As Roger Smith has argued in Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the
Creation of Human Nature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), being
human, like ethnicity and other forms of identity, is not fixed but, rather, continuously created through reflection on historical experience.
the concept of the ‘human’
35
Finally, despite the accretions that have grown around it over millennia, the concept of ‘humanity’ remains most fundamentally based
on an experience—one of closeness to the earth, combined with
awareness of transience and vulnerability. This contrasts paradoxically with our seeming dominance among forms of life on the planet,
yet the human drive for dominance has always had something profoundly defensive about it. Modern culture is widely described as
‘anthropocentric’, but that label is a bit oversimplified. It overlooks
that along with human arrogance, and deeply bound up with that,
there have always been intense feelings of extreme human vulnerability, even inferiority, with respect to other creatures.50 Failure to recognise this frequently leads to an undertone of misanthropy, which
often runs through writing about animals or the environment.51 If we
are to overcome human arrogance, we should first understand its
nature and its source.
It would be interesting to know how Plato and the people of
Athens responded to the chicken of Diogenes. The idea of humanity
as frail often seems counterintuitive today, and probably did in
Plato’s day as well. This is because we tend to personify ‘humankind’.
We forget that humanity is composed of individuals, and then imagine our collective identity as a single man or woman, making our
species seem far more unified, and thus more powerful, than it actually is. It makes us appear to act with a single will. This sort of personification is apparent, for example, when we speak of democracy
or moon shots as ‘human accomplishments’, the persistence of poverty as a ‘human failure’, or mass extinctions as a ‘human crime’. We
then further exaggerate human control by regarding the power of
technologies as entirely our own, when, in fact, we never foresee their
social and environmental implications in much detail. Each of
us may individually feel nearly helpless as we contemplate a vast
number of threats from personal bankruptcy to global warming,
from viruses in our meals to a collapse of the global economy, from
being replaced by a computer at work to€nuclear war. Nevertheless,
‘humanity’ itself seems nearly omnipotent. Since it is rather like the
50
╇References to anthropocentricism are now so widespread that to single out any
one mention seems almost arbitrary. The best discussion, however, of the rise of
anthropocentric philosophy in the early modern period, together with all its ambivalences, may be Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in
England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983).
51
╇ Fontenay, Le silence des bêtes.
36
boria sax
way that the Greeks personified lightning as Zeus and the sea as
Poseidon, the personification of humankind as a dominant figure is,
in very literal ways, a ‘myth’.52
But, far from being unified, we human beings barely keep our tendency toward mass slaughter of one another under fragile and sporadic control. We are nowhere remotely close to being able
consciously to guide the course of history or even the evolution of
technology. ‘Anthropocentrism’ is this tendency to vastly exaggerate
human dominance, understanding, power, autonomy, unity, guilt,
virtue, wickedness, and morality.
On a day to day basis, our middle classes may appear to enjoy lives
of relative comfort and security, but the threats to humanity from
plague, war, and natural catastrophes are much the same as in Biblical
times. It is precisely this experience of ‘humanity’ that enables us to
indentify strongly with imperilled animals, from the plucked chicken
of Diogenes to the polar bear on a melting piece of ice. Our status
and survival are far from assured, but how could we be ‘human’ if
they were?
52
╇ Human beings in the twenty-first century have not ceased to conceive the
world in mythic terms. ‘In the words of enthusiasts just as in those of the prophets of
destruction, we find the iconic images and ideas, figures and metaphors taken from
premodern Christianity. Thus the cosmos of the technophiles abounds in images of
neotenic angels, theriomorphic demons, disembodied entities, and absolute goodness; at the same time, in the pantheon of the technophobes are enormous millennial
terrors, deference for the integrity of creation, strikes at the arrogance of humankind’. Marchesini, Post-human, 546 (author’s own translation).
the view from somewhere
37
The view from somewhere:
anthropocentrism in metaethics
Kevin DeLapp*
Anthropocentrism is a normative concept that embodies or expresses,
whether implicitly or explicitly, a set of beliefs or attitudes that privilege some aspect(s) of human experience, perspective or valuation.
This concept has been particularly evident in the history of religious
and cosmological thought. It has also come to play a significant role
in discussions concerning the philosophical status of non-human
animals and the natural environment. One important dimension of
anthropocentrism that has received somewhat less attention, however, has been its status within the field of metaethics, i.e. the area
of philosophy that examines the metaphysical and epistemological
foundations of moral values, properties and language.
A fundamental division within metaethics can be framed as a
debate concerning the role that anthropocentrism plays (or should
play) in our understanding of morality. On the one hand are those
who envision moral language as expressing descriptive claims about
the external world, claims which can be true in correspondence with
a moral reality that is universal and objective. This position is called
‘moral realism’ and has been defended by its proponents on the
grounds that it most accurately reflects our shared moral experience
of universal condemnation or praise for certain actions and characters (e.g. genocide or self-sacrificing heroism), irrespective of the cultures or contexts in which they occur. The rival metaethical view
envisions moral values as culturally constructed in some way: the
only ‘reality’ our moral language describes is a relative one, conditioned by different cultural histories and semantic contexts. This
position is called ‘moral relativism’, and has been defended on the
grounds that it better accommodates the intractable nature of moral
disagreement and diversity, thereby engendering a more openminded toleration.
╇ I am grateful to Rob Boddice for many helpful comments on an earlier version
of this paper.
*
38
kevin delapp
Anthropocentrism has had a contested history vis-à-vis this metaethical debate. The suggestion that moral value is even partially
affected, let alone constructed, by differential human capacities or
perspectives has been typically associated in contemporary metaethics with relativism; such that proponents of relativism embrace
anthropocentrism, whereas proponents of realism eschew it.
Investigating the pre-modern history of anthropocentrism, however,
yields remarkably different associations. By exploring the antagonism
toward metaethical anthropocentrism that developed in early-modern thought, we can unearth different understandings of the concept
that can be used to articulate defensible alternatives to the realismrelativism debate today. Furthermore, focusing on anthropocentrism
as a metaethical position helpfully disentangles it from other extensions of the concept. Metaethical anthropocentrism can be defined as
the view that conceptions of morality are constrained by human perspectives and sensibilities (it is this dependence that has led to the
common association of metaethical anthropocentrism with relativism). Ethical anthropocentrism, however, says nothing about the
foundations or conceptions of morality, but instead refers to the
more commonplace view that moral consideration is only properly
granted to humans. In this way, ethical anthropocentrism represents
what we may call a ‘first-order’ moral judgement: it is a claim about
what is moral. Metaethical anthropocentrism, by contrast, is a ‘second-order’ moral judgement (i.e. a judgement about moral judgement): it is a claim about what morality is.
It is quite possible to be anthropocentric in one, but not both of
these senses. Indeed, as discussed in section two below, Western philosophy has tended to affirm ethical anthropocentrism despite a pronounced rejection of metaethical anthropocentrism. My own view is
an inversion of this trend: in section three, I defend a form of metaethical anthropocentrism that does not entail anthropocentrism
of the first-order, ethical variety. The thesis is that moral values may
be realist without thereby sacrificing the ineliminable role that
human sensibility and experience play in their constitution; and that
this form of metaethical anthropocentrism rejects the pernicious
moral myopia toward non-human animals that is bred by first-order
anthropocentrism. Finally, in section four, I look to philosophical
Daoism as an actual, liveable embodiment of this position.
the view from somewhere
39
Craving Objective Reasons
We can best appreciate the position of anthropocentrism in Western
philosophy by looking to ancestral understandings of the concept in
early Hellenic thought. A recurrent theme in Hellenic philosophy is
the notion that only certain types of human beings are capable of
mature moral deliberation, the cultivation of virtuous character, and
the performance of noble actions. As has been well-documented by
classicists, the ethical horizon of the early Hellenes tended to eclipse
voices or perspectives that were non-male, non-Greek speaking, or
otherwise alien to the dominant ideal. Aristotle’s comments in the
Politics are representative of such ethical exclusion when he defends
the view that foreigners (barbaroi) deserve to be slaves (douloi)
because their essence (ousia) is constituted primarily by their physical bodies rather than by anything rational. Furthermore, Aristotle
asserts that this slavish ‘essence’ is a fact of nature (physis), not
merely a by-product of human laws or conventions (nomos).1
These exclusions and omissions have been rightfully critiqued
as prejudicial by contemporary scholars. However, it is highly ana�
chronistic to express such critiques by appealing to concepts such as
‘sexism’ or ‘racism’. For one thing, these concepts are semantically
embedded in uniquely modern institutions and frameworks.2
Whatever the precise extensions of words for ‘race’ were within the
Hellenic lexicon, there certainly did not exist a notion of ‘race’ in the
quasi-scientific sense that would come to characterise the racism of
the modern era.3 Indeed, if ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ are understood
today as the systematic oppression of a targeted group of people, the
1
╇ Aristotle: Selections, trans. Terence Irwin and Gail Fine (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1995), 456–8 (Politics, 1254a20–1255a1).
2
╇ For example, it is not clear that the ancient Hellenes possessed any concept of
‘race’ upon which to be racist in the first place. Although the Greek word genos may
be translated as ‘race’, different Hellenic city-states were themselves denominated by
this term, so that the word fails to uniquely differentiate foreigners. Even the Greek
word xenos, commonly translated as ‘alien’, does not work well with modern conceptions of racism: the word is too deeply embedded in the Hellenic institution of hospitality, according to which even fellow Greek-speakers could be xenoi.
3
╇One of the most influential expressions of early modern ‘scientific racism’
was offered by François Bernier, ‘New divisions of Earth by the different species or
races which inhabit it’, Journal des Sçavans (April 24, 1684), trans. T. Bendyphe in
‘Â�Memoirs Read before the Anthropological Society of London’, vol. 1 (1863–4): 360–
4. For a history of scientific racism in the modern era, see Stephen Jay Gould, The
Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981).
40
kevin delapp
moral and political exclusions of ancient Hellas cannot properly be
called sexist or racist for the simple and disturbing fact that women
and foreigners were (typically) not even conceptualised as people at
all. The reason for this deeper form of moral and political exclusion
may be linked with the observation that in classical Greek, the word
logos evolved to have the dual meaning of both ‘language/speech’ as
well as ‘reason/rationality’. Furthermore, it was widely assumed that
the capacity for logos in both senses of the word was a distinguishing
feature between the human and non-human realms.4 Thus, since
women were largely incapable of public linguistic representation in
virtue of their relegation to the private sphere (oikos), Greek-speaking
males concluded that they lacked rationality, and ipso facto lacked
personhood. Similarly, if non-Greek speaking foreigners communicated at all, it was in a manner incomprehensible to the Greek ear
and tongue. Thus, foreign ‘barbarians’ could not possibly be viewed
as legitimate humans because they were thought to lack the rationality that characterises the unique function (ergon) of the true human.5
In this way, the etymology of logos formed the basis of a pernicious
syllogism: (1) All rational entities must be capable of speech; (2)
�certain entities that might otherwise appear human are not capable
of speech (or, at least, not any forms of speech understandable to
Greeks); (3) therefore, such entities cannot be rational, despite
appearances. And non-rational entities are not human. Humans may
share other overlapping characteristics with animals, but Aristotle
believed that the possession of logos rendered humans largely sui
generis. Thus, we can see that the moral and political exclusions of
ancient Hellas are more accurately characterised as a form of anthropocentrism, rather than racism or sexism. Such anthropocentrism
4
╇ Cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1098a5-10, in Selections, 357. Aristotle takes himself to be
describing un-controversially the common opinions (doxa) of his culture. He goes
on to express his ethical anthropocentrism by denying non-human animals the end
of genuine happiness on the grounds that they lack reason and speech (logos) as well
as decision-making abilities (boulesis). See Aristotle, Politics, 1100a1–5 and
1111b12–14in Selections, 361, 380. This alleged metaphysical difference separating
humans and non-humans, and in turn reinforcing Aristotle’s ethical anthropocentrism, can also be found at Politics, 1332b5–6; Metaphysics, 980b26–28; On the Soul,
414a29–414b19; and History of Animals 588a1–588b4.
5
╇ The etymology of the word ‘barbarian’ seems to be derived from an onomatopoetic representation of what the Persian language sounded like to Greek ears—‘barbar’ being the Greek equivalent of the English ‘blah, blah, blah’. See also Milligan,
‘Speciesism as Anthropocentrism’, this volume.
the view from somewhere
41
was both ethical as well as metaethical: Aristotle’s rejection of moral
consideration toward non-humans (i.e. ethical anthropocentrism) is
conceptually grounded in his view that legitimate moral status
requires something he thought was unique to human sensibility (i.e.
metaethical anthropocentrism).
This anthropocentrism did, however, manifest in differential ways
with respect to different targets. Aristotle, for example, grants to
women somewhat more rational capacity than barbarians possess—
although, even here, he asserts that female deliberative capabilities
are nonetheless ‘ineffective’ (akuron) in comparison to their male
equivalents. Furthermore, although humans have the distinguishing
characteristic of rationality, Aristotle seems to regard this characteristic more as a potential (dynamis) than something always actualised.
After all, humans may often act otherwise than rational. And when
this occurs, Aristotle appeals to animalistic language to describe the
result. Humans whose rationality fails to translate into corresponding
action are called ‘incontinent’, but he reserves the label of ‘beasts’
(theria) for beings incapable of rationality altogether.6
There were important voices in classical Hellas that objected to
Aristotle’s anthropocentrism. Plato famously grants accessibility (at
least in principle) to women to become rulers of the ideal state in
Republic. Aeschylus’ popular play Persae might be interpreted as
extending moral consideration to a vanquished barbarian foe. And
Herodotus stresses the fact that the term ‘barbarian’ is itself highly
relative.7 In addition, the Pythagorean tradition famously championed the moral consideration of non-human animals, specifically
advocating ethical vegetarianism, with which ‘Pythagoreanism’ was
synonymous until the nineteenth century. Of course, it must be
noted that Pythagoras’ moral consideration of animals was not,
strictly speaking, motivated by assumptions about any intrinsic moral
status of non-human animals themselves. Pythagoras defended moral
consideration toward animals primarily on the metaphysical grounds
that animals may very well embody reincarnated human souls.
Diogenes Laertius makes this metaphysical rationale clear in the following fragment attributed to Xenophanes:
╇ Aristotle, Politics, 1147b5, in Selections, 416.
╇ Herodotus, Histories, 2.158. Note, however, that even Herodotus only grants
moral inclusiveness on the basis of linguistic accessibility: specifically, the other culture in question must still be ‘same-tongued’ (homoglossous).
6
7
42
kevin delapp
Once they say that he [Pythagoras] was passing by when a puppy was
being whipped, and he took pity on it and said: ‘Stop, do not beat it;
for it is the soul [psyche] of a friend that I recognized when I heard it
giving tongue’.8
The ethical treatment of animals in Pythagoras is therefore quite
consistent with ethical anthropocentrism. For the ‘animals’ that are
being well-treated are simply not viewed as non-humans in the first
place. At any rate, early forms of ethical anthropocentrism such as
Aristotle’s bequeathed an array of insipid biases that persisted in the
cultural inheritance of subsequent traditions throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods.
With the dawn of the early modern period, European societies witnessed a remarkable degree of flux and destabilisation: theological
dogma fragmented in the wake of reformers like Martin Luther; and
the hegemonic assurance that the Earth (and in turn, Western
Europe) was at the centre of all things—geographically, cosmologically and ideologically—was overturned by new scientific and anthropological discoveries. In Britain alone, the Glorious Revolution of
1688 demolished whatever assumptions there might have remained
in the supreme power of the monarchy. That same year, the newly
established parliamentary democracy passed the Act of Toleration
extending some religious freedoms to different Christian denominations and ending the unity and authority of the Church of England.
And the long-lived House of Stuart, having collapsed with the death
of Princess Anne, was replaced by a new lineage of foreign
Hanoverians.
Thus, the beginnings of modernity in Europe ushered in a pronounced undermining of traditions that had historically offered spiritual guidance, political commitment and moral confidence.
Descartes’ manic search for reliable epistemological foundations was
quite representative of this Weltanschauung. The dizzying complexity, disorienting elaboration and compensatory extravagance of the
Baroque was further recapitulated in the visual, musical and literary
arts of the era.
Adding to the growing nexus of cultural destabilisation was an
emerging view of ‘human nature’ as itself chaotic and pernicious. The
8
╇ Xenophanes fr.7, Diogenes Laertius VIII, 36 in The Presocratic Philosophers,
ed. G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 219.
the view from somewhere
43
twin spectres of Bernard Mandeville and Thomas Hobbes loomed
large in the eighteenth century, since both were largely read by their
contemporaries as graphically depicting the natural barbarism, selfishness and brutishness of mankind.9 As Leslie Stephen famously
observed, when traditional religious and political authorities decay,
people tend to turn to ‘human nature’ to provide an alternate foundation for morality.10 But what solace could such an unflattering and
dismal depiction of our nature provide? Grimly sceptical theories of
human nature such as Hobbes’ were seen as threatening the sanctity
of morality by denying that moral norms had a metaphysical basis in
anything above or beyond our own self-interest. This was cause not
only for sociological concern (what would happen if the constraints
of society broke down, as indeed they seemed on the verge of doing
at the time?); it was also the expression of a metaethical anxiety about
the foundations of morality.
Thus, the Enlightenment moralists inherited three serious cultural
pressures. First, the increased cosmopolitanism and liberalism of the
Enlightenment stimulated an era of reforms and revolutions against
the exclusionist anthropocentrism that had characterised much of the
classical world, as described above. Second, there was a need to locate
moral values in a way that might insulate them from the cultural
instability and impermanence of modernist Europe. Third, if Hobbes
was correct about our human nature, then morality also needed to be
safeguarded from our ‘animalistic’ subjectivities. As David Wiggins
notes evocatively, our moral commitment ‘craves objective reasons,
and it often could not go forward unless it thought it had them’.11 It
was precisely such ‘objective reasons’ which the moralists of the
Enlightenment sought as remedies to the three worries mentioned
above. This craving for ethical objectivity culminated in a sweeping
rejection of individual human subjectivity, i.e. anything distinctively
anthropocentric.12
9
╇ L.A. Selby-Bigge remarks in the ‘Introduction’ to his British Moralists (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1897) that these two authors might differ as to the seriousness of
their theses—e.g. Mandeville might have been more satirical than literal—but he
agrees that both theses nevertheless stimulated a ‘crisis’ that galvanised the next generations of moralists.
10
╇ Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of the Pacific, 2003).
11
╇David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 99.
12
╇ Cf. Krebber, ‘Anthropocentrism and Reason’, this volume.
44
kevin delapp
Adam Smith is representative of this objectifying manoeuvre.
According to Smith, the criterion of whether a ‘moral sentiment’ is
justifiable is simply the extent to which it would be approved by an
‘impartial spectator’.13 In the process of contemplating the performance of a morally relevant action, Smith requires that we imaginatively ‘divide’ ourselves into two persons, the second of which is
envisioned as completely detached and ‘objective’. The point-of-view
of this virtual person then determines whether an action is praiseworthy or blameworthy. As useful as the ‘impartial spectator’ might
be as a moral heuristic, however, it surely uses ‘spectator’ in a highly
artificial sense, given the lack of any embodied subjectivity to enliven
such a perspective. David Hume offers a similar criterion for moral
legitimacy, one which likewise attempts to minimise (if not banish
altogether) anthropocentric elements. On Hume’s picture, moral
engagement requires that we exist in some relationship of proximity—spatial, causal, psychological, etc.—with the object of our moral
consideration. For example, in order to be motivated to be compassionate toward another person, Hume claims that it is necessary to
perceive some connection between that person and one’s self: perhaps the other person is physically nearby, maybe he or she looks
similar to one’s self, or perhaps he or she affects one’s life in some
observable way. But since we do not always experience these connections with other people all the time, Hume argues that we must
sometimes imagine being in the requisite position. He calls this imaginative connection ‘sympathy’ and he argues that it is cultivated by
adopting a ‘general point of view’—a vantage point that evaluates
agents and actions without any subjective element or bias.14
Many other moralists of the early modern period shared Smith’s
and Hume’s eschewal of subjective perspective. Indeed, part of what
has been called the ‘project of the Enlightenment’ can be seen as a
general rejection of anything remotely anthropocentric in metaethics.
Instead of the biased and culturally-relative moral systems of the
classical world, the Enlightenment instead sought transcendent moral
principles which would be applicable and attainable universally—no
longer the Pax Romana of a particular cultural perspective, but an
13
╇ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 131.
14
╇David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (3.3.1), ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978), 581–2.
the view from somewhere
45
objective Pax Ethica. Thus, despite quite enormous differences in
other aspects of their theories, the projects of Rousseau (with his
‘General Will’), Kant (with his ‘Categorical Imperative’) and Diderot
(with his quest for ‘General Principles’ to adjudicate individual passions) all share a common suspicion and rejection of ethical subjectivity.
However, the eschewal of ethical subjectivity on the part of all
these writers marked a rejection of metaethical anthropocentrism
only. Theorists such as Smith, Hume and Kant were worried primarily about the foundations of moral value depending on something as
idiosyncratic and corruptible as human nature was proving to be.
First-order ethical anthropocentrism, however, continued to flourish.15 After all, in practically the same breath in which Kant sequesters moral worth from human subjectivity by appealing to the
impartial Categorical Imperative, he simultaneously denies nonhuman animals admission into his ‘kingdom of ends’ on the grounds
that they lack the requisite rationality. Since Kant believed that nonhuman animals lack the rationality which alone generates true freedom (viz. freedom from instincts), he concluded that such animals
can have ‘only a relative value as means and are therefore called
things’.16 Hume is friendlier than Kant to the biological and embodied dimensions of human nature (although, as discussed above, he
still felt compelled to insulate morality from human subjectivity by
appealing to ‘the general point of view’). However, even Hume makes
it quite clear that his ethics grant primary moral consideration to
humans alone:
In forming our notions of human nature, we are apt to make a comparison between men and animals, the only creatures endowed with
thought that fall under our senses. Certainly this comparison is favourable to mankind. On the one hand, we see a creature [human], whose
thoughts are not limited by his narrow bounds… On the other hand,
we are presented with a creature [animal]… limited in its observations
and reasonings to a very few sensible objects which surround it… What
a wide difference is there between these creatures! And how exalted a
notion must we entertain of the former, in comparison of the latter!17
╇See Krebber, ‘Anthropocentrism and Reason’, this volume.
╇ Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W.
Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 35–6 (Ak. 428).
17
╇David Hume, ‘Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature’, in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 82.
Emphasis mine.
15
16
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kevin delapp
This statement of ethical anthropocentrism used language and intuitions that were in common circulation at the time: a generation
earlier, John Balguy expressed his anthropocentrism quite similarly:
There is likewise a wide Difference between the Nature of rational Creatures, and that of Brutes; and between the Nature of Brutes, and that
of inanimate Things. They require therefore respectively a suitable
Treatment. To treat Men in the same Way we treat Brutes, and to treat
Brutes in the same Way we do Stocks and Stones, is manifestly as
disagreeable and dissonant to the Natures of Things, as it would be to
attempt the forming of an Angle with two parallel Lines.18
While Balguy disallows cruel treatment toward animals (they are to
be treated better than mere inanimate objects), he is nonetheless
insistent that to grant them the moral status of humans would be
tantamount to committing a logical absurdity (forming an angle with
two parallel lines). Such rampant anthropocentrism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been well documented.19 But this
first-order, ethical anthropocentrism needs to be differentiated from
the separate metaethical project of insulating moral value itself from
anything subjective or distinctively human.
The objectifying trend of the Enlightenment continues to dominate normative discourse in contemporary theory. One of the most
influential normative frameworks of the twentieth century is the
analysis of justice as ‘fairness’ offered by John Rawls.20 According to
Rawls, the principles of a just society are determined by imaginatively
re/positioning our subjective perspectives into an ‘original position’
in which we are ignorant of our particularities. Behind this ‘veil of
ignorance’, we do not know our race, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, nationality, body type or any other attribute that would
differentiate our perspective from other, differently-situated perspectives. We would, however, retain a kind of instrumental rationality in
18
╇ John Balguy, ‘The Foundation of Moral Goodness’ (1728), British Moralists, ed.
Selby-Bigge, 79. Emphasis mine.
19
╇Rob Boddice has argued, for instance, that such ethical anthropocentrism was
even consistent with the anti-vivisectionist movements of the time. See Boddice,
A History of Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals (Lampeter:
Edwin Mellen Press, 2009). Gary Steiner has also provided an overview of other attitudes toward animals in the philosophical literature of the period. See Steiner,
Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of
Western Philosophy (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).
20
╇ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971).
the view from somewhere
47
this original position, along with a healthy amount of self-interest
and risk-aversion. Without our subjective perspectives to bias or distract us, Rawls argues that we will seek a society that is fair and
roughly equal, at least in terms of access to the ‘primary goods’ necessary for material flourishing and political representation.
And yet, without precisely these distinctive capacities, we relinquish any substantive sense of being ourselves. We would have traded
our embodied humanity for a denuded and purely formal ‘rational
agency’.21 Furthermore, by metaethically grounding moral value in
the (alleged) impartiality and abstraction of reason, Rawls seems
committed to ethical anthropocentrism: non-human animals that
lack the requisite rational capacities would be excluded from the
original position. They could not, for Rawls, ever qualify as moral
subjects/agents—although they might nonetheless qualify as moral
objects/patients. After all, as Rawls himself admits, his contractarian
theory is only intended as a theory of justice, and does not address
aspects of morality that might be unrelated to justice. As Rawls notes
of his own theory:
Not only are many aspects of morality left aside, but no account is
given of right conduct in regard to animals and the rest of nature. A
conception of justice is but one part of a moral view. While I have not
maintained that the capacity for a sense of justice is necessary in order
to be owed the duties of justice, it does seem that we are not required
to give strict justice anyway to creatures lacking this capacity. But it
does not follow that there are no requirements at all in regard to them,
nor in our relations with the natural order.22
Despite such concessions to non-human animals, they are still denied
standing in Rawls’ normative theory. And at the metaethical level,
Rawls’ framework is firmly in the same trajectory as his Enlightenment
forebears in that he too seeks to transcend human considerations in
order for morality to be viewed as ‘objectively’ justified.
╇ This is how Michael Sandel critiques Rawls’ theory of political personhood in
his ‘The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self’ in Contemporary Political
Philosophy, eds. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell University
Press, 1997), 247–55.
22
╇Rawls, Theory of Justice, 517
21
48
kevin delapp
Perspectival Moral Realism
The language of objectivism that twentieth century metaethics has
inherited has unfortunate and misleading connotations. For one
thing, ‘objectivism’ seems to suggest an implausible moral ontology
of objects. Since moral values are clearly not literally objects—i.e.
entities bound and extended spatiotemporally—significant effort has
been devoted in contemporary metaethics to articulating a more permissive understanding of ‘objects’. To cite one of the more famous
examples, G.E. Moore embraced a Platonist ontology in order to
accommodate the desired objectivity of moral value. Moore argued
that moral predicates such as ‘good’ cannot be reducible to any other
predicates (particularly not to naturalistic predicates) without eroding the privileged sui generis status to which Moore believed our
moral language was committed.23 Numerous theorists followed
Moore’s romantic impetus over the course of the next few decades.
Even opponents of Moore’s position found themselves embattled on
the terms and the field that Moore established. Thus, for example,
relativists criticised realists for committing to an unparsimonious
ontology of mysterious, free-floating, causally-inert moral objects.24
J.L. Mackie aptly characterised this prevalent construal of moral realism when he famously derided the view that moral values were ‘part
of the furniture of the world’.25
In addition to these uncomfortable ontological associations, the
language of moral ‘objectivity’ suffers from epistemological challenges as well. David Brink (who defends a post-Moorean or ‘naturalistic’ version of moral realism) characterises moral objectivity as
the view that moral values are impersonal, impartial or otherwise
lacking any ‘qualitative dimension’.26 However, there is a conÂ�siderable
degree of ambiguity in this stipulation. For claiming that someone
ought to be (epistemologically) impersonal in his or her deliberation
╇G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (New York: Amherst, 1988), especially chapter 1.
╇ For influential discussions of moral realism which use ‘realism’ interchangeably with ‘objectivism’, see J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London:
Penguin, 1977); James Rachels, ‘The Challenge of Cultural Relativism’, Conduct and
Character, ed. Mark Timmons (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1999), 69–75;
David B. Wong, Moral Relativity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
25
╇Mackie, Ethics, 16. Emphasis mine.
26
╇David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge:
Â�Cambridge University Press, 1989), 14–36.
23
24
the view from somewhere
49
is quite different from saying that moral values themselves are (metaphysically) impersonal. Values are intractably personal in the analytic
sense that they make reference to ‘being valued’, and ipso facto refer
to valuers. Indeed, Brink’s characterisation would not be able to
accommodate impersonal deliberation as a value itself.
Bernard Williams has added an additional sense of objectivity to
debates between realists and relativists by appealing to what he called
an ‘absolute conception of reality’.27 According to Williams, whether
or not something admits of an absolute conception constitutes a litmus test for whether it is genuinely objective; and something admits
of an absolute conception if and only if it is ‘non-perspectival’.
Williams describes being non-perspectival as a purging of ‘our perspective and its peculiarities’.28 Using similar language, J.J.C. Smart
claimed that such objectivity cannot be in any way ‘anthropocentric’.29
Conflating this sense of objectivity with moral realism, however,
implies that, in order for values to be ‘real’, they must make absolutely no reference to anything anthropocentric. Yet this generates a
contradiction—for how could a conception of reality be non-perspectival when the very act of conceiving of a non-perspectival conception itself constitutes a perspective? How can we characterise
reality by absolute conception in the first place if we are prevented
from using our human concepts? Indeed, having a perspective at all
(or at least having a perspective that one is aware of as such) appears
to be a uniquely anthropocentric capacity. Peter Railton has made a
similar objection: ‘A standpoint without any subjectivity is a standpoint with no point of view—which is to say, no standpoint at all’.30
Thomas Nagel’s consideration of the ‘view from nowhere’ further
helps illuminate some of the problems that face theories of moral
realism which reject anthropocentric elements tout court.31 Nagel
highlights what he considers to be an intractable tension in any
attempt to reconcile our ineliminable subjective perspective (i.e. the
27
╇ Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:
Â�Harvard University Press, 1985), 132–55.
28
╇ Williams, Ethics, 138–9.
29
╇ J.J.C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Truth (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1963), 151.
30
╇Peter Railton, ‘Aesthetic Value, Moral Value, and the Ambitions of Naturalism’, Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 63.
31
╇ Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986).
50
kevin delapp
feeling that a particular point of view is uniquely mine) with the
impulse to attain an objective perspective (i.e. the abstraction from
anything peculiar to a particular perspective). Wiggins has described
a similar tension between what he calls the ‘inner view’ and the ‘outside view’, noting that ‘…the outside view must pay some heed to the
differences that the inner view perceives’.32
Although we feel pulled toward objectivity, we find it impossible
fully to relinquish our subjectivity (as desired by the objectifying
trends we have seen operative in Smith, Hume and Rawls) because
our subjectivity is itself a part of the very world which the objective
perspective seeks to identify. While attempting to bracket a personal
perspective is a useful heuristic to identify bias, exclusively reducing
our conception of morality to this perspective would eliminate too
much, resulting in what Nagel calls ‘objective blindness’.33 As Nagel
argues:
Not all reality is better understood the more objectively it is viewed.
Appearance and perspective are essential parts of what there is, and in
some respects they are best understood from a less detached standpoint… If what we want is to understand the whole world, we can’t
forget about these subjective starting points indefinitely; we and our
personal perspectives belong to the world.34
In this way, we can distinguish moral realism from moral objectivism.
On the one hand, we can believe that moral values exist independently of any of our beliefs about them (i.e. affirm realism). On the
other hand, we can also believe that the content of such values nonetheless make reference to uniquely human capacities (i.e. reject
objectivism). Morality may be essentially or even exclusively about
us, but it is no less real for this fact. Indeed, familiar non-moral entities are no different: shoes would (presumably) exist regardless of
the different perspectives adopted toward them; but it would be
impossible to meaningfully articulate the concept of ‘shoes’ without
thereby referencing anthropocentric interests and perspectives.
If Nagel is right, then a novel species of perspectival moral realism
emerges. This position appreciates the ‘craving of objective reasons’
that has motivated modern metaethics; and it is quite consistent
with the epistemological caveat to be impartial and unbiased (as
╇ Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth, 100.
╇Nagel, View from Nowhere, 7.
34
╇Nagel, View from Nowhere, 5–6.
32
33
the view from somewhere
51
much as one can be) in moral deliberation. However, perspectival
moral �realism also embraces the consistency and desirability of a
moral ontology that is deeply anthropocentric. Denying the metaethical anthropocentrism of value eliminates arbitrarily humans (and
our concepts) from reality. Our subjectivities exist and must be
accounted for in any objective perspective that purports to be total,
complete or ‘absolute’. Any contending metaethical position that has
nothing to say about human beings, our lives and our constitutions
will have missed the whole point of moral theorising, which is to
make sense of those very same lives and constitutions. What is essential to note, however, is that the species of anthropocentrism envisioned by perspectival moral realism is metaethical only. As we have
seen, the second-order metaethical view that moral concepts are our
moral concepts is perfectly compatible with the first-order ethical
view that the content of those same moral concepts requires giving
significant moral consideration to non-human animals and the natural en�vironment. In the next section, I turn to philosophical Daoism
as a historically salient tradition which embraces metaethical anthropocentrism, while rejecting ethical anthropocentrism.
Hiding the World in the World
The position of perspectival moral realism defended above would be
purely academic if it represented merely an abstract possibility,
�inaccessible and insensitive to real life and real people. Indeed, there
would be a deep irony if a defence of metaethical anthropocentrism
yielded a position that was not liveable by the very humans from
whose perspective it is supposed to be generated. In this final section, I argue that philosophical Daoism, specifically the text of the
Zhuangzi, represents an actual, historical ‘live-option’ for perspectival moral realism. Furthermore, philosophical Daoism will be
shown to embody a deep moral regard for the non-human world
that is best understood as an affirmation of metaethical anthropocentrism and a rejection of ethical anthropocentrism.35
35
╇Of course, Daoism is not a monolithic tradition: this essay focuses specifically on philosophical Daoism, drawn largely from the classical text of the Zhuangzi.
Alternate Daoist texts, different interpretations of Daoism which are more religious
in orientation, or historical developments in Daoist thought after the classical era, all
go beyond the scope of the present analysis. These alternate sources might well yield
quite different positions with respect to metaethical or ethical anthropocentrism.
52
kevin delapp
One of the striking features of a text such as the Zhuangzi is the
predominance of a diverse cast of non-human characters, metaphors
and examples: butterflies interchange with humans in dreams; insects
and snakes undergird the ‘mysterious workings’ of ecological metamorphoses; frogs discuss philosophy; fish are compared with kings;
and turtles figure in sacred auguries. The entire text of the Zhuangzi
begins with the story of a polymorphic fish and ends with an allegory
about rabbits. Furthermore, when human characters are deployed in
the text, they typically represent perspectives outside the bounds of
even traditional human society: lepers and cripples are often depicted
as the wisest interlocutors.36 This might suggest that Daoism is highly
critical of anthropocentrism, urging readers instead to transcend
the limitations of our circumscribed experience, our petty social positions and our sometimes selfish personal projects. Indeed, the
Zhuangzi is teeming with examples of how myopic perspectives can
frequently mislead people. For example, a horse-lover’s overly zealous attachment to his horse ‘leads him into error’ by stifling the
horse’s own nature.37 Little birds are criticised as having comparably
‘little understanding’ when they scorn a bigger bird for a flight pattern that, in their ignorance, they cannot fathom.38 On this interpretation, the panoply of lepers, cripples and non-human animals
functions as a check and balance against the hubris of over-blowing
or reifying our human concepts and experiences.39
One of the central concepts motivating such injunctions is the
Daoist notion of ‘not daring to be at the forefront of the world’
(bugan wei tianxia xian). To not dare to be at the forefront of the
world is humbly to resist placing one’s interests or perspective in an
ethically privileged position with respect to any other (human or
36
╇ e.g. Burton Watson, Chuang-Tzu: The Basic Writings (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), 62–4.
37
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 59.
38
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 24.
39
╇Eric Schwitzgebel interprets Zhuangzi in a similar way, referring to his use of
language as ‘ironic’ and his aims as ‘therapeutic’. See Schwitzgebel, ‘Zhuangzi’s Attitude Toward Language and His Skepticism’, Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and
Ethics in the Zhuangzi, eds. Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe (New York: SUNY
Press, 1996), 68–97. Mark Berkson makes an analogous point in his comparative
reading of Zhuangzi alongside Derrida, in which he describes the use of language by
both thinkers as ‘apophasic’. See Berkson, ‘Language: The Guest of Reality—
Zhuangzi and Derrida on Language, Reality, and Skillfulness’, Essays on Skepticism,
eds. Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, 97–126.
the view from somewhere
53
non-human) entity. Such a warning against hubris is operative when,
for example, the Zhuangzi describes the practice of tiger-training:
Don’t you know how the tiger trainer goes about it? He doesn’t dare
give the tiger any living thing to eat for fear it will learn the taste of
fury by killing it… He gauges the tiger’s appetite and thoroughly
understands its fierce disposition. Tigers are a different breed from
men, and yet you can train them to be gentle with their keepers by
following along with them. The men who get killed are the ones who
go against them.40
Here it is not tiger-training per se which is presented as wrongful,
but rather the ethically anthropocentric failure to ‘thoroughly understand’ the given nature of tigers and thereby ‘go against them’. Such
a disrespectful tiger-trainer arrogantly disrupts the natural flow of
things by imposing his own desires and personal projects.41 At
another point in the text, when Zhuangzi is discussing the difference
between the human world and the natural world, he says, ‘A horse
or a cow has four feet. That is Nature. Put a halter around the horse’s
head and put a string through the cow’s nose, that is man. Therefore
it is said, “Do not let man destroy Nature”’.42
Furthermore, not only should humans refrain from imposing their
wills on non-humans in such ways, we can also learn much by
�looking to non-humans for inspiration.43 For example, Zhuangzi
diagnoses as a major cause of human suffering the ‘anger’ bred by
misunderstanding another’s words—particularly words uttered in
moments of intense emotion. By contrast, non-human animals can
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 59.
╇Of course, Zhuangzi also seems to acknowledge that even non-humans can be
guilty of such anthropocentric imposition. In one example, a praying mantis is slain
by an on-coming carriage when the insect foolishly attempts to stop the carriage by
waving its arms: ‘such was the high opinion it had of its talents’, the text adds sardonically. See Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 59.
42
╇ This translation follows Wang-tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). Watson substitutes ‘heavenly’ for
‘nature’, cf. Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 104. The Chinese word in the text is dao, which
seems to permit both renderings.
43
╇ Looking to the animal and natural world for ethical inspiration is a theme
found in various Confucian passages as well. In a well-known example from Mencius, a king is described as discovering his own heart (xin) for his human subjects
through the sympathy he feels upon watching an ox about to be sacrificed. The king
is reminded that, ‘once having seen them [animals] alive, he cannot bear to see them
die, and once having heard their cry, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. That is why the
gentleman (junzi) keeps his distance from the kitchen’. See D.C. Lau, trans. Mencius
(London: Penguin Books, 1970), 55.
40
41
54
kevin delapp
embody a quiet nobility by the very fact that they lack the words that
too often generate strife: ‘When animals face death, they do not care
what cries they make; their breath comes in gasps and a wild fierceness is born in their hearts’.44
Zhuangzi is quite right to castigate such blind and dangerous
forms of anthropocentrism, reminding us that we should celebrate
and learn from differences. We should be open to new experiences,
avoid self-assurance or arrogance, and respect the animal and natural
worlds in which we live. But the anthropocentrism that is being
rejected here is primarily of the first-order, ethical variety rather than
the metaethical sort of anthropocentrism discussed above.45 The
Daoist critique of certain perspectives should not be conflated with
an eschewal of anything perspectival. Although moral consideration
should be expanded beyond the exclusively human realm, humans
must nonetheless envision non-human interests from the perspective
of their own (human) interests and sensibility. For, our picture of the
moral status of non-human animals is just that: our picture.
Indeed, the Zhuangzi abounds with numerous passages which are
best interpreted as embracing perspectivalism and disdaining absolute conceptions or ‘objective blindness’. For instance, throughout
the Zhuangzi, creatures are praised for staying true to the sorts of
entities that they ‘naturally’ are. Thus, the ‘perfect person’ follows the
‘mind (xin) given’ to him or her, and in so doing ‘rides the clouds
and mist, straddles the sun and moon, and wanders beyond the four
seas’.46 The ‘natural’ chirping of birds, however, is described as being
semantically ephemeral, ‘like wind’.47 And although creatures may
respond differentially to different expressions, ultimately ‘there is no
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 57.
╇ Furthermore, even the passages in which ethical anthropocentrism is apparently rejected should not be overblown. Lisa Kemmerer, who favours this interpretation of Daoism, nonetheless acknowledges that other passages in the text might be
equally supportive of ethical anthropocentrism. For example, the Laozi describes
Heaven and Earth as ‘ruthless’ and then enjoins the human Sage (shengren) to be
similarly ruthless. See D.C. Lau, trans. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching (London: Penguin
Books, 1963), 9. However, Kemmerer notes that, ‘arguments [that find ethically
anthropocentric attitudes in Daoism] are easy to come by. Most people (whether in
China or the U.S.) grow up believing that human exploitation of other creatures is
religiously sanctioned’, and so even a small amount of text challenging such beliefs
is noteworthy. Lisa Kemmerer, ‘The Great Unity: Daoism, Nonhuman Animals, and
Human Ethics’, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 7:2 (2009), 63.
46
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 41.
47
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 57.
44
45
the view from somewhere
55
change in the reality behind their words’.48 So, on the one hand,
Zhuangzi seems to be saying that our perspectives, bound as they are
by our language and concepts, are limited. And yet, it would be
unnatural and impossible to seek to transcend these limitations: birds
continue to chirp and humans (Zhuangzi himself included!) continue
to speak. Despite the partiality of their perspective, both nonetheless
‘have something to say’.49 Similarly, Zhuangzi points out that creatures such as the morning mushroom or the summer cicada are
‘short-lived’, but no conclusion is drawn that this limitation is an
undesirable let alone an eliminable quality. After all, the mushroom
and the cicada live ‘naturally’, and the ‘length’ of a lifespan is a highly
relative concept. Indeed, when long lives are pursued by creatures for
whom longevity is unnatural, they are chastised as ‘pitiful’.50
Zhuangzi famously asserts that ‘name is only the guest of reality’.51
Like all relationships between guest and host, this arrangement must
be mutually respectful: objective reality must meet our subjective
naming-practices halfway. When the cocky logician Huizi ‘treats his
spirit like an outside’ by reifying his own logical distinctions, he trespasses on the objective reality which hosts his experience.52 The Sage
(shengren) by contrast is able to respect the mutuality of both guest
and host—i.e. the interconnectedness of subjective and objective
standpoints—and is therefore praised for ‘walking two roads’ and
‘resting in heaven the equalizer’. The Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi
conclude with a mythic allegory concerning this host-guest relationship. The spirits of the North and South seas (Hu and Shu, respectively) are described as inadvertently slaying their host Hun-tun (who
occupies the Centre of the world) when they ‘bore holes’ in him out
of the mistaken belief that this will return the kindness of his hospitality.53 These names can be read as allegories for Nagel’s two fundamental differences in perspective which were discussed above: the
names hu and shu refer to the limited and ephemeral subjective
standpoint;54 Hun-tun refers to everything, i.e. the totality of objective
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 36.
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 34.
50
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 24.
51
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 26.
52
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 72.
53
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 95.
54
╇ Kjellberg translates these terms onomatopoetically as ‘Whish’ and ‘Whoosh’.
Watson translates them as ‘Sudden’ and ‘Brief’. See Kjellberg, ‘Zhuangzi’, Readings
48
49
56
kevin delapp
reality that defies conceptualisation.55 This tragedy of slaying HunTun is ultimately the tragedy of disrespecting the tension between the
objective and the subjective standpoints. Such an error is averted
only when both ‘come together’, where they are treated ‘very generously’.
What emerges on this reading is an interpretation of Daoism in
which perspectival realism is embedded as an historical, liveable philosophy. As Nagel argued theoretically, the objective and subjective
standpoints are each individually essential to an adequate understanding of morality, but they stand in a relation of incommensurable tension. One cannot subsume the other without an important
aspect of reality being explained away in the process. Zhuangzi
embraces the same conflict. On the one hand, it is asserted that
‘beyond and within can never meet’.56 And yet, the most celebrated
characters in the text are able to negotiate this incommensurability
with delicacy and style: ‘When Man and Heaven do not defeat each
other, then we may be said to have the True Man’.57
Philosophical Daoism recognises a dimension of moral reality that
exists in a constitutive relationship with subjective human sensibility
and perspective:
Everything has its ‘that’, everything has its ‘this’. From the point of
view of ‘that’ you cannot see it, but through understanding you can
know it. So I say, ‘that’ comes out of ‘this’ and ‘this’ depends on ‘that’—
which is to say that ‘this and ‘that’ give birth to each other.58
The external, independent reality of ‘that’ conditions and is conditioned by the internal and dependent subjective ‘this’. Traditional
moral realism (i.e. the variety representing the flight toward objectivity characterising Western modern metaethics, as discussed above)
would recognise moral value exclusively as a ‘that’, denuded of all
anthropocentric elements. Most varieties of metaethical relativism,
however, would reduce moral value purely to a ‘this’. The hybrid
position of perspectival moral realism dialectically reveals this opposition to be a false dichotomy.
in Classical Chinese Philosophy, eds. Philip Ivanhoe and Bryan Van Norden (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 236; Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 95.
55
╇ Kjellberg translates this word as ‘All-Full’ whereas Watson has ‘Chaos’.
56
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 83.
57
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 76.
58
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 34.
the view from somewhere
57
This essay has argued not only that perspectival realism has its
own philosophical merits as a metaethical position, but also that it
has significant hermeneutic attractions when conjoined with Daoism.
On the one hand, Daoism provides a liveable worldview that
addresses worries about the ‘ecological validity’ of perspectival realism. On the other hand, perspectival realism provides a useful interpretative framework with which a difficult text like the Zhuangzi can
be understood. The perspectival moral realism of Daoism harnesses
the craving to locate moral values in a realm that is independent of
the vicissitudes and idiosyncrasies of subjective opinion. But it also
avoids the pernicious first-order anthropocentrism of both ancient
Hellenic as well as Enlightenment thought, in which linguistic biases
disabled the extension of moral consideration to non-human animals
or the natural world.59 The constitution of morality may be fundamentally anthropocentric, without the content of that morality being
anthropocentric. And such a morality is no less ‘real’ for that fact. As
Zhuangzi puts it more poetically, ‘If you were to hide the world in the
world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality’.60
59
╇Eric Nelson has recently offered a similar interpretation of Daoism as rejecting
what I have called ethical anthropocentrism. Although he does not address the metaethics of anthropocentrism per se, his interpretation of dao as a dynamic, emergent
property born of the relationship and interaction between things in the world—what
he calls an ‘ethics of encounter’—contains somewhat similar commitments to the
thesis I have defended in this paper. See his ‘Responding with Dao: Early Daoist Ethics and the Environment’, Philosophy East and West, 59:3 (2009): 294–316.
60
╇ Watson, Chuang-Tzu, 77.
the making of the human
59
the making of the human:
anthropocentrism in modern social thought
Richie Nimmo
Modernity is often defined in terms of humanism,
either as a way of saluting the birth of ‘man’ or as
a way of announcing his death. But this habit itself
is modern, because it remains asymmetrical. It
overlooks the simultaneous birth of ‘nonhumanity’—things, or objects, or beasts—and the equally
strange beginning of a crossed-out God, relegated
to the sidelines.1
Anthropocentrism: A Humanist Ontology
What is it to be human? Though this is by no means an exclusively
modern question, it is a question that modernity has both asked and
answered in ways that define the age. But its answers at first seem
impossibly complex. Understood concretely as an historical epoch,
modernity has witnessed a dizzying array of competing visions of
the human being, from calculating egoistic actor to freedom fighter,
from one-dimensional man to übermensch. It would be hopeless to
try to abstract from such diverse narratives any singular discourse
of humanity. One has first to understand modernity differently, not
as a bounded temporal period filled with discrete ‘events’, but as a
form of order, as an ontological and epistemological formation, an
ensemble of related ways of seeing, knowing, and being in time and
space, the nature of which has both been emergent from and has
profoundly conditioned and structured what has occurred in the field
of events. It then becomes possible to ask what it means to be human
in modernity thus understood, or to put it another way, to enquire
as to the role of the category ‘human’ in the ordering processes constitutive of modernity.
In this light I want to suggest that it is precisely the centrality of
the question of what it is to be human that is most significant, because
1
╇ Bruno Latour, We Have Never been Modern (Harlow: Pearson, 1993), 13.
60
richie nimmo
it is the overriding preoccupation with the place of humanity in the
nature of things that unites the diversity of modern discourses, and
which points to the unity underlying their apparent divergence. What
is it to be human? Modernity has furnished a great many answers,
but they are finally answers to the same question. In this sense all
modern discourses can be understood as discourses of humanity, so
that to be modern is to have a human-centred view of the universe.
Thus human beings are hailed as the source of all meaning and value,
the agents in all action, the eye in the storm of existence itself. Rather
than a sheer contingency, a cosmic and evolutionary accident in an
indifferent universe, ‘man’ is taken to be the measure of all things,
and the world merely an arena for human action.
I will refer to this worldview as humanism, or humanist discourse,
since ‘anthropocentrism’ already foregrounds its negative aspects—it
is human-centred, it neglects the significance of non-humans;
whereas humanism better describes the spirit of the thing in its positive, affirmative aspect—it champions humanity. People will not
often label themselves anthropocentrists, but they will proclaim that
they are humanists. So let us use the more positive word, the broader
to aim our critique and the better to show that humanism is merely
anthropocentrism as it views itself, which is to say, as the doctrine of
humanity.
If humanism is the doctrine of humanity, then it is also the doctrine of its ‘others’. To be able to place humans at the centre of the
world, one must firstly separate them from that world. Humanism
therefore relies upon making an essentialist distinction between
humanity and its others, let us call them ‘non-humans’, as the word
is fittingly anthropocentric in its logic, presuming such human
uniqueness as would render the homogeneous category of ‘nonhumans’ somehow meaningful. This division takes many forms, but
perhaps the most basic and persistent is subject-object dualism,
which has structured Western ontology since Ancient Greece, and is
nothing less than foundational for modernity.2 Humans are subjects,
╇ I should stress that I do not want to suggest that modernity and humanism are
simply synonymous. Modernity in all its concrete complexity is of course irreducible
to any singular ‘way of thinking’. What I am arguing is the slightly more nuanced
case that modern ontology is structured by the discourse of humanism, so that the
core distinctions of the humanist worldview permeate a huge variety of modern
practices, knowledges, discourses and forms of social life. Insofar as I sometimes
seem to use the words synonymously, this is because I am presupposing a view of
2
the making of the human
61
while non-humans are objects, it tells us, and from this essential difference all else follows. In truth both parts of this dualism are mutually constitutive, such as to make a nonsense of their separation: A
‘subject’ can only exist as a subject in a world irreducible to its subjectivity; while an ‘object’ can only exist as a distinct object, a thingin-itself rather than part of an indivisible flux, when perceived as
such by a subject. But humanist discourse suppresses this dialectical
interrelationship, rendering it an asymmetric dualism and inscribing
humans and non-humans as incommensurable, as though they
belong to different ontological domains or sectors of reality. This in
turn enables humanity to be elevated and centralised, while its necessary other—its very conditions of existence—are suppressed and
marginalised, relegated to the status of a ‘context’, a mere ground
upon which the human subject stands.
In its Cartesian form this is mind/body or mind/matter dualism, a
philosophy much criticised but still strikingly persistent in many
subtle ways. Its central assertion is that all humans possess ‘minds’
and ‘consciousness’ whereas all non-humans do not. Thus nonhumans merely exist, as things-in-themselves, while humans do not
merely exist but also think; we are conscious and self-conscious
beings-in-ourselves. This is essentially religious, for by dislocating the
‘mind’ from its material embodiment and conceiving it as a kind of
immaterial substance, Cartesian dualism effectively retains the notion
of the human ‘soul’, albeit translated into secular form. For what else
is this intangible, metaphysical thing, irreducible to the thinking
body, the cognitive organism, and which is the basis of our self-separation from the world of matter and nature? Like the ‘soul’, the
‘mind’ of course does not exist as such. If we cut into our heads we
find only brains, which is to say, more body, more matter and more
nature. The ‘mind’ is a category of our language which we enact into
being in our lived practices. When rendered as a kind of immaterial
substance, an ontological other of matter, then it can only be a theological notion—the secular ‘soul’ of modern humanism.
modernity as a certain ontology (rather than as a period in social and intellectual
history as such) and a view of humanism as the postulation of subject/object dualism
(rather than merely as one side of that dualism). I leave the vast question of the precise relationship between modernity as ontology and modernity as empirical history
to others, except to suggest that the relationship is by no means uni-directional;
ontologies inhere within practices and relations, and thereby shape empirical and
intellectual histories, not just the other way round.
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Nor is this merely a matter of intellectual history. It goes to the
very heart of modernity as a socio-cultural formation, its ontological
architecture underpinning modernity’s science, its economics and its
politics. Thus, though Descartes may have been widely challenged
and discredited, the epochal way of thinking, seeing and being-inthe-world to which he gave such influential expression cannot so easily be rejected, because it has long since seeped into a multiplicity of
other forms, epistemic, material and political, all of which retain its
basic dualism and its human-centred ontology. We struggle to perceive the world in any other way because this division seems simply
a ‘matter of fact’, something given in the order of things and irrevocable.
To challenge anthropocentrism means to refuse this commonsense, this deeply entrenched human/non-human dualism. But I
want to argue that its refusal is less a matter of asserting one ontology
against another, and more a matter of carefully attending to constitutive processes. For as soon as one begins to question humanist discourse and its division of the world into two incommensurable
domains, then it begins to become apparent that this division is not
simply given in the nature of things, but must be perpetually reconstituted in the face of a world in which human and non-human are
thoroughly and constitutively intermixed; far from being given, it is
the unlikely product of an enormous labour. In this light modernity
can be understood as an ensemble of processes which perpetually
re-inscribe and instantiate humanist discourse. These processes are
not metaphorical but real, being simultaneously ontological and
material. They are ultimately processes of reproduction, because the
division between humans and non-humans is a condition of existence of modernity as a form of order, and indispensable to its continued coherence and authority; it is the fissure from which modernity
is perpetually reborn.
Humanist discourse is so pervasive partly because it has so many
manifestations. Its postulation of an essential difference between
humans and non-humans informs multiple subsidiary and related
dichotomies. These divisions constitute the architecture of modern
knowledge. This helps to explain why the role of human/non-human
dualism in the social sciences has only relatively recently begun to be
problematised, and even then only partially and only at the radical
margins of the discipline, notably in ecological perspectives within
the making of the human
63
environmental sociology,3 in human-animal studies,4 in feminist
technoscience,5 in ‘hybrid geographies’,6 and in the generalised symmetry of actor-network theory.7 Beyond these significant but still
relatively maverick developments it has been almost entirely taken
for granted, in the guise of the multifaceted but near universal culture-nature dichotomy.
The significance of this dichotomy cannot easily be overstated; it
has profoundly shaped the development of social scientific knowledge. But it is by no means specific to social science; the social
╇ The environmental sociologists Riley Dunlap and William Catton Jr. gave perhaps the clearest expression of an emerging eco-centric approach by contrasting
what they called the ‘Human Exemptionalist Paradigm’ or hep with a ‘New Ecological Paradigm’ or nep. The former they argued is based upon the assumption that
humans are so unique in their possession of culture as to be exempt from environmental forces and processes affecting other species, whereas the latter paradigm
stresses the complex interdependence of humans with other species and the material
embeddedness of human society within wider bio-physical processes and eco-system
dynamics. See Riley Dunlap and William Catton Jr., ‘Environmental Sociology’,
Annual Review of Sociology, 5 (1979): 243–73.
4
╇ I cannot possibly do justice here to what is a sizeable, diverse and growing
literature, but a few exemplary texts might include Adrian Franklin, Animals and
Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity (London:
Sage, 1999); James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal
Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Arnold Arluke and
Clinton Sanders, Regarding Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996);
Steve Baker and Carol J. Adams, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
5
╇Synonymous with the work of Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and
Women (London: Free Association Books, 1991); eadem, Primate Visions: Gender,
Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Verso, 1992); eadem, The
Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).
6
╇See in particular Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, cultures,
spaces, (London: Sage, 2002); and Steve Hinchliffe, Geographies of Nature: Societies,
Environments, Ecologies (London: Sage, 2007).
7
╇See Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988); idem, We Have Never Been Modern; idem, Reassembling the
Social: An introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press
2005); Michel Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication
of the scallops and the fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay’, Power, Action and Belief: A New
Sociology of Knowledge, ed. John Law (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986);
John Law, ‘Introduction: Monsters, Machines and Sociotechnical Relations’, A Sociology of Monsters? Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1991), idem, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (London:
Routledge, 2004); Mike Michael, Constructing Identities: The social, the Nonhuman,
and Change (London: Sage 1996); idem, Reconnecting Culture, Technology and
Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity (London: Routledge 2000).
3
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�sciences have merely been complicit in the much wider epochal practice of systematically separating the human from the non-human;
they have been the unwitting servants of humanist discourse. The
natural sciences are equally implicated however, because the social
sciences and humanities are to the natural sciences as culture is to
nature. Indeed the overarching demarcation of modern disciplines
with its bifurcation of domains of knowledge is fundamentally structured by the culture-nature dualism of humanist discourse. Let us
therefore look more closely at this dualism.
Culture and Nature
The notion of ‘culture’ is critically important to conceptions of the
objects, methods and rationales of the social science disciplines.8 But
because these forms of knowledge begin from the fact of culture, they
do not explain it to us. Social anthropology for example, defines itself
centrally as the study of cultures and cultural differences, but it tends
to treat culture itself as a given, as the being-in-the-world of human
beings. This is a matter of self-affirmation, for culture is not just the
object of anthropological knowledge but is also its condition of possibility; the cultural nature of human beings affords social anthropology its very rationale. Similarly for cultural sociology; it presupposes
either the cultural nature of social life or at the very least the existence of a cultural domain within a wider ‘social’. These disciplines
cannot therefore afford to be disinterested in the coherence of this
category; they are very much interested parties, their legitimacy heavily invested in the reproduction of this ontological framework.9
What, then, is the central idea underpinning this notion of ‘culture’?
It depends ultimately upon the postulation of an essential dif�
ference. It posits that there are two kinds of phenomena, natural
�phenomena and cultural phenomena, and that the two are incommensurable, so different in nature that they cannot be understood in
similar terms. Whatever else it may mean, ‘culture’ is always and ultimately that which is not nature; it is the other of nature. Where the
term ‘society’ or ‘the social’ is preferred, though in certain respects
different nuances of meaning are involved, the same fundamental
8
9
╇Peter Brooker, Cultural Theory (London: Arnold, 1999), 51.
╇See Tonutti, ‘Anthropocentrism and the Definition of “Culture”’, this volume.
the making of the human
65
othering process is at work: society and culture are other than nature,
they are the domain of humans, as distinct from that of non-humans.
This is simultaneously an ontological and an epistemological claim:
because the world itself is fundamentally divided into two incommensurable domains, our forms of knowledge must be similarly
divided, into natural knowledge on the one hand and socio-cultural
knowledge on the other, each being conceived as essentially different.
In effect this performs what Bruno Latour has called a ‘work of
purification’;10 it ‘purifies’ the human domain by rendering it seemingly autonomous, by stripping ‘culture’ or ‘the social’ of all the
diverse non-humans with which in practice it is always inextricably
bound up.
The social sciences have often seemed the awkward case in this
modern episteme, being located somewhat ambiguously between the
longer established natural sciences and humanities. This has been
expressed in the persistent debate as to what should be their proper
self-identification, with some seeing the idea of a ‘social science’ as a
contradiction in terms,11 others deeming it a necessity,12 and still others as a desirable but only approximately achievable ideal. This debate
has been vigorous and sustained. What it has not done however, or
what has only relatively recently begun to be done, is to question the
very modernist division of knowledge in terms of which the entire
debate has been framed. Despite their pronounced tendency towards
epistemological reflexivity, the various shades of social scientific
thought have remained very much in thrall to the core ontological
assumptions of humanist discourse.
In the following sections I trace this discourse through certain key
moments in nineteenth-century social theory, showing how it has
deeply structured modern thinking on ‘the social’ and has contributed profoundly to shaping the social sciences more widely. The specific path I trace will necessarily be a partial and selective one, and
one which overemphasises my own discipline of sociology. I take it
for granted that others would have very different visions of what are
the key developments. I should also stress that I do not aspire to furnish a complete or comprehensive analysis of humanist discourse in
╇ Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 11.
╇ A highly influential statement of this position can be found in Peter Winch,
The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1990).
12
╇See for example Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism.
10
11
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the history of social thought. Such a project would require a large
volume to itself, if not several volumes. The aim here is a much more
limited one, in that I merely want to show how humanism has been
pivotal in the formation of some key foundational positions in sociology, even to positions which would not usually be considered
‘humanist’.
Marx’s Humanist Dialectic
In the continuous flow of time there are no beginnings, rendering
all starting points more or less arbitrary. Marx though seems to offer
a slightly less arbitrary starting point than most of the plausible alternatives from which to begin this particular analysis. It may seem odd
to privilege Marx in this way, given that he was never a sociologist
as such and would surely have repudiated the label. But it is difficult
to overemphasise his influence on the subsequent development of
social thought, not least upon Emile Durkheim and Max Weber,
whom unlike Marx were direct contributors to the establishment of
sociology as an academic discipline and to the founding of the major
methodological and ontological traditions which continue to shape
the possibilities of social thought. Marx is also the most unusual of
the ‘classical’ sociologists in that his conception of culture-nature
relations is considerably more complex and nuanced than many later
social thinkers. As Timothy Mitchell has argued:
In social theory there is an important exception to the rule that human
action is put at the centre and the external world is treated as an arena
for such action rather than the source of forms of agency and power.
It is found in the work of Marx.13
Marx himself sought to position his historical materialism as compatible with the historical naturalism of his contemporary Charles
Darwin, whose Origin of Species Marx read with great enthusiasm.
Marx wrote that ‘Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as
a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history’, and ‘this
is the book which contains the basis in natural history of our view’.14
Engels was later to claim that ‘just as Darwin discovered the law of
13
╇Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 30.
14
╇ Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 364.
the making of the human
67
development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history’.15 This may seem to posit a very strong
correlation between these theories, but upon closer inspection the
posited relationship is mainly one of analogy, for note the ontology
implied by Engels’ words: Nature is separate from history, history
being human and social; Darwin’s account is adequate for nonhumans, but not for humans, since humans are social rather than
merely natural; for this reason they are historical beings, and are not
subject to the laws of natural history, but to the laws of human history. Positivist this may be, but it is still very much dualist in its
conception of the relation between nature and society. Equally,
though Marx admired Darwin’s form of historical explanation and
his naturalistic conception of ‘man’, not least because it was perceived as a huge fillip to atheism, he was highly cautious when it
came to the political applications of Darwin’s theory, and he had
nothing but derision for social Darwinism proper, which sought to
explain history in terms of human biology, population pressure,
competition for survival, and the evolution of the species through
selection.
‘History’ then, for Marx, that is to say, human ‘social’ history, is
connected to nature through human agency or praxis, through purposive human action upon nature, rather than through Darwinian
natural mechanisms or any other kind of volition or agency on the
part of nature itself. Nature was regarded by Marx as the reactive
object, humanity as the active subject. The term for human praxis
acting upon nature was labour, which Marx conceived as a metabolic
interchange between humanity and nature, a process in which
humanity (re)creates both itself and ‘society’:
Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by
which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls
the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature… he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this
way he simultaneously changes his own nature.16
So labour is the key mediating moment of the subject-object �dialectic
at the centre of Marx’s thought, at once historically, epistemologically
15
╇Terrell Carver, ‘Darwinism’, Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), 131.
16
╇ Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1976),
I, 283.
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and ontologically. Interestingly, this conception of labour is very
close to the etymological root of the word ‘culture’ as the cultivation
of natural resources.17 For Marx social history (subject) has emerged
out of natural history (object) yet represents a fundamental departure
from it; it is tied to natural premises, but has become other than
nature.
Yet Marx has often been seen as a naturalistic thinker, and not
without some justification, for he insisted that historical materialism
alone gave due recognition to the historical significance of the human
existence as a species of natural, physical beings compelled to produce the means to satisfy their material needs. This did not mean that
humans were wholly natural beings, but on the contrary, it was the
way in which humans laboured that determined their social-historical being, over and above their natural existence. Nature merely dictated the necessity of labour, whereas the mode of organisation of
labour and its technological development not only shaped society,
but was itself shaped by society. Marx therefore described his position as a unity of naturalism and humanism, as ‘humanist naturalism’.18
But the cogency of this dialectical unity is wholly dependent upon the
special work performed by the category of ‘labour’. It is labour which
both separates society from nature, while also, in the process and the
medium of this very separation, simultaneously establishing their
socially and historically conditioned interaction. Without this mediating concept Marx’s ontology would be quite straightforwardly
dualist, for it is only the category of labour that stands between Marx
and his otherwise transcendental-realist conception of ‘nature’. It is
precisely the capacity of ‘labour’ to perform this dialectical conjuring
trick of simultaneous purification-and-mediation while remaining a
materialist concept that I want to call into question.19
Marx wants to be able to acknowledge that humans are part of
nature and that ‘man’ is a natural being, while also maintaining that
humans alone are ‘social’ and ‘historical’ beings, thus:
╇Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Collins, 1981); Terry Eagleton, The Idea
of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
18
╇ For a more detailed discussion of this see Ted Benton, ‘Marx on Humans and
Animals: Humanism or Naturalism’, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and
Social Justice, ed. Ted Benton (London: Verso, 1993), 23–57.
19
╇See also Ben Dawson’s discussion of anthropolarity in the context of Marx in
‘Modernity as Anthropolarity’, this volume.
17
the making of the human
69
Man is a directly natural being… But man is not only a natural being,
he is a human natural being. This means that he is a species being that
exists for himself, thus a species being that must confirm and exercise
himself as such in his being and knowledge.20
So for Marx it is humanity’s capacity to create and recreate its own
‘internal’ nature through its action upon ‘external’ nature that distinguishes human society from the non-human world, as it is from
this process of human self-authorship in labour that the social character of humans derives. This ontology is coherent enough with reference to the relations between humans and the inert objects of
labour, but if humans alone are to be deemed social, then some distinction has to be made between humans and non-human animals.
As Marx recognises, the only properly materialist grounds for such
a distinction is labour itself, hence he posits the distinction as follows:
Men... begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they
begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of
subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.21
We are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labour
which remain on the animal level... We presuppose labour in a form
in which it is an exclusively human characteristic.22
But what is this form of labour? For as Marx recognises, non-human
animals also labour in order to reproduce their conditions of existence:
It is true that the animal, too, produces. It builds itself a nest, a dwelling, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc.23
A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and
a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction
of its honeycomb cells.24
Indeed there is nothing in the empirically observable character of
human labour that separates it decisively from comparable animal
20
╇ Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (‘epm’), Karl Marx:
Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 104–
5.
21
╇ Karl Marx, ‘The German Ideology’, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Â�McLellan,
160.
22
╇Marx, Capital, I, 283–4.
23
╇Marx, ‘epm’, 82.
24
╇Marx, Capital, 284.
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activity. On the contrary, these labours are radically equivalent when
grasped symmetrically and non-anthropocentrically, in other words,
when grasped not in terms of specifically human standards but in
relation to the form of life in question.
Even judged narrowly in terms of complexity, there are many
forms of human labour which are more repetitive and routine than
certain cases of non-human labour, just as there are forms of animal
labour which manifest the characteristics of highly organised collective activity.25 But these radical symmetries are deeply incompatible
with Marx’s conception of the unique place of humans within nature,
for without the ontological architecture of humanist discourse the
society/nature dichotomy begins to unravel. Hence the distinction is
theoretically necessary to Marx; which perhaps explains why he tacitly turns away from the observable character of the activity and
towards its inner, metaphysical essence, its uniquely human ‘soul’, as
follows:
What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the
architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.26
Conscious vital activity differentiates man immediately from animal
vital activity. It is this and this alone that make man a species being.27
When rendered in these terms, however, this is not in fact a distinction between the labour of humans and that of animals, but between
the consciousness of humans and the putative (un)consciousness of
animals, as ostensibly manifest in their labour. Though Marx stresses
activity and practice, it is the status of human activity as conscious
activity—conceived in terms of its becoming an object to itself, hence
as self-consciousness—that actually does the conceptual work of separating human from animal labour. It is not the activity itself but its
Cartesian mental accompaniment that is being invoked in order to
legitimise the human/non-human distinction. Thus Marx’s separation of human from animal labour rests upon what in his own terms
25
╇ For some parallel reflections see Tim Ingold, ‘The architect and the bee: reflections on the work of animals and men’, The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on
Human Ecology and Social Relations, ed. Tim Ingold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). See also Frans de Waal and Peter Tyack, eds., Animal Social
Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualised Societies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
26
╇Marx, Capital, 284.
27
╇Marx, ‘epm’, 82.
the making of the human
71
is an ‘idealist’ rather than a materialist conception—that of ‘consciousness’; humans possess it, animals do not, it is asserted, and in
this fact alone the labour of humans is distinct. Human labour is
conscious, intentional, designed in advance, or in other words ‘cultural’, whereas the labour of animals is unconscious, merely instinctive, without purpose, and therefore ‘natural’. It follows that the
distinction between human and animal labour in Marx is actually
based upon the postulation of an essential difference between humans
and animals on the grounds of ‘culture’ itself: humans possess it,
animals do not.28 The concept that forms the mediating core of
Marx’s dialectic of nature and culture turns out to be based upon
precisely the kind of prior separation of the two domains characteristic of humanist discourse.
Two Faces of Dualism
The role of humanist discourse in structuring Marx’s society-nature
dialectic has had profound consequences for the subsequent development of social thought. I cannot go into a detailed or exhaustive
analysis of these consequences here, but the main point is that the
category of labour upon which Marx’s conception of ‘society’
depended, and which prevented it from dissolving into ‘nature’, concealed a thoroughly ‘mentalist’ and humanist kernel incompatible
with the materialist premises of Marx’s method. This meant that the
dialectical conception of ‘society’ was condemned to oscillate between
its two internal poles, humanism and naturalism, each of which
should have been cancelled out by Marx’s materialism but were
instead left partly in place, crossed out but not deleted by an asymmetrical dialectic with a humanist heart.29 With time these unstable
28
╇ That this is Marx’s position is made very clear in Harry Braverman’s influential reading of the Marxist conception of labour in his Labour and Monopoly Capital
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
29
╇ This is not the place to go into an extensive account of how this logic works
itself out through all the various schools of Marxism which developed during the
twentieth century. It is perhaps worth saying, however, that it is just as evident in
structuralist Marxism as in the more explicitly ‘humanist’ Marxism. Both rely upon
a fundamental separation of humanity from the nonhuman world and thus implicitly posit human uniqueness and autonomy. The difference is that ‘humanist’ Marxism locates this uniqueness in a kind of philosophical anthropology, a residual
human ‘nature’ or ‘species being’, which as I have shown is used to distinguish
humans from animals and nature; whereas structuralist Marxism eschews any such
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poles were bound to crystallise into irreconcilably opposed, incommensurable positions; thus the social ‘subject’ and ‘object’ became
both splintered from each other and dislocated from the human relationship to nature from whence they had arisen. Much of the subsequent development of social theory can be understood as the
intellectual shockwave of this fracturing, consisting of various more
or less unsuccessful attempts to put Marx’s dialectic back together
again.
Durkheim and Weber, who did more than any other writers to
establish sociology as a discipline, illustrate this very clearly. Of
course neither of these prodigious thinkers can adequately be
summed up in just a few lines, but in terms of their core methodological prescriptions and the positions these involve on the nature/
society-human/non-human nexus, it is clear that they occupy almost
antithetical locations on a dialectical continuum defined in large part
by Marx.30 If Weber is methodologically humanist, paving the way
for interpretivist sociology, then Durkheim is systematically realist or
‘naturalist’ in the positivist sense, advocating the imitation of the
method ascribed to the natural sciences. As I will show however, both
of these social thinkers rehearse the same anthropocentric dualism,
though they do so by occupying its opposing sides.
At the centre of Durkheim’s sociology is the concept of ‘social
facts’. It is the existence of ‘social facts’ that for Durkheim justifies the
existence of sociology; the concrete reality of social facts provides the
discipline with its raison d’être and its object of knowledge. ‘Treat
social facts as things’, Durkheim famously declared in his Rules of
Sociological Method. This was an affirmation that social phenomena
have the same ontological facticity as natural phenomena and are
naturalisation of humanity (even as a starting point used to separate humans from
nonhumans) and instead locates human uniqueness entirely in social relations, conceived as completely autonomous of nature, so that humanity is defined as society,
as the totality of social relations. Interestingly, this latter approach still essentially
underpins poststructuralist thinking. But from the point of view of a critique of
anthropocentrism the difference is fairly inconsequential. Both positions assert the
same divide, albeit in different ways, and it is the divide itself that is the fundamental
characteristic of humanist discourse as I understand it. Indeed, this old divide in
Marxism in many ways parallels that in sociology between the interpretivist inheritors of Weber and the positivist inheritors of Durkheim, which I discuss here.
30
╇ H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ‘Intellectual Orientations’, From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology, eds. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1991),
57.
the making of the human
73
therefore knowable in the same way and according to the same method.31 In this way Durkheim’s social ontology is built upon a thoroughly Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, for it relies upon a
notion of the contemplative individual as a being of consciousness
over and against the world, a consciousness that confronts matter as
an alien externality and an obstacle to the will. This is a characteristically modernist sensibility, closely bound up with the dominance of
scientific ways of knowing. Thus Durkheim’s position conflates social
collectivity with the concept of ‘externality’ born of sceptical philosophy’s mind/body problem. It treats whatever is over and above the
individual as ‘objective’, in the sense of it being like a physical object
that confronts the individual ‘mind’ or consciousness.
By beginning in this way from the point of view of a pre-social
abstract subjectivity, Durkheim solidifies sociality into externality
and process into object; in short he reifies the social. This underlying
ontological individualism leads to the mechanistic objectivism which
characterises his sociological method, making Durkheim the theorist
par excellence of society as a ‘thing’, as an objective unit, totality or
system. It is the objective reality of this macro-object ‘society’ that,
for him, justifies sociology and underpins its methodological autonomy and its scientific character. The unique purpose of sociology, for
Durkheim, is to study ‘social facts’; it is this that separates sociology
decisively from psychology and psychological explanations. That is
why Durkheim insists that sociology is a science sui generis, or as he
puts it:
A science can be established only when it has for its subject matter
facts sui generis, facts that are different from those of the other sciences.
If society did not produce phenomena which are different from those
observable in the other realms of nature, sociology would be without
a field of its own. Its existence can be justified only if there are realities
which deserve to be called social and which are not simply aspects of
another order of things.32
If sociology depends so fundamentally upon the coherence of the
idea of an ontological domain of ‘the social’, then one must ask what
role sociology has had in bringing its object into being. As the actornetwork theorist Mike Michael has remarked: ‘What counted as
╇ Anthony Giddens, Durkheim (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 35.
╇Emile Durkheim, ‘Sociology and its Scientific Field’, Essay on Sociology and
Philosophy (New York: Harper Row, 1964), 363.
31
32
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“natural” or biological, and what counted as social or “human”, was
influenced by the exigencies of constructing and maintaining institutional and disciplinary boundaries’.33 Indeed it cannot be confidently assumed that there are phenomena which are specifically and
exclusively social. Social and cultural phenomena are always already
technological, political, economic, legal, scientific, and indeed natural. The attempt to specify some essence within these constitutively
interwoven phenomena that is specifically ‘social’, or to designate a
level at which all these things are resolved into a general sociality
that encompasses them, or that is relatively autonomous of them, is
to create a pure abstraction, corresponding to nothing in this heterogeneous world. The purpose of such abstraction is ultimately selfaffirmation; to create the object that justifies the existence of social
science itself. Durkheim did more than anyone to ensure that sociology developed according to this strategy.
Like Marx, Durkheim’s sociology depends at some point upon
making an essential distinction between humans and animals. The
condition of possibility of Durkheim’s reification of society as an
autonomous domain entirely separate from nature is the drawing of
an absolute distinction between human nature, which he believes is
socially determined, and animal nature, which he assumes is instinctive and tied to biology.34 This is central to Durkheim’s whole analysis of modernity. He suggests for example that this is why human
desires, unlike animal desires, are potentially unlimited, because they
are generated and regulated by society rather than being rooted in
‘organic needs’, that is, in the physical needs of the organism. Human
desires may be derived from such organic premises evolutionarily but
have long since transcended these ‘animal’ origins:
In short, society, through the moral regulation it institutes and applies,
plays, as far as supraorganic life is concerned, the same role that instinct
fills with respect to physical existence. It determines, and it rules what
is left undetermined. The system of instincts is the discipline of the
organism, just as moral discipline is the instinctive discipline of social
life.35
As Mike Hawkins observes, ‘the point of the dualism is to show that
man’s physical nature plays no part in determining his social exis╇Michael, Constructing Identities, 137–8.
╇Emile Durkheim, Socialism (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 241.
35
╇Durkheim, Socialism, 244.
33
34
the making of the human
75
tence and, therefore, socially induced needs require limitation by
some supra-individual agency, i.e. society’.36 This in turn is at the
core of Durkheim’s key notion of ‘anomie’—the view that modern
industrial capitalism has led to an erosion of the social regulatory
forces required in order to constrain the egoistic desires it generates.
In this way Durkheim’s sociology of modernity is thoroughly predicated upon the interconnected dualisms of human/animal and society/nature, leaving little room for non-anthropocentric reflections of
any kind.
In his commitment to the idea that social phenomena are epistemologically equivalent to natural phenomena, Durkheim’s sociology
could not be more sharply contrasted with that of Weber. At the core
of the Weberian position is the charge that, by treating social phenomena as though they were ‘things’, as though they were like the
objects of natural science, one neglects the ‘cultural’ nature of social
life, that is, the meaningful character of social actions and the reflexivity and subjectivity of social actors. It is this meaningful aspect of
social life that Weber’s sociology emphasises; indeed this is the basic
enabling assumption of all post-Weberian constructionist and interpretative sociology—that social phenomena are incommensurable
with natural phenomena. This is to have come full circle, to the point
at which Weber, in his antithesis to Durkheim, ends up performing
the same dualism that underpins Durkheimian naturalism.
These apparent opposites then turn out to be united in their dualist approach to nature and society. Whereas Durkheim asserts that
society and nature are distinctly separate objects, but knowable in the
same way, Weber asserts that they are different kinds of object, and
therefore knowable in distinctly separate ways. Hence Weber’s interpretative sociology or ‘sociology of understanding’ was, for him, ‘a
unique approach of the cultural sciences, which deals with man
rather than with other animals or with lifeless nature’.37 The assumption is that human conduct alone is ‘meaningful’ and ‘understandable’. Whereas the objects of natural science must be studied
according to the method of causal explanation of facts, the subjects
of social/cultural science must be grasped according to the method of
36
╇Mike J. Hawkins, ‘A Re-Examination of Durkheim’s Theory of Human
Nature’, Emile Durkheim: Critical Assessments of Leading Sociologists, ed. S.F.
�Pickering (3rd ser., London: Routledge, 2001), I, 107.
37
╇Gerth and Wright Mills, ‘Intellectual Orientations’, 56.
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richie nimmo
‘verstehen’ or the interpretative understanding of meaningful social
action, that is, in terms of the intentions and understandings of the
human subjects involved. This echoes, at least in part, the
Enlightenment view of ‘man’, in which the reasoning and rational
individual is the basic unit of society. The putative self-understanding
of such individuals provides the terms in which interpretivist sociological explanation is ultimately conceived. It therefore enthrones the
human ‘subject’ as the constitutive unit of an inter-subjective ‘social’.
In this way the whole methodological orientation of Weber’s sociology is predicated upon a humanist ontology, the notion that there are
two incommensurable realms, one of human subjectivity, meaningfor-itself, ‘culture’, the other of non-human objectivity, matter-initself, ‘nature’.
Weber is a complex sociologist, in many ways far more complex
than Durkheim, and the boiling down of his methodological position
to this humanist ontology is far from simple and straightforward. As
Anthony Giddens points out:
The genealogy of Weber’s methodological essays is complex, and they
must be placed within the framework of the then current controversy
over the relationship between the natural and the ‘human’ or social
sciences... The lengthy and complicated debate which arose in Germany
over the status of the sciences of man thus explored issues which
remained largely quiescent in French history and social philosophy.38
Nevertheless, in the end Weber’s immersion in this debate led him
to the essentially Kantian conclusion that ‘The social sciences are
necessarily concerned with “spiritual” or “ideal” phenomena, which
are peculiarly human characteristics which do not exist in the subject-matter treated by the natural sciences’.39 Just as Marx’s humanism is most visible in his resort to metaphysics in order to legitimise
a spurious distinction between human and animal labour, Weber’s
humanism is most apparent in his not dissimilar distinction between
‘social action’ and ‘mere behaviour’:
Social action, in the Weberian sense, is distinguished from mere behaviour. Action which is oriented towards inanimate objects, for example,
does not qualify... In short, only behaviour which is intentional, and
38
╇ Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the
Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1971), 133.
39
╇Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, 134.
the making of the human
77
which is oriented toward the behaviour of other human beings, qualifies as social behaviour.40
This underlines the extent to which Weberian sociology is predicated
upon an ontology and epistemology that systematically exclude nonhumans from consideration. With breathtaking circularity, ‘the
social’ itself is deployed as the mechanism of this purification, for
whatever is not inter-subjective, in the sense of existing in the world
of meanings between human beings, is simply not ‘social’. This
remarkable sleight of hand conjures up a purified dualist world
inhabited only by human subjects and inert and meaningless objects.
Weber and Durkheim then, at the most fundamental level, are far
more alike than distinct; the interpretivism and positivism respectively that characterise their work turn out to be different faces of the
same humanist ontology. I should emphasise that this is not just a
matter of intellectual history, because in the shape of constructivism
or interpretivism on the one hand, and positivism or realism on the
other, this dualism continues to define a great deal, indeed most, of
contemporary social thought. That is why for much of social science
nature is still an absent other; it is what happens outside of the cultural-social-semiotic-meaningful world of human beings, and can for
that reason be either left to the natural sciences or theorised in ‘cultural’ terms, but never grasped non-anthropocentrically in a vision of
a collective that is every bit as natural as it is social.
The Making of the Human
The hold of humanist discourse over sociological thought is embedded at the level of the core ontological and epistemological assumptions of the discipline; it therefore informs most of its key concepts
and methodologies. Even so, it has not gone wholly unchallenged.
Ever since Marx there have been strands of alternatives to anthropocentrism in social thought, but these have tended to be marginalised and suppressed by the dominant humanist currents. Hence
there are occasional non-humanist reflections to be found even in
the work of otherwise anthropocentric social thinkers, very often
40
╇ William Tucker, ‘Max Weber’s Verstehen’, Sociological Quarterly, 2 (1965):
157–65, reprinted in Max Weber: Critical Assessments, ed. Peter Hamilton (London:
Routledge, 1991), 45.
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richie nimmo
when they have cause to give some consideration to non-human
animals.
For example, in advocating the methodology of ‘verstehen’ or
meaningful understanding, Max Weber reflects that:
In so far [as the behaviour of animals is subjectively understandable]
it would be theoretically possible to formulate a sociology of the relations of men to animals, both domestic and wild. Thus, many animals
‘understand’ commands, anger, love, hostility, and react to them in
ways which are evidently often by no means purely instinctive and
mechanical and in some sense both consciously meaningful and
affected by experience.41
Though a highly significant admission, this was never incorporated
more systematically into Weber’s sociology and thus was not taken
up by those who later drew upon Weber’s methodological prescriptions in developing interactionist sociology. George Herbert Mead
for example used descriptions of animal ‘behaviour’ solely as something against which to define human ‘action’. As Clinton Sanders
observes:
In laying the intellectual groundwork for the constructionist perspective that would later become symbolic interactionism, Mead maintained that, although animals were social beings, their interactions
involved only a primitive and instinctual ‘conversation of gestures’ (the
dog’s growl or the cat’s hiss, for example). In Mead’s view, animals
lacked the ability to employ symbols and were, therefore, unable to
negotiate meaning and take the role of co-interactants. Their behaviour
was directed toward achieving simple goals such as acquiring food or
defending territory, but because they were unable to use language, their
behaviour was devoid of meaning. They were mindless, selfless, and
emotionless.42
This is not untypical. Indeed it is striking how predictably nonanthropocentric reflections have arisen in sociological thought only
to be ultimately swept aside, whether on the grounds of ‘culture’,
‘language’, ‘reflexivity’, ‘agency’, or some other means for asserting
the exceptional nature of human beings in the interests of properly
‘social’ science.
╇ Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free
Press, 1947), 104.
42
╇ Clinton Sanders, ‘The Sociology of Human-Animal Interactions’, H-Animal
.net, www.h-net.org/~animal/ruminations _sanders.html. May 2006. Accessed October 2009.
41
the making of the human
79
Notwithstanding the occasional non-anthropocentric reflection
then, the key traditions in classical sociology, and those which have
been central in determining the core identity of the modern discipline, have been remarkably consistent in inscribing an essential and
incommensurable difference between a human domain, whether
referred to as ‘culture’ or ‘the social’, and a non-human domain of
‘nature’. This dualism has been foundational for social scientific
thinking. It has taken multiple forms, ontological, epistemological
and methodological, but in every case it is the human subject which
is ultimately at stake and which is really at the elusive centre of these
distinctions; the subject, that is, conceived in terms of ‘mind’ or ‘consciousness’, subjectivity, and an ostensibly unique capacity for meaningful action or ‘agency’.43 Hence there is a deep and basic alignment
between, on the one hand, ‘culture’ or ‘the social’, and on the other
hand, the human, so that every distinction between culture and its
others invokes an underlying and parallel differentiation between
what is human and what is not.
In this way the discursive positioning of human beings at the centre of modern cosmology is organised around the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘the social’. Both involve defining the subject as a being of
agency vis-à-vis a non-humanity conceived in terms of nature
inscribed as an object. The resultant subject is integral to the coherence of modernity as an epistemic and ontological order. Thus the
forms of knowledge, which modernity both defines and is in turn
defined by, are rooted in the anthropocentric dualism emergent from
humanist discourse. The social sciences have not only been fundamentally shaped by this but have actively contributed to its reproduction; by systematically purifying ‘the social’ of its non-human others
they have been key apparatuses of humanist discourse. That is why
there can be no merely empirical solution to the problem of anthropocentrism in social science; it is necessary radically to rethink the
organising categories of our knowledge if we are to really grasp the
world and ourselves in a way that dispenses with an anthropocentric
conception of the human being.
╇ Hence what we might heuristically call the ‘external’ dimension of anthropocentrism, in dividing humans from nonhumans, is inseparable from the ‘internal’
dimension of anthropocentrism, that is, from the question of how we understand
human beings and what it is to be human. Anthropocentrism is not just a matter of
how we view the status of animals and other nonhumans, and our relations with
them; it is also profoundly a matter of how we understand our own status as human
beings, and our relations with ourselves.
43
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
81
toward a non-anthropocentric
cosmopolitanism
Gary Steiner
Historical Cosmopolitan Ideals
The ideal of civil society that prevails today owes a direct debt to
Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, who sought to articulate the
importance of notions such as autonomy, equality, reciprocity, and
mutual respect for any viable system of political decision-making.
But our contemporary ideal owes an equal if indirect debt to an
ancient cosmopolitan ideal according to which human beings are
morally superior to all other natural beings and hence enjoy a natural prerogative to use non-human beings to satisfy human needs and
desires. Kant does not invent the cosmopolitan ideal but simply
modifies it in accordance with the liberal humanist notion of the
individual that had developed through the reflections of the Christian
humanists in the Renaissance and those of Descartes and the social
contract thinkers in modernity. Thus to the extent that the ancient
cosmopolitan ideal is fundamentally anthropocentric, it should come
as no surprise that Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and our contemporary ideal of civil society are likewise anthropocentric. For the
Western philosophical tradition this posed no problem, since the
tradition conceived of society as being concerned exclusively with
human relationships and activities. And for many people today, this
still poses no problem whatsoever. But for anyone concerned with
the fortunes of non-human animals, it has become a matter of serious controversy whether the concept of society or community should
ultimately be restricted to human beings, particularly given the fact
that so many of our activities and cultural practices involve the subjection and exploitation of animals.1 For if social relationships and
responsibilities are conceived in exclusively human terms, then, in
1
╇ As in all my writing on animals, when I refer to ‘humans’ or ‘human beings’
I mean human animals, and when I refer to ‘animals’ I mean non-human animals.
It is beyond question that human beings are animals.
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gary steiner
accordance with the ancient cosmopolitan ideal advanced by the
Stoics, animals are categorically excluded from the sphere of justice
and nothing we do to animals can be classified as unjust. According
to early Greek writers such as Hesiod, human society originated in
a ‘golden age’ in which human beings shared a fundamentally peaceful existence not only with one another but also with animals. Human
beings lived as if they were gods, without having to struggle for their
existence, and without having to kill and eat animals.2 Only after a
sort of fall from grace did human beings become violent toward one
another and toward animals, and only then did it become necessary
for Zeus to impose dike or the law of justice and peace. According
to Hesiod, Zeus thereby placed all human beings in the sphere of
justice and expressly excluded all animals—apparently on the grounds
that animals were not capable of ‘listen[ing] to justice’.3 Ovid, too,
offers a Verfallsgeschichte, the beginning of which is a golden age in
which humans and animals lived together in a sort of paradise.4 To
the extent that the historical roots of our received conception of
justice lie in an ideal of peaceful coexistence with animals, it strikes
me as odd that our conception of justice categorically excludes any
consideration of animals. Or perhaps it is the other way around:
Given that our traditional conception of justice has no implications
whatsoever for our treatment of animals, it ought to strike us as odd
that Hesiod and Ovid characterised our original and putatively ideal
condition as one in which we were friends and companions of animals.
The history of the West is marked by a conspicuous tension
between fanciful depictions of a peaceful ideal state and the factum
brutum of violence. Our history is not simply one of violence among
human beings, but also and perhaps even more significantly a history
of human violence toward animals. Every year 53 billion land animals are slaughtered for the sake of the welfare and enjoyment of
human beings, and our traditional principles of justice do not raise
the least scruple against such practices. If we are to take the interests
╇See Hesiod, Works and Days, 105–201. On the recurrence of this golden age
myth in Western thought, see Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents:
The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 39, 44f., 50f., 95, 106–13, 137. See also Sax, ‘What
is this Quintessence of Dust’, this volume.
3
╇ Hesiod, Works and Days, 213, 275.
4
╇Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1, 90–162.
2
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
83
and the fate of animals seriously, we will need a more exacting conception of justice than the one we have inherited. As even Rawls
recognised, a robust conception of obligation toward animals would
presuppose ‘a theory of the natural order and our place in it’.5 And
yet Rawls claims that the concept of justice pertains exclusively to
relations among human beings. Like the Stoics before him, Rawls
maintains that, to the extent that animals lack the capacity to enter
into contracts and assume obligations, it is impossible in principle to
do an injustice to an animal; for Rawls it is utterly meaningless to
speak of justice or injustice with regard to animals. I take this tension
in Rawls’ thought to be an indication that even Rawls, if only against
his own intention, sees his theory of justice against the background
of a more fundamental theory of the natural order and our place in
it. For Rawls this appears to be a theory according to which human
beings have a superior place in the cosmos and animals an inferior
one. Rawls, in other words, simply gives modern expression to the
Stoic doctrine of cosmopolitanism. On the Stoic view, material goods
such as animals are mere adiaphora or ‘indifferents’, and animals
were created specifically for the sake of human beings.6 Of course
there is a basic difference between Rawls and the Stoics: Rawls conceives of the world in secularised, presumably godless terms, whereas
the Stoics presume the cosmos to have been ordered by the gods. But
with regard to the moral status of animals, this difference is insignificant. Regardless of whether a traditional theory of the cosmos and
our place in it presupposes a creator-god or not, the implications
for animals are the same. Like the earlier view of human beings as
created in the image of a God or gods, the modern, secularised view
still conceives of humanity as in certain respects godlike.7 In both
cases the conviction that human beings are godlike serves as the
basis for a moral hierarchy of living beings in which rational beings
(humans) are superior and non-rational beings (animals) inferior.
5
╇ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, (revised edn., Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard,
1999), 448.
6
╇See Cicero, De natura deorum, 2.37–9, The Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. and
trans. A.A.€Long and D.N.€Sedley (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), I, 54H. See also Epictetus, Discourses, 1.6.18, 1.16.1-5, 2.8.6-8 and Steiner,
Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents, 85.
7
╇ In the twentieth century the most illuminating account of the concept of
human willing as a secularised version of the divine will is Carl Schmitt’s. See Carl
Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922/1934),
trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).
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gary steiner
The �supposedly superior beings enjoy the prerogative, indeed the
right, to use the supposedly inferior beings as they see fit.
As I have noted, the contemporary cosmopolitan ideal has its roots
in an ancient theory of the cosmos. The crux of this theory is found
in the writings of Aristotle. In the Politics, Aristotle proclaims the
superiority of human beings over animals:
After the birth of animals, plants exist for their sake, and... the other animals exist for the sake of man, the tame for use and food, the wild, if not
all, at least the greater part of them, for food, and for the provision of
clothing and various instruments. Now if nature makes nothing in vain,
the inference must be that she has made all animals for the sake of man.8
In texts such as De anima and the Politics, Aristotle denies animals
reason and the capacity to form beliefs, and he excludes animals from
the moral-political community on the grounds that they lack these
capacities. Aristotle presupposes a natural hierarchy in which humans
are superior to all non-rational beings and may use such beings in
any way they see fit for the satisfaction of human needs and desires.
The use of animals, like all use of non-rational beings, liberates
human beings from material need and facilitates our striving for
eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is dependent on rational contemplation or
theoria, an activity that makes human beings godlike—contemplation
places us, as Heidegger might put the point, in the nearness of the
gods.9 According to Aristotle, animals have no capacity for contemplation, hence no share in eudaimonia.10 Animals are ‘inferior in their
nature to men’ and are categorically excluded from virtue and politics.11
Like Aristotle, the Stoics presuppose a cosmos hierarchically structured in terms of degrees of perfection. According to the Stoics, the
world itself is the highest perfection. The world is rationally ordered,
and its perfection can be grasped only by rational beings. Thus only
human beings and gods can actively participate in the true good that
characterises the cosmos; all other beings, such as animals and plants,
8
╇ Aristotle, Politics, 1.8 at 1256b15-21, Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jona�than
Barnes (2 vols., revised Oxford translation, Princeton: Bollingen/Princeton University Press, 1995), II, 1993–4.
9
╇Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 269f.
10
╇ Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 10.8 at 1178b22-29.
11
╇ Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1.7 at 1217a24-25, Complete Works of Aristotle, II,
1926.
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
85
are inferior to (less perfect than) rational beings. According to
Seneca, ‘the Good [is] non-existent’ in plants and animals ‘because
there is no reason there... that alone is perfect which is perfect according to nature as a whole, and nature as a whole is possessed of
reason’.12 This is a decisive commitment that informs the dominant
voice in the entire history of Western philosophy, ancient as well as
modern: only those beings that can apprehend or contemplate the
good, are intrinsically rather than merely instrumentally good. In
Stoic thought, the influence of this prejudice finds expression in the
doctrine of living in accordance with nature. The meaning of living
in accordance with nature (kata physei) varies with the being in question and its place in the cosmic hierarchy. Animals are moved by
immediate perceptions and impulses; ‘for them it is sufficient to eat
and drink and rest and procreate, and whatever else of the things
within their own province the animals severally do’. But for human
beings, ‘to whom [God] has made the additional gift of the faculty of
understanding, these things are no longer sufficient... For of beings
whose constitutions are different, the works and the ends are likewise
different’.13 For human beings, material welfare is a necessary but not
a sufficient condition for living in accordance with nature. The
endowment of reason makes human beings capable of moral conduct, and according to Cicero such conduct is ‘the sole thing that is
for its own efficacy and value desirable, whereas none of the primary
objects of nature is desirable for its own sake’.14 Plants and animals
count as such ‘primary objects’ and exist for the sake of human
beings.15 On the Stoic view the world itself is also an object. To the
extent that the world is an object of contemplation, it exists for the
sake of gods and humans alike. But because the gods are by nature
self-sufficient, the world, to the extent that it is a means for the satisfaction of bodily needs, exists for the sake of human beings.16 Thus
12
╇Seneca, Ad lucilium epistulae morales, 124.8, 14, Latin with English trans.
Richard M. Gummere (3 vols., London: William Heinemann/New York:
G.P.€Putnam’s Sons, 1925), III, 441, 445.
13
╇Epictetus, Discourses, 1.6.14-17, The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, Books
I-II, Greek with English trans. by W.A. Oldfather (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2000), 43.
14
╇ Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, 3.21, Latin with English trans. H.
Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 240f.
15
╇See Cicero, De natura deorum, 2.37-39; see also 2.133 and Diogenes Laertius
7. 138.
16
╇See Epictetus, Discourses, 1.16.1-5.
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gary steiner
animals and other non-rational beings are ‘destined for service’, in
order that human beings may be freed for reflection on ‘the divine
administration of the world’.17
According to Stoic cosmology, such contemplation is the essence
of cosmopolitanism, and cosmopolitanism is the highest level of existence. This anthropocentric vision of ideal existence influences the
entire subsequent history of European thinking about the status of
human beings and animals in the cosmic scheme of things. In medieval Christianity this influence is especially evident in the thought of
Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, although it is also apparent in the writings of such thinkers as Origen, Saint Basil, John
Chrysostom, and even Saint Francis of Assisi. Like his predecessors
the Stoics, Augustine maintains that animals have no access to divine
truth because they lack reason.18 Thus ‘human beings are superior’ to
animals; and animals, like all non-rational beings, exist ‘to serve us in
our weakness’.19 Because animals were not created in God’s image,
we are entitled to kill them for the satisfaction of our needs. And we
may do so without the least scruple, inasmuch as we share no ‘community of rights’ with animals. ‘We can perceive by their cries that
animals die in pain, although we make little of this since the beast,
lacking a rational soul, is not related to us by a common nature’.20
Augustine’s denial of a community of rights with animals is a restatement of the Stoic prejudice that all and only rational beings are members of the sphere of justice, and that nothing we do to non-rational
beings such as animals can possibly be construed as an injustice.
Like Augustine, Aquinas sees human beings as the crown of creation and maintains that animals exist for the satisfaction of human
needs. Humans are rational beings who possess free will and stand in
the nearness of God.21 Animals, on the other hand, lack both reason
and freedom; thus their behaviour must be guided by the hand of
God.22 On Aquinas’ view:
╇Epictetus, Discourses, 2.10.3, 268f.
╇See Saint Augustine, Confessions 7.17.
19
╇Saint Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, 1.9, trans. Thomas Williams
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 15; see also Confessions, 10.31.
20
╇Saint Augustine, The Catholic and Manichaean Ways of Life, 2.17.59, 2.17.54,
trans. Donald A. Gallagher and Idella J. Gallagher (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1966), Fathers of the Church, vol. 56, 105, 102.
21
╇Saint Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 5, art. 8, resp.,
Summa Contra Gentiles, 3.97.
22
╇Saint Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputate de veritate, q. 24, art. 1, resp.
17
18
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
87
all animals are naturally subject to man... For the imperfect are for the
use of the perfect: plants make use of the earth for their nourishment,
animals make use of plants, and man makes use of both plants and
animals. Therefore it is in keeping with the order of nature that man
should be master over animals... Since man, being made in the image
of God, is above other animals, these are rightly subject to his government.23
From this follows Aquinas’ well-known conviction that our duties
with regard to animals are in fact duties toward humanity; the only
reason to avoid cruelty to animals is that being cruel to animals
makes us more likely to be cruel to our fellow human beings.24 Apart
from this anthropocentric restriction, Aquinas recognises no limits
on what we may do to animals to satisfy our desires: ‘It is not wrong
for man to make use of [animals], either by killing or in any other
way whatsoever’.25 Thus Aquinas advances a cosmopolitan ideal
according to which animals have no direct moral status but are
merely resources and instruments for the practice of virtue.
In the Enlightenment, the cosmopolitan ideal develops in accordance with Kant’s program for religion within the limits of reason
alone. Kant and other modern cosmopolitan thinkers adhere to the
Stoic-Christian prejudice that animals are ‘lower’ beings that are not
only practically but also morally inferior to humans. The replacement
of God with secularised human reason as the ultimate basis for moral
as well as metaphysical truth does nothing to change the moral status
of animals; the traditional assumption of human divinity and the
resulting sense of superiority over animals remain unshaken.
This assumption of human superiority is central to Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal:
In the system of nature, a human being (homo phaenomenon, animal
rationale) is a being of slight importance and shares with the rest of
the animals, as offspring of the earth, an ordinary value (pretium vulgare)... But a human being regarded as a person, that is, as the subject
of a morally practical reason, is exalted above any price; for as a person
(homo noumenon) he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends
╇Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1–2, q. 96, art. 1, resp., Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (2 vols., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997),
I, 692.
24
╇Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 3.92 and Summa Theologica,
1–2, q. 102, art. 6.
25
╇Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 3.92, Basic Writings of
St. Thomas Aquinas, II, 222.
23
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of others or even to his own ends, but as an end in himself, that is, he
possesses a dignity (an absolute inner worth) by which he exacts respect
for himself from all other rational beings in the world.26
All natural beings, to the extent that they are natural beings, possess
‘ordinary’ [gemeinen], which is to say ‘slight’ [geringen], worth. Here
Kant presupposes a hierarchy of value according to which embodied
beings have an inferior status in the cosmos. Non-rational beings are
‘things’ with merely instrumental or relative value, whereas rational
beings are ‘persons’ and possess worth ‘above all price’.27 In the
Kantian cosmos, those beings possess the highest moral worth who
can recognise their own intrinsic worth and be recognised to possess
such worth. Beings that make value distinctions are fundamentally
superior to beings that do not make value distinctions; and given
that the making of value distinctions is a rational activity on Kant’s
view, human beings possess a worth that is incomparable to that of
all other beings in the world. The worth of rational beings is not
merely quantitatively but is in fact qualitatively superior to that of
all non-rational beings. Absent the discovery of non-human rational
beings in the universe, a possibility that Kant explicitly entertains,
this means that human beings are fundamentally the ‘lord[s] of
nature’.28 To the extent that animals cannot contemplate abstract
notions such as that of absolute worth, they are categorically excluded
from the sphere of moral beings. Human beings possess reason,
which makes possible mutual respect among moral agents and
�progress in our moral striving. The apex of such striving is the realisation of a cosmopolitan condition in which all rational beings live
‘in accordance with [an] integral, prearranged plan’ that ‘nature has
as its highest purpose’.29 In accordance with this plan and purpose,
26
╇ Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 186. For a more detailed discussion of Kant, see
Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents, 166–71.
27
╇ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 186. On the person-thing distinction, see
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind, trans. Peter
Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147, and Grounding for the
Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett,
1981), 35–7.
28
╇ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987), sec. 83, 318 (Ak. 431).
29
╇ Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’,
Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
41, 51 (translation altered).
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
89
‘violence will gradually become less on the part of those in power,
and obedience towards the laws will increase. There will no doubt be
more charity’.30 And yet in this supposedly ideal society human
beings will have no duty of charity toward animals, but at most a
duty of compassion that forbids ‘violent and cruel treatment of animals’.31 Like Aquinas, Kant sees a causal relationship between cruelty
toward animals and cruelty toward our fellow human beings. The
less cruelty we exhibit toward animals, the more respect we will show
to human beings. Kant’s view of charity is an extension of his view
of friendship: ‘Friendship (considered in its perfection) is the union
of two persons through equal mutual love and respect’. Because no
‘morally good will unites’ human beings with animals, there can be
neither friendship nor charity shared between the two.32 Indeed,
there can be no direct duties of any kind on the part of a person
toward a mere thing. Our duty of compassion toward animals is in
no way an indication of respect for animals, inasmuch as animals are
mere means and hence not the kind of beings toward which it is
possible to have respect. And to the extent that we find it relatively
easy to exploit animals without feeling any pangs of conscience,
Kant’s assurance that violence on the part of those in power will
gradually become less in a cosmopolitan state has little if any significance for the fortunes of animals: the remarkable extent of animal
exploitation in contemporary society stands as a testimonial to our
ability to excuse our acts of animal cruelty as we assert and congratulate ourselves for our ‘civilised’ humanity. Thus, for example,
‘when anatomists take living animals to experiment on, that is certainly cruelty, though there it is employed for a good purpose;
because animals are regarded as man’s instruments, it is acceptable’.33
The idea of ‘a good purpose’ is unequivocally anthropocentric in
considerations of this kind. Notwithstanding his tepid assertion of
indirect duties toward animals, Kant really conceives of ethics as a
system of exclusively human relationships concerned with ‘human
beings’ duties to one another’; even ‘the question of what sort of
moral relation holds between God and human beings goes �completely
beyond the bounds of ethics and is altogether incomprehensible for
╇ Immanuel Kant, ‘The Contest of Faculties’, Political Writings, 188.
╇ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 192.
32
╇ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 215.
33
╇ Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 213. Here Kant goes on to say that animal cruelty ‘is
never [acceptable] in sport’.
30
31
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us’.34 Ethics is that part of morality that deals exclusively with the
good for human beings, whereas the subject matter of morality as a
whole is the good per se; morality as a whole encompasses relations
between humanity and God but excludes relations between human
beings and animals. For Kant our moral relation to God is literally
‘incomprehensible’ inasmuch as it is not reducible to conceptual
understanding but presumably requires recourse to something like
faith. This means that, in effect, animals are banished not simply
from the sphere of moral relationships and duties among human
beings, but from the sphere of morality altogether. For practical purposes, indirect duties toward animals are as good as no duties.
Two things should be noted about Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal.
First, Kant sees ethics as an exclusively human affair that does not
take its bearings from God as a transcendent being. As a postulate of
pure practical reason, God serves as an immanent, purely conceptual
model ‘of practical perfection, as an indispensable rule of moral conduct, and as a standard for comparison’.35 In accordance with this
secularised conception of God and the idea of perfection that comes
with it, ethics takes no cognizance of the interests of animals whatsoever. Second, even though Kant’s concepts of God and the human
good are secularised and immanent, they are strongly influenced by
ancient conceptions of the good, divinity, and the relationship
between gods and human beings. Like his predecessors in antiquity,
Kant understands the good as a possibility that is accessible only to
rational beings. Only those beings capable of reflecting on the good,
which for Kant are moral agents, merit genuine moral status. For
Kant as for the Stoics, the moral status of a being is determined by
that being’s proximity to the divine. Animals are much further
removed from the divine essence than human beings are, hence animals have a putatively lower moral status than humans—provided
that animals can be said to have any moral status whatsoever.
Regardless of whether God is understood to be a transcendent being
or simply a postulate of pure practical reason, the implications for
the moral status of animals are the same: animals are mere things,
means for the satisfaction of the needs and desires of beings that are
capable of contemplative activity.
╇ Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 232.
╇ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (3rd
edn., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Library of Liberal Arts/Prentice Hall, 1993), 134n.
34
35
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
91
Cosmic Justice
We are heirs to this anthropocentric way of thinking; animals are its
victims. Whether or not we still believe in God, we must forever
renounce the arrogance of asserting our superiority to and dominion
over animals. The warrant traditionally invoked for regulating
human-human and human-animal relationships has been an ideal
of God as a perfect being and measure for human striving; a corollary
of this image of God has been the proposition, often repeated in the
history of Western philosophy, that God created animals expressly
for the sake of human beings. But have we really understood ourselves as made in God’s image? Or have we instead fashioned an all
too convenient image of God that is consonant with our own desires?
For what has ultimately been decisive in the moral sphere in our
tradition is precisely the well being of human beings; the cosmos that
we have outwardly conceived as theocentric is in fact utterly anthropocentric. We have done less to understand ourselves as having been
made in God’s image than to make God in our own. The recognition
of this anthropocentric prejudice brings with it the need to rethink
the notion of the divine. Kant sees the inappropriateness of basing
moral judgements on considerations of material welfare, and calls
instead for an ethic based on the principle of respect. But he limits
the principle of respect to rational beings, which is to say to human
beings. In effect, on Kant’s view, the respect that human beings have
for themselves and other human beings is a secularisation of reverence for God, where both human beings and God are understood to
be fundamentally linguistic-rational beings. Once again, for Kant as
for the Stoics, morality has direct implications only for beings capable of the logos.
In my judgement, it is a fundamental mistake of the Western tradition to have posited language and reason as conditions for moral
worth. The tradition was right to deny these capacities to animals (to
most if not all of them, at any rate), and it was also right to consider
these capacities to be conditions for the possibility of taking on moral
obligations. But there is no logical connection between these capacities and moral worth. So it should not be surprising that not one
single representative of the tradition has explained or justified this
supposed connection; instead such a connection is dogmatically
Â�presupposed and used as a justification—or rather, as an excuse—for
the widespread exploitation of animals. This is why the traditional
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concept of justice, as it has been understood by thinkers such as
Rawls, is ill-suited to the task of animal liberation. This task demands
a radical rethinking of the concept of justice and a corresponding
rethinking of the notion of dwelling.
This recalls Rawls’ assertion that ‘a correct conception of our relations to animals and to nature would seem to depend upon a theory
of the natural order and our place in it’.36 Karl Löwith gestures toward
such a theory of our place in the natural order when he writes that
‘human community cannot be in order when it is not in tune with
the cosmos [kosmosartig verfaßt]’.37 In order to appreciate the proper
place and vocation of human beings, we must think ‘cosmo-politically in the literal sense of the term’.38 This requires us to acknowledge that the world is not merely the human world; that there is a
‘pre- and suprahuman world of sky and earth, which stands and
maintains itself utterly on its own [and] infinitely eclipses the world
that stands and falls with human beings. ...it does not belong to us,
but rather we belong to it’.39 Löwith begins here to uncover the nonanthropocentric potential of the notion of world, a potential ignored
by the Stoics and Kant alike. When contemplated in relation to this
suprahuman world of earth and sky, ‘the world of [human] Dasein...
[is] not the ordered cosmos, but is instead our world of being with
others [Mitwelt] and our environment near and far, which has a kind
of order only insofar as it is centred on concernful human beings’.40
When this anthropocentric sense of order refuses to acknowledge its
debt to a deeper, cosmic sense of order, we encounter the problem of
hubris, a refusal to acknowledge the ultimately subordinate place of
human beings in the larger cosmic scheme of things. Whereas ethics
has traditionally been understood fundamentally in terms of human
world and human relationships, Löwith’s teacher Martin Heidegger
saw the possibility of a more primordial ethics in which freedom is
conceived as ‘letting beings be’ and which ‘ponders the abode of
human beings’.41
╇Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 448.
╇ Karl Löwith, Welt und Menschenwelt: Beiträge zur Anthropologie, Sämtliche
Schriften (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981), I, 303.
38
╇ Löwith, Welt und Menschenwelt, I, 295.
39
╇ Löwith, Welt und Menschenwelt, I, 295.
40
╇ Löwith, Welt und Menschenwelt, I, 307.
41
╇Martin Heidegger, ‘On the Essence of Truth’, Pathmarks, 144; ‘Letter on
“Humanism”’, Pathmarks, 271. Cf. Philip Tonner, ‘Are animals poor in the world?’,
this volume.
36
37
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
93
This sense of abode or dwelling needs to be thought in terms of
Löwith’s cosmo-political ideal, so that Heidegger’s idea of ‘dwelling
in the truth of being’ is seen to signify dwelling within the order of a
suprahuman nature, and his ideal of the human being as the ‘shepherd of being’ is understood in a non-anthropocentric sense.42 If the
specifically human notion of justice is oriented on reciprocal rights
and corresponding duties, the cosmic notion of justice takes its bearings from a fundamental asymmetry between human beings and animals—and perhaps from the asymmetry between human beings and
non-human living beings generally. This asymmetry consists in the
fact that it is possible—and, I argue, morally incumbent upon human
beings—to recognise that we have fundamental obligations toward
animals (and perhaps toward non-human nature generally) in spite
of the fact that animals (and non-human nature generally) are fundamentally incapable of taking on reciprocal obligations toward us.
The tradition was right to proclaim that moral agency requires the
capacities for reason and language, and to proclaim that non-human
animals are incapable of being moral agents. The central mistake of
the tradition was to assume that because animals cannot be moral
agents, they cannot be beneficiaries of direct moral concern either.
Thus it becomes imperative to develop a notion of asymmetrical
duties toward animals, i.e. duties with no corresponding rights that
we can assert against those beings toward whom we have these duties.
The sphere of specifically human goods, which Kant calls ‘ethics’,
does include certain asymmetrical duties, such as those we are generally assumed to have to so-called ‘marginal cases’ such as the severely
mentally impaired; but that sphere cannot ultimately accommodate
the full range of asymmetrical duties. This failing of the tradition is
due to a speciesistic prejudice whose abandonment makes possible
the establishment of a new and more adequate conception of justice.
To recognise the arbitrariness of excluding animals from the sphere
of morality or the good is to begin to understand the notion of ‘the
abode of human beings’ in a truly cosmo-political sense, and in turn
to begin to realise such a sense of dwelling. To do so would be to take
a decisive step in the direction of what Heidegger calls ‘the piety of
thinking’.43
╇ Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, 243, 252.
╇Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977), 35 (translation altered).
42
43
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But Heidegger himself did not conceive of this piety in animalfriendly terms, at least not explicitly. In this connection, Derrida
maintains that Heidegger repeats the ‘anthropo-teleological’ preÂ�
judice of the tradition in excluding animals from death in the phenomenological-existential sense and hence from the sphere of
responsibility.44 Heidegger denies that animals, as non-linguistic
beings, have any sense of death as such, and for Heidegger this means
that animals do not possess freedom and cannot take on any kind of
responsibility. For Derrida this means that Heidegger effectively
belittles animals by reducing their deaths to the status of merely passing out of existence, rather than viewing the death of an animal as an
event with any real moral gravity. Thus it is ironic that even Derrida
scrupulously avoids making any definitive claims about the right of
animals not to be eaten by human beings. The closest Derrida comes
to making any such pronouncement is a rather tepid statement at a
conference to the effect that ‘I am a vegetarian in my soul’.45 In his
soul. To my knowledge, Derrida was neither a vegan nor a vegetarian. Moreover, even though Derrida purports to believe that ‘we must
reconsider in its totality the metaphysico-anthropocentric axiomatic
that dominates, in the West, the thought of just and unjust’, he punctuates his remarks about the wrongness of killing animals with the
qualification that he is ‘not recalling this in order to start a support
group for vegetarianism, ecologism, or for the societies for the protection of animals’.46 For Derrida, any definitive claim about the
moral status of animals, such as a categorical call for veganism or
even vegetarianism—indeed, any definitive moral claim about anything at all—would bring the activity of questioning, which is essential for authentic responsibility, to a standstill. In doing so, Derrida
does exactly what he charges Heidegger with doing, namely, failing
to take genuine responsibility. Derrida is outraged by Heidegger’s
involvement with National Socialism and with Heidegger’s persistent
silence on his role in Nazism, and as a result Derrida misconstrues
44
╇ Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter
Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 112f.
45
╇ Jacques Derrida, from the Cerisy Conference, 1993, cited in David Wood,
‘Comment ne pas manger—Deconstruction and Humanism’, Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 20.
46
╇ Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, Cardozo Law Review, 11 (1989–90), 953; ‘Eating Well’, 112.
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
95
Heidegger’s views on animals in a way that confuses Derrida’s own
thinking.47 It is fair to say that Heidegger is unconcerned with animals as moral beings and that he is far from believing that human
beings should have anything like respect for animals. Clearly,
Heidegger places higher cosmic worth on humans than on animals.
But this has nothing to do with why Heidegger excludes animals
from the existential phenomenon of death. The reason he excludes
animals from death in the existential sense is that ‘animals do not
relate to beings as such’, i.e. animals lack the essential capacities for
understanding and Ek-sistenz, that way of being in the world in
which human beings relate to themselves, to others, and to possibility
as such.48 Herder and Schopenhauer recognised that animals lack the
‘Besonnenheit’ or reflective awareness that makes freedom and
responsibility possible, although both thinkers acknowledged a fundamental continuity between human beings and animals.49 Heidegger
implicitly follows this line of thought: The lack of reflective awareness
in animals signifies an essential ‘captivation [Benommenheit]... The
animal as such does not stand in an open relation to beings. Neither
its so-called surroundings nor its own self are [in the] open [for it] as
beings’.50 Animals have their own kind of openness to beings, but this
is an ‘openness [in the mode] of submission [Hingenommenheit]’ to
things in contrast with the kind of openness that makes freedom or
‘letting beings be’ possible.51 To describe human beings as ‘worldforming’ and animals as comparatively ‘world-poor’, as Heidegger
does, is to acknowledge that not animals but rather only human
beings are ‘addressed by being’ and stand ‘in the light of being’, i.e.
that not animals but only humans ‘ek-sist’ and ‘experience death as
death’.52 Thus ‘an animal can never be “evil”… For evil presupposes
╇See Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents, 217–22.
╇Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983), xxix/xxx, 368. On Ek-sistenz, see Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, Pathmarks, 246–51.
49
╇See Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents, 182, 185, 189.
50
╇ Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 361; see also Martin Heidegger,
‘What are Poets For?’ Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New
York: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2001), 106.
51
╇ Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 361, 368.
52
╇ Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, 247f.; idem, On the Way to Language,
trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971), 107. See also Tonner,
‘Are animals poor in the world?’, this volume, which fully unpacks Heidegger’s position on animals.
47
48
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spirit. The animal can never get out of the unity of its determinate
rank in nature… The animal is not capable of dealing with principles’.53
Heidegger maintains that ‘this comparison between animals and
humans in terms of world-poverty and world-formation does not
give license to estimations or evaluations of perfection and imperfection—quite apart from the fact that such estimations are hasty and
inappropriate’.54 Thus we must approach the question of the relative
worth of humans and animals with caution: ‘Is the essence of human
beings higher than the essence of animals? All this is questionable in
the very posing of the question’.55 In other words, the essential differences between human beings and animals have no moral significance
but simply amount to the fact that human beings can experience existence and death as such, because only human beings, in virtue of
their reflective awareness, stand in the light of being, can grasp principles, and are therefore capable of making choices in a manner that
is impossible for animals. Both in the human social sphere and in the
cosmic sphere, reflective awareness or ek-sistence is the condition for
the possibility of taking on duties. From the cosmic standpoint, a lack
of ek-sistence is not a basis for the denial of rights, provided that the
prospective beneficiary of rights in question is a conscious being.
And yet Heidegger’s thinking remains anthropocentric to the
extent that he retains much of the old prejudice concerning the proximity of human beings to the gods. Although in the ‘Letter on
“Humanism”’ he seeks to call this proximity into question, he ultimately proclaims a special relationship between mortals, which he
conceives as human, and gods; moreover, he conceives of the ‘abode
of mortals on the earth’ in terms of the capacity for ‘dwelling’, which
he considers to be unique to human beings.56 ‘But “on the earth”
already means “under the sky”. Both of these also mean “remaining
before the divinities” and include a “belonging to human beings with
one another”. By a primordial oneness the four—earth and sky,
divinities and mortals—belong together in one’.57 This does not mean
53
╇Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen
Freiheit (1809), ed. Hildegard Feick (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971), 173f.
54
╇ Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 286.
55
╇ Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 286f.
56
╇ Heidegger, ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, 248; ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’,
Poetry, Language, Thought, 147.
57
╇ Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, Poetry, Language, Thought, 147
(translation altered).
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
97
simply that human beings stand in closer proximity to the gods than
do animals, but rather that animals do not stand in proximity to the
gods at all. Thus Heidegger repeats the mistake of the tradition to the
extent that he confuses proximity to the gods with the ability to think
this proximity. In this connection it is noteworthy that he does not
say one single word on behalf of the moral status of animals, but
instead treats animality as a sort of abstract counter-concept to the
human.
One thinker who does not view animals in these terms is the NeoPlatonist Porphyry, who rejects the Stoic commitment to the cosmic
superiority of human beings over animals.58 In place of the ideal of
an anthropocentric cosmopolitanism, he develops an ideal of cosmic
justice that is well suited to the establishment of a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism. According to Porphyry, justice consists in
‘restraint and harmlessness toward everything that does not do
harm’.59 This includes all animals, at least those endowed with voice
(phone), inasmuch as they participate in the logos of nature; but it
excludes plants inasmuch as they are incapable of perception and
hence have no share in the logos.60 Given their capacities for memory
and perception, animals are rational beings and in this sense participate in the logos.61 Porphyry anticipates an objection that Gassendi
will later make against Descartes, when he argues that participation
in the logos need not involve the full-blown linguistic ability possessed by human beings.62 Such a non-linguistic conception of the
logos is the key to developing a cosmic sense of justice and cosmopolitanism, in that it opens us to the prospect of an essential kinship
not simply between human beings and gods, but between conscious
beings generally and the divine. Where Aristotle and Kant reject the
possibility of friendship between human beings and animals,
Porphyry sees such friendship as a corollary to the essential cosmic
kinship that unites humans and animals.63 Porphyry reminds us of
58
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, trans. Gillian Clark (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2000), 1.31.3.
59
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 3.26.9.
60
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 3.2.4, 3.3.3, 3.19.2.
61
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 3.1.4.
62
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 3.2.4; Pierre Gassendi, ‘Fifth
Set of Objections to the Meditations’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans.
John Cottingham, et. al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), II, 189.
63
╇ Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 8.11 at 1161b1-3; Kant, The Metaphysics of
Morals, 215.
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the Golden Age, in which ‘friendship and perception of kinship ruled
everything [and] no one killed any creature, because people thought
the other animals were related [oikeios] to them’.64 Porphyry stresses
that in Egyptian tradition, animals were beloved of the gods and that,
when we acknowledge the bond of kinship that prevails between
humans and animals, ‘the friend of the genus will not hate the species’.65
Porphyry’s account of the way in which animals participate in the
logos and his view of the resulting kinship between human beings and
animals provide the basis for a non-anthropocentric notion of community with animals and a conception of justice that calls on us to
refrain from harming any conscious being that poses no harm to us.
Porphyry recognises that killing conscious beings is sometimes
unavoidable, as when we defend ourselves against a deadly animal or
human adversary; and he suggests that we may well have a right to
kill in such situations. But he is clear that we have no such right in
our relations with harmless creatures.66
A reader could hardly be reproached for inferring from Porphyry’s
arguments and from the title of his text that he is an advocate of
universal vegetarianism. After all, when he lists the things without
which human beings cannot survive, he names ‘air and water, plants
and crops’ but makes no mention of animal flesh.67 And yet Porphyry
does not argue that all human beings ought to practice vegetarianism.
He writes that:
my discourse will not offer advice to every human way of life: not to
those who engage in banausic crafts, nor to athletes of the body, nor
to soldiers, nor to sailors, nor orators, nor to those who have chosen
the life of public affairs, but to the person who has thought about who
he is and whence he has come and where he should try to go.68
Porphyry’s arguments are directed in Neo-Platonist fashion to those
among us who aspire to take part in ‘the Olympics of the soul’, those
who would seek to transcend the conditions of embodiment toward
an ideal of spiritual purification.69 Indeed, the Neo-Platonist strain
in De abstinentia stands in an uneasy tension with the many passages
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 2.22.1.
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 4.9; 3.26.6.
66
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 2.22.1-2.
67
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 3.18.4.
68
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 1.27.1.
69
╇Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 1.31.3.
64
65
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
99
in which Porphyry presents what modern thinkers would call a direct
duties approach to animals: on the one hand we are told that practices such as eating meat arouse our passions and therefore are
incompatible with the aspiration to achieve spiritual enlightenment,
while on the other hand we are told that animals are beloved of the
gods and that we should respect the inherent dignity of animals. It
remains for the contemporary reader to resolve this tension, and in
particular to confront the question whether Porphyry’s reasons for
excluding so many people from the duty to eschew animal flesh have
any force within the context of contemporary society and consciousness.
Notwithstanding this limitation in his views, Porphyry points the
way toward a revision of the Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis or belonging.
The Stoics conceived of oikeiosis as a stepwise progression in the
notion of community, in which all but the final stage are possible for
animals as well as for human beings. The first stage of oikeiosis takes
the form of pure autoaffection, and begins at birth:
Immediately upon birth… a living creature feels an attachment for
itself, and an impulse to preserve itself and to feel affection for its own
constitution and for those things which tend to preserve that constitution, while on the other hand it conceives an antipathy to destruction
and to those things which appear to threaten destruction.70
The second stage of oikeiosis involves a broadening of the sphere of
belonging to include love for one’s offspring.71 These first two stages
show that the Stoics conceive of oikeiosis as the expansion of affection
to ever-larger circles of belonging, beginning with the individual’s
relation to itself and progressing to concern for one’s offspring as
extensions of oneself. The Stoics also recognise that members of some
species of animals form mutually beneficial bonds with creatures that
are not their immediate family members, and that some animals participate in cross-species symbiosis.72 But the Stoics believe that in
animals, the capacity to expand circles of belonging is sharply circumscribed. They maintain that only human beings can expand the
range of oikeiosis beyond the first two levels, by employing reflection
to recognise a higher potential than that exhibited by the filial bond
in animals. According to Hierocles, ‘the outermost and largest circle
╇ Cicero, De finibus, 3.16, 232f.
╇ Cicero, De finibus, 3.62, 280f.
72
╇See Cicero, De finibus, 3.63, 282f.
70
71
100
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[of oikeiosis], which encompasses all the rest, is that of the whole
human race… It is the task of a well-tempered man, in his proper
treatment of each group, to draw the circles together somehow
towards the center’.73 Unique to human beings is a universal sense
of belonging that obligates each of us to treat strangers far removed
from our inner circle as if they were closely related to us. Cicero
describes the characteristics of this third level of oikeiosis in the following way:
Nature has endowed us with two roles [personae], as it were. One of
these is universal, from the fact that we share in reason and that status
which raises us above the beasts; this is the source of all rectitude and
propriety [decorum], and the basis of the rational discovery of our
proper functions. The second role is the one which has been specifically
assigned to individuals.74
On the Stoic view, both of these personae are unique to human beings
and are requisite for the true good of which only human beings are
capable. Porphyry shows us how we might dispossess ourselves of
the anthropocentric core of Stoic thinking by conceiving of the universal persona of human beings as the source of an essential kinship
between human beings and animals, where the Stoics presuppose an
essential enmity between humans and animals. The affirmation of
our inner kinship with animals will enable us to develop an ideal of
justice that is both necessary and sufficient for a non-anthropocentric
cosmopolitanism, a cosmopolitanism in which we actively acknowledge the cosmic equality of humans and animals and eschew our
regrettable history of animal exploitation.
Contemporary Cosmopolitanism: A Critique
Contemporary disputes over the proper nature and terms of cos�
mopolitanism have some highly revealing implications for the endeavour to achieve a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism. Like the
larger debates about the political in the past generation, these disputes over the terms of cosmopolitanism are fundamentally anthropocentric and take the form of disagreements over the viability of
classical liberal notions such as agency, equality, and universal
╇ Hierocles (Stobaeus, 4.671, 7-4.673.11), The Hellenistic Philosophers, 57G.
╇ Cicero, On Duties, 1.107, The Hellenistic Philosophers, I, 66E.
73
74
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
101
�
principles
in the endeavour to respect and/or empower disenfranchised segments of humanity. A key focal point of these disputes is
whether cosmopolitanism ought to concern itself first of all with the
fortunes of individual agents or instead with the fortunes of groups,
be the identities of those groups racial, ethnic, religious, geographic,
or economic—or some combination of these.
Like Kant before them, contemporary thinkers in the liberal tradition take as their point of departure the notion of universality as a
regulative ideal for coordinating the actions of diverse agents on a
worldwide scale. Martha Nussbaum argues that this ideal demands
looking past local and national allegiances and affirming common
aims that underlie difference.75 Nussbaum understands cosmopolitanism as ‘allegiance... to the worldwide community of human beings’
and sees in the affirmation of universally shared human qualities and
values the best prospects for overcoming the factionalism that was a
concern of the Stoics.76 The primary operative value for Nussbaum,
as for Kant, is respect for others; for example, in order for an
American to ‘love or attend to’ an Indian, it is necessary to attain ‘a
human identity that transcends these divisions... The world citizen
must develop sympathetic understanding of distant cultures and of
ethnic, racial, and religious minorities within her own. She must also
develop an understanding of the history and variety of human ideas
of gender and sexuality’.77 In doing so, the cosmopolitan becomes
uprooted from her familiar surroundings and accustomed way of
doing and valuing things, and thereby enters into ‘a kind of exile—
from the comfort of assured truths, from the warm nestling feeling
of being surrounded by people who share one’s convictions and passions’.78
But does Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan manifest concern for animals?
The fact that Nussbaum follows and develops Rawls’ model of justice
makes it unsurprising that she equivocates on this question and ultimately gives a fundamental priority to the interests and fortunes of
75
╇Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, For Love of Country: Defining the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press,
1996), 9.
76
╇Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, 4, 15, 8.
77
╇Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in
Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997),
67, 69.
78
╇Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 83.
102
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human beings over those of animals. Not only does her characterisation of the concerns of the cosmopolitan focus more or less exclusively on our relationship to other human beings, but she frames her
discussion of the capabilities approach to justice in pointedly anthropocentric terms. Nussbaum considers it ‘clear that there is no respectable way to deny the equal dignity of creatures of species across
species’, inasmuch as many animals possess capacities that qualify
them as agents rather than as mere instrumentalities for the satisfaction of human needs.79 Animals, on Nussbaum’s view, are ‘direct subjects of the theory of justice’; but because ‘the members of the
consensus’ that we seek to reach in ethical and political matters ‘are...
all human’, this ‘consensus is an anthropocentric idea’.80 The crux of
this anthropocentric idea is the proposition that whereas justice
requires us to secure certain capabilities for all human beings equally,
it requires us to secure certain capabilities for animals only to a
degree of adequacy to be determined, presumably, through the process of consensus-making.81 We ought to secure the vital capabilities
of animals according to ‘a high threshold of adequacy’.82
This does not prevent us from subordinating the interests of animals to those of humans in situations in which we consider the sacrifice to be urgent, or at least reasonable, precisely because we need
only secure the ‘adequate’ realisation of animal capabilities, not the
realisation of capabilities equal to that enjoyed by human beings.
Why not? For several reasons. First, beings that are mentally more
sophisticated are more capable of suffering harm than those that are
mentally less sophisticated; thus the harm posed by death ‘seems less
grave’ to the latter beings than to the former.83 Because we are held
to a standard of adequacy with regard to animals but to one of equality with regard to humans, this means that we can justify ‘the painless
death of [a free range] animal’ but not that of, say, a mentally
impaired but still sentient human being.84 Second, on Nussbaum’s
79
╇Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Mem�
bership (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2006),
383.
80
╇Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 389.
81
╇Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 381f.
82
╇Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 383.
83
╇Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 387.
84
╇Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 386; cf. 187f., where Nussbaum draws the line
at anencephalic children and humans in persistent vegetative states, arguing that
‘only sentiment leads us to call [such persons] human’; in order to count as human,
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
103
view, ‘where humans are concerned, the idea of equal dignity is not
a metaphysical idea’, whereas where animals are concerned it is; and
given that ‘the question of equal dignity [for animals is] a metaphysical question on which citizens may hold different positions while
accepting the basic substantive claims about animal entitlements...
the idea of cross-species dignity is not a political idea that can readily
be accepted by citizens who otherwise differ in metaphysical
conception’.85 The Rawlsian form of political liberalism endorsed by
Nussbaum seeks to remain neutral as regards substantive claims
about the good, focusing instead on providing the procedural conditions necessary for different human political agents to pursue their
interests. Thus members of a liberal polity may disagree about the
moral status of animals and their basic entitlements.86
Nussbaum argues that animals should be recognised to have basic
entitlements, such as the entitlement not to be killed gratuitously for
sport, but she never explains how she can argue for some entitlements on liberal grounds but not for others.87 What she does tell us
is that she is keenly interested in avoiding conflicts with major religions regarding animals, which reminds us of the fundamentally
anthropocentric orientation and hence the limits of political liberalism as regards the moral status of animals and the prospects for
achieving a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism. ‘A truly global
justice... requires looking... at the other sentient beings’, but ultimately ‘the pursuit of global justice requires the inclusion of many
people and groups who were not previously included as fully equal
subjects of justice: the poor; the lower classes; members of religious,
ethnic, and racial minorities; more recently, women’.88 ‘Looking at
the other sentient beings’ does not prohibit us from using them in
various forms of entertainment such as horse racing; it does not prohibit us from killing them (painlessly, of course) to provide food for
humans; it does not prohibit us from experimenting on animals (as
people must possess ‘the ability to love and relate to others, perception, delight in
movement and play’, i.e., the capacity to live one’s life ‘bound up in a network of
human relations’.
85
╇Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 383f.
86
╇See Gary Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 149.
87
╇Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 393. But cf. 377, where Nussbaum justifies
training horses to race and engage in dressage, dismissing criticisms of such practices as flights of ‘romantic fantasy’.
88
╇Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 405f.
104
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long as we seek to ‘improve the lives of research animals’); and it by
no means requires us to decry any practice that harms animals as
long as it is undertaken in the name of religion.89 Thus in accordance
with the terms of political liberalism as articulated by Rawls and
developed in the direction of capacities by Nussbaum, animals are
not genuinely recognised to be subjects but instead remain instrumentalities for the satisfaction of human needs.
Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a comparably anthropocentric
vision of cosmopolitanism. He models cosmopolitanism on the
Golden Rule, the idea ‘that we should take other people’s interests
seriously, take them into account’.90 Like Nussbaum, Appiah
embraces an ideal of universality that can relate all of humanity in a
global community. He recognises that in important respects this ideal
remains a regulative ideal lacking concrete content, and he suggests
that ‘we can live together without agreeing on what the values are
that make it good to live together; we can agree about what to do in
most cases, without agreeing about why it is right’.91 Cosmopolitanism
is an ideal of human beings living together in harmony, even where
they do not agree on underlying values. The mechanism for achieving
this harmony is not the operation of timeless reason but instead
active engagement in conversation and persuasion. The goal here is
not consensus, which remains elusive, but rather ‘help[ing] people to
get used to one another’.92 What people share in common are ‘concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong’.93 Conversation and
persuasion help us to clarify these ideas and render them concrete,
with the aim of ‘temper[ing] a respect for difference with a respect
for actual human beings’.94 Both forms of respect give rise to obligations to strangers, although Appiah believes that our first allegiances
are properly to those closest to us.95 On Appiah’s view, both strangers
and those closest to us are human beings. Whatever forms of concern
or tolerance our shared humanity may require of us with regard
to other human beings, animals are excluded from the sphere of
╇Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 402f.
╇ Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(New York and London: Norton, 2006), 63.
91
╇ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 71.
92
╇ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 84f.
93
╇ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 97.
94
╇ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 113.
95
╇ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 153, 165.
89
90
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
105
�
concern,
and presumably from the sphere of justice, because they are
aloga and hence incapable of the conversation and persuasion that
Appiah places at the centre of his cosmopolitan ideal. Thus there is
no reason to suppose that there should be any necessary agreement
on the question of whether it is ‘cruel to kill cattle in slaughterhouses
where live cattle can smell the blood of the dead... because applying
value terms to new cases requires judgement and discretion’. Such
questions, like moral questions generally, are ‘essentially contestable’.96
The anthropocentric terms of Appiah’s cosmopolitanism make such
a conclusion unsurprising but nonetheless troubling. Even though
he maintains that reason cannot produce substantive moral uni�
versals that would be clear and compelling to everyone, he none�
theless assumes that human beings can converse with and persuade
one another ‘about what to do in most cases’ and thereby ‘live in
harmony’. Appiah tacitly assumes the same thing as Rawls and NussÂ�
baum: a vision of humanity that includes conceptions of agency,
equality, mutual respect, and something like reasonableness. Even
though Appiah stresses that there is no one thing that it means to be
reasonable, he implicitly presupposes a shared conception of reasonableness as the basis for living in harmony and respecting difference.
We are entitled to disagree about the acceptability of industrial
slaughterhouses, and our disagreement is implicitly reasonable. It is
difficult to imagine Appiah countenancing comparable disagreement
about, say, the acceptability of trafficking in human slaves.
Notwithstanding this anthropocentric limitation, Appiah’s apÂ�Â�
proach has the advantage of recognising that while universality plays
an important role in securing cosmopolitan harmony, this universality is formal and empty until it is given concrete content through
discursive practices. Seyla Benhabib takes this conception of universality as the point of departure for her reflections on what she calls
‘another cosmopolitanism’, one in which ‘the universalist standpoint... views the moral conversation as potentially including all of
humanity... every person, and every moral agent, who has interests
and whom my actions and the consequences of my actions can
impact and affect in some manner or another is potentially a moral
conversation partner with me’. But where Appiah casts suspicion on
the power of reason to ground conversation, Benhabib argues that
each of us ‘has a moral obligation to justify [our] actions with Â�reasons’
96
╇ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, 59f.
106
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to other participants in the discursive process or to their representatives.97 The goal of cosmopolitanism is not simply to realise or concretise universals, but rather to ‘mediate moral universalism with
ethical particularism’ and to ‘mediate legal and political norms with
moral ones’ so as to bring about ‘dialogic universalism’.98 ‘Universal
principles of human rights... precede and antedate the will of the sovereign... The tension between universal human rights claims and particularistic cultural and national identities is constitutive of
democratic legitimacy. Modern democracies act in the name of universal principles, which are then circumscribed within a particular
civic community’.99
Thus for Benhabib cosmopolitanism is the endeavour, on a worldwide scale, to find a balance between universal ethico-political principles and the rightful claims of particular groups or communities.
Those undertaking this endeavour must acknowledge a basic ‘paradox of democratic legitimacy’, namely, that there is an irreducible
tension between ‘a promise to uphold human rights... and the will of
democratic majorities’. This paradox cannot be overcome, but ‘its
impact can be mitigated through the renegotiation and reiteration of
the dual commitments to human rights and sovereign selfdetermination’.100 This tension between universal principles of justice
and the good on the one hand and the claims of particular groups on
the other is the central focus, if only implicitly, of most if not all
approaches to cosmopolitanism in contemporary thought. Liberalminded thinkers tend to give a special primacy to the universal even
where, like Benhabib, they argue that the universal must derive its
content from discursive attempts at persuasion or consensus-making
and that the particular cannot properly be subsumed under the universal but instead must be brought into something like a dialectical
mediation with it. For her own part, Benhabib seeks to bring the
universal and the particular into balance with one another by means
of ‘democratic iterations’, which are ‘complex processes of public
argument, deliberation, and exchange through which universalist
rights claims and principles are contested and contextualised, invoked
and revoked, posited and positioned, throughout legal and political
╇Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), 18.
98
╇ Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 19f.
99
╇ Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 32.
100
╇ Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 35.
97
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
107
institutions, as well as in the associations of civil society’. Such iterations are ‘a dialectic of rights and identities’.101 Working toward a
dialectical relationship between universal human rights claims and
particularistic sovereignty claims (such as the respective claims of
different nations), cosmopolitanism undertakes ‘an immanent critique of the tradition of moral and legal universalism’ that promises
to ‘undermine the logic of exclusions and to expose the self-contradictions of liberal universalism’.102
Benhabib seeks to ‘situate’ the universal in relation to concrete
cultures, values, and practices, just as she has sought to ‘situate’ the
self as an ever-evolving product of difference and cultural specificity.103
But in certain key respects, particularly as regards the fortunes of
animals, her cosmopolitanism remains squarely within the anthropocentric tradition. This is most evident in Benhabib’s conception of
universalism as ‘dialogic’: participants in the process of democratic
iterations are fundamentally linguistic beings capable of showing
‘universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity’.104 Naturally this
by itself does not exclude animals as beneficiaries of ethico-political
discourse. Benhabib acknowledges that
there may be beings to whom we owe moral obligations and who may
become moral victims by virtue of being impacted by our actions but
who cannot represent themselves: sentient beings capable of pain, such
as animals... the moral interests of those who are not full participants
in moral discourses ought to be and can be effectively represented in
discursive contexts through systems of moral advocacy.105
But her central concern is to extend her situated universalism ‘to all
of humanity’, and one must question very seriously her suggestion
that animals ‘can be effectively represented in discursive contexts
through systems of moral advocacy’. In the absence of a substantive
commitment to the inclusion of animals as members of the moral
community with a moral status essentially equal to that of human
beings—precisely what Nussbaum refuses to grant because it is a
101
╇Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 179, 209; see also Another Cosmopolitanism, 48, 67, 70.
102
╇ Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 162.
103
╇See Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992).
104
╇ Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 19f.; The Rights of Others, 13.
105
╇ Benhabib, The Rights of Others, 13f.
108
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‘metaphysical’ commitment on which reasonable people can disagree—it seems far-fetched to suppose that animals will spontaneously find advocates in linguistic beings whose own interests so often
and so extensively conflict with their own interests.
That Benhabib is ultimately no more willing than Nussbaum to
make room for this kind of substantive commitment is suggested by
Benhabib’s criticism of David Held’s cosmopolitan principles for giving ‘not only a vision of justice but one of the good as well’.106 To give
a vision of justice without giving a vision of the good is to sketch
procedural principles that promote the empowerment of different
human agents to act on their own respective conceptions of the good;
these procedural principles include equality, reciprocity, and mutual
respect. But, as noted above, such a procedural vision of justice is
neutral as regards particular substantive conceptions of the good.
This leaves animals in the position of having to wait for the good
graces of a linguistic-moral agent to act on their behalf, and of being
beholden to the ability and willingness of human beings to set aside
self-serving prejudice and to try to envision life and the good from
the standpoint of an animal. Procedural principles of justice work to
the advantage of those beings who are in a position to act as agents
in an ethico-political context, and leave non-linguistic beings vulnerable and subject to human anthropocentric prejudice. The fact that a
thinker such as Nussbaum is inclined to argue that the ideal of
human equality is non-metaphysical, whereas the ideal of humananimal equality is a metaphysical one about which reasonable individuals can disagree, is an indication that any conception of
cosmopolitanism that takes its bearings from human linguistic-moral
agents rather than from a principle of respect for sentient life is
doomed to subject animals to exactly the kind of exclusion that
Benhabib seeks to avoid in the case of human relations.
Contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers are considerably more concerned with the exclusion of human beings than they are with the
exclusion of animals from empowerment in the ethico-political
sphere. This is true even and perhaps especially for those postmodern
thinkers who argue that the liberal focus on autonomous individuals
and the articulation of universal principles serves an ethnocentric
prejudice and in effect functions to exclude disempowered groups
from full moral and political consideration. This strong critique of
106
╇ Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 43n36.
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
109
political liberalism takes a number of forms, but its various proponents are united in rejecting the standpoint of the autonomous individual as an Enlightenment fiction that fails to acknowledge the
operation of difference in constituting the various and always shifting
identities of individuals and groups. Poststructuralism, these thinkers
argue, has shown that the very way in which we characterise political
subjects or actors is itself a political process; as Foucault argued, representation is not objective but instead always serves interests of
power.107 By focusing on power and the cultural practices, particularly discursive ones, that constitute and transform group identities,
poststructuralist thinkers are led in the direction of arguing that
instead of seeking the sort of overlapping consensus recommended
by Nussbaum, the proper function of political discourse is to radicalise the process of representation in a manner that empowers disenfranchised groups rather than assimilating them into some
hegemonic total vision of the human. ‘The objective should be not
just the legitimation of minority discourses but also the minoritization of the body politic as such... it is only ethically and politically
appropriate that minority discourses take a lead, in the form of ongoing coalitions, in producing radical change’.108 The operative
assumptions here are twofold: that every identity is in principle ‘heterogeneous and fissured from within’, and that the true function of
the political is to facilitate the transformation of minority identities
so as to ‘[unsettle] the binary matrix’ of traditional liberal representation and bring about ‘the generalization of heterogeneity over the
entire body politic so that there will be a time when binarity will be
no more’.109
This focus on difference rather than stable, all-encompassing identity takes many forms in contemporary postmodern discourse, but a
guiding if typically unstated premise of discourses of this sort is that
politics is polemical in the strict sense of the term: properly understood, political discourses need to promote a certain conflict rather
than promoting harmony. Thus, for example, Paul Rabinow gestures
toward a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ built on Marilyn Strathern’s call
for a conception of politics as ‘oppositional... suspicious of sovereign
╇See R. Radhakrishnan, ‘Minority Theory, Re-Visited’, CR: The New Centennial
Review, 6:2 (2006): 39–55 at 48f.; Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’,
The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 86, 88.
108
╇Radhakrishnan, ‘Minority Theory, Re-Visited’, 50.
109
╇Radhakrishnan, ‘Minority Theory, Re-Visited’, 52.
107
110
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powers, universal truths’, and respectful of difference.110 The aim of
such a cosmopolitanism would be to examine critically the relations
of power and discourse between anthropologists and the ‘others’ they
study, with an eye toward militating against the forceful imposition
of ethnocentric prejudices in the process of representing the others
being studied by anthropology. This anthropological aim has a more
general implication for cosmopolitanism as an ethico-political ideal,
namely that the various ‘others’ in the political realm, particularly
those who have been marginalised by traditional ethnocentric (which
is to say, Eurocentric) prejudices, need to become empowered to
explore their own identities and possibilities on their own terms.
Indeed, according to the terms of poststructuralist thinking, identity
and possibility ultimately converge with one another.
Taken to its logical extreme, this radical rethinking of cosmopolitanism actually leads to a conception of ‘pluralized forms of popular
global political consciousness’.111 The radicalisation of the political
renders it irreducibly plural, hence cosmopolitanism in the singular
would amount to a hegemonic imposition of a single sense of identity
on a plurality of processes of political self-assertion. Nonetheless a
number of poststructuralist approaches to cosmopolitics make a
place for the universal in political discourses; the universal here
‘exceeds the pragmatic demands of the specific context’ but ‘must
not... be permitted to programme political action, where decisions
would be algorithmically deduced from incontestable ethical precepts’.112 ‘The task that cultural difference sets for us is the articulation of universality through a difficult labor of translation’ that may
prove to be an endless process.113 Such a radicalised, non-essentialist
notion of the universal is needed in political discourse in order to
110
╇Paul Rabinow, ‘Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology’, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed.
James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986), 258.
111
╇Pheng Cheah, ‘Introduction’, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the
Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press, 1998), 36.
112
╇Simon Critchley, ‘Preface’ to Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and
�Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York:
Routledge, 2001), xi.
113
╇ Judith Butler, ‘For a Careful Reading’, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical
Exchange, Seyla Benhabib, et. al., (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 130. Cf.
p. 133: The aim here is ‘recasting agency within matrices of power’.
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
111
prevent existing particular identities from functioning hegemonically
to prevent the exploration of alternative understandings and ways of
being. ‘A plurality of situated cosmopolitanisms’ promises to promote ‘the variously willed and forced detachments from local and
restrictive identities’ and hence to give rise to ‘a vivid spectrum of
diverse dialectics of detachment, displacement, and affiliation’.114
To the extent that the most marginalised peoples arguably constitute ‘the immense majority of the world population’, it should not be
surprising that so many contemporary thinkers advocate a polemical
model of political discursivity: existing liberal institutions and discourse would appear neither to have taken the needs and interests of
marginalised peoples into account nor to be capable of doing so. Any
monolithic approach to cosmopolitanism would thus appear simply
to reproduce and reinforce both the thinking and the institutions that
perpetuate the marginalisation of most of the world’s population. To
the extent that ‘a politics of exclusion [is embedded] into the heart of
nineteenth-century European liberal theories and practices with
respect to empire’, the ‘deracinated’ and universalistic approach of
liberalism is bound to perpetuate the ‘infantilization’ of ‘whole peoples’.115 What is needed, then, is something that Kant professed to
recognise but to which he never ultimately did justice: a recognition
of the particular and the ways in which it must be brought into relation with the universal rather than simply being subsumed under it.
David Harvey takes Kant’s remarks on the importance of local geography to their logical conclusion, arguing that any cosmopolitanism
worth its name must be focused on social movements and founded
on the ‘construction of an entirely new and different geography
(practically as well as conceptually) around relational principles of
belonging that entail a completely different definition of space and
place to that contained either in the Kantian or Heideggerian schemas’.116 In a similar spirit, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César
114
╇ Amanda Anderson, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, 274. Situated cosmopolitanism also has its humanist proponents. See, for example, Lorenzo
C. Simpson, The Unfinished Project: Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism (New
York and London: Routledge, 2001).
115
╇David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 37, 39f.
116
╇ Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, 50 (following an
idea proposed by Chandra Mohanty), cf. 162: What is needed is a conception of
space and time as ‘dialectical and alive’ rather than ‘dead and fixed’, as ‘relational’
112
gary steiner
Rodríguez-Garavito call for a ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’, an
approach to cosmopolitanism that ‘aims to empirically document
experiences of resistance, assess their potential to subvert hegemonic
institutions and ideologies, and learn from their capacity to offer
alternatives to the latter’.117 A commitment to subaltern cosmopolitanism is implicit in the approach of any cosmopolitan thinker who
believes that ‘top-down’ approaches are destined to fail because they
impose a totalising vision of the political on a diversity of local processes of identity-formation. The ‘bottom-up’ approach recommended by de Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito seeks to promote
justice, in particular ‘counter-hegemonic projects seeking to subvert
interstate hierarchies and borders’.118
But who, exactly, counts as a subject or participant in such ‘counter-hegemonic projects’? Will ‘our cosmopolitan quest for universal
justice’ include a sustained and authentic commitment to justice for
animals?119 Or do the plural, dialectically informed cosmopolitanisms
of postmodernity offer animals no better prospects than does liberalism, with its ‘lure of a transcendental guarantee’?120 Common to the
various postmodern and liberal approaches to cosmopolitanism is a
commitment to discursive processes for the formation and transformation of political identities and possibilities. This is particularly
clear in Rawlsian political liberalism and Habermasian discourse ethics; but it holds equally for any approach that emphasises ‘the grammar of representation’ and focuses on ‘the problem of the formation
of collective subjectivities in the modern world by consideration of
the material, institutional, and discursive bases’ for the construction
of identity.121 Nothing in principle excludes animals from considerations of justice as we human beings seek to transform our identities
and realise possibilities for re-situating our always already situated
rather than as ‘absolute’. Cf. also 180 and 185, where Harvey criticises Heidegger’s
conception of place as ‘essentialist’ and as ‘notoriously abstract and vague’.
117
╇ Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito, ‘Law, Politics,
and the Subaltern in Counter-Hegemonic Globalization’, Law and Globalization
from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 15.
118
╇De Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, ‘Law, Politics, and the Subaltern in
Counter-Hegemonic Globalization’, 13.
119
╇ Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, 283.
120
╇ Butler, ‘For a Careful Reading’, 130.
121
╇ Benedict Anderson, ‘Nationalism, Identity, and the World-in-Motion: On the
Logics of Seriality’, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, 121, 130.
a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism
113
senses of autonomy. But to the extent that ‘cosmopolitanism generally invites a description from the perspective of the participant as he
or she negotiates a dense array of affiliations and commitments’, it
seems at best wildly wishful thinking to suppose that animals will be
recognised without further ado as full participants in the never-ending process of cosmopolitan identity-transformation—precisely
because ‘participants’ are conceived by liberals and postmodernists
alike as linguistic agents.122
It is beyond question that a primary concern of many of the postmodern thinkers of cosmopolitanism is the dialectical overcoming of
the hegemonic influence of global capital on local, marginalised communities and the concomitant realisation of a new relationship to
nature.123 Some advocate a move toward ‘socialist cosmopolitanism’,
while others focus on a more general conception of ‘social justice’
whose beneficiaries are women, ‘Blacks, Latinos, American Indians,
poor people, lesbians, old people, [and] the disabled’.124 Apart from
the occasional passing suggestion that animals and/or nature generally can be(come) political subjects, one finds little if anything of concrete value in contemporary writings on cosmopolitanism as regards
the fortunes of animals. In liberal thought this is a product of the
endeavour to secure procedural fairness for human beings by refusing to articulate any first-order substantive conception of the good.
In postmodern thought this is a product of a specifically discursive
(and polemical) conception of the formation and transformation of
political identities. In both cases, animals are an afterthought precisely because they are aloga and hence are not conceived as fully
empowered ethico-juridico-political agents. Animals cannot speak
on their own behalf and hence are incapable of being liberal actors or
participants in acts of polemical resistance to established institutional
power structures. Iris Marion Young is quite right when she suggests
that ‘in order to be a useful measure of actual justice and injustice, [a
theory of justice] must contain some substantive premises’. Young
believes that these premises must be ‘about social life’, and she
╇ Anderson, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of
Modernity’, 275.
123
╇See for example Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom,
259f.
124
╇ Cheah, ‘Introduction’, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation,
33; Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 14.
122
114
gary steiner
�
correctly
observes that such premises are ‘usually derived, explicitly
or implicitly, from the actual social context in which the theorizing
takes place’.125 The question remains what sort of substantive premises are needed to ground a theory of justice that is not simply about
social life but that encompasses all of sentient life. As things stand
today, I do not believe that postmodern conceptions of cosmopolitanism are in any better situation than liberal ones to provide an
answer to this question, precisely because both approaches take as
their point of departure ‘the actual social context in which the theorizing takes place’—a context that by its very nature does not make
room for non-human animals as primary ‘participants’. NotwithÂ�
standing the assurances of liberals and postmoderns alike that animals are or can be genuine beneficiaries of justice, both approaches
are beset with a certain anthropocentric prejudice that can be overcome only by situating our conception of social justice within the
larger context of what I refer to as ‘cosmic justice’, a conception of
justice whose substantive basis I have sought to develop in terms of
‘cosmic holism’.126 The human, all-too-human wars and struggles for
recognition are urgent and entirely real. The ideal of cosmic justice
seeks not to devalue these struggles but rather to place them in a
larger world context that we have tended to repress from the beginnings of civilisation up to the present.
The imperative of cosmic justice is one that requires a Herculean
effort of us: to look past ourselves and see ourselves as part of a larger
cosmic whole that has, in recent generations, and incorrectly in my
judgement, been dismissed as merely an immanent product of human
discourses (and hence as just another effect of power and discursivity) rather than being seen as the living measure of our own selfunderstanding and the ultimate source of any authentic conception
of justice. Such an act of selflessness is the absolute precondition for
the possibility of a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism.
125
126
╇Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 4.
╇See Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community, ch. 5 and ch. 6.
part two
religion, society, culture
anthropocentrism and religious language
117
anthropocentrism and the medieval problem
of religious language
Eric J. Silverman*
Recent study of anthropocentrism has often focused on the question
of whether certain practices and attitudes embody an unethical
favouritism in preference of humanity over other animals. The interest in this topic is largely due to the moral value contemporary utilitarianism places upon increasing pleasure and avoiding pain for all
creatures capable of those experiences. While precedent for this
interest goes at least as far back as John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism,1
the recent interest in addressing this type of anthropocentrism was
ignited by Peter Singer’s work.2 However, the intense contemporary
focus upon this form of anthropocentrism makes it easy to overlook
the fact that anthropocentrism is not a new concept within philosophy.
There is a much older concern about anthropocentrism that has
garnered the attention of philosophers and theologians since at least
the medieval era. The desire to avoid anthropocentrism permeated
medieval thought as theistic philosophers addressed the puzzle and
potential dangers of religious language. One significant concern was
that if words describing God’s attributes essentially had the same
meanings as words describing human attributes then there was a risk
of committing anthropocentrism by comparing an infinite and perfect God to finite and imperfect humans.
Centuries before contemporary scientists and psychologists asked
whether the concept of God is merely an abstraction of an idealised
human, the medieval theists were quite aware of that very danger and
sought to avoid it. Of course, the medieval thinkers’ fear was not that
╇ I am indebted to Jennifer Hart Weed, Fr. Kevin L. Flannery, and Lori J. Underwood for providing many helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter.
1
╇ John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2007),
21.
2
╇Peter Singer, ‘All Animals Are Equal’, Animal Rights and Human Obligations,
eds. Tom Regan & Peter Singer (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 148–
62.
*
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eric j. silverman
the entire concept of God was merely a fabrication made possible by
idealising human traits, but that the limited nature of human language and intellect might communicate inaccuracies about the deity.
For example, they were concerned that claiming God is ‘good’ might
be problematic if the word were used in the same way that we might
call some human moral exemplar ‘good’. They feared that claiming
God to be merely ‘good’, in the same way that great humans like
Mohandas Gandhi or Mother Teresa were morally good, might entail
a serious form of anthropocentrism that would profane God by casting Him in the image of imperfect humanity. Therefore, using religious words in a univocal way that was identical to their normal
usage was feared to be religiously pernicious.
However, the most obvious alternative interpretation of religious
words also has troubling implications. If words describing God are
completely equivocal with respect to their normal use, then religious
language may fail to communicate anything at all. If we say that God
is ‘good’ but view the meaning of ‘goodness’ in this context as something radically different from the normal usage of the word, then our
claim about God may lack content entirely. If religious words are
completely equivocal, saying that ‘God is good’ may communicate
nothing more meaningful than claiming that ‘God is six dimensional’, or ‘You should listen to the colour of God’s voice’. The theist
is left with a troubling dilemma: how can one make meaningful
claims about God without committing anthropocentrism?
Two influential solutions to the problem of religious language
from the medieval era are offered by Moses Maimonides and Thomas
Aquinas. We will begin by looking at Maimonides’ account of the
problem of religious language and its solution from his Guide for the
Perplexed. He argues that anyone who predicates traits of the divine
essence in an affirmative way commits anthropocentrism, polytheism, and a radical category error. He attempts to solve the problem
of religious language through the via negativa. This method claims
that words describing God’s essence should be understood not as
affirming claims concerning God, but instead should be interpreted
as establishing God’s distance from limitations or impurities that are
radically incompatible with the divine essence. Thus, his method of
negative predication works by negating all associations between
God’s essence and concepts that are utterly beneath Him.
After examining Maimonides’ method of negative predication, this
chapter will proceed to examine Aquinas’ account of analogical lan-
anthropocentrism and religious language
119
guage. He claims that the proper use of religious words is neither
completely univocal nor equivocal. Instead he believes that religious
language can go beyond the limited sorts of claims made possible by
Maimonides’ method of negative predication. Aquinas argues that
certain similarities between God and creation make analogical, but
not strictly univocal language possible thereby enabling a positive,
yet limited understanding of God’s nature.
Finally, this chapter concludes by discussing the relevance of the
medieval concerns about anthropocentrism to our contemporary discussion. One upshot of this investigation will be that anthropocentrism can be caused by a failure to recognise the limitations of human
language. Just as there are limits to what human concepts can express
about God, there are limits to what human concepts are capable of
expressing about non-human animals. As Thomas Nagel demonstrates in his famous essay ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’ our ability
to understand other creatures is limited by our concepts and expe�
riences.3
While the differences between humanity and other animals are less
significant than the differences between humans and any sort of
immaterial divine being, those differences remain a barrier to our
ability to understand them. We cannot fully understand what it
would be like to experience a bat’s sense of echolocation any more
than we could understand what it would be like to experience the
world from a deity’s timeless viewpoint. While we can describe the
concepts of echolocation and timelessness, these descriptions are
rough approximations at best. At worst, they mislead us into believing that we understand what it would be like to have experiences that
are simply incompatible with human nature. Even when we do grasp
something about such experiences, it seems that we merely grasp
what it would be like for a human to have such experiences, rather
than what it would be like for a bat or a deity.4
Nagel explains the problem:
Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many
levels of animal life… and it is very difficult to say in general what
provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny
it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless
50.
3
╇ Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review (1974): 435–
4
╇See Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, 439.
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eric j. silverman
forms totally unimaginable to us… But no matter how the form may
vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means,
basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.5
A central problem in understanding animals stems from the difficulty
in accessing their subjective experience of the world. While almost
everyone acknowledges that animals have a conscious experience and
we might develop a partial objective description of that experience
using familiar concepts that tie into our necessarily human experiences, we can never understand what it is to experience life as that
type of organism. Therefore, any attempt to describe that experience
exhibits some degree of anthropocentrism. Nagel effectively illustrates this problem:
Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose
range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has
webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn
catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency
sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s
feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it
tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But
that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own
mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it
either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining
segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination
of additions, subtractions, and modifications.6
Since our own human experience shapes what we can imagine, any
attempt to imagine the subjective experience of a non-human animal
is necessarily anthropocentric. Unfortunately, there is a potentially
devastating implication of this problem. Since consequentialism
grounds moral status in a being’s subjective experience of pain and
pleasure, this conceptual problem threatens our ability to understand
the very attribute consequentialism uses to give animalsâ•‚ moral
standing. Therefore, any insight that we can gain from the medieval
investigation into the limitations of human concepts and how to
proceed when standard uses of concepts are no longer appropriate
will aid our efforts at overcoming anthropocentrism.
5
6
╇Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, 436.
╇Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, 439.
anthropocentrism and religious language
121
Maimonides’ Via Negativa
Moses Maimonides is widely regarded as one of history’s greatest
Jewish philosophers. During the twelfth and thirteenth century he
worked to synthesise the religious resources of Judaism with the
newly rediscovered philosophical resources of Aristotle. His place in
Jewish thought is summed up by the medieval saying that ‘From
Moishe [the prophet Moses of the Jewish Scriptures] to Moishe
[Moses Maimonides] there was none like Moishe’. His significant
influence continues in Judaism to this day.
Among Maimonides’ great accomplishments was the compiling
and defending of thirteen central tenets of Judaism in his Commentary
on the Mishnah.7 Among these thirteen central tenets are the existence and oneness of God, in other words a belief in monotheism.
Interestingly, Maimonides portrays the misuse of religious language
as a potential violation of these most basic tenets of monotheism. He
views the threat of anthropocentrism in this context as diametrically
opposed to faithful, mature Judaism. In particular, he claims that one
should never make positive attributions about God. Claims like ‘God
is good’, ‘God is powerful’, or ‘God is wise’ are unacceptable if they
are understood as literally affirming that God has these traits.
Maimonides claims that making positive attributions concerning the
divine essence entails that the words describing God must be applicable to other things as well, unacceptably implying that the divine
essence is fundamentally similar to the other things described with
these words. This practice of univocally affirming traits concerning
God entails a serious form of anthropocentrism by casting God into
a human likeness.
Furthermore, Maimonides believes that qualifying everyday words
to express quantitative extremes that do not occur among humans
does not escape this problem. So, transforming the relatively common human attribute of ‘knowledgeable’ to the quantitative extreme
of ‘all-knowing’ fails to avoid anthropocentrism because this practice
still suggests an essential similarity between God and humanity. Even
though God is attributed more knowledge than any human could
have, the implicit comparison of God’s knowledge to our own makes
the concept of God too anthropocentric and is viewed as outright
7
╇Moses Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah, trans. Fred Rosner (1168;
New York: Feldheim, 1975).
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eric j. silverman
blasphemy. God’s real attributes are not merely perfections of human
attributes that can be measured on the same scale as human attributes. Divine traits are so qualitatively different from human attributes that they are even superior to perfect, limitless instantiations of
human attributes. Furthermore, he believes such attribution implies
a complexity in the divine essence that is incompatible with the strict
oneness and simplicity he ascribes to God.
He portrays attributing traits to God as a form of idolatry since
any ‘god’ that could be described through positive attributions would
be inferior to the real God of Jewish monotheism. He illustrates his
position with this comparison, ‘It is as if a mortal king who had millions of gold pieces were praised for possessing silver. Would this not
be an offense to him?’8 In other words, any affirmative trait one might
associate with God would still be so far removed from His actual
greatness that it would result in an insult instead. The story is carefully chosen in that it uses the Aristotelian category of substance
rather than quantity to illustrate the difference between the inadequate praise and the reality of the king’s wealth. Maimonides wants
his reader to know that the problem with positive attribution is not
that when we attribute something like ‘goodness’ to God we misrepresent the divine essence in that His goodness is quantitatively greater
than human goodness. It is not merely that we need to attribute more
goodness to God than language allows. Instead, the problem is that
God’s goodness is a radically different and superior type of being, so
that no accurate comparison with human goodness can occur.
Furthermore, Maimonides warns that the affirmative use of divine
attributes actually implies polytheism, because it portrays humanity
as fundamentally similar to God, since the same words are used to
describe both. Such language simultaneously debases God because it
fails to portray Him accurately, while anthropocentrically idolising
humanity. Therefore, the misuse of religious language is not merely
improper, but undermines monotheism itself. Maimonides argues
that:
I shall say accordingly that an attribute does not particularize any
object of which it is predicated in such a way that it is not associated
by virtue of that particular attribute with other things. On the contrary,
the attribute is sometimes attributed to the object of which it is pred8
╇Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1969), I:LIX.
anthropocentrism and religious language
123
icated in spite of the fact that the latter has it in common with other
things and is not particularized through it.9
The reasoning here is straightforward. Attributes are meant to communicate by comparing the unfamiliar object described to some second object with which the listener is more familiar. But if an attribute
refers to something entirely unique such as God, then there should
be nothing to compare it to and nothing can be accurately communicated.
Therefore, Maimonides views this practice as a serious error that
reveals utter ignorance about God. Accordingly, he views the practice
of positive attribution of traits to God as a serious category error that
demonstrates deep ignorance. He argues:
I shall not say that he who affirms that God, may He be exalted, has
positive attributes either falls short of apprehending Him… but I shall
say that he has abolished his belief in the existence of the deity without
being aware of it… one who has an apprehension of a thing that is
different from what that thing really is, must yet necessarily apprehend
something of it as it really is. However, I shall not say of him who
represents to himself that taste is a quantity, that his representation of
the thing is different from what the latter really is; rather I shall say
that he is ignorant of the being of taste and does not know to what the
term applies.10
For Maimonides, using words that affirm traits of God entails a radical category error. He refers to the traditional Aristotelian categories
of quantity and quality, and argues that using affirmative predicates
of God is like attempting to use taste as a measurement of length.
Anyone who makes such a mistake is not merely confused about
some trait an object possesses, but holds a radically incorrect view
of the object since she places it in the wrong category altogether.
These emphases within Judaism on reverence towards God and on
caution with words associated with God have deep roots in the
Torah, the Jewish scriptures. It is well known that misuse of the name
of God, yhwh, is forbidden by the Ten Commandments.11 What is
less well-known is that traditional Judaism interpreted this prohibition in a far more sweeping way than did Christianity. The traditional
Jewish application of this commandment went far beyond the mere
╇ Guide of the Perplexed, I:LVIII.
╇ Guide of the Perplexed, I:LX.
11
╇Exodus 20.
9
10
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eric j. silverman
avoidance of swearing. Nearly all use of the divine name was avoided
as a precaution against any conceivable violation of the commandment. Maimonides illustrates the seriousness associated with the
divine name and the rarity of its use:
There can be no doubt about the fact that this great name, which as
you know is not pronounced except in the Sanctuary by the sanctified
Priests of the Lord and only in the benediction of the Priests and by
the High Priest upon the day of fasting, is indicative of a notion with
reference to which there is no association between God, may He be
exalted, and what is other than He… the greatness of this name and
the prohibition against pronouncing it are due to its being indicative
of the essence of Him, may He be exalted, in such a way that none of
the created things is associated with Him in this indication.12
The name ‘yhwh’ has a special significance in the Jewish tradition
that other referents to God do not have. Thinkers like Maimonides
believe that it refers to that which is completely other and completely
beyond human experience. Note that this word does not entail
anthropocentrism, since the name never refers to anything other
than God, thereby avoiding any implicit comparisons. While using
this name avoids the anthropocentric problems of positive attribution and is associated with deep religious experiences, claiming that
‘God is yhwh’ does not seem to communicate much at all about
God. It does not explain what God is like, how he can be expected
to act, or what one should think of him.
What then can be said about God? If affirming traits of God in a
univocal way leads to idolatry, polytheism, and category error, one
might try to use words in a completely equivocal way that we
acknowledge is radically different from the ordinary use of these
words. While this strategy might avoid the anthropocentrism that is
entailed in univocally attributing predicates to God in an affirmative
way, this strategy leads to another serious problem. If one claims that
‘God is good’ but then insists that the goodness of God has no similarities to the goodness of any created thing, it seems that nothing
about God has been communicated at all. In fact, if words are being
used in a completely equivocal way it is hard to see the difference
between claiming that ‘God is good’ and ‘God is evil’.
Maimonides offers the way of negative predication, the via negativa, as a solution to the mystery of religious language. It is meant to
╇ Guide of the Perplexed, I:LXI.
12
anthropocentrism and religious language
125
avoid the problems of both univocal positive attribution of traits and
the radically equivocal use of language to describe God. He explains:
Know that the description of God, may He be cherished and exalted,
by means of negations is the correct description—a description that is
not affected by an indulgence in facile language and does not imply
any deficiency with respect to God in general or in any particular
mode.13
When Maimonides says that God should be described ‘by means of
negations’ he means that, properly understood, claims about God do
not affirm anything about the divine essence, but instead identify
traits with which we are familiar but must not be associated with
God. In other words, a relationship between God and inadequate or
deficient terms is ‘negated’ rather than affirmed. Thus, the religious
use of such words differs considerably from their normal usage, yet
this use of religious language still communicates important truths
about God.
Instead of affirming traits of the divine essence, words describing
God actually claim that the divine essence is completely free from
traits entailing imperfection, corruption, or limitation. Maimonides
explains, ‘Of this thing [God] we say that it exists, the meaning being
that its nonexistence is impossible’.14 In other words, saying ‘God
exists’ communicates nothing directly about the divine essence, but
instead communicates about a concept with which we are familiar:
‘nothingness’ or ‘non-existence’. It takes the concept we are familiar
with and then claims this concept cannot be associated with God in
any way. Therefore, the via negativa interprets the claim ‘God exists’
as communicating that God is a being that is so radically distinct
from ‘non-existence’ that God had to exist. It entails that God is a
necessary being that could not have failed to exist.15
Similarly, if we describe God as ‘good’ we are really claiming that
God, unlike humans, has no bad or morally imperfect trait. If we
describe God as ‘omnipotent’ we are really claiming that God, unlike
humans, has no limits to his power. If we describe God as ‘omniscient’ we are really claiming that God, unlike humans, has no limits
to his knowledge. In this way, religious words are univocal in that
╇ Guide of the Perplexed, I:LVIII.
╇ Guide of the Perplexed, I:LVIII.
15
╇ This claim has an interesting similarity to one of the central premises of St.
Anselm’s famous ontological argument for the existence of God.
13
14
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eric j. silverman
they refer to the same traits that exist in humans, but they avoid
anthropocentrism and idolatry by emphasising God’s complete superiority to and lack of association with these corruptible, finite, inferior human traits with which we are all familiar. Yet they also avoid
the problem of the radical equivocal use of language. These words
make meaningful claims about the nature of God.
While using negative attribution is Maimonides’ most important
use of religious language, because he believes that it allows meaningful communication about God without anthropocentrism, he allows
for a second use of religious language. Another legitimate use of religious language is to describe God’s actions in the world. Maimonides
explains, ‘All the names of God, may He be exalted, that are found in
any of the books [Scriptures] derive from actions’.16 Since Jewish theism holds that God acts in the world, these actions can provide
another basis for explaining religious language. While God may be
infinite, beyond human categories, and beyond description due to
His radical otherness from the world, divine actions in the material
world have a finite and describable scope. God’s actions can be
described as just, loving, strong, or wise. So, the claim that ‘God is
just’ could be understood as neither a positive nor negative attribution concerning the divine essence, but merely a claim that God’s
actions in the material world are similar to the actions of a just person.
Therefore, for Maimonides all appropriate uses of religious language are either negative claims about the divine essence or qualitative descriptions of divine actions in the world. Neither reveals the
true essence of God, but meditation upon these truths can bring the
devout closer in understanding than they were before. He ultimately
concludes that the best way to praise God is through silent meditation upon His essence, radical difference from, and superiority to
everything in creation.17
The Analogical Language of Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas lived shortly after Maimonides during the thirteenth century. He played a role in Christianity similar to Maimonides’
╇ Guide of the Perplexed, I:LXI.
╇ Guide of the Perplexed, I:LIX.
16
17
anthropocentrism and religious language
127
role in Judaism in that he synthesised the philosophical resources of
Aristotelianism with the religious resources of Christianity. Aquinas’
philosophical theology is among the most influential models of theism and continues to be particularly influential within the Catholic
Church.
While Aquinas shares some of Maimonides’ concerns about religious language, he claims that religious language can communicate
more than mere negative predication concerning God. Aquinas
agrees with Maimonides that words referring to God fail to express
anything about God fully, but he claims that religious language succeeds in expressing truths about Him to the fullest degree that the
human intellect is capable of understanding the infinite, perfect, and
immaterial God. The difficulty in learning about God comes more
from the limitations of human rationality rather than from human
language, although there are obvious connections between the two.
Aquinas discusses two uses of religious language that Maimonides
rejects: metaphorical and analogical language. Metaphorical language
is religious language that compares God to something material that
is radically different from God, but has at least one broad similarity.
This usage of language is largely, but not entirely, equivocal. However,
for Aquinas the more important type of religious language is analogical language, which requires a foundational similarity between
creation and Creator to enable language to communicate some claim
about God’s nature. While this use of language is not strictly univocal, it purportedly communicates more about the divine essence than
Maimonides’ method of negative attribution.
The less revealing type of religious language for Aquinas is metaphorical language. Metaphorical language uses concepts that are primarily associated with creation rather than God. The traits themselves
are not found in God at all; instead the metaphorical attribute serves
as a symbol for an aspect of the divine essence that is considerably
distinct from the attribute itself. He explains:
All names that are said of God metaphorically, are names applied primarily to creatures instead of God, because when said of God they only
refer to similarities to such creatures. In the same way that when ‘smiling’ is said of a meadow, it only signifies that the field’s flowering
beauty is like the beauty of a person’s smile to the degree there are
similar proportions, thus when the name ‘lion’ is said of God it signifies only that God is like a lion in that he manifests strength in his
works, as a lion does in his works. Therefore when these names are
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eric j. silverman
said of God they can only signify a definition through names that are
primarily said of creatures.18
Obviously, God is nothing like a literal lion in that He has paws, fur,
a body, or is finite regarding strength, intelligence, or lifespan. Yet
Aquinas argues that God is metaphorically similar to a lion in that
He, like a lion, has great power in all He does despite the numerous
literal dissimilarities between them. While this sort of metaphorical
language is very limited in what it communicates about God, it still
goes beyond what Maimonides allows because it identifies a vague
similarity between God and creation and allows for a comparison
between them.
For Aquinas, the more important use of religious language is analogical language. Analogical language uses words that refer to traits
of things in the material world to point towards divine attributes that
exist on a higher level of perfection in the divine essence. Furthermore,
these attributes exist differently in the divine essence from the way
they exist in creatures, since all of His traits exist essentially in Him
rather than accidentally. When Aquinas claims these attributes exist
essentially in God he means that unlike many attributes of creatures
none of God’s attributes could have been otherwise. It is not possible
that God could have been evil, weak, or ignorant.
Aquinas believes analogical language is possible because he posits
a metaphysical similarity between creation and creator that enables
language to communicate certain truths about God, albeit in a limited and imperfect way. Aquinas argues that:
God has in Himself every perfection of creatures, since He is simply
and universally perfect. Hence every creature represents Him, and is
similar to Him to the degree that it has perfection. Yet a creature does
not represent Him as something in the same species or genus, but
instead it represents Him as an excelling source, from whose form
inferior effects are brought about, yet whose likeness they represent…
Therefore, the previously mentioned names of God signify the divine
substance, but imperfectly, just as creatures imperfectly represent it.
Thus, when it is said that ‘God is good,’ it does not mean… ‘God is not
18
╇ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae (st), author’s own translation, I.13. 6.
I consulted the translation of the Fathers of the Dominican Province and found it to
be helpful. Here and elsewhere making the text accessible to non-specialists was a
priority.
anthropocentrism and religious language
129
evil,’ but it is understood that, ‘The good we speak of in creatures
preexists in God in a more perfect way’.19
This quotation reveals a foundational difference between Maimonides’
and Aquinas’ metaphysics. Whether one views creation and Creator
as similar in some foundational way, or as radically different, has far
reaching implications. While Maimonides embraces a radical dissimilarity between creatures and God as his starting point, Aquinas
embraces an important foundational similarity. Since Aquinas
accepts this foundational similarity between God and creation, he
finds that religious language can be used to describe God in fuller,
more direct ways than Maimonides thinks possible. Aquinas’ ultimate conclusion is that the most illuminating claims about God’s
nature are analogical claims. Therefore, he claims that just as other
causes can be known by their effects, albeit imperfectly, creation
serves as an effect that imperfectly reflects the Creator who caused
it.
What sort of similarity between God and creation makes analogical language possible? According to Aquinas it is the shared trait of
existing or being itself that makes analogical language possible. He
describes three levels of similarity and claims that the most general
category of similarity exists between God and creation. He explains:
Since likeness is based upon either agreement in form or communication in form, there are several types of similarity, according to the many
types of communications in form…Therefore if the agent is contained
in the same species with its effect, then they will share a likeness in
form… as man begets man. However, if the agent is not contained in
the same species as its effect, there will be similarity, but not one
according to the pattern of species. For example, an effect generated
by the sun’s heat has a similarity to the sun, not as a recipient of its
form as in the similarity of species, but according to a more general
likeness. Therefore if there is an agent that is not contained in any
general category, its effects will be even less similar to the agent’s form
than in these first two types of similarity… it will merely be similar
according to a kind of analogy, since existence is common to everything. And in this way all things are like God…20
In this important passage Aquinas clarifies that the similarity between
God and creation is the most general kind of similarity possible: one
based upon shared existence. Since God is identified as existing and
19
20
╇ st I.13.2.
╇ st I.4.3.
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eric j. silverman
as the source of every other thing in existence, he believes this very
general similarity is enough to make analogical language possible.
Aquinas uses his alternative account of religious language to reject
Maimonides’ view concerning the limits of religious language. He
concludes that attributing goodness to God expresses more than the
realisation that all that is evil or corrupt is separate from Him.
Instead, Aquinas argues that we can attribute goodness to God in a
positive sense, since the goodness we encounter in the world can be
analogically attributed to God on the highest order of perfection.
Similarly, knowledge, power, existence, or any other genuine good
encountered in this world must also exist within God, but on the
highest order of perfection. Thus, the goods of this world are mere
shadows of the goodness within the divine essence, yet they allow a
glimpse of what these perfections must be like. Whatever limited
good that exists within creatures, necessarily exists within God’s
essence in a higher and better way than it could ever exist even within
an ideal creature.
Aquinas views analogical language concerning God as predicating
attributes to the divine essence. Therefore, he makes the bold claim,
rejected by Maimonides, that such words can be attributed to God’s
essence itself in a positive sense. He offers his account of analogical
religious language:
Concerning names that are not applied to God metaphorically, the
same principle applies to them as if we merely say that God is the cause
of those attributes in the world, as some thinkers have believed. When
one says ‘God is good,’ it would only mean that God is the cause of
creatures’ good, and when God is called ‘good,’ it includes the good of
creatures in that concept. Therefore, ‘good’ would be said primarily of
creatures rather than of God. But… these names are said of God not
merely as their cause, but they are also spoken of God essentially. For
when one says ‘God is good’ or ‘wise,’ these names not only signify
that he is the cause of wisdom or goodness, but that these traits preexist more excellently in Him. Hence, these names primarily signify
God and are applied primarily to Him rather than to creatures, because
God brings about perfections in creatures. But concerning the labelling
of names, we know creatures first, and primarily apply these names to
creatures.21
Unlike metaphorical words that are primarily associated with creatures, analogical words are primarily associated with God rather than
╇ st I.13.6.
21
anthropocentrism and religious language
131
creation. We may first learn these words and apply them to things
in creation, but Aquinas claims that unlike words that are used to
describe God metaphorically, these words refer primarily to God
rather than to humans. Our use of words like good, powerful, or
knowledgeable to describe humans is more common but less precise.
For Aquinas, God is not merely the cause of these attributes in creation, but the most perfect forms of these traits are found in the
divine essence. Therefore, no anthropocentrism is committed by
positively attributing these perfections to God, since creation
expresses truths about the Creator from whom goods in creation
ultimately proceed.
How does Aquinas distinguish metaphorical from analogical religious language? The critical difference is that metaphorical religious
language uses words that refer to modes of existence that are specific
to creatures and therefore is not properly associated with God at all.
For example, the claim that ‘God has a strong arm’22 is clearly metaphorical. Obviously, there is no literal sense in which a material body
or anything requiring a material body can be associated with an
immaterial God. Unlike wisdom, there is no sense in which a right
arm exists more perfectly within God in either a qualitative or quantitative sense: material existence is strictly associated with creation.
Yet, the fact that God is powerful in what He does, in some way that
is similar to a warrior’s strength and power on the battlefield, communicates a truth about God. Metaphorical language is less clear and
precise than analogical language, but draws upon images that a layman may be better able to understand.
Aquinas offers a clearer distinction between analogical and metaphorical language in the Summa Contra Gentiles (scg). He explains:
Indeed, every perfection of the creature is discoverable in God in
another more excellent way. Whatever names designate absolute perfection without defect are predicated both of God and of other things:
such as goodness, wisdom, being and other such words. However,
whatever words express names like these perfections but require a
mode of existence proper to creatures cannot be said of God except as
similitude and metaphor. By this method the attributes of one thing
are adapted to another type of thing as when a man is named ‘block’
due to his dense intellect.23
╇Psalm 89:13 (North American Standard Bible).
╇ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, author’s own translation, I.30.
I consulted the translation by Joseph Rickaby and found it to be helpful.
22
23
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eric j. silverman
The test offered here for distinguishing analogical from metaphorical
language is clearer than the Summa Theologicae’s (st) explanation:
that names more closely associated with creatures are metaphorical,
while names more closely associated with God are analogical. The
test offered in the scg is that words denoting perfections are used
analogically rather than metaphorically. Traits like goodness, wisdom, and existence can refer to perfections and therefore are more
properly attributed to God than to anything within creation. In contrast, metaphorical words require a type of existence that is inherently incompatible with the kind of being He is.
Given that Aquinas lived after Maimonides we should ask whether
he offers an adequate response to the objections that were raised
against positive attribution. Why does Aquinas believe he has evaded
the problem of anthropocentrism in religious language? In st I.13.2
Aquinas addresses this issue and asks ‘Whether any name can be said
of God substantially?’ Here he considers whether positive attribution
is inherently anthropocentric. He addresses Maimonides’ theory of
negative attribution:
Some have said that although all such names are spoken in an affirmative way of God, they were nevertheless invented to express distance
from God rather than to express anything positive about Him. Hence
they claim that when we say ‘God lives,’ we signify that God is not like
an inanimate thing and this principle similarly applies to other names.
And this principle was taught by Rabbi Moses [Maimonides].24
Aquinas is aware of Maimonides’ arguments, but offers three reasons
to reject the limits of negative attribution (as well as another view
that rejects the possibility of analogical language that is sometimes
attributed to Alanus ab Insulis): ‘First because neither of these positions [the alternatives to Aquinas’ account of religious language] is
able to give a reason for why some names are more appropriate to
say of God than others’.25 Aquinas’ first response to Maimonides is
that if no words can be positively affirmed of God, it is unclear why
any words would be more appropriate to describe God than others.
Maimonides clearly believes that ‘God is good’ is true in a way that
‘God is evil’ is not. Yet if God is so far beyond human categories that
we can only attribute goodness to God through negative predication,
why isn’t it equally correct to claim that ‘God is evil’ and explain that
╇ st I.13.2.
╇ st I.13.2.
24
25
anthropocentrism and religious language
133
these words simply mean that God is radically other and beyond our
account of goodness? Whether or not we ultimately judge this argument to be successful, this objection is a serious challenge to
Maimonides since it suggests that negative predication completely
undermines communication about God.
‘Second, these positions imply that all names said of God would be
said of Him secondarily, just as “healthy” is said of medicine secondarily, for the word signifies only the cause of health in the animal,
and it is the animal which is primarily called healthy’.26 Aquinas’ second objection is less persuasive. He correctly argues that these alternative interpretations of religious language have the undesirable
implication that religious words communicate far less about God
than is often thought. Furthermore, he is correct that these competing views imply that words communicate about God in a less direct
way than is often thought. Yet his argument seems to assume that
religious words can be used of God primarily and not just secondarily. While he may be correct, someone who doubts this point will
not ultimately find this argument convincing. In particular,
Maimonides has no problem accepting this implication of rejecting
the analogical use of religious language.
‘Third, this interpretation conflicts with the intention of those who
speak of God. For when they say “God lives” they intend to communicate more than these views allow; they mean more than God is the
cause of our life or that He is different from inanimate bodies’.27
Aquinas’ third reason for rejecting Maimonides’ position is that most
people who use religious language intend to communicate far more
than negative attribution allows. When religious people claim that
God is good, virtually all of them believe they are saying something
more than that God is in no way bad. When people say that God lives
they certainly think they are communicating more than ‘God is not
dead’ or ‘God is not inanimate’. They at least believe they are communicating more about God’s nature than Maimonides’ approach
allows.
One might uncharitably think that this third argument commits
the ad populum fallacy, by claiming something must be true simply
because most people deem it to be so. Yet there is more to Aquinas’
argument than an appeal to public opinion, since with language the
26
27
╇ st I.13.2.
╇ st I.13.2.
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eric j. silverman
intention of the communicator certainly helps shape what is communicated. As with most ‘ordinary language’ style arguments, it
relies upon the fact that the way words are actually used implies
something about the way words should be used.
It is helpful to distinguish between two related questions about
religious language. First, the question of what is entailed by a claim
about God, and second the question of whether the claim is true or
false. On the first issue, Aquinas is certainly correct that when people
say ‘God is good’ most of them intend to claim more than ‘God is in
no way bad’. We even seem to mean more than that when we say of
a virtuous human that ‘she is good’. It would seem that separation
from badness or evil would merely establish a being’s moral neutrality rather than its goodness.
The second question is harder to resolve. Has Aquinas proven that
we can correctly claim that ‘God is good’ without committing anthropocentrism? His objection here on its own does not seem to prove
that we can. Instead, it seems that whether or not we ultimately can
make such claims without committing anthropocentrism depends on
whether or not the good things we observe in this world are indeed
reflections of perfections that pre-exist within God. If so, then there
is a foundational similarity between creature and creator that enables
analogical language to succeed. At the very least, Aquinas’ position is
internally consistent, even if it depends on difficult-to-verify metaphysical claims. He also provides the plausible argument we have
already examined concerning a foundational similarity between God
and creation, based on the fact that they both exist. Furthermore, he
offers a protracted argument elsewhere for the claim that the perfections of all things must pre-exist within God because causes must
have some similarities to their effects.28 Finally, his position fits well
within the broader Christian tradition, which has typically been comfortable with using religious language in a more univocal way.
Relevance to Contemporary Discussion of Anthropocentrism
One might mistakenly think that we can learn nothing from the
medieval era concerning anthropocentrism. After all, wasn’t it their
account of the Great Chain of Being that entrenched anthropocentric
╇ st I.4.2-3.
28
anthropocentrism and religious language
135
attitudes towards animals for centuries?29 Undoubtedly, some aspects
of medieval philosophy have been used and abused as reasons for
mistreating animals and the environment. Yet, this callous view
towards animals is hardly the only implication that can be drawn
from the medieval worldview.
One important thread in medieval thought depicts God not only
as transcendent beyond the created world but portrays Him as simultaneously immanent within the created world. One medieval response
to the doctrine of divine immanence can be seen in the life of St.
Francis of Assisi who was well-known for his life of voluntary poverty, his love of nature, and his care for animals. G. K. Chesterton
describes the important roles both Francis and Aquinas played in
rooting the medieval Catholic faith in both divine immanence and
divine transcendence:
It may be misunderstood if I say that St. Francis, for all his love of
animals, saved us from being Buddhists, and that St. Thomas [Aquinas], for all his love of Greek philosophy, saved us from being Platonists. But it is best to say the truth in its simplest form; that they both
reaffirmed the Incarnation, by bringing God back to earth.30
Chesterton’s claim is that a distinctly Christian worldview rejects the
sharp dualism between the material and immaterial world found in
Platonism, which is the ultimate source of the theory of the Great
Chain of Being. Accordingly, Aquinas rejects the overly dualistic
view of the world found in Platonism. By emphasising a similarity
between God and the entire created world that makes analogical religious language possible Aquinas subtly moves away from more dualistic metaphysical views. Similarly, Chesterton points to Francis as
one who perceived the immanence of God in the world, while rejecting an overly monistic view of the world (that he attributes to
Buddhism).31 Both the practical actions of Francis and theoretical
29
╇See DeLapp, ‘The View from Somewhere’; Steiner, ‘Toward a Non-Anthropocentric Cosmopolitanism’; and Attfield, ‘Social History, Religion and Technology’,
this volume.
30
╇Gilbert Keith Chesterton, St Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi (San
Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2002), 28.
31
╇ Buddhism is a more complex tradition than we can do justice to in a few sentences. I am uncomfortable with simply describing Buddhism as a monist view of the
world without adding numerous qualifications (and perhaps, even after adding qualifications). Yet, for our purposes it suffices to note that Chesterton is reacting against
monism and equating it with Buddhism just as he is reacting against dualism and
equating it with Platonism.
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eric j. silverman
views of Aquinas embody a move away from radical dualism.
Therefore, it would be inappropriate to overlook the medieval
debate’s relevance to the contemporary conversation about humananimal relationships.
In what ways are the medieval concerns of religious anthropocentrism relevant to contemporary ethical concerns in human-animal
relationships? First, this debate helps place the contemporary discussion concerning anthropocentrism into a fuller, more accurate historical and dialectic context. Despite the attitudes of many
contemporary thinkers, anthropocentrism is neither a new concern
nor is it a concern that is reducible to an interest in animal advocacy.
The most important goal for avoiding anthropocentrism is to identify
humanity’s proper place in ethical evaluations, which is a goal that
goes beyond improving human attitudes towards non-human animals.
Second, we must return to the problem we raised earlier in this
chapter. We are limited to human concepts when describing animal
experience. If we use such concepts in a straightforward univocal
way, we risk a serious form of anthropocentrism. Yet, if we use concepts in an equivocal way, we may fail to understand anything at all
about the subjective experiences that have traditionally been used to
ground the moral status of animals.
While the bat’s sense of echolocation is an obvious difference
between a bat’s experience and our own, other differences between
humanity and animals may be less extreme. Yet the barrier they create to understanding the animal world is no less real. To what degree
can we really understand creatures that lack reflective self-consciousness; animals whose lifespan is limited to a few weeks; or species that
rely upon smell rather than sight as their primary sense? Therefore,
overcoming anthropocentrism requires special attention to the concepts we use to describe animals and especially their inner experiences.
What then are we to do? I suggest two ways to proceed: one
inspired by Maimonides and one by Aquinas. At the least in the spirit
of Maimonides’ via negativa, we can search out the limitations of
human concepts and acknowledge the inherent anthropocentricity of
humanity’s limited point of view. Even if we are uncertain concerning what can be affirmed of animal experience of the world, we might
at least avoid the obvious anthropocentrism of casting them into a
human image. So, one worthwhile project could focus on identifying
anthropocentrism and religious language
137
and exploring the limitations of human concepts for capturing the
essence of animal experience. Speculation beyond that may be possible, but if we proceed by acknowledging the inherently anthropocentric nature of that speculation it will at least help us avoid more
serious errors.
However, there is a second worthwhile project suggested by
Aquinas’ approach. Our discussion reveals that deeper understanding of non-human beings rests on our ability to identify foundational
similarities. To the degree that we are unable to identify such similarities our ability to understand these animals will be limited.
Therefore, a systematic investigation of the similarities and differences between humanity and other animals will enable us to improve
our use of concepts when discussing animals. Clearly, there are many
aspects of humanity that are similar to other animals and in these
aspects we may speak in an analogical but imprecise way. However,
areas where we are the most different from other animals are the
areas where we are most likely to be in error. The temptation to commit anthropocentrism in our use of language is likely to be strongest
in the areas where there are the greatest dissimilarities. Our knowledge of this fact may not enable us to avoid anthropocentrism completely, but the more aware we are of it, the more likely we are to
improve our ability to meet this important ethical challenge.
vitruvian man is a pterosaur
139
Vitruvian Man is a Pterosaur: Notes on the
Transformation of an architectural ideal
Paula Young Lee
The Humpback of St. Eugène
‘It is an antediluvian architecture, more monstrous and more humpbacked than the most repulsive mastodon’.1 With this cryptic comparison in 1853, archaeologist Alphonse-Nicolas Didron dismissed
Louis-Auguste Boileau’s call for a ‘new architectural form’ that would
come in the shape of a ‘synthetic’ cathedral. Didron attacked Boileau’s
architecture with the harshest words he could deliver, declaring that
Boileau’s buildings were worse than barbaric: they were prehistoric.
Three years earlier, Boileau had imagined this cathedral in stone,
but when he republished the design in 1853, he recast it in iron.2 In
Boileau’s opinion, the bounding vaults and expansive windows of the
well-lit interiors could only result from a developed system of iron
construction. When an ‘architectural skeleton’ was well made, functioning as ‘construction’ and ‘expression’ at the same time, Boileau
affirmed confidently, then these ‘incombustible skeletal systems must
show themselves naked [nu]’. There must be no attempt at ‘dissimulation’, to ‘hide’ the true character of the metal.3 Hence iron struts,
colonnettes, and even traceries were left unabashedly exposed. For
critics of the period, their stark materiality expressed ‘progressive’
ideals that positioned architecture as an agent of social and political
reform.4 In the wake of the Revolutions of 1848, however, such a role
1
╇ Alphonse-Nicolas Didron, ‘Review of L.-A. Boileau, Nouvelle forme architecturale’, Annales Archéologique, 13 (1853), 329: ‘C’est de l’architecture antédiluvienne,
plus monstrueuse est plus bossue que les mastodontes les plus rébarbatifs’.
2
╇ Louis-Auguste Boileau, Nouvelle forme architecturale composée par M. Boileau, architecte, exposé, notes, et appreciations (Paris: Gide et Baudry, 1853), 19, quoted in Bruno Foucart, ‘La “Cathédrale Synthétique” de Louis-Auguste Boileau’,
Revue de l’art, no. 3 (1969), 58.
3
╇ Louis-Auguste Boileau, Les préludes de l’architecture du XX siècle (Paris:
Librairie Fischbacher, 1893), xxiii. Emphasis in original.
4
╇ Louis-Auguste Boileau, ‘Mémoire sur diverses améliorations apportées dans
l’emploi des bois pour la menuiserie’, Société d’émulation du département des Vosges,
Epinal. Annales, 6 (1847): 142–3.
140
paula young lee
could be dangerous. For Didron, Boileau’s ‘new’ architecture was a
misbegotten throwback, invoking forms as ‘ancient as could be’. The
looming frame of Boileau’s building reminded Didron of a mastodon, a mammal that French anatomist Georges Cuvier had famously
proved was neither elephant nor mammoth but was definitely
extinct.5 As an archaeologist, Didron viewed this prehistoric animal
with revulsion, for it fell outside the parameters of the historical project working to explain the mystery of human uniqueness.
A human scale, the measure of man: these were within the province of a history in the process of writing itself. At the mid-nineteenth century, ‘history’ was broadly defined as a ‘narrative [récit] of
facts, of events pertaining to peoples in particular and humanity in
general’.6 Amid these efforts to render the human past legible and
complete, pre-history was defined by its very exclusion of the tabula
of the written record. Given these associations, Boileau’s ‘incoherent’
architecture must derive from this time before man, and hence before
writing, order, and reason.7 Boileau’s architectural work was thus as
repulsive as the monstrous mastodon, and as justifiably sacrificed to
the telos of history in order to make room for the superior works that
would come.
Architectural historians have largely framed the critical rejection
of Boileau’s cathedral in terms of the challenges it posed to questions
of style. However, the constant comparisons to vertebrates both
extant and extinct suggest that another set of conditions were being
redrawn even as they were being violated. Specifically, this architectural controversy defines a watershed moment in the history of consciousness, for the critics of this cathedral repeatedly replaced an
established anthropomorphic ideal with a zoomorphic model. They
did so in order to nominate their contempt, for inside the Western
tradition, the first work of architecture has long been understood
as the human body.8 Adam’s house in Paradise is his physical frame,
or the ‘house of the soul’. Inside Eden, this ‘house’ was sufficient
unto itself. Crafted by God the Architect, the mortal human vessel
╇Georges Cuvier, ‘Sur le grand Mastodonte, animal très-voisin de l’éléphant…’,
Annales du Muséum d’histoire naturelle, 8 (1806): 270–312, 7 plates.
6
╇ ‘Histoire’, in Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 1863.
7
╇Didron, ‘Review of L.-A. Boileau, Nouvelle forme architecturale’, 329.
8
╇See Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise (New York: Museum of
Modern Art; Chicago: Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts,
1972).
5
vitruvian man is a pterosaur
141
�
epitomised
a gendered Christian cosmology where man occupied the
privileged position on earth, and was thus understood as the ideal
generative principle informing human attempts to build.
In De Architectura, written during the time of Augustus, the
Roman writer Vitruvius had invoked an established analogy between
the proportions of the Greek temple type and ‘a finely shaped human
body’. In his now-canonical description, the ‘strength and grace’ of
the Doric column recalls a robust man, the Ionic column a matronly
woman, and the Corinthian a young maiden (Vitruvius, Book III. 1).
The caryatid column—a sculptural column explicitly shaped like a
young female—remains the most literal expression of this anthropomorphic tradition. Following Vitruvius’ lead, various Renaissance
theorists developed powerfully anthropomorphising principles that
were incorporated into the plan, while fusing the practice of architecture with an explicitly Christian worldview. The ‘building is truly a
living body’,9 wrote Italian architectural theorist Filarete. ‘Some
[buildings] never fall sick and yet suddenly die; others are killed by
man for one reason or another’.10 It was understood that the body in
question was a human male, of which the most perfect example was
Christ (Fig. 1). The most familiar of these representational efforts
remains Leonardo da Vinci’s version of the Vitruvian man, a male
nude inscribed in circle (in motion) and in square (at rest), incarnating the generative principles of the ideal architectural plan.
When Boileau completed work on the neo-Gothic church of St.
Eugène in 1855, centuries of debate had contributed to the secularisation of the cathedral, persuasively recast by architectural theorist
Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc as the product of pure reason
divorced from spiritual values. As Robin Middleton has pointed out,
the furore over Boileau’s cathedral makes no sense unless attached to
this controversy over the cultural implications of the Gothic revival.
Purely on aesthetic grounds, for example, Boileau’s combination of
an industrial material with the Gothic style was shocking to contem-
9
╇ Antonio Averlino Filarete, Architecture Civile e militare, I, fol. 6, quoted in Françoise Choay, ‘La ville et le domaine bâti comme corps dans les textes des architectesthéoriciens de la première Renaissance italienne’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 9
(Spring 1974), 247.
10
╇ Antonio Averlino Filarete, Architettura Ingegneria, I, fol. 6, 12–3, quoted in
Choay, ‘La ville et le domaine’, 245.
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paula young lee
Fig. 1.╇ The Sanctuary of the Temple in Jerusalem, from Hieronymous Pradus and
Ioannes Baptista Villalpandus, in Ezechielem explanationes et apparatus Urbis ac
Templi Hierosolymitani, Rome, â•‚.
porary observers, as it was received as an intolerable vulgarisation.11
As such, it was also the veritable image of the animal, a servile body
bereft of God’s grace and beholden to earthly values. Soulless, the
building had become pure machine inside a dystopic reality.
╇Robin Middleton, ‘Viollet-le-Duc and the Rational Gothic Tradition’ (Ph.D
thesis, Cambridge University, 1958). Middleton observed that the church of St.
Eugène offended both sides of the archaeology v. engineering debate, for if one side
saw its rejection of the flying buttress as an affront to archaeological standards, the
other perceived it as stylistically retrograde in its adaptation of historical forms.
11
vitruvian man is a pterosaur
143
Bird, Animal, Man
‘Confused sounds penetrate the warm moist air. They are the croakings of batrachians, the hissing of reptiles, the lowings and bleatings
of ruminants, the hoarse roar of mammoths, and the cries of large
birds’.12 This was how Viollet-le-Duc imagined the dawn of civilisation, where he searches for the origins of architecture. A far cry from
the perfect bliss offered by the biblical account, his version of the
origination myth was a potent combination of popular science with
pure fiction, and his ‘original man’ was a pathetic, naked creature
shuddering in the hostile land. Seated high on a mountain, two
angelic aliens named Epergos and Doxius watch as a group of hominid ‘creatures’ seek shelter, fight with each other, and cry over their
wounded. ‘Are they men?’ a sceptical Viollet-le-Duc asks his reader.
For ‘all animals engage in attack and defence’; their erratic actions
prove nothing except that they have the power of motion.13 The
clumping and seeking movements of these man-like ‘creatures’ are
simply propelled by ‘instinct’, akin to simple organisms and even
plants. He refuses to specify what these hominids are, if indeed they
are not men. We are meant to understand that they are animals.
Taking pity on their helplessness, Epergos and Doxius descend to
earth, and show the ‘Naïrriti’ how to build a shelter by binding the
tops of trees together. It is now up to the Naïrriti to demonstrate the
capacity to reason for themselves; as Viollet-le-Duc had stated earlier
in his influential Lectures, ‘building a hut with branches of trees is not
Art; it is merely the supplying of a material want.14 The proof of
humanity is in the building: only ‘if the huts we see then [in a hundred thousand days] are better made than these... in that case these
creatures are not mere animals’.15 There is a causal relationship
between one state of being and its material expression, but to build a
shelter is no proof of innate intelligence. There must be improve12
╇Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire de l’habitation humaine (Paris: J.
Hetzel, 1875). It is translated into English as The Habitations of Man in All Ages,
trans. Benjamin Bucknall (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington,
1876), 1. All translations will be taken from this edition.
13
╇Viollet-le-Duc, Habitations, 2. Descartes had said the same of the lamb fleeing
the wolf; it was just an ‘involuntary action’, just as the cries of animals are no indication of pain but are akin to the screeching of gears.
14
╇Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Lectures on Architecture, (New York:
Dover, 1987), I, 13.
15
╇Viollet-le-Duc, Habitations, 7.
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ment. ‘While we observe that in the depth of the sea the humble
molluscs build themselves substantial dwellings adorned with bright
colours’, he noted, ‘we have not been able to understand how the
most intelligent among animated beings should not have been able
to make themselves shelters, or have possessed only mean abodes’.16
This was the essential question: if molluscs could build their own
housing, how could men be truly men, and not be able do better?
The intervention of reason as the true denominator separating
‘man’ from ‘animal’ is enough to suggest Descartes’ influence, but
Viollet-le-Duc’s homage was intentional. His history of habitations
revived a critical dialogue begun in Descartes’ Recherche de la vérité
par la lumière naturelle (Search for the Truth by Natural Light), an
early work from about 1628 that was part of Viollet-le-Duc’s personal
library. The Recherche featured a fictional conversation between
‘Epistemon’ and ‘Eudoxe’, names that Viollet-le-Duc surely intended
to echo with his own main characters, ‘Epergos’ (‘he who does’) and
‘Doxius’ (‘he who judges’).17 The narrative opens with Epistemon and
Eudoxe seeking out ‘Polyandre’ (‘Everyman’), an untutored man of
average intelligence (‘mediocre esprit’), at his isolated house in the
country. Polyandre is self-conscious about his lack of formal education, but he is assured by his tutors that all he needs is a ‘reasoning
soul’ from whence begins ‘all knowledge’. From the study of objects,
to the close observation of nature that will demonstrate ‘how the
souls of plants and animals differ from ours’, Polyandre learns that
without rigorous method, his education is like ‘a badly built house’
just as he, as a man, will also be badly built.18
Only through architecture, art, and written history could the moral
and intellectual perfection of a race be correctly gauged.19 CharlesErnest Beulé (1826–74), a classicist who followed Quatremère and
╇Viollet-le-Duc, Habitations, 33.
╇Per Laurent Baridon’s explanation of the names’ meaning in the Greek. Viollet-le-Duc owned a collected edition of Descartes, Discours de la méthode; Méditations philosophiques; Les passions de l’âme; Règles pour la direction de l’esprit; De la
[recherche de la] verité par les lumières naturelles, ed. L. Aimé Martin (Paris: Lefèvre,
1844). The dialogue was continued by Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité, où
l’on traite de la nature de l’esprit de l’homme et de l’usage qu’il en doit faire pour éviter
l’erreur dans les sciences (2 vols., Paris: Pralard, 1674–5). See Baridon, L’imaginaire
scientifique de Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Editions l’Harmattan, 1996), 249, n. 8.
18
╇Descartes, Recherche de la Vérité, 509.
19
╇ Louis Agassiz, De la succession et du développement des êtres organisés à la
surface du globe terrestre (Neuchâtel: Henri Wolfrath, 1841), 13.
16
17
vitruvian man is a pterosaur
145
Raoul-Rochette (1789–1854) as perpetual secretary of the Académie
des Beaux-Arts, retained something of Quatremère’s view of the
Greek temple as an immutable ‘species’ when he called it ‘a living
being’. However, he went on to assert that its form was ‘subject to the
laws that govern human nature’, laws that were, implicitly, the same
that shaped human form. Hence by ‘recovering just one of its [a temple’s] parts, one can determine its former dimension, style, proportion of its other parts... just as a naturalist, being given a fossil bone,
reconstructs an antediluvian monster’.20 In other words, this understanding of civilisation as an expression of intellectual domination
not only expanded outward to other peoples, but extended inward
right down to the very bones.
A ‘Lesson in Comparative Anatomy’ appeared in Viollet-le-Duc’s
last published work. Illustrated with various diagrams of ‘animalmachines’ that were also shown as machines, he returns us to
Descartes and the origins of the rationalist tradition (Fig. 2). In the
end, Viollet-le-Duc was searching for simplicity, and he wished for
the creative spirit to be dipped in the mythical waters of Lethe, which
obliterate all memory.21 It seems a peculiar desire for one so inclined
to look back into history, but it also accounts for his fascination with
the methods of comparative anatomy, which created a different past
on its ahistorical premises. For the ‘disease’ of the nineteenth century
was too much stuff and information; like fat Fau, who for Viollet-leDuc embodied the character of the Chinese people, architecture was
‘dying of excesses’ and refused to take the practical solution, just a bit
of daily walking, or active application over bookish reiteration.22
‘We... will produce a building, unassuming it may be, yet one in
which not a detail shall be found that is not the result either of a
necessity of the structure or of the requirements of its occupants’, he
wrote in L’histoire d’une maison (The story of a house), 1873.23 The
house shall be built economically, he continued, with clarity of purpose and use, and as a result, ‘the architectural organism we have
╇ Charles-Ernest Beulé, Histoire de l’art grec avant Périclès (Paris: Didier et cie,
1870), 33.
21
╇Viollet-le-Duc, Habitations, 394. This is his closing line.
22
╇Viollet-le-Duc, Lectures on Architecture, I, 447.
23
╇Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, L’histoire d’une maison, trans. by Benjamin
Bucknall as How to Build a House (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1874), 117.
20
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Fig. 2.╇E.-E. Violet-le-Duc, ‘Application des jointures des os à la mécanique’, Histoire
d’un dessinateur, comment on apprend à dessiner, Paris: J. Hetzel, 1879.
built will always allow us to see its organs, and how these organs
perform their functions’.
One sees the problem then, with Boileau, who embraced the opposite stance by offering an architectural accumulation of various cultures and histories. Instead of privileging the ahistorical bones,
Boileau had proposed that architecture emerged from the ‘small
number of cells’ that controlled the three major faculties of the
human body: sentiment, reason, and realisation. This ‘eurhythm
taken from inorganic matter’ was in turn taken from physician
Philippe Buchez, who argued that the key link between human bodies
vitruvian man is a pterosaur
147
and the social organism was ‘nevrosité’.24 The literal product of these
exchanges between individual anatomy and the social body was the
architectural object. Boileau’s idea to design a synthetic cathedral
based on Buchez’s ‘nervous’ cells was meant seriously; the thin white
lines painted on the colonnettes of St. Eugène were like nerves running up and down the ‘skeletal system [ossature]’ of the church’s
interior. In short, Boileau proposed a medicalised human anatomy as
the generative principle for a new progressive architecture.
This was not how his work was received. Didron sarcastically submitted that if Boileau had ‘truly invented anything’, it was a sort of ‘camelconstruction’ (‘l’architecture-chameau’).25 As an ugly, imported beast of
burden, Boileau’s iron-based construction was a hunchback, an architectural Quasimodo whose presence perverted true cathedrals such as
Notre Dame, ‘Our Lady,’ a building then being restored by Viollet-le
Duc as an expression of architectural rationalism. His hunchback-cathedral was all the more horrible for occupying the central overlap between
the circular leaves of the trefoil, as it appears in Léopold Flameng’s illustration to Victor Hugo’s famous novel of 1831, Notre Dame de Paris
(translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a work that
helped spark the Gothic revival in France). In place of the perfect resolution of the Three-in-One, out pops the misshapen and lumpy sphere that
is Quasimodo’s head. Like Boileau’s synthetic cathedral, he is bossu and
rébarbatif, and his misshapen body refuses to be restrained by the arcing
intersections of the ideal, religious frame. As if by force of Quasimodo’s
warped gaze, the stone stringcourse begins to crack. Didron’s language
is telling in this regard, for he describes Boileau’s architecture as monstrueuse but also bossue, meaning humped (for camels), or hunchbacked
(for persons). But the related word bosser means ‘to work hard’, ‘to
slave’, and also ‘to strike’ (thereby raising a lump, bosse); its stem root,
bossuer, means to ‘swell up’, ‘bulge out of shape’ or otherwise become
distorted by inflation. In other words, a hunched back was a deformity
that connoted hard labour and physical stress, the silhouette of the overburdened and overflowing bodies of the labouring classes.
24
╇Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez, ‘Essai de coordination positive des phénomènes qui ont pour siège le système nerveux’, Journal des progrès des sciences et institutions médicales, 9 (1828): 175–206; and idem, ‘Etablir par l’histoire et par les
monuments les principales formes, que l’architecture religieuse a revêtues depuis les
temps plus reculés, jusqu’à nos jours’, Congrès historiques européens, 1 (1835): 261–4.
25
╇Didron, ‘Review of L.-A. Boileau, Nouvelle forme architecturale’, 329.
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The stonebreakers and coalscuttlers were blackened and dirtied by
earth, and in Boileau’s cathedral, they were represented by the economical, hardworking earthen metal itself, through ‘that crowd of
thin pillars which, towards the centre, attain considerable pro�
portion’.26 Standing in unison, the tall iron colonnettes sturdily bear
their loads; if they are ‘monstrous’, it is because they are likewise
capable of immense, inhuman growth. There is a latent violence in
these ‘incoherent forms’ that threaten to ‘strike’ (‘bossent’) in the
sense of hitting, but also of refusing to work and thus to ‘swell up’
(‘bossuer’), gaining a critical mass of numbers and exceeding controllable boundaries. Like Balzac’s magic skin of an ass, this fantastic
material delivered on its promise of worldly gain every time its own
dimensions contracted, but as it hardened and dried it also took a
little bit of spiritual vitality with it. Notably, such a reading transferred directly to iron’s sécheresse: in 1865, one critic interpreted
Boileau’s ‘ossified’ architecture as a horrifying symptom of rapidly
shrivelling souls in an overworked industrial age.27
Contraction and extraction, reproduction and death: within this
interpretive frame, the séche and bossu character of Boileau’s iron
architecture were extensions of the conflicted needs of urban society.
Whether imagined in terms of mastodons, camels, or hunchbacks,
Boileau’s ‘nouvelle formes’ implied more than Didron wanted to
know about social and cultural changes that were already underway.
For lastly, bossu meant ‘a terrain where there are many small inequalities, and in that sense one says proverbially, that cemeteries are
lumpy, that is to say, The terrain is uneven because of the number
of people who are constantly being buried there’.28 Cuvier’s proofs
of catastrophic extinction turned all of Paris into one such ‘unequal’ grave, swollen with bones of the recent as well as the very long
dead.29
26
╇ Albert Lenoir, in Boileau, Nouvelle forme architectural, 24: ‘cette foule de
piliers qui, ver le centre, deviennent d’une proportion considerable’.
27
╇ ‘Salon de 1865. Architecture. Edifices construits ou en construction’, 1865, col.
129. Quoted and translated in Frances Steiner, French Iron Architecture (Ann Arbor,
MI: UMI, 1984), 102.
28
╇ Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, 1765: ‘un terrain où il y a beaucoup de
petites inégalités; & dans ce sens on dit proverbialement, que les cimitières sont bossus, pour dire, que Le terrein en est inégal, à cause de la quantité de gens qu’on y
enterre continuellement’. Emphasis in original.
29
╇Georges Cuvier, ‘Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe’, appendix
to idem, Leçons d’anatomie comparée, (Paris: Dumeril, 1805) V; and idem,
vitruvian man is a pterosaur
149
The New Adam
As French novelist Honoré de Balzac famously observed, Cuvier had
laboured to ‘reconstruct worlds based on whitened bones, just as
Cadmus rebuilt cities using only teeth’. The comparison to Cadmus
refers to the brother of the abducted Europa, who, failing to recover his
sister, fears to return home to Tyre. He consults an oracle, which tells
him that he will find a cow, and where it stops, he should build a new
city. The cow stops before the cave of a terrible dragon that kills all of
his men. Cadmus must do battle alone. After a mighty struggle, he finally
slays the monster by pinning its jaws to a tree. As Cadmus contemplates
the display, he hears a voice that tells him to take the dragon’s teeth and
sow them in the earth. A crop of fully armed warriors springs up, and
fight each other until only five are left standing. These five cease fighting,
and join Cadmus in building the city of Thebes.30
Emerging from the anatomical sciences, a revised mythology of
origins located the origins of the city in the teeth of two animals: one
monstrous, and one domestic, reconstituting Vitruvian man as a
hybrid creature belonging to the realm of matter and materialism.
From an ontological perspective, this substitution is astonishing.
What is even more surprising, however, is that it was accomplished
without remark, and continues to pass unnoticed despite being
folded into a modernist canon through Viollet-le-Duc’s influence.
Even as he rejected Boileau’s ‘synthetic’ theories, the rationalist architect celebrated an extraordinary extinct vertebrate whose existence,
in a certain sense, was wholly indebted to Cuvier’s logic. It was 1852,
or one year before St. Eugène was built, that Viollet-le-Duc first mentioned the violation of natural order represented by clothing the
Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles, (Paris: Déterville, 1812), I, 1. ‘On ‘monuments’ in
reference to fossil remains, see Rhoda Rappaport, ‘Borrowed Words: Problems
of Vocabulary in Eighteenth-Century Geology’, British Journal for the History of
Â�Science, 15 (1982): 27–44.
30
╇ Archibald MacMechan points out that ‘the Chaldaic name for the book of
Genesis is “b’Cadmin,” in the beginning, or “Cadmon,” beginning, from the opening
words of the first chapter of Genesis. Adam-Cadmon is the primitive and ideal man
of the Cabalists’. See ‘Notes’ to Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Archibald MacMechan, (Boston and London: Ginn & Company, Athenaeum Press,1896), 296.
MacMechan quotes Albert Stöckl on the Cabalic Adam: ‘Der Urmensch ist das Prototyp der ganzen Schöpfung, der Inbegriff aller Wesen, der Makrokosmus, die Ewige
Weisheit; er ist dasjenige, was von Andern Logos oder Wort genannt wird’.
Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters II (Mainz, 1865), 235.
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‘skeleton of a lizard in fur’. This was an oblique reference to the classificatory problem posed by the pterodactyl, a name that means ‘wing
finger’. This was an extinct flying creature that was initially thought
to have been a bird, perhaps a mammal, possibly covered in fur or
hair, maybe capable of swimming, until in 1812 Cuvier demonstrated
that it was a lizard.31
The acknowledged improbability of the animal, combined with the
firmness of Cuvier’s proofs, continued to entrance Viollet-le-Duc for
the next twenty years. The pterodactyl reappeared in his final published work, Histoire d’un dessinateur, comment on apprend à dessiner, 1879 (Fig. 3). For him, learning the methods of comparative
anatomy was a fundamental step in learning ‘how to draw’, of which
the first requirement was learning how to see clearly and systematically.32 Notably, his remarks regarding the pterodactyl reflected his
knowledge of Cuvier’s Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles as well as
the on-going debate regarding the animal’s classification. It is also of
note that his drawing of the pterodactyl (now reclassified as ‘pterosaur’) is original, meaning that it was not copied directly from a
known source, as was conventional for the period. Nor was he interested in general views that were a ‘little vague’, as the Magasin pittoresque admitted of its own version of that vanished age with
pterodactyls flying overhead. With this creature, it was the interplay
between the (avian) head and the (humanoid) hand that interested
him.33 He emphasised the ‘lizard-like’ quality of the animal by attaching the head of a serpent to the body of a bat, effectively denying an
affinity to birds, and stressing the eloquent finger as the critical
instrument linking it to man.
His choice, however, illustrates the operative difference between
the power of method and the properties of the actual model, for
despite his comments to the contrary, what was truly ‘functional’
about this animal’s anatomy was not its anatomy per se—as Cuvier
pointed out in 1834, ‘it must have held its neck erect and recurved
31
╇Georges Cuvier, ‘Mémoire sur le squelette fossile d’un reptile volant des environs d’Aichstedt, que quelques naturalistes ont pris pour un oiseau, et donc nous
formons un genre de Sauriens, sous le nom de Ptero-Dactyle’, Annales du Muséum
d’Histoire Naturelle, 13 (1809), 424.
32
╇Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d’un dessinateur, comment on
apprend à dessiner (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1879).
33
╇Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Débats et polémiques à propos de l’enÂ�
seignement des arts du dessin, Louis Vitet, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure de Beaux-Arts, 1984), 100.
vitruvian man is a pterosaur
151
Fig. 3.╇E.-E. Violet-le-Duc, ‘Pterodactyl’, from Histoire d’un dessinateur, comment
on apprend à dessiner, Paris: J. Hetzel, 1879.
backward so that its enormous head would not lose all equilibrium’;
it was an awkward flier at best—but the logical pattern that could be
discerned from its bones, a logic that defied all expectations and still
maintained its own coherence even when the conclusions were wrong
(as was the case with Cuvier and the fixity of species.)34 Like the
organism that Littré defined as an ensemble of functions, ‘the leaf of
a shrub, a flower, an insect’, all ‘maintain their existence according to
34
╇ Cuvier, Recherches (4th edn.), quoted and translated in Kevin Padian, ‘The
Case of the Bat-Winged Pterosaur: Typological Taxonomy and the Influence of Pictorial Representation on Scientific Perception’, Dinosaurs Past and Present, ed. Sylvia
J. Czerkas and Everett C. Olson, (Seattle and London: University of Washington
Press and Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, 1987), II, unpaginated. I am
grateful to Prof. Padian for his help with Viollet-le-Duc’s drawing.
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laws essentially logical’, Viollet-le-Duc insisted. The logic of the
bones was innate, predictable, and entirely ‘natural’, serving both justification and explanation for the problematic persistence of the
Gothic cathedral in a secular age. But in place of the body of Christ,
he substituted the vexed body of the pterodactyl. It has remained
there ever since.
In his discussion of American architect Louis Sullivan’s ‘functionalist’ philosophy (a philosophy heavily influenced by Viollet-le-Duc
but layered with American Darwinism), for example, historian
William Jordy nominated an artificial taxonomy within Sullivan’s
oeuvre, consisting of ‘Skelotabulatum wainwrightus’, ‘Skelotabulatum
bayardus’, ‘Skelotabulatum carpiscottus’, and ‘Skelotabulatum
gageus’, in reference to Sullivan’s most famous tall office buildings.35
He then illustrated the ‘morphology’ of these buildings’ skeleton
frames by creating a comparative table of their flattened, schematised
façades.36 Yet the skeleton frame of the skyscraper incarnates the carcasses of slaughtered cows passed down from Cadmus’ legend, even
as the classificatory system he imposes derives from Cuvier’s influence.
It is not unimportant that the conditions of architecture have long
been puzzled over by philosophers, and often pointed to as the
(indexical) representation of the collective state of the human spirit.
Stated simply, ‘the manner in which we humans are on the earth’,
says Martin Heidegger, ‘is Buan, dwelling’.37 But this dynamic
between beings and buildings has changed, because the conceptualisation of this core has changed. From noble guardian before the
ancient temple, to skeletal drudge inside the modern factory, each
shift in the iconic human image is matched by a shift in architectural
35
╇Sullivan’s Wainwright (1890–1), Bayard (1897–8), Carson, Pirie, Scott (1899–
1904), and Gage (1898–90) buildings, each establish one of four principal classificatory headings. See William Jordy, American Buildings and their Architects:
Progressive and Academic Ideals at the Turn of the Century (New York: Doubleday,
1972).
36
╇ In the 1800’s, architect J.-N.-L. Durand had created similar ‘comparative anatomies’, which he based upon functional types rather than upon formal variation
within a ‘species’. See Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture
donné à l’Ecole Polytechnique (2 vols., Paris: 1802; 1805); and idem, Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre, anciens et moderns ( Paris: 1801; rev. edn., Paris: 1809).
37
╇Martin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
vitruvian man is a pterosaur
153
emphasis. If that model body is indeed now purely body, i.e. animal,
what are the fuller implications for the realities of human dwelling?
The historical arcs of these changes are overly simplified here; and
they beg the question of why and how these changes occur in the first
place. For the time being, suffice it to say that each change has
increasingly stressed material worth over spiritual values, and provoked great anxiety over human-animal boundaries. The institutional
repression of wildness, marked by the creation of zoos and the proliferation of household pets, is one obvious marker of cultural
attempts to control the animal difference. Correspondingly, these
displaced activities illustrate that the question of how humans ‘dwell’
on the earth has never been more acute, even as extinctions of modern animals accelerate for reasons that capitalism denies and politics
dictate.
It may be that the anthropomorphic body-paradigm is no longer
valid, as the sudden proliferation of explicitly zoomorphic architecture may suggest. A recent work by George Legendre suggests that
new architectural ontologies may disregard the flesh entirely. As virtual realities and avatars work to redefine socio-cultural relations, the
new century is seemingly poised to inhabit a new set of conditions
defined by technology, raising Donna Haraway’s cyborg to the level
of deity.38 It goes without saying that the human disenfranchisement
from nature would thus be made complete, as matter without consciousness—i.e. the unmediated organic world—cannot navigate
simulated environments driven by scopophilic fantasies. It is here
that philosophy replaces history.
38
╇George Legendre, Bodyline: The End of our Meta-Mechanical Body (London:
AA Files, 2006).
modernity as anthropolarity
155
Modernity as anthropolarity:
The Human economy of Frankenstein
Ben Dawson
I began the creation of a human being.
—Victor Frankenstein
You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and
triumph… You would not call it murder.
—Frankenstein’s creature
In the body of criticism that has grown around Frankenstein, scholars have questioned whether the monster is to be understood as
‘other than fully human’.1 Rebounding on itself, the question opens
a second-order problem that properly supersedes it: why does it
become appropriate, in the context of Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus (1818), to put the word ‘fully’ next to the word ‘human’?
At what point, under which epistemic conditions, or under whose
authority did/does/can the formulation ‘fully human’ begin to have
meaning, to function within economies of sense? The parameters of
this question extend through the pages of this early nineteenth-century novel to the Nazi death camps to the many and multiplying
twenty-first-century sites at which, for any reason or none, murder
is not called murder.
Frankenstein’s monster is both incompletely and overtly human;
‘sub’-human in his physical ugliness and self-sufficiency and almost
‘excessively’ human in his spiritual dependence, acute injurability,
emotional needfulness, etc. Our aim here is to consider this ‘riddle’
1
╇Mellor asserted that ‘Mary Shelley saw the creature as potentially dangerous,
but she never suggested that he was other than fully human’. Quoted in M. McLane,
‘Literate Species: Populations, “Humanities,” and Frankenstein’, ELH, 63:4 (1996)’,
962, who disagrees. The issue, however, is frequent in discussions of the monstrosity
of the monster in Frankenstein scholarship. There seems some critical agreement
that, by falling neither fully inside nor fully outside the category of humanity as it
operates in the novel, the creature functions as an abject or monstrous humanity that
destabilises the category.
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ben dawson
of the monster’s precarious and multi-stable humanity as the
Â�symbolic articulation of the form(s) of ‘human being’ that is or are
the condition and effect of modern power. Stated in bold, our thesis
is that the governmentality of capitalist society transforms the human
into a polarity, and that Frankenstein exposes, in a strident yet complex manner, key aspects of this ‘anthropolarity’. Shelley’s novel
deploys overlapping, accumulating binaries, some of which exploit
semantic resources (e.g. friend/fiend, Victor/victim) while others isolate and redesign certain fundamental Western-cultural themes (creation/begetting, father/son, creator/creature, substance/relation,
nature/history, life/language…). As is well-documented by scholars,
it is the shifting constellation of complementary and competing binaries, its restive and unassured ambivalences, that makes for the fluid,
incompletely reconcilable character of the novel, an incompleteness
that seems crystallised in the question of the monster, or the monster
as a question. Our wager is that, as such, Frankenstein continues to
function as an illuminating model for the peculiarly included and
excluded position of anthropos today. Further, through its ‘doubling’
and ‘coupling’, internal separation and interrelation, of ‘man’, the
novel constitutes a significant, reflective or meta-historical, document in the programme of ‘secularisation’. In other words, it is ‘secularisation’—to which we seem to be condemned—which we are
attempting here, tentatively and partially, to redescribe as ‘anthropolarisation’.
We shall not approach ‘anthropolarity’ directly (i.e. through historical investigation and conceptual construction) but rather through
a reading of the novel. But it is worth sketching the philosophical
model behind our claim that the thematics of Frankenstein are of
such extra-literary interest. Our guiding proposition is that, as both
a form and an object of power/knowledge, ‘humanity’ operates on
and with itself, in modernity, on the condition of an unavowable distinction within human being.2 Anthropolarity is one term for this;
we could likewise speak of the ‘inner difference’ and ‘operational closure’ of the human. Generically, this internal distinction of the
2
╇ Cf. Osamu Nishitani’s powerful analysis of the secretly guiding distinction,
from the early modern period, between anthropos and humanitas. It is an ‘organized
non-coincidence’ (as Schütz glosses), which may be seen to function as a key apparatus in the occidentalisation of the world. Osamu Nishitani, ‘Anthropos and
Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of “Human Being”’, Translation, Biopolitics,
Colonial Difference (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007).
modernity as anthropolarity
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human would be pre-determinate or pre-cognitive. It is not, at least
not ordinarily, an ‘objective’ distinction made by observing subjects,
as, for instance, in certain traditional forms of racism. But this generic
pre-determinate distinction would have, at certain times and in ways
that Frankenstein would be peculiarly helpful in unpacking, a ‘special’ mode of operation. The distinction can become embedded in the
visible (registered, in Frankenstein, as an ‘ugliness’ for which words
cannot compensate) and function, in its pre-determinate way, at the
level of appearances. Here, it becomes a distinction that belongs to
the observing subject, but not determinately or constitutively to its
empirical objects; rather, it is a distinction occasioned or solicited
precisely by the resistance of the human being to objective determination as human, to subsumption under the concept of humanity.
Insofar as this operates at the level of the phenomenon of the human
being, as it seems to in the case of Frankenstein’s hideous progeny,
this indicates a racism of another a kind, more insidious than ‘objectivist’ forms—an implicit pre-judice operating at the level of intuited
appearances themselves. In an extraordinary inversion of romantic
aesthetics, Frankenstein emphatically presents the monster’s (human)
vitality as the essence or source not of beauty and purposiveness for
pleasurable observation but of an observationally and pre-cognitively
intolerable ugliness. The inversion offers us the model of an aesthetic
reflective racism that would be the special form of generic anthropolarity, of the concept (qua inner difference) of the human, of humanity’s self-moving, geographically expansive non-coincidence with
itself. We might add that this special operation of an internal differentiation of the human is possible only on the presupposition of the
essential unity of the human genus, a presupposition that was consolidated ‘biologically’ in the life-sciences of the second half of the
eighteenth century (notably, with the gradual acceptance of Buffon’s
breeding definition of species and the attendant conception of a single human Stammgattung).
More than the beautiful object and more even than the living
organism, it is human beings that, as the fold at the centre of the
modern thought-system, resist objectification, refuse as individuals
the category prepared for them by the epistemology of government.
This means, fundamentally, that they resist their own mass existence.
In doing so, human subjects solicit the system of power/knowledge
to reflection. From a certain angle (ours), the concrete enactment of
modern political rationality can be viewed as the continual unfolding
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of the internal difference of the human, the polarity of omnes et
�singulum, where the individuality of the human being is not simply
opposed to its species-being but is, rather, in a reflexive and dynamic
relationship with it. In this light, the ‘population’, foregrounded by
Foucault’s analyses of modern liberal government, is a complex, selfreflexive dispositif, a political technology that operates by immanently
resisting its own positivity. Power does not act upon the population,
as a subject would act upon an object; rather, abstractly stated, the
system of power is the self-solicitation of this dynamic sub-object.
Since, in the system of regulatory or governmental power, reflection
is constitutive (when it ceases, other forms of power, or simple force,
emerge), the non-identity and reflexivity of the population must be
understood to perform a fundamental function here. Modern power
appears as the operationalised reflexivity of the human. Humans
paradigmatically resist objectification by being reflective (or critical);
by not being entirely determined through a ‘mechanical’ or unilateral
causality; by ‘refusing who they are’.3 Thus, the human being, as the
paradoxical embodiment of reflection or critique, is both a remnant
of subjectivity excluded from the reflexive organisation of modern
governmentality, and the fundamental form of that externalised
reflexivity we call society. Reflection constitutes a field of ‘anthropolarity’, and the opposition society/individual is really a reflexive selfdistinction of the human.
In the main body of this essay, we attempt, through the assembly
of several fragments necessary to our interpretation of Frankenstein,
to begin to redescribe the self-organising system of capitalist society
as a ‘human economy’. Through three overlapping subsections, we
try to distil the central contradiction of the novel—the ‘riddle’ of the
monster—which centres on the idea that he is the cipher of both the
form of modern industrial-capitalist society emerging in 1818 and
the human remainder of that society. We focus primarily on the first
pole, here, since the creature’s rejection by European society in the
novel is much more obvious and has been comprehensively analysed
by scholars. First, concentrating on the creation scene, we consider
the mysterious relationship between Frankenstein and his creature in
3
╇See, esp., Michel Foucault, ‘What is Critique?’, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotinger, trans. Lysa Hichroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2007), for the argument concerning the inextricability of governmentalisation and
critique (power and resistance).
modernity as anthropolarity
159
terms of an intersection of theological and political ‘economies’.
Next, we turn to the eighteenth-century concept of ‘animal economy’
in order to provide a scientific background for common
‘physiological’/‘physiocratic’ form of living and governmental organization. The crux of our thesis is that the metabiological foundations
shared by bioscience and ‘bio-power’, at this early juncture, are constituted through the separation of ‘life’ from ‘volition’, and the reflexive constructions of de-voluntarised subject-objects: population and
organism. Referring to certain experimental practices, from the
decades either side of 1800, of separating and artificially continuing
organic functions (notably, respiration), we try to indicate a materialpractical separation of voluntary and involuntary dimensions of living beings. On the basis of this (experimentally rooted) separation,
we highlight the fundamental analogy between the governmental
subject-object (the population) and the industrial factory as a ‘vast
automaton’. By relating the monster to the factory (through the idea
of the automaton), we attempt to reveal the form and foundation of
a capitalist governmental order that is not merely self-organising and
self-reproducing (i.e. metabiological) but also, insofar as it is involves
the separation and self-perpetuating refinement of intellectual and
manual labour, super-anthropological. We wish, in this way, to move
beyond the anti-humanist paradigm of ‘biopower’, in which government functions at the level of the inner difference or self-relation of
life, toward the figure of ‘anthropolarity’, in which power operates,
between externalisation and exclusion, as the internal differentiation
of humanity.
The Human Economy
And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant;
but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of �property.4
In his influential sociology of literary forms, Signs Taken for Wonders,
Franco Moretti explained the peculiar terror evoked by Frankenstein’s
monster: it is, he argued, because of the absence of factories in the
novel. In Moretti’s eyes, the creature is a figure of the proletariat, the
collective subject artificially recomposed out of the corpses of the
4
╇Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, ed. Marilyn Butler
(1818; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 111.
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feudal ‘poor’, the peasantry ‘whom the breakdown of feudal relations
has forced into brigandage, poverty and death’.5 Moretti’s point was
that this new organism, recomposed by the science of industry, is
gigantically powerful and, if that power is not continuously and
exhaustively turned into profit (which it cannot be because of the
lack of factories), highly dangerous.
In fact, however, there may be a factory, of sorts, in the novel—
there may even be two. There is the laboratory of Victor Frankenstein.
In this ‘workshop of filthy creation’ 6—a space of indistinction
between life and death, creation and curse, situated somewhere
between the semi-private space of early modern labour and the infernal abode of industrial-capitalist production as described by Engels,
Marx, and a number of other nineteenth-century writers—all sentiments are suspended and traditional bonds dissolved: ‘I wished, as it
were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until
the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should
be completed’.7 In his lab, cutting himself off from his father (who
writes him a letter explaining what is ‘unlawful’) and family (precapitalist harmony), Victor gives himself to production:8
Winter, spring, and summer, passed away during my labours; but I did
not watch the blossom or expanding leaves—sights which before always
yielded supreme delight, so deeply was I engrossed in my occupation…
But my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I appeared rather
like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade, than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every
night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most
painful degree; a disease that I regretted the more because I had hitherto enjoyed most excellent health, and had always boasted the firmness
of my nerves.9
If we suspend for a moment its epistemic dimension and concentrate
solely on its materiality, the process of the monster’s creation
5
╇ Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms
(London: Verso, 2005). See the essay ‘Dialectic of Fear’, 85. It helps to recall, with
Marx, that the term ‘wretch’, which is one of the most frequent names given the
monster, was ‘the technical expression used in English political economy for the
agricultural labourer’. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (1867; London: Penguin, 1976), I, 517.
6
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 36.
7
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 37.
8
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 37.
9
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 38.
modernity as anthropolarity
161
approaches the industrial labour process as Marx describes it in
Capital. There, labour power is conceived as something akin to nervous energy (life and health), which, through the calculus of ‘socially
necessary labour time’, gets ‘crystallised’ in commodities as value.
Once this process of the externalisation of living labour goes beyond
the threshold of its daily self-replenishment (sleep, food, warmth,
intimacy, etc.), the worker begins daily to deteriorate in much the
way Victor does. Ventriloquising the worker in order to emphasise
the labour/capital polarity at stake in this process, Marx has him
explain:
What appears on your side as the valorization of capital is on my side
an excess expenditure of labour-power… [B]y means of the price you
pay for it every day, I must be able to reproduce it every day, thus
allowing myself to sell it again. Apart from natural deterioration
through age etc., I must be able to work tomorrow with the same normal amount of strength, health and freshness as today.10
Labour is the expenditure and, viewed from the other standpoint,
‘consumption of life’.11 ‘Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man
can only expend a certain quantity of his vital force… During part
of the day the vital force must rest, sleep’.12
It is in this light that we may grasp what occurs in Victor’s ‘workshop of filthy creation’, the laboratory, which Frankenstein figures as
the site of a physical or, more precisely, a material-nervous expenditure, a self-emptying.
After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue,… I became
myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter… yet to
prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all the intricacies of fibres,
muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty
and labour… I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour. My
cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement… My eyeballs were starting from their sockets
in attending to the details of my employment.13
╇Marx, Capital, I, 343.
╇ This was directly apparent in the ‘forced labour until death’ of African slaves.
After the transition to commodity production (the export of cotton rather than production for immediate local requirements), ‘the consumption of [the Negro’s] life in
seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system’. Marx,
Capital, I, 345.
12
╇Marx, Capital, I, 341.
13
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 34–7.
10
11
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During the long and arduous process of assembling the creature’s
body, Victor resembles a manufacturing labourer, a scientific craftsman, a resemblance which serves to present science as labour (discovery equals production) and labour as parturition. In the creation
scene, however, ‘on a dreary night of November’, this secular analogical model of proto-industrial material/epistemic work becomes
explicitly theological. Victor imitates the Father or divine essence
emptying itself of itself into external (human) form.
With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the
lifeless thing that lay at my feet… [B]y the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed
hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs… I beheld the
wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created… I was lifeless,
and did not recover my senses for a long time.14
Victor’s diabolical imitatio dei is ambiguous: on the one hand, it
clearly echoes Jehovah’s creation of Adam in his own image (‘a being
like myself’), and thus subversively imitates God in his creation of
his own imitation, man;15 yet, the stress on Victor’s self-alienation
in the labour process more directly models the Christian deity’s
adoption of human form in Christ. The ambiguity concerning
whether the monster is, so to speak, made or begotten emerges from
the material and ‘vitalist’ form in which Frankenstein elaborates creation as kenosis. If Victor’s labours of selecting the limbs and deciding on its features narrate the creation of a human being (as in
Genesis), the kenosis through which life is dispensed, expended, and
bestowed seems distinctively Christian. The inaugural act which
Frankenstein repeats is already internally doubled through its typological Christianisation. In this sense, it does not repeat/displace the
original act of creation so much as its New-Testament repetition/
displacement.
Victor’s immediate revulsion for his creature may be interpreted
as a kind of surrogate appearing in place of the pleromatic, reconciling spirit of love. Instead of a ‘seeing that it was good’ functioning as
the foundation of the relationship between the two beings, and
thereby establishing the possibility of redemption, the completion of
the creative/experimental process refills with loathing a heart that has
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 38–43.
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 35.
14
15
modernity as anthropolarity
163
spent itself in ‘infinite’ ‘ardour’: ‘His limbs were in proportion, and I
had selected his features as beautiful…; but now that I had finished,’
instead of breath, and life, and love, ‘breathless horror and disgust
filled my heart’.16 The wrongness of this state of things is made more
explicit by the immediate appearance of the ‘beloved Clerval’, Victor’s
angelic friend. His love replenishes Victor in the aftermath of the
creation process, a restoration that ought (as in the un-alienated process of human labour) to have come from enjoyment of his creation.
[S]urely nothing but the unbounded and unremitting attentions of my
friend could have restored me to life. The form of the monster on whom
I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes…17
This vitalistic dynamic of emptying and filling refigures Incarnation
in the godless terms of terrestrial animation and affect. If Frankenstein
is Mary Shelley’s ‘secularisation’ of Judaeo-Christianity, Victor’s
chemical ‘instruments of life’ perform a kind of obscene sacrament,
a paradoxical act through which the creature’s life is simultaneously
consecrated and profaned—an ‘accursed’ saeculum that he is ‘doomed
to live’, as he complains. Insofar as this disenchanting figuration of
the creative/kenotic, experimental/sacramental, process inaugurates
an essentially mysterious relation between Victor and the monster,
the novel highlights what ‘secularisation’ might most fundamentally
entail. The antithetical or polarised consubstantiality between the
terrestrial figures of Victor and the monster is the absorption of,
rather than any emancipation from, the ‘mystery of the Economy
with flesh of the Only-Begotten’.18 The ‘human economy’ of
Frankenstein is this fundamentally ‘mysterious’ relationship between
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 39.
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 43. Later in the novel, after his death, Henry Clerval
(friend) is explicitly coupled with the monster (fiend), his murderer. Victor explains
that he lived ‘in a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me. Sometimes they were the expressive eyes of
Henry, languishing in death…; sometimes it was the watery clouded eyes of the
monster’ (Shelley, Frankenstein, 154). There is, as it were, no contest between the
two, but, like a multi-stable figure, where one is seen the other is not.
18
╇ Cyril of Alexandria, That Christi is One, in A Library of Fathers of the Holy
Catholic Church: Anterior to the Division of the East and West, vol. 47, trans. P.E.
Pusey (Oxford, 1881), accessed online at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/cyril_
christ_is_one_01_text.htm (Feb. 2010). Harold Bloom suggests the insight that
the monster and his creator are ‘two antithetical halves of a single being’ was ‘first
recorded by Richard Church and Muriel Spark’ (Harold Bloom, ‘Introduction’, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers,
2007), 2).
16
17
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Victor and the monster, which we are proposing as, so to speak, the
cipher for an intra-human separation and relation in our ‘secular
age’.
The relation of Frankenstein and his creature is a polarity—a
dynamic, rather than a simple, opposition—or, in different terms, an
internal separation. Neither can ever distinguish the other as a stably
independent object. One is always literally chasing the other, and the
tension of pursuit/evasion, as it were, comes to precede them, to
supersede their individual identities. This tension between these two
poles (Frankenstein/monster) is emphasised by the structure of the
novel: by the fact that the tale of the monster’s terrorising pursuit of
Victor is narrated by Victor while he recovers sufficiently to continue
his avenging pursuit of the monster.19 The essence of their bipolarity
seems most exposed in this attraction and repulsion, which, dialectically phrased, is the identity and difference of soliciting and solicited
force.
However, unlike both traditional Trinitarian ‘economies’ as well as
the consummating movement of the Hegelian dialectic (traditionally
understood), there is the material tension of a disjunctive synthesis
between creator and creature in Frankenstein, without a third (loving) moment of reconciliation in which unity is recovered and
realised. Such reconciliation would ultimately mean the identity of
difference and identity—externalisation reappropriated or paradise
regained—whereas what is presented is rather their ‘difference’.
When, ‘by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light’, Victor sees
‘the dull yellow eye of the creature open’, the work of thought is (as
far as Victor is concerned) accomplished, finished, or ought to be.
But the monster opens his eyes, ‘if eyes they may be called’, and fixes
them on him, stretching out a hand, ‘seemingly to detain [him]’.20 It
even mumbles something, or may have, but Victor has already fled.
Instead of reconciliation (mutual recognition or love), there is a negative dialectic of victim/victor, cursing/accursed, terminating in
reciprocal ‘suicide’—a suicide which is, in a sense, the novel’s most
utopian moment since, in actuality, such structures are perpetually
self-reproducing rather than teleologically self-destroying. The curse
╇ Cf. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning
and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (1993; London: Routledge, 2006),
126. The spectre (of communism) is that which the traumatised (Europe) ‘chases
(excludes, banishes, and at the same time pursues)’.
20
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 39–40.
19
modernity as anthropolarity
165
that unites Frankenstein and his monster is, as it were, the parodic or
inverted echo of the sanctification of the Holy Spirit: ‘Cursed, cursed
creator! why did I live?’21 ‘I was doomed to live’.22 Or Victor: ‘I was
cursed by some devil, and carried about with me my eternal hell’.23
The curse that endlessly repels them, that refuses their reconciliation,
may be identified with the spark of human life, of material-nervous
force, that inhabits both and thus also unites them. Together they
figure the negative dialectic of the human; their point of intersection
is the locus of their separation.
During the labour process of each act of creation he undertakes
(both the original monster’s and the abandoned bride’s), Victor
becomes a nervous wreck, i.e. physically evacuated of his health. In
both cases, he becomes increasingly alienated from nature and its
serene beauty the closer he approaches the moment of ‘bestowing
animation on lifeless matter’ (an alienation described using the figures of romantic aesthetics). This process of material self-emptying is
crucial to the reciprocally bound destruction, the shared ‘curse’, of
Victor and the monster. They are substantially and vitalistically connected, forming a singularity whose two aspects are at war. Two antithetical poles of a single being: call them, labour and capital.
In ‘The Working Day’ chapter of Capital, Marx lets the voices
capitalist society is producing be heard over ‘the sound and fury of
the production process’. It is an extraordinary withdrawal of philosophical authority:
I… demand a working day of normal length, and I demand it without
appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You
may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the R.S.P.C.A., and you may
be in the odour of sanctity as well; but the thing [Ding] you represent when
you come face to face with me has no heart in its breast. What seems to
throb there is my own heartbeat.24
In order to grasp the deranged ontology at work here, we must recall
that, on the previous page, Marx has written: ‘As a capitalist, [a capitalist] is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital’. His
soul, the capitalist’s, is the soul of capital, but capital ‘has no heart
in its breast’; what seems to beat there is the worker’s heartbeat.
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 110.
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 149.
23
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 173.
24
╇Marx, Capital, I, 343.
21
22
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Capital is only the semblance of life, a soul and appetite without a
heart, yet the life it ‘seems’ to have is an actual life, the labour off
which it ‘lives’. ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only
by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more it sucks’.25 The
mystery of this Heißhunger (the ravenous hunger for surplus labour)
is that it beats with the other’s life. Labour is with capital, but capital
is not with labour; capital is a ‘thing’ of nothing.
A diversity of readings of Frankenstein converge at the acknowledgement that Victor and the monster are ‘antithetical halves of a
single being’.26 And if, as Moretti observed, the monster must be
grasped as the proletariat, he is equally also capital, the infernal
machine itself, the ‘demoniacal corpse’ which is produced through
the ‘infinite pains and care’ of the worker (Victor).27 Victor and the
monster are two poles of the same (human) substance. Each laments
his ‘accursed’ existence, a concept (the curse) which is, as suggested,
the locus of their interpenetration as mutual alienation or internal
separation.
Frankenstein’s materialism exposes a connection between the doctrine of Trinitarian circuminsession (perichoresis)—mutual indwelling of Father and Son—and the reality of modern ‘secular’ society.28
In the latter, Labour and Capital are likewise related as substance and
economy. Labour is not only labour but also capital, which is the differential relation of dead labour and living labour. In a capitalist
mode of production, the mystery of this economy is embedded in the
commodity, the quasi-object in which they are conjoined. The One
Life in which both ought absolutely to interpenetrate, to return to
unity, is a spirit or spectre of repulsion, of separation not love. This
is the key characteristic of the society organised by commodity production: the commodity is the all-encompassing, cursing and
accursed subject-object in which, exactly like Victor and his creature,
one cannot find oneself in one’s reflection.
The monster Victor creates ought to be his reflection (‘a being like
myself’) but is not. And by not finding himself in the being of his
╇Marx, Capital, I, 342.
╇ Bloom, ‘Introduction’, 2.
27
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 40, 39.
28
╇Giorgio Agamben, Le règne et la gloire: Pour une généalogie théologique de
l’économie et du gouvernement. Trans. Joël Gayraud and Martin Rueff (Paris: Seuil,
2008), has offered an archaeology of modern governmentality in terms of the transmission of the paradigm of the Trinitarian oikonomia.
25
26
modernity as anthropolarity
167
creation, Victor becomes an accursed being, haunted by his nonreflecting other. Paradoxically, however, as an accursed being, he
finds his reflection in his accursed creature. In a capitalist society, the
product of labour does not reflect its producer. As such, as Derrida
has seen, the producer becomes a spectre (a thing without a
reflection).29 And yet, by not finding oneself in one’s reflection (creation), one becomes a thing which is ‘reflected’ in (and only in) a
thing which does not reflect. This is the paradoxical form of unity in
capitalist modernity. Such integrated separation is universal and
expansive.
The creature is the product of a material act of self-emptying (of
Entäußerung, to speak with Hegel and Marx). Frankenstein makes
the individual parts into a living whole by emptying or exhausting
himself, the nervous substance of his corporeal life, into his creature.
In this, Mary Shelley was ‘materialising’ the mystery of the Christian
oikonomia in the wake of various eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury researches on ‘animal economy’—the research that had
experimentally developed concepts not only of ‘function’ and ‘organisation’ but, more concretely, of ‘nervous influence’ and ‘vitality’.
In his article on ‘Œconomie Animale’ (1765) for the Encyclopédie,
the Montpellier vitalist Ménuret defined it, in its ‘most exact and
common sense’, as ‘the order, mechanism, and overall set of the functions and movements which sustain life’.30 The concept of animal
economy was essential to the ideological transition from mechanism
to vitalism in the eighteenth century. But, more significant is its role
in the deeper epistemic shift from ‘structure’ to ‘function’, and its
corollary, from substance to emergence. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the physiological ‘economy’ will have determined
the object and programme not merely of vitalism, in Montpellier and
elsewhere, but, more fundamentally, of modern bioscience. And,
stopping not at the organism, nor at the organic system of nature in
general, ‘economy’ (function, organisation, process, system) will have
penetrated into and in large part reconstructed the structure of
29
╇ Cf. the final chapter of Derrida, Specters of Marx, and Andrew Zimmerman,
‘The Ideology of the Machine and the Spirit of the Factory: Remarx on Babbage and
Ure’, Cultural Critique, 37 (1997): 5–29.
30
╇ Quoted in Charles T. Wolfe and Motoiki Terada, ‘The Animal Economy as
Object and Program in Montpellier Vitalism’, Science in Context, 21 (2008): 537–79,
at 546. Emphasis in original.
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European power/knowledge. At this level, it is not easy to distinguish
the direction of influence between the sciences of life and the arts of
governance.31
François Quesnay, the father of laissez-faire ‘economic government’, wrote a Physical Essay on Animal Economy in 1736 (revised
1747). Through such texts, the notion of ‘economy’, closely related to
the concept of function, became the means through which human
society could be imagined not simply physically (i.e. mechanically)
but ‘physiologically’. For this reason, Quesnay’s entry on ‘Man’ in the
Encyclopédie was pivotal in Foucault’s analysis of ‘security’ in his
ground-breaking 1977–8 course Security, Territory, Population. As he
developed the concept of ‘governmentality’, of a governmentalisation
of power in the West, Foucault focused on Quesnay’s physiocratic
model of ‘economic government’ alongside its crucial correlative, the
‘population’.32
It is worth adding that Quesnay proposed ‘a human automaton in
which will be seen the performance of the principal functioning of
the animal economy’. By its means, he thought, ‘phenomena that do
not seem susceptible will be submitted to the balance of experiment’.33 This is significant because it suggests the connection between
two things: ‘the hydraulic model of active fluid flow’, which became,
as Schaffer observes in line with Foucault, ‘an image [in Quesnay’s
physiocratic treatises] of the right form of government’, and the
�transition from the Vaucansonian automaton as an object of
31
╇ We are focussing on the connections between ‘biology’ and ‘political economy’, but the third discursive formation in Foucault’s triune modernity, ‘historical
philology’, is also, but in a different way, fundamental here. Comparative linguistics,
as Raymond Schwab and Edward Said explained, became ‘a science of all humanity,
a science premised on the unity of the human species and the worth of every human
detail’ (Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995), 133; see also Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s
Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-King and Victor
Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Schwab and Said both show
how philology was central to the process of integrating and distinguishing European
and ‘non-European’ humanity.
32
╇ For a suggestive connection between Quesnay’s medical and physiological
research and his own later publications as an economist as well as those by other
Physiocrats, see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and
the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009), 203ff.
33
╇ Quoted in Simon Schaffer, ‘Enlightened Automata’, The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, eds. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 143.
modernity as anthropolarity
169
entertainment and spectacle into the automaton as a modern technoscientific and ‘economic’ thing. In this respect, Frankenstein’s creature (monster, automaton, commodity) is a kind of hybrid technology
that mediates between society and nature.
This connection allows us to see something essential: animal economy and political economy symmetrically supersede the traditional,
substantial, and, as it were, ‘first-order’ concept of volition. The
‘automaton’ is an involuntary ‘human’ inasmuch as (ideally) it would
have independent life but no will. In some respects, the eighteenthcentury fantasy of an automaton is effectively realised in the object of
economic government, the ‘population’ (in contrast to the People),
and in the ‘organism’, the object of a ‘biology’ that precisely emerges
with the separation of vital force from rational purposeful volition,
or the soul. Crucially, both the ‘organism’ and the ‘population’, these
twin subject-objects of the modernity that begins in the second half
of the eighteenth century, are reflexively organised ‘economies’
(rather than determinately structured substances). If, ontologically,
their reality is processual, epistemologically, their reflexive objectivity
is only reflexively knowable. This is why Kant’s critique of teleology,
which first grapples with the double reflexivity of organisation, is an
unsurpassable reference-point in the meta-history (i.e. the immanent
observation) of societal modernity: the fact that the reflexivity of the
organism is cognisable only reflectively means that the self-organised
‘object’ is a functional rather than substantial entity.
It is important to acknowledge the similarity between biology and
government at this level of reflective object-constitution. According
to Foucault, with the ‘entry of a “nature” into the field of techniques
of power’, the ‘sovereign must deploy reflected procedures of government’, operating ‘within this nature, with the help of it, and with
regard to it’.34 Classical volition is subtracted from both subject and
object in the emergence of regulatory power and the population. The
‘heart’ becomes the living paradigm of government: first, because it
is the centre of ‘circulation’ (the key concept of laissez-faire economics as the culmination of the medieval analogy between blood and
money); and, second, because it is an essentially ‘involuntary’ motion
or force. While, in the writings on animal economy, the heart was
�
34
╇Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1977–8, trans. Graham Burchel, ed. Michel Senellart (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2007), 75.
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ben dawson
analysed as the involuntary core of life, or at least one of its primary
subsystems (the sanguiferous), the ‘process of the circulation of both
people and things’ becomes a ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ reality, the knowledge/management of which belongs likewise within and not supervenient to this reality.
It is helpful—indeed not only helpful but, methodologically, crucial—to consider the experimental basis for the separation of ‘life’
from ‘volition’ (i.e. from the rational/purposeful soul). Several experiments carried out in the early nineteenth century, many of which
were published in the Philosophical Transactions, used a set of miniature bellows as a means of artificially continuing respiration after
the experimental subject (e.g. rabbits and dogs) had been killed.35 In
this way, it could be shown that the digestive system and the circulation of the blood were dependent upon the respiratory system but
independent of the brain.
[T]he circulation was supported by artificial respiration… The chest was
then opened, and the heart found beating regularly, and with considerable
force. The spinal marrow, as far as it had been laid bare, was now wholly
removed, but without in the least affecting the action of the heart. After
this, the artificial respiration being frequently discontinued, we repeatedly
saw the action of the heart become languid, and increase on renewing it.
The skull was then opened, and the whole of the brain removed, so that
no part of the nervous system remained above the dorsal vertebrae, but
without any abatement of the action of the heart…36
Wilson Philip concluded from his experiments ‘made to ascertain
the principle on which the action of the heart depends, and the relation which subsists between that organ and the nervous system’ that
‘the muscles of involuntary motion obey the same laws with those
of voluntary motion’; that ‘the apparent difference in the nature of
these muscles, arises from their being under the influence of different
35
╇See Benjamin Brodie, Physiological Researches [collected and republished from
Physiological Transactions, 1811–2] (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), 3; A.P. Wilson Philip, ‘Experiments Made with a View to Ascertain the
Principle on Which the Action of the Heart Depends, and the Relation Which Subsists between That Organ and the Nervous System’, Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society of London, 105 (1815): 65–90, at 68–9, for a description of his own such
experiments and a list of others performing similar ones. And for the history of the
idea of artificial respiration, see A.B. Baker, ‘Artificial Respiration: the History of an
Idea’, Medical History, 15 (1971): 336–51.
36
╇ Wilson Philip, ‘Experiments’, 69.
modernity as anthropolarity
171
stimuli’; that ‘the power of both is independent of the nervous system’ though ‘capable of being stimulated through [it]’; that ‘what is
called the nervous system consists of two parts, whose existence is
not immediately dependent on each other; the one performing the
sensorial functions, the other conveying impressions to and from the
sensorium and, without bestowing any power on the muscular system,
acting as a stimulus to it’; and that ‘the muscular system, though
independent of the nervous system, is so influenced by it, that the
power of the former may even be destroyed through the nervous
system’.37
This research belongs within a tradition of experimental physiology, beginning with Haller’s development of the practice of vivisection in mid-century, the fruits of which were presented to the Royal
Society of Göttingen in April 1752. Here, Haller defined the concept
of stimulus in radical distinction from the concept of ‘power’ or force:
the whole force of the muscles does not depend upon the nerves, because
after these have been tied or cut, the muscular fibres are still capable of
irritability and contraction; and some time or another perhaps, the use of
the nerves with regard to the muscles will be reduced to convey to them the
commands of the soul, and to increase and excite that natural tendency
which the fibres have of themselves to contract, in whatever manner that
is brought about.38
The historical import of this distinction is profound: if volition indicates a purposeful idea bound to the force that realises it, this concept
of stimulus displaces will (and thus ultimately soul); it begins to ‘devoluntarise’ (i.e. functionalise) the living being.
Through the developments of nerve theory, and, more generally,
in the emerging field of biology, in the eighteenth century, a deep
separation of will from the organic processes of life began. The
organic model of irritability, ‘the unity of reflection in action or reaction’ as Hegel defined it, opposed simple teleological models in which
the mechanism of living creatures was directed by a supervenient
(and finally supernatural) practical intellect.
╇ Wilson Philip, ‘Experiments’, 89–90; emphasis added.
╇ Albrecht Haller, A Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals
(English translation of 1755) (1752), in Institute of the History of Medicine, Bulletin 4
(1936): 651–99, at 678–9.
37
38
172
ben dawson
Irritability… expresses organic elasticity, the capacity of the organism to
react at the same time that it is reflected into itself, the actualization which
is opposed to the initial quiescent being-within-self [i.e. passive sensibility],
an actualization in which that abstract being-for-self is a being-for-another.�39
Haller was interested in the involuntary, reflex dimension of muscular motion. The muscles and the nerves of living creatures evidently
operated in complex relations to each other and in vital independence of the mind. As suggested, the paradigm case here is the heart.
The heart is the centre of life, the condition of the possibility of circulation, and it is irritable not voluntary; it ‘reacts’ in a reflexive, not
simply mechanical, manner.
Following Haller’s research on ‘irritability’, the key theorists of the
‘immaterial substance’ of life (‘contractility’ or ‘excitability’) in
Britain, were Robert Whytt, William Cullen, and John Brown.40
Unbeknown to the experimental physiologists, the research was
operating fundamentally to transform the self-image of the body
politic. Societal modernity is, so to speak, a decapitated body politic
kept ‘alive’ ‘artificially’ by the industrial systems of production,
exchange, circulation, etc. The concept of irritability was a model for
the emergence of regulatory power, a non-voluntarist form in which
the object (the population or, more abstractly, the economy) is constructed as irritable and self-reflexive rather than passive and
mechanically obedient. The object and objective of such power is a
reflexive system not a subject. It is the ‘anthropolarity’ of this system
that Frankenstein may help us to grasp.
The controversy concerning ‘galvanic’ phenomena, or ‘animal electricity’, emerged against the background of this research on nervous
energy. In composing Frankenstein, Mary Shelley probably had in
mind Luigi Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, whose instruments
of life consisted of a ‘considerable series of Voltaic piles’ (early batteries made of alternately stacked copper and zinc plates). Applied
39
╇G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), §266. Hegel may be thinking of Kielmeyer’s division
of the system of nature into three classes: Reproductivtieren, Irritabilitätstieren, and
Sensibilitätstieren. See Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Technology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (revised edn., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 51.
40
╇ For a discussion, see Neil Vickers, Coleridge and the Doctors (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
modernity as anthropolarity
173
(in front of the Prince of Wales) through electric rods to the corpse
of a hanged criminal, ‘the limbs were violently agitated; the eyes
opened and shut; the mouth and jaws worked about, and the whole
face thrown into frightful convulsions’.41 This is reported by a certain
Dr. Andrew Ure, himself a British public ‘administer’ of electrophysiological experimentations at this time. He is the very same Dr. Ure
whose Philosophy of Manufacture (1835) is quoted so extensively in
Capital because of the purity with which it expresses the ideology of
factory-based capitalism. Marx calls Ure the ‘Pindar of the automatic
factory’.
In 1819, a few months after the publication of Frankenstein, Ure
conducted and published reports of a series of his own electrical
experiments on the hanged body of a ‘murderer’ named Clydesdale.42
In Experiment 3, for instance, the ‘supra-orbital nerve… in the eyebrow’ was connected to a large voltaic pile with one conducting rod,
‘and the other to the heel’: ‘every muscle in his countenance was
simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair,
anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the
murderer’s face, surpassing the wildest representations of a Fuseli or
a Kean’.43 More than simply a real-life postscript to Frankenstein,
Ure’s active empirical interest in animal electricity offers us a fresh
understanding of his own (Pindaric) definition of the factory as ‘a
vast automaton composed of various mechanical and intellectual
organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinate to a self-regulated moving
force’.44
Behind Ure’s Philosophy of Manufacture, which has been considered the ‘origin of a mechanical, factory-centred tradition in the
understanding of capitalism’,45 we can observe, coming together for
the first time, three forms of power: the ‘vital force’ circulating in the
bodies of organisms; ‘living labour power’ as the universal substance
of value; and the motive ‘power of steam’ derived, recursively through
41
╇ Andrew Ure, ‘An Account of Some Experiments made on the Body of a Criminal immediately after Execution, with Physiological and Practical Observations’,
Journal of Science and the Arts, 6 (1819): 283–94, at 284.
42
╇See Ure, ‘An Account’.
43
╇Ure, ‘An Account’, 290. Cf. Byron: ‘And Galvanism has set some corpses grinning, / But has not answered like the apparatus / Of the Humane Society’s beginning,
/ By which men are unsuffocated gratis’ (Don Juan, Canto 2. St. 130).
44
╇ Andrew Ure, Philosophy of Manufacture, quoted in Marx, Capital, I, 544.
45
╇See Zimmerman, ‘Ideology of the Machine’, 27n3.
174
ben dawson
the technology it enables, from coal mined from the earth. In all three
forms of ‘energy’—labour power, health/life itself, and nature as the
energy resource in modern technology—the reflexive paradigm of
self-regulation, self-organisation, and self-motion materially develops.
At this point, we arrive, then, at the second ‘factory’ in the novel.
For, we may begin to recognise Frankenstein’s monster, recomposed
out of the dismembered parts of the feudal ‘poor’, as himself a ‘factory’, in contrast, as it were, to the manufacturing ‘workshop’ from
which he emerges. Capitalist production dissects the body of the
worker into components or organs, which it recombines into a new,
functionally reconditioned whole. The evolution from the manufacturing workshop to the industrial factory is, for Marx and Ure, a
qualitative transformation brought about by what we would call disciplinary power:
The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art
of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the
growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at
the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more
obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely.46
Although our concepts do not directly square with Foucault’s, the correlation between docility and utility is intimately connected to volition
and vitality; the factory-subject (i.e. the vast automaton as an organised
whole) becomes reciprocally more ‘vital’ and less ‘voluntary’. With the
sole aim of intensifying the self-valorisation of capital, the disciplinary
power Ure theorises continuously decomposes and recomposes the collective worker, transforming ‘the living mechanism of manufacture…
made up solely of… one-sidedly specialized workers’ into ‘a really scientific division of the production process into its component parts’.47
The ‘crippling’ effect of functional specialisation on the individual
worker during the period of manufacture not only deforms the worker
(into a figure resembling Frankenstein’s monster) but moreover prepares the ‘new conditions for the domination of capital over labour’.48
╇Or, again: ‘These methods, which made possible the meticulous control of the
operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces and
imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility, might be called “disciplines”’.
(Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(London: Penguin, 1977), 138; emphasis added).
47
╇Marx, Capital, I, 458.
48
╇Marx, Capital, I, 486.
46
modernity as anthropolarity
175
From Marx’s perspective, the form of division of labour developed in
manufacture produces the quantity and social dependence of unskilled
labour (abstract living labour or bare life) required for large-scale industry.49 Hence, the capitalist organisation of production becomes selfperpetuating, self-reproducing.
At the societal or economic level, the function of disciplinary
power is to prepare the conditions, so to speak on the ground, for the
triumph of governmental power, of normalisation, and societal/economic self-regulation. Discipline operates through a norm or ideal
on the basis of which it codifies behaviour as desirable and nondesirable, and establishes the conditions for maximising the former
and minimising or eradicating the latter. Regulatory power, by contrast, normalises, which means that it finds the ‘norm’ (qua normal)
in reality, and seeks to facilitate normality, the normal functioning of
reality, by annulling abnormalities. ‘Annulling’ here, or ‘cancelling’,
refers to the way governmental power will merely, without supervening directly, redeploy other elements of reality to counteract the
unwanted abnormality. It does not supervene but only intervenes to
secure the on-going functioning of what is happening. The triumph
of capitalist governmentality, the self-organisation of capitalist society, signals the further or final eclipse both of traditional sovereignty
and the will of the people. In their place moves a new subject-object
of economic government, the population.
So long as the fundamental unit in the production process
remained the skilled ‘hand’ of the handicraftsman (however specialised), the technically narrow basis gave workers power: ‘the complaint that the workers lack discipline runs through the whole period
of manufacture’.50 Within the disciplinary space of the workshop,
there is the constant potential for individual insubordination and disobedience. Within the enclosure of the factory, this potential does
not disappear, but it is constitutively cancellable by the systematic
organisation of the whole. This super-anthropological phenomenon
is the prime variable of capitalist governmentality. As Foucault
stressed, there is no essential fissure between disciplinary power and
the society of control. Rather, as the case of the factory unsurpassably
╇ Cf. Marx’s quotations from the factor inspectors on the ‘flesh agents’ or ‘dealers in human flesh’ who manage the ‘the disposable population’. Marx, Capital, I,
379 and note 78.
50
╇Marx, Capital, I, 490. It was over the chorus of this complaint that Ure sang
the praises of the factory.
49
176
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exposes, disciplining the individual body creates the conditions for
the social ‘body’, the de-voluntarised subject-object, the self-organising automaton.
At the more abstract level, so long as personal skill persisted at the
foundation of the production process, as it did during the early modern period of manufacture, humans were and remained essential to
the production of society: ‘manufacture was unable either to seize
upon the production of society to its full extent, or [scientifically] to
revolutionize that production to its core’.51 In the factory, a functional coherence reduces humans to component organs and supersedes them as individuals.
The transition from manufacture to machinery and large-scale
industry was in essence a transition into the concretely self-moving
character of capital in scientific and societal modernity. For Marx,
this transition into the era of governmental power had a technological basis.
Not till the invention of Watt’s second and so-called double-acting
steam-engine [1784] was a prime mover found which drew its own
motive power from the consumption of coal and water, was entirely
under man’s control, was mobile and a means of locomotion, was
urban and not—like the water-wheel—rural, permitted production to
be concentrated in towns instead of—like the water-wheels—being
scattered over the countryside and, finally, was of universal technical
application, and little affected in its choice of residence by local circumstances.52
The system begins recursively to feed itself, when, through a ‘universal’ technology, it internalises its ‘prime mover’. Societal ‘ontogeny’
recapitulates industrial phylogeny. The self-moving systematicity of
society is recapitulated in the individual factory, which is, in contrast
to the manufacturing workshop, an ‘objective organism’.
Ironically, or perhaps paradoxically, it is only when the motive
power of industrial production is ‘entirely under man’s control’ that
the capitalist system of production becomes self-organising. Society
escapes ‘man’s control’ by being entirely under it, for it is now
entirely independent of ‘nature’. The point is, of course, that the
‘man’ under whose ‘control’ the ‘prime mover’ appears to be (which
is already a partial contradiction) is not the self-determining (volun╇Marx, Capital, I, 490.
╇Marx, Capital, I, 499.
51
52
modernity as anthropolarity
177
tary) subject of Enlightenment science and political philosophy, but
the representative of an undead Thing with ‘no heart in its breast’.53
The human being becomes, for us or in itself, external to the system of production—that is to say, fully alienated from society—with
the birth of the factory; likewise, the sovereign subject becomes external to society when the ‘human species’ (population) becomes its
exclusive subject-object and objective. ‘[H]uman material is incorporated’ in this ‘objective organism’, but the latter is an objectively selfmaintaining structure—a finally subjectless object. ‘As soon as a
machine executes, without man’s help, all the movements required to
elaborate raw material, and needs only supplementary assistance
from the worker, we have an automatic system of machinery capable
of constant self-improvement in its details’.54
In the factory, ‘machinery subjects’ unskilled abstract living labour
(notably, women and children) ‘to the exploitation of capital’.55 It
certainly remains possible to observe the function of disciplinary
power, here, but docility-utility is now imposed by the machine itself,
rather than a traditional norm-imposing human authority. Discipline
is now imposed by the mechanical rhythms and inhuman continuousness of the machine on the unskilled mind and body of the
worker, whose main function is to watch and correct it.
At the end of the eighteenth century, we see an Entaüßerung of
power into the purely objective organism of the factory-machine
guided by nothing but the requirement of increasing efficiency,
intensifying productivity, and maintaining itself. This is a way of conceiving the supplementation of disciplinary power by regulatory
power, the inclusion of the instrumentalising power exercised on the
human individual within the normalising power exercised by ‘society’ upon itself.
When, in the 1790s, Kielmeyer observed that the carbon and calcium found in inorganic nature tended ‘to bear the traces of an
organic origin’, he ‘drew the tentative conclusion that organic bodies
were thus apparently factories [Werkstätten] for the production of
53
╇ ‘The work of directing, superintending and adjusting becomes one of the
functions of capital, from the moment that the labour under the control of capital,
becomes cooperative. Once a function of capital, it requires special characteristics’.
Marx, Capital, quoted in Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 175.
54
╇Marx, Capital, I, 503.
55
╇Marx, Capital, I, 520.
178
ben dawson
certain elements central to the inorganic kingdom’.56 The organism
and the factory were born together in the laboratory of societal
modernity.
What is peculiar about Frankenstein from this perspective is that
it presents, as it were, an objective organism, a factory, fully instinct
with thought, feeling, and language. The thing into which life and
power have been externalised is human. If capitalist society becomes
materially and meta-biologically self-organising with the technological onset of large-scale industry, the compressed and cultured figure
of the monster presents this system as not only bio-logical but also
anthropo-logical. It is nothing less than this, the proposition that the
technological society of modernity is not meta-biological so much as
super-anthropological, that must be grasped when, fifteen years after
he set the corpse of Clydesdale grinning, Ure drew his most prescient
analogy for the self-acting mule directly from Frankenstein, or the
Modern Prometheus. It is:
a machine apparently instinct with the thought, feeling, and tact of the
experienced workman—which even in its infancy displayed a new principle of regulation, ready in its mature state to fulfill the functions of a
finished spinner. Thus, the Iron Man, as the operatives fitly call it, sprung
out of the hands of our modern Prometheus at the bidding of Minerva—
a creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes, and to
confirm to Great Britain the empire of art. The news of this Herculean
prodigy spread dismay through the Union, and even long before it left its
cradle, so to speak, it strangled the Hydra of misrule.57
If we accept the analogy between these objective organisms—the
industrial factory, societal/governmental modernity, and Franken�
stein’s monster—all of which emerge through a decomposition and
recomposition of the feudal estates, as well as through a certain devoluntarisation, we start to see, too, why the monster’s ‘humanity’
could become a problem. After our fragmentary and problematically
schematic detour, then, we shall now begin gradually to return to
the riddle of the monster as the ‘anthropological’ consequence of the
reflexivity and organisational closure of capitalist society. Frankenstein
offers a glimpse of the paradoxical situation of the humanity in the
age of anthropolarity.
╇ Lenoir, Strategy of Life, 51.
╇ Philosophy of Manufacture, quoted in Zimmerman, ‘Ideology of the Machine’,
56
57
12.
modernity as anthropolarity
179
Precarious Humanity
We suggested in the introduction that the human being, as the
embodiment of reflection or critique, is both a remnant of subjectivity excluded from the reflexive organisation of governmental or societal modernity, and the fundamental form of that reflexivity, that
society, itself. We are now in a position better to comprehend this
proposition. We have attempted to reconstruct the creature as the
objective materialisation of externalised humanity. Now, much more
briefly, we wish to acknowledge him as the remnant produced and
excluded in the externalisation.
If the monster is a metaphor for modernity’s demoniacal corpse (a
‘super-anthropological’ self-organisation of capitalist society), he is
also its accursed human remainder. This is what seems so incomprehensible. He is a multi-stable figure, a Kippbild, the alienated societal
totality and the human being whose estrangement is its condition or
collateral effect. To characterise this latter position further, we would
have to comprehend his existence in counter-relation to traditional
European humanity’s self-definition as it is embodied by Victor and
the De Lacys. We shall not do so here. It is enough to acknowledge
that the creature exists on and speaks from the complex border
between humanity and inhumanity.
In the monologue delivered to his creator in the mountains outside Geneva, the monster explains that, denied ‘communion with an
equal’, he is ‘excluded’ from ‘the chain of existence and events’.58 His
logic (and the novel’s) is difficult: exclusion from community is
exclusion from existence; permit him communion with an equal and
therefore existence, and he will disappear from human knowledge, or
epistemic existence: ‘I shall become a thing, of whose existence everyone will be ignorant’.59 Pathetically, the monster aspires to move
from a condition of ‘inexistence’ to an existence permitted because
absolutely invisible.
The coordinates of his dream mirror the extreme situation which
afflicts so many human beings today. If the monster asks for a life
that is permitted so long as it remains totally inert, in our day, a billion people survive in a closely corresponding bind: remain invisible
or be excluded from the chain of existence altogether. These lives are
58
59
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 121.
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 121.
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ben dawson
precarious. The life that is permitted is a precarious life because permission can, for any reason or none, always be withdrawn.60
The monster is, as he constantly repeats, ‘abandoned’. He acknowledges the irony of referring to the cottagers as ‘my protectors’, calling
this ‘an innocent, half-painful self-deceit’, but the recurrent reference
to the De Lacys as his ‘protectors’ serves not only to highlight his
‘innocence’ but emphatically to reinforce his entirely unprotected
condition:
You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph… You would
not call it murder…61
His extermination might be a victory, a triumph; it would not be
murder.
The precarious situation to which Shelley, through the monster,
gives a voice closely approximates that which Arendt formulates in
relation to the refugee in the section of the Origins of Totalitarianism
dealing with ‘The Perplexities of the Rights of Man’. It is an extremely
disturbing formulation: ‘Their plight is not that they are not equal
before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are
oppressed, but that nobody wants to oppress them’.62 This ‘plight’
emerges from the organised non-coincidence of ‘Man’ and ‘Citizen’
which renders bare humanity (anthropos) the possessor (or vehicle)
of an inaugurally unenforceable ‘right’. To date, Giorgio Agamben
has proceeded furthest in the effort to grasp the complex articulation
60
╇ Contextualising the political writings of Ockham with reference to the ‘standard view of theologians before John XXII’ (whose bull rescinded the legal basis of
Franciscan poverty, of usus facti), Kilcullen explains: ‘Permission sometimes confers
a legal right, but not always; it may be what the civil law calls a precarium, and this
is the kind of permission the Franciscans have. They do not claim or exercise any
legal rights, either individually or as an order. They have a moral right to use things
because the owners give them precarious permission, but if permission is withdrawn
(for any reason, or none), the Franciscans have no right they can enforce in court.
This is “simple use of fact.” In this case, the phrase does not mean the act of using, it
means a right; but it is a moral right, not a legal right. Simple use of fact is “a licit
power of using…to which there is not necessarily”—in the Franciscans case, not
actually—“annexed any right to which one might claim use in court”’ (John Kilcullen, ‘The Political Writings’, The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. P.V. Spade
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 308.
61
╇Shelley, Frankenstein, 119.
62
╇ Hannah Arendt, ‘The Perplexities of the Rights of Man’, The Portable Hannah
Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (London: Penguin, 2000), 36. For a recent critical response
to Arendt that focuses on this famous statement, see Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the
Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103:2/3 (2004): 297–310.
modernity as anthropolarity
181
between this precarium and governmental modernity as Christianity’s
secularised oikonomia.
If Frankenstein is of use in continuing this effort, it may be because
the paradoxical position of Frankenstein’s monster is analogous to
the identity and difference of the population as the immanent correlative of a reflexive power/knowledge and homo sacer as the life
whose murder is not called murder; or, in still other terms, the identity and difference of the Iron Man of the factory and the Proletariat
as ‘the complete loss of man [der völlige Verlust des Menschen]’.63
Let us not attempt to resolve this opposition, but simply to state
the contradiction as baldly as possible. As an ‘objective organism’,
Frankenstein’s creature is capital’s super-man, ‘societal humanity’,
‘apparently instinct with… thought, feeling, and tact’. He is the economy of society not merely as ‘living’ but moreover as ‘human’, the
heartless, reflexive, recursive and re-cursed ‘soul’ of capital. Yet, at
the same time, his individual situation is that of the most extreme
abandonment to power. If the novel exposes and finally destroys
without resolving this almost insupportable contradiction, precisely
for this reason it constitutes an unsurpassable reference point for a
history of the present. For, the contradiction is ours.
63
╇Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, quoted
from Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to
the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005),
30.
anthropocentrism and ‘culture’
183
Anthropocentrism and the Definition of
‘Culture’ as a Marker of the Human/Animal
Divide
Sabrina Tonutti
The aim of this essay is to address the topic of anthropocentrism by
focusing on the concept of ‘culture’ as it has been shaped within the
humanities and anthropological thought (by scholars such as Herder,
Tylor, Boas, Kroeber, and Geertz). More specifically, the human/
animal divide and its connotations will be analysed, in order to shed
light on how the definition of the culture concept has generated an
unbridgeable hiatus between the two domains. Given this con�
sideration, two questions arise: is it fair to accuse cultural anthroÂ�pology—the discipline that occupies itself with ‘culture’—of being
anthroÂ�pocentric? And is ‘culture’ the very trait which defines and
characterises ‘humanity’ as opposed to ‘animality’?
Nature (Animals) vs. Culture (Humans)
The reflection on the nature/culture divide, and on the supposed
boundary between humanity and animality, is a topos in anthropological thought. The relationship between nature and culture, humans
and animals, innate and learned behaviours, phylogeny and ontogeny, and other correlated topics have been discussed within the discipline in the past, but they currently seem to have lost their appeal
to mainstream anthropology. However, I believe that re-analysis of
the human/animal divide can play a central role in updating social
sciences in general. In other words, I am convinced that it is not
possible to work properly on defining human culture from an anthropological perspective without having previously untied the Gordian
knot of the human/animal opposition.
This speculation does not regard humans and animals as categories per se. It will be drawn against the background of a wider reconsideration of the core tenets of cultural and social anthropology: to
be more precise, I refer to those heuristic devices, cultural categories
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sabrina tonutti
and concepts commonly used by anthropologists in arguing about
humans and animals, nature and culture, which present a certain
ambiguity, and therefore require critical scrutiny.1
Dichotomies
Iconically, in binary opposition to the human, counterpart animals
are polysemic representations in the process of human autopoiesis.
From this reductive and mechanistic perspective, animality functions
as a definer of humanity. However, the human/animal dichotomy
constitutes an unverified a priori assumption on which the development of anthropological discourse regarding humans, human cultures, etc. is based. It seems therefore necessary to clarify what the
content of each of these opposite concepts is, and to verify the heuristic value of the opposition itself.
In many respects it is possible to define the dominion encompassed by the term ‘human’, since we refer to one species,2 homo
sapiens, and we can trace its ethos, as the anthropos (humankind).
But when it comes to the opposing polarity, animals, the lack of
homogeneity within the category creates an impasse, because animals
1
╇Roberto Marchesini and Sabrina Tonutti, Manuale di zooantropologia (Rome:
Meltemi, 2007); Sabrina Tonutti, ‘L’opposizione natura/cultura: quando le categorie
sono usate come ontologie’, ‘Umano, troppo umano’, Riflessioni sull’opposizione naÂ�Â�
tura/cultura in antropologia, eds. Alessandro Lutri, Alberto Acerbi, and Sabrina
Tonutti, (Florence: SEID, 2009), 33–53.
2
╇ However, the concept of ‘species’ complicates the matter, instead of simplifying it. In fact, as it is shown by taxonomic studies, there is no clear-cut definition of
‘species’. While we learn form Mayr that ‘species are groups of interbreeding natural
populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups’, and from Lancaster that ‘species’ is ‘the basic taxon among sexually reproducing animals’, we
should also note, with Dupré, that species ‘are not evolutionary units, but merely
classificatory units’. See Ernst Mayr, ‘Species Concepts and Their Application’, The
Units of Evolution: Essays on the Nature of Species, ed. Marc Ereshevsky (Cambridge,
MA and London: MIT Press, 1992), 17; Jane B. Lancaster, Primate Behavior and the
Emergence of Human Culture (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 90;
John Dupré, Humans and Other Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 5–6.
The following admonition from Darwin’s The Origin of Species warns us against
the risk of ‘naturalising’ categories and essentialism: ‘we shall have to treat species in
the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely
artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect;
but we shall at least be free from the vain search for the undiscovered and undis�
coverable essence of the term species’ (quoted in David L. Hull, ‘The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy—Two Thousand Years of Stasis’, The British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, 15:60 (1965), 320).
anthropocentrism and ‘culture’
185
in this context refers to ‘all animal species except humans’, a categorical field which does not have an ethos. Scientifically speaking, such a
categorisation proves inappropriate and possibly misleading, if
applied beyond rhetorical use.
What emerges from an analysis of human/animal and nature/culture oppositions is that the recognition of similarities, differences and
elements in common between humans and (other) animals is framed
by a perspective which:
–â•fi views human cultural traits under a magnifying lens, while reducing
all animal traits into a single category, without taking into consideration inherent phylogenic differences;
–â•fi ignores/denies elements of continuity between human and other
animal species, labelling signs of culture in other animals as ‘protoculture’, ‘pre-culture’, and so on, with the aim of underlining the
uniqueness and superiority of human species, while ignoring that
every species is in its own way unique and differentiated;
–â•fi ignores phylogenic links between our species and other animals
(mostly primates), which the evolution of human behavioural patterns must refer to.
This opposition is grounded in an intrinsic essentialist perspective,
which assumes the existence of a characteristic shared by all human
beings (in this case culture), which is able qualitatively to distinguish
humans from all the other animal species.
The ‘Culture’ Concept: Between Humanism and Anthropology
Humanitas and Feritas
Descriptions and representations of the place of humans in nature
are often conveyed by evocative images and metaphors: humanity
has been portrayed as an ‘island’, the difference between the nature
of animals and human culture as a ‘Rubicon’, and man described
as an ‘empty container’ filled with culture.3 In other words, these
3
╇ The ‘Rubicon’ metaphor has been mentioned by the anthropologist Francesco
Remotti (‘Introduction’, Antropologia dei modelli culturali, Alfred L. Kroeber (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1974), 12) in describing Kroeber’s claim of a complete independence
of culture (and humans) from biology (and the realm of animals). It was also used by
M. Critchley in the sixties: Critchley, a researcher in neurology, poses the following
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metaphors emphasise and suggest the existence of a clear-cut boundary between the two dominions, marked by the expression of culture
within the human domain as a unique characteristic and essential
trait.
Specularly, a mechanistic metaphor defines animals’ essential trait;
to use Descartes’ expression, they are ‘automata’, and so inherently
‘natured’ (res extensa) that they constitute to humans (res cogitans)
the radical diversity incarnate. In this perspective, ‘animality’ refers
to instincts, corporeity, evolutionary past, and other correlated connotations which, while shared by humans, have been discarded from
the human dominion as the ‘dark mirror’ of man.4
As far as humanism is concerned, the perspective of humanitas
revolved around the same a priori assumption: the existence of a
radical difference between humans and animals. Despite lacking in
instincts and biological apparati, humans were seen as completed by
culture, and it is this capacity that would emancipate them from the
constraints of nature. In the words of the humanist Marsilio Ficino
(1433–99) in his L’uomo è senza dubbio dio degli animali:
the essence of man is fundamentally similar to divine nature, since man
in himself, with his sense and ability, manages himself, not at all constrained by his corporeal nature, and emulates the single works of
superior nature… Compared to brutes, he is less in need of the help
of inferior nature…; by his own means he obtains… food, clothing, a
place to sleep, dwellings, furnishings, weapons. Thus… he provides for
himself more efficiently than nature does for animals.5
Moreover, humanitas presupposes the pedagogic role of culture, in
that it saves humans from animality: ‘Humanitatem induere, feritatemque deponere’. Petrarch (1304–74) urged those earnestly
�pursuing their human nature (humanitas), to fight against feritas
(‘ferinity’, also means disorder/violence). The animal condition is
question, regarding the difference between human language and animal communication: ‘Can it be, therefore, that a veritable Rubicon does exist between animals and
man after all?… Can it be that Darwin was in error when he regarded the differences
between man and animals as differences merely in degree?’ (quoted in Donald R.
Griffin, The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, 1981), 74).
4
╇ Luisella Battaglia, Lo specchio oscuro. Gli animali nell’immaginario degli
uomini (Turin: Satyagraha, 1978).
5
╇Gino Ditadi, ed., I filosofi e gli animali (Este: Isonomia, 1994), 438–9, author’s
own translation.
anthropocentrism and ‘culture’
187
always there, as a threat to humans, who risk falling back into a pri�
mordial ‘beastly’ condition.6
According to Petrarch, an absolute qualitative difference seems to
emerge between humans and animals, of essence, not of degree. For
humanists, humans are naturally predisposed to knowledge, while
animals belong to the instinctual condition. Humans seem to be forever suspended between the two opposing poles and conditions of
humanitas and feritas.
In this brief summary of humanistic tenets, it emerges how in such
a cosmological and anthropological framework the process driving
men towards humanitas runs parallel to the eradication of all those
traits which link human beings to the animal dominion (corporeal
constraints, instincts, animal kinship, etc.). Humanists reject human
immanence. It is considered negatively, as a limit derived from nature
and comparable to the ‘inability’ of animals to transcend their feral
state. Man is therefore engaged in a struggle to build his proper identity by elevating himself from animality. This process of perficere
(‘perfecting’) is played in contrast to animals, who represent a negative model, a dense and material repertoire of symbols for humans to
appropriate as a negative reflection of themselves.
I believe that the legacy of this perspective, although expressed in
different terms, currently exerts great influence on the way we address
the definition of contents such as ‘humanity’, ‘culture’, and ‘nonhumans’, and also on the relationship between different kinds of
knowledge. What I refer to is the humanist divide between humanities (social sciences in general) and natural sciences, mirrored by the
Geisteswissenshaften (sciences of the ‘spirit’, human sciences) and
Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) binomial.
One of the elements commonly used to discuss the study of Man
in humanistic dissertations was the bitter dispute against natural sciences. In a way, we can say that humanism turned its back on nature;
it assumed humanitas as a subject of speculation and totally dismissed humanity’s natural dimension. At the same time, it was considered improper for natural sciences to deal with any traits of
humanity. This contrast reached its acme in the dispute Petrarch
engaged against natural knowledge, stating that only culture owns a
╇Gioacchino Paparelli, Feritas, Humanistas, Divinitas. Le componenti dell’umaÂ�
nesimo (Messina-Florence: D’Anna, 1960), 32.
6
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pedagogic and moral role. The poet in Invectiva contra medicum
quendam addressed a potential medical doctor:
do your job, mechanic, I beg you, cure the bodies, if you can… But
how could you ever dare to be so sacrilegious as to subordinate rhetoric to medicine, the master to the servant, a liberal art to a mechanic
art?7
Medical doctors are considered as only being able to deal with bodies, leaving ‘the care and education of souls’ to philosophers and
orators.8
Undoubtedly, our considerations of knowledge, disciplinary
boundaries and missions have developed and changed. Also the definition of the term ‘culture’ has shifted from its humanistic meaning
of cultura animi (erudition) to the current and anthropologic acceptation. The shift from a subjective to an objective definition dates
back to the second half of the eighteenth century, when ‘culture’
started meaning ‘progress towards a social state opposed to barÂ�
barism’.9 Culture started referring to an objective reality, to the condition of a population or of all humankind, and to the processes of
development.
Herder
Philosopher and anthropologist Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–
1803) adopted this acceptation in his work Ideen zur Philosophie der
Geschichte der Menschheit. With Herder, the concept of culture
enables us to identify a process and a field of expression of something
which is essentially human,10 and completely lacking in animality.
He considers culture as a second genesis for mankind.
7
╇ Quoted in Eugenio Garin, L’Umanesimo italiano. Filosofia e vita civile nel
Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1952), 34, author’s own translation.
8
╇ Quoted in Eugenio Garin, L’Umanesimo italiano, 34, author’s own translation.
9
╇Pietro Rossi, Cultura e antropologia (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 105, author’s own
translation.
10
╇ ‘As the human intellect… seeks unity in every kind of variety, and the divine
mind, its prototype, has stamped the most innumerable multiplicity upon the Earth
with unity, we may venture from the vast realm of change to revert to the simplest
position: all mankind are only one and the same species’. A characteristic trait of this
species is the ability to think, while animals rely on their instincts to survive. Therefore, no kinship between them exists. Herder warns: ‘thou, man, honour thyself: neither the pongo nor the gibbon is thy brother: the American and the Negro are: these
therefore thou shouldst not oppress, or murder, or steal; for they are men, like thee:
with ape thou canst nor enter into fraternity’. See Johann Gottfried von Herder,
anthropocentrism and ‘culture’
189
Tylor
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) formulated the scientific definition of ‘culture’, stressing that ‘culture’ is ‘acquired’, and thus shifting
from the humanistic meaning to the anthropological one. Tylor
emphasised the learned characteristic of culture, as signifying the
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society.11
In emphasising these aspects, Tylor adapted anthropological defining tools (the culture concept) in order to include the ‘primitives’
within the field of culture, and therefore of anthropological inquiry.
Tylor’s inclusive perspective became a point of reference in the
following decades for such anthropologists as Franz Boas, Carl
Wissler, Robert Lowie, and Alfred L. Kroeber, who used this concept
in opposition to ‘innate’ (nature), leading to the creation of a dramatic hiatus between learned/innate, cultural/biological with correlated disciplinary separations. Boas and his followers stressed the
opposition between humans and animals with regard to culture: thus
the former acquire it by living in society, while animals, which lack
culture, rely on their innate biological apparatus.
Boas and His School
Franz Boas (1859–1942) invented the paradigm of ‘culture’ as
opposed to ‘instinct’, and more broadly, to ‘nature’. He emphasised
the uniqueness of the human species, whose essential trait would be
culture. Boas ended up defining the boundaries and the identity of
the discipline itself: anthropology was acknowledged as the science
whose mission is the study of culture, as opposed to biology, which
focused on the study of instinct.
Boas excluded animals from the realm of culture.12 His conceptual
operation can be interpreted as an anti-racist conceptual operation.
Boas’ drawing of a classificatory line, which encompasses the entire
human family, added more internal homogeneity and strength to the
category. Assumptions of a continuum between the human and the
animal domains, on the other hand, could have easily paved the way
Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 5, 6–7.
11
╇ See Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871).
12
╇ See Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1911).
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to the collocation of certain human groups outside that boundary,
closer to animals than to other human beings.
Boas’ distinction between humans and animals is of kind, not of
degree. When Boas and his followers ‘did venture comments on the
abstraction, Boasians saw culture as fundamentally human, i.e. not
the property of animals, and even declared it the attribute which distinguishes animals from humans, or simply that which has no basis
in biology’.13 Their theory is characterised by anti-determinism (as
opposed to racial determinism), and by an essentialist anthropocentric definition of ‘culture’, along with the claim of man’s superiority
over other beings. In Race and Racism, Ruth Benedict, one of Boas’
most famous disciples, wrote:
culture is the sociological term for learned behaviour: behaviour which in
man is not given at birth, which is not determined by his germ cells as is
the behaviour of wasps or the social ants, but must be learned anew from
grown people by each new generation. The degree to which human achievements are dependent on this kind of learned behaviour is man’s great claim
to superiority over all the rest of creation; he has been properly called ‘the
culture-bearing animal’.14
Morgan
Pronouncements that went against this claim did not effect anthropology under its surface. The discipline was taking its first steps in
academia when the Morgan-Boas controversy took place.
The American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81) not
only never used the culture concept, but also strongly opposed the
concept of ‘instinct’, which was supposed to be able to explain ‘the
intelligent acts of animals’.15 ‘This term’, I quote from The American
Beaver, ‘was an invention of the metaphysicians to assert and maintain a fundamental distinction between the mental principle of the
human species and that of the inferior animals’.16 For Morgan the
term was ‘wholly incapable of explaining the phenomena of animal
13
╇ Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, ‘Culture’, Encyclopedia of Social and
Cultural Anthropology, ed. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (London and New
York: Routledge, 1996), 138.
14
╇ Ruth Benedict, Race and Racism (London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1983), 9–10.
15
╇ Lewis Henry Morgan, The American Beaver and His Works (Philadelphia:
J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1868), 275.
16
╇ Morgan, American Beaver, 275–6.
anthropocentrism and ‘culture’
191
intelligence’.17 He also claimed that the difference existing between
the human species and animals was ‘one of a degree, not of kind’,18
because the abilities they share19 emanate from a principle which ‘is
the same in kind, but bestowed in different measure, to adapt each
species to its particular mode of life’.20
However, possible theoretical consequences of this approach never
developed. Academia dismissed evolutionary theory (supported by
Morgan) on the one hand, and embraced Boasian anthropology on
the other.21
Kroeber
One of Boas’ followers, Alfred Kroeber (1876–1960), theorised that
‘culture’ is ‘superorganic’. He completely separated humans from the
animal realm,22 believing in the ontological independence of culture
from the biological, psychological, and social dimensions. So, Kroeber
hypothesised a leap in nature from the organic level to the cultural,
and a gap between humans and animals. Again it was a difference in
kind, not in degree.
Explaining the basic principles of his theory, in The Superorganic
Kroeber referred to the Aristotelian formulation of complementary
antithesis, based on mutually exclusive binary oppositions such as
body/soul, physical/mental, organic/cultural, as a way of thinking
characteristic of Western society.23
╇ Morgan, American Beaver, 276.
╇ Morgan, American Beaver, 277.
19
╇Namely: ‘manifestation of perception, appetite and passion, memory, reason
and will’ (Morgan, American Beaver, 276).
20
╇Morgan, American Beaver, 277. Morgan strongly objected that ‘long-standing
religio-philosophical’ body of knowledge, principles, assumptions on which the culture concept supported by Boas was founded. ‘Culture’ ended up replacing ‘soul’ in
marking the separation between humans and animals. See John H. Moore, ‘The Culture Concept as Ideology’, American Ethnologist, 1:3 (1974): 537–49, at 546.
21
╇Moore, ‘Culture Concept’, passim.
22
╇See Alfred Kroeber, ‘The Superorganic’, American Anthropologist, 19:2 (1917):
163–213; idem, Anthropology (London: G. Harrap, 1923).
23
╇ Kroeber links conceptual dualism to Aristotle. More generally, it is in the
ancient Greek opposition between nómos and phúsis that we can trace the origin of
the nature/culture, and human/animal dichotomies. This opposition then became
central in classical rationalism and in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, till it was
absorbed and adapted by the Cartesian doctrine of the machine-animal (Annamaria
Rivera, ‘La construction de la nature et de la culture par la relation home-animal’, La
fabrication de l’human dans les cultures et en anthropologie, eds. Claude Calame and
Mondher Kilani (Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 1999), 51). Western culture shaped by
17
18
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Geertz
Clifford Geertz (1928–2006) launched the paradigm of man as an
incomplete creature, in line with the tenets described above. Following
some of Kroeber’s assumptions, Geertz described culture as something external to the human organism,24 independent from the biological apparatus.
Geertz defined ‘culture’ as ‘a set of control mechanisms—plans,
recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”)—for the governing of behavior’.25 He then stated that:
the behavior patterns of lower animals are, at least to a much greater
extent, given to them with their physical structure; genetic sources of information order their actions within much narrower ranges of variation, the
narrower and more thoroughgoing the lower the animal. For man, what
are innately given are extremely general response capacities, which,
although they make possible for greater plasticity, complexity, and on the
scattered occasions when everything works as it should, effectiveness of
behavior, leave it much less precisely regulated.26
Given this perspective, it follows that ‘man is precisely the animal
most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin
control mechanisms, such cultural programs, for ordering his
behavior’.27
As we have already mentioned, in Geertz’s view man would be ‘in
physical terms, an incomplete, an unfinished, animal’, and culture
would compensate this state by filling in what nature lacks.28 Geertz
Christian tradition has stressed the importance of human life, in contrast with other
forms of life, and this perspective has its origin in the Genesis. During Medieval
times, Aristotle’s philosophy and Christian thought came to a synthesis thanks to
Aquinas: since everything in nature has an end, less rational beings as animals are
considered means to humans’ ends. Even if Aquinas’ philosophy was criticised later
on, man’s superiority was not contested. On the contrary, this paradigm gave rise to
Cartesian dichotomy (res extensa/res cogitans), and then reached a sophisticated formulation with Kant (See Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death (Melbourne: Text
Publishing Co., 1994)).
24
╇ Clifford Geertz, ‘The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of
Man’, Man in Adaptation: The Cultural Present, ed. Yehudi A. Cohen (Chicago:
Aldine Publishing Company, 1968): 19–32; idem, The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973).
25
╇Geertz, ‘Impact of the Concept of Culture’, 26.
26
╇Geertz, ‘Impact of the Concept of Culture’, 27.
27
╇Geertz, ‘Impact of the Concept of Culture’, 27.
28
╇Geertz, ‘Impact of the Concept of Culture’, 27; idem, Interpretation of Cultures, 96.
anthropocentrism and ‘culture’
193
presumes the existence of an inverse proportion in man between
nature (innate) and culture (acquired): the less rich and adequate the
genetic mechanisms (instincts), the more important the role of culture.
However widespread in the social sciences and accepted by mainstream anthropology, the ‘incompleteness paradigm’ and its correlated metaphor (man as an ‘empty vessel’) have been and are being
criticised by other perspectives.
In Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, Lévi-Strauss (1908–
2009) claimed that everyone is given at birth a whole series of possibilities to develop their mental organisation, and that each culture
makes a selection within this repertoire. Enculturation, therefore,
would operate through selection, successfully guaranteeing specialisation at the expense of other alternatives.
A metaphor opposing that of the ‘empty vessel’ has been proposed
by Roberto Marchesini in his Post-human.29 In underlining the richness of human natural apparatus, Marchesini describes man as a
statue sculpted in marble, where marble represents the redundancy
of the biological possibilities with which man is endowed; culture is
the sculpting process which operates through selection and gives way
to man’s ontogenesis.30 If there was no such biological and evolutionary richness, Marchesini argues, humans would not possess their
complex cultural expression nor epigenetic freedom. He also points
out that the plasticity of human nature is not pre-determined by
genes, rather it is an historical process that takes place through ontogenetic development.
Lévi-Strauss and Descola
As far as the discussion around culture is concerned, Lévi-Strauss
contributed another important revision of anthropological assumptions. In the second edition of Les structures élémentaires de la
parenté (1967) he re-elaborated his own theories in the light of contemporary discoveries made by ethology and paleoanthropology,
rejecting his own interpretations of nature/culture and human/�
29
╇Roberto Marchesini, Post human. Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza (Turin:
�Bollati Boringhieri, 2002).
30
╇Marchesini, Post-human, 30.
194
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animal oppositions from the first edition (1949) and offering a completely new perspective.31
What he stated was that the nature/culture opposition was not
an objective trait of reality, but the output of a defensive cultural
operation aimed at dismissing and rejecting similarities and links
with other animal species that are so close to us as to be perceived as
a threat to human identity. As a consequence, the boundary line
between humans and animals becomes unstable and gives way to
similarities, analogies, homologies and overlappings between the
two—previously conceptually separated—domains. In Race et
Histoire, Race et Culture, Lévi-Strauss stated that elements of what we
call culture, do spring up here and there in various animal families
(2002).32
To come to other recent contributions, even the transcultural
characteristic attributed to the nature/culture opposition has been
critiqued. Philippe Descola demonstrated that this opposition is not
a universal cultural trait, rather an historical product of certain cultural contexts, as well as an analytical tool belonging to symbolic and
structuralist anthropology.33
Ethnographic research on cosmological and taxonomic systems in
some ‘non-Western’ societies has investigated the use of modelling
processes which are based on analogical codes and cultural categories
different from binary oppositions. These cultural systems also show
representations of human/animal and humans/environment relationships different from those we are accustomed to and commonly
use. For example, the Jivaro Achuar population from the Amazon
considers the majority of animals and plants as ‘persons’ who live in
their own societies and make contact with humans according to specific social and behavioural rules. The Chewongs from Malaysia do
not believe a categorical or ontological separation between humans
and other beings exists, since plants, animals and spirits are all characterised by consciousness, have a language, rationality, intellect, and
moral codes.
At the end of this summary, what emerges is that the shaping of
the concept of culture in social sciences has been deterministic and
31
╇ Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949; Paris:
Mouton, 1967).
32
╇ Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et Histoire, Race et Culture (Paris: Albin Michel,
2001).
33
╇Philippe Descola and Gísli Pállson, eds., Nature and Society: Anthropological
Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1996).
anthropocentrism and ‘culture’
195
anthropocentred, impervious to any possible ‘contamination’ with
naturalistic perspectives. In accordance with Michael Carrithers,
then, culture has become ‘an unexamined or even dogmatic preÂ�
supposition, an unquestioned feature of reality’,34 and the study of
culture has become a deterministic form of ‘culturology’. As a consequence, many important issues and questions anthropology should
itself address fall beyond the boundaries of the discipline.
However, when paradigmatic separations—such as nature/culture—prove unstable, a renegotiation of boundaries seems to be necessary. Lévi-Strauss suggested rejoining the ties that bind humans to
the animal realm and to avoid the tendency to think of culture as
something separate from nature, as the ‘essence’ of humankind.35
Essentialism
Before analysing the issue of essentialism regarding the concept of
‘culture’, I would like briefly to address the topic of animal culture,
to pinpoint some salient elements along the human/animal divide,
which contradict this dichotomic separation.36
Animal Culture
Ethology—the phylogenic study of behaviour—has produced some
profound literature on animal cultures. Among the most salient studies it is necessary to mention the research carried out by the primatologist Jane Goodall on chimpanzees in Gombe, and the related
‘outrage’ provoked by her ethologic reports which proved the use of
tools by these animals (see Lawick-Goodall 1971).37 Other famous
34
╇Michael Carrithers, ‘Nature and Culture’, Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural
Anthropology, eds. Barnard and Spencer, 394.
35
╇ Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires.
36
╇ Cognitive ethology is not alone in bridging the supposed gap between humans
and animals, by analysing cultural behaviours in other animals. Other disciplines,
such as anthrozoology, paleoanthropology, genetics, human ethology draw new
interpretive horizons and foster the revision of some important epistemological
assumptions.
37
╇See Jane van Lawick-Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1971). Referring to tool use as a marker of humans uniqueness in
nature, Barnard and Spencer quote the words L.S.B. Leakey is supposed to have said
when Jane Goodall reported to him the use of tools by the Gombe chimpanzees:
‘“Ah, now we must redefine tool, redefine man—or accept chimpanzees as humans!”’
(Barnard and Spencer, ‘Culture’, 140).
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primatologists were Dian Fossey (who studied gorillas), Biruté
Galdikas (who researched orangutans), and Kinji Imanishi (who
focused on the Japanese Monkey Macaca fuscata), to name a few.38
As a consequence of the development of these field-studies, a growing list of population-specific behavioural traditions, ontogenetically
acquired by members of the different animal (chimpanzee) communities, is now available.
What we learn from these and other studies is not only that the
observed species show cultural behaviours39 that are specific to their
own species,40 but also that cultural differences occur at the level of
the group.41 To put it in other words, we are dealing with animal
ethnographies. The case of the Koshima Monkeys, studied by the
Japanese primatologists Imanishi, Kawai and Kawamura, represents
a key example in the redefinition of what culture is. On Koshima
Island, an exclusive food habit (non species-specific) exists today that
was started in 1952 by a young female monkey called Imo. Imo
started rinsing sweet potatoes in sea water before eating them, and
subsequently launched the innovation of wheat sluicing42. Those
behaviours subsequently spread among the community as a shared
cultural trait acquired by members of the group through observation
and imitation.43
38
╇Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983);
Biruté M.F. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden: My Life with the Orangutans of Borneo
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1995).
39
╇ Among chimpanzees a remarkable variability exists as far as their diverse
capacities and traditions in the use of tools, patterns of grooming, use of food
resources, and capacity for attention are concerned. Diversity in personality and
temperament has also been demonstrated.
40
╇ Apart from primates, forms of ‘culture’ have been documented in songbirds,
cetaceans, elephants, and other mammal species.
41
╇See Frans B.M. de Waal and Peter L. Tyack, eds., Animal Social Complexity:
Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies (Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press, 2003); Frans B.M. de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master:
Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
42
╇ ‘When wheat was given to monkeys, it was simply thrown out in piles on the
beach. Very quickly it would become mixed with sand and the monkeys would have
to sit for hours painstakingly picking out the wheat grain by grain. In 1960 the young
female began to pick up handfuls and armloads of wheat and sand, dash on two hind
legs to the water, and drop them in. The wheat would then float while the sand sank
so that she could easily sweep up handfuls of wheat and eat them’ (Lancaster, Primate Behavior, 46).
43
╇Tetsuro Matsuzawa, ‘Koshima Monkeys and Bossou Chimpanzees: Long-Term
Research on Culture in Nonhuman Primates’, Animal Social Complexity, eds. de
Waal and Tyack, 374–87.
anthropocentrism and ‘culture’
197
The case of Imo’s innovations raises issues about animal individuality and subjectivity.44 As shown by Matsuzawa’s research, an animal
community is not entirely endowed with the same capacities, abilities, tastes, intelligence (the same can be said of human societies).
Some shared behaviours and traditions can stem from individual
genius, before becoming accepted in the group through a selective
process of evaluation, imitation, and social transmission.45
To come to the language argument, there is insufficient space to
analyse the experiments of human-ape symbolic communication
here. Suffice to say that a rich literature covers the subject. Apart
from the evidence gathered by this field of research, what is more
pertinent to our discussion are the theoretical a priori assumptions
on which the interest towards the subject is grounded. What we seek
is proof that apes are able to learn human language. Again, even if an
evolutionary approach has been adopted in addressing this subject,
and even if a continuum is supposed to link humans to other animals, animals have to ‘show’ how they are—at least a little—‘human’,
lest they fall back to the ‘brutes’, or ‘automata’ category. In fact, if
they fail, that is taken as a ‘lack’ in some ability, and their ‘answer’ to
our inquiry is considered as a ‘non-answer’, not as a ‘different’
answer.
Going back to our premises, a perspective such as this underwrites
‘the poverty of a humanism that thinks it has grounded itself in a
human essence, a stable species identity to be secured by its contrast
with animality’.46
╇See Sabrina Tonutti, ‘Imo e Ogotemmeli: eccesso di personalità. Una riflessione attorno a soggettività, informatori, cultura, persone’, La Ricerca Folklorica, 54
(2007): 115–22.
45
╇ What I believe is that only by adopting a particularistic approach would it be
possible to get to a deep understanding of animal culture and subjectivity; by ‘particularistic’ I mean the observational perspective proposed by ethnography in studying local communities, life histories, and the like. In this respect I believe that
sociocultural anthropology could suggest a different approach to animal behavioural
sciences regarding the study of animal cultures, which could be extremely innovative
and useful in keeping reductionism and determinism at bay. It focuses on ontogeny
rather than phylogeny, and on the individual rather than species.
46
╇ Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and
Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xii.
44
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Ontological Problems
The human/animal divide can be/is used as an easy and quick rhetorical device to refer superficially to two domains that we have projected onto reality in order to better our specific investigation into
certain human cultural traits. Thus far the heuristic use of the opposition is acceptable.
The problem arises when this contingent interpretive grid is not
considered as a heuristic device, but transformed into ‘essences’, into
‘natural kinds’, or, quoting Descola, into an ‘ontological paradigm’.47
In doing so, categories are treated as though they were ‘things’, phenomena emerging from nature. As a consequence of this process,
categories are made to appear as real things, and not as what they
really are, namely culturally and historically determined contingent
epistemological devices.48 Seen thus, the human/animal separation
constitutes an axiom that apparently does not require any further
explication, analysis or scrutiny.
Given this tendency, some scholars prefer to inquire into cultural
phenomena using other concepts and expressions instead of that of
‘culture’. Arjun Appadurai addresses ‘culture’ as a ‘dimension’, stating that in underlining ‘dimensionality’ instead of ‘substantiality’ we
can think of culture as an heuristic device useful to talk about difference, and not as a trait characteristic of some people or some groups.49
Conclusion
Meta-anthropologically speaking, arguing about the human/animal
divide has become a sort of disciplinary taboo: this basic opposition
constitutes a sort of sacred area, crisscrossed by fragile, vulnerable
boundaries. I refer to the related issues of innate/acquired; biology/
culture; and, at a broader extent, nomothetic (naturalistic) and idiographic (humanistic) disciplines. However, boundaries, taboos and
sacralisation processes have always been central in anthropological
inquiry. I believe socio-cultural disciplines can make their best contribution in dealing with subjects such as these. As a result of such
speculation, some former unbroken disciplinary boundaries may
╇Descola and Pállson, Nature and Society, 82.
╇See Tonutti, ‘L’opposizione natura/cultura’.
49
╇See Ajun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
47
48
anthropocentrism and ‘culture’
199
change or become discontinuous, as long as the definition of ‘humanity’ and ‘culture’ change. So we may witness the welding of new
epistemological bonds, instead of unbridgeable gaps and deep separations.
part three
speciesism and the status of animals
are animals poor in the world?
203
are animals poor in the world? a critique of
heidegger’s anthropocentrism*
Philip Tonner
Being
To date, philosophers have struggled with the concept of animality.
As witness to this, Peter Singer, in his preface to the recent collection
Animal Philosophy, reminds us that, at best, animals have hitherto
been regarded with little ethical significance in Western philosophy
and at worst they have been taken to have no ethical significance
whatsoever. Aristotle took animals to exist for our sake as resources;
St. Paul wondered ‘Doth God care for oxen?’; Christian thinkers such
as Augustine and Aquinas thought that cruelty to animals was not
in and of itself problematic, being problematic only as a possible
source of human to human cruelty; Descartes denied that animals
can in fact suffer and Kant restricted the kingdom of ends to humans,
animals being mere means to our ends. Yet there were a few contrary
voices: Montaigne was unhappy with human arrogance and saw fit
to challenge it; David Hume argued for the ‘gentle usage’ of animals
and the British Utilitarian thinkers factored in animal suffering to
their accounts of utility.1 Nevertheless, such dissenting voices are in
the minority and a general anthropocentrism has prevailed in the
history of philosophy hitherto. In Continental European philosophy
in the twentieth century discussion of animals has not featured
prominently in either ethical or ontological enquiries. Martin
*╇ An earlier version of this paper was delivered at Durham University at the 31st
Annual Meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group, 18th December 2009, in the
session, ‘Oneness and Otherness: Self and Identity in relation to material and animal
worlds’. I would like to thank the session organisers, Marcus Brittain, Andy Needham, Nick Overton and Penny Spikins, for all their hard work in convening the session and for their helpful and suggestive comments. I would also like to thank
Cheralynne Hyde of Glasgow Museums for comments on an earlier draft.
1
╇Peter Singer, ‘Preface’, Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental
Thought, ed. M. Calarco and P. Atterton (London and New York: Continuum, 2004),
xi. A number of the chapters in this volume are pertinent to these observations,
notably those by Nimmo, Steiner, Silverman and Krebber.
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Heidegger who, along with Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, contributed greatly to the development of European
philosophy over the course of the last century was acutely aware of
the limitations of the philosophical tradition in the West.2 His project took its point of departure from the failure of Western philosophy
to adequately raise, never mind answer, the question of the meaning
of being (die Seinsfrage). So far as Heidegger is concerned the
Western metaphysical tradition has ‘forgotten being’ and has, as a
consequence of this, failed adequately to understand human existence qua Dasein (being t/here).
One central plank of Heidegger’s critique of Western thought has
been his objection to its anthropocentrism. Yet despite being critical
of anthropocentrism Heidegger’s thought does not transcend it and
his early statement of his position in Being and Time firmly places
Dasein at the centre of the ontological universe. Ultimately, there is
an important sense in which Heidegger’s fundamental ontology
upholds a form of ‘transcendental anthropocentrism’ and to that
extent Heidegger is heir to the tradition of European philosophy that
2
╇ As Zimmerman has put it ‘The phenomenology developed by Husserl and
transformed by Heidegger provided the basic conceptual distinctions for much of
twentieth century continental philosophy’ (M.E. Zimmerman, ‘Heidegger’s Phenomenology and Contemporary Environmentalism’, Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the
Earth Itself, ed. T. Toadvine (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 1). Heidegger is a central point of reference for existentialism, hermeneutics and post-structuralism as well
as for phenomenology: his early masterpiece Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie
and E. Robinson (1927; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962)) had a formative influence on
Jean-Paul Sartre; his other works, particularly on art and language, have been crucial
to the development of hermeneutics and deconstruction in the hands of thinkers
such as Gadamer and Derrida. In fact, there is not a branch of philosophy in Europe
that has not been influenced—positively or negatively—by Heidegger at some stage
over the course of the last 80 or so years. This influence shows no sign of letting up.
His influence is also not confined only to philosophy. Most recently Heidegger’s
thought has begun to influence archaeologists and anthropologists who have started
referring to what they call the ‘dwelling perspective’ in their work. This perspective
is a direct out-growth of Heidegger’s account of human Dasein who ‘poetically
dwells on this earth’. Some excellent works on Heidegger and animals have appeared
in recent years. For example, Calarco and Atterton, eds. Animal Philosophy; M.
Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008); D.F. Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Lifephilosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992); S. Glendinning, On
Being with Others: Heidegger—Derrida—Wittgenstein (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998); S. Elden, ‘Heidegger’s Animals’, Continental Philosophy Review, 39
(2006): 273–91.
are animals poor in the world?
205
originated with Kant.3 Heidegger upholds the (phenomenological)
thesis that all things—including objects, animals and events—are
given order and meaning by human beings—by Dasein—in terms of
their possibility for interaction or appropriation into a human task
or project: such objects, animals and events are understood in terms
of our involvement, or possible involvement, with them qua Dasein,
and they exist only as part of a web of possible encounters wherein
all ‘things’ refer, relate to, or point at, other ‘things’ within that web.
In addition to this transcendental anthropocentrism—the Â�meaning
of objects, animals and events is constituted by Dasein’s engagement
with them—there is also a metaphysical dimension to Heidegger’s
anthropocentrism. That is, in his fundamental ontology Heidegger
critically appropriates the traditional metaphysical idea of the scala
naturae in terms that allow for the insight and limit of transcendental philosophy to be retained.4 Based on the fundamental ontology of
Dasein, what Heidegger calls in his 1929 work Kant and the Problem
of Metaphysics a ‘metaphysics of Dasein’, Heidegger transforms the
traditional account of human beings, animals and objects that was
developed in the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition of substance ontology. In his lecture course of 1929–30, The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that while Dasein is ‘world forming’
(weltbildend), by analogy with Dasein, objects are ‘worldless’ (weltlos)
and animals are ‘poor in the world’ (weltarm). From the point of
view of his fundamental ontology, a position that conceives Dasein(s)
to be capable of transcending their pragmatic environment in the
creation of meaningful worlds, animals are impoverished precisely in
terms of their inability to transcend the environment of their immediate and pragmatic concerns. This is Heidegger’s anthropocentric
presupposition and on this presupposition objects are entirely without world in these terms.
I want to suggest in what follows that this presupposition acts as
a limit to an adequate conception of animality in both the early
and later phases of Heidegger’s thought. This presupposition is a
determining factor in Heidegger’s account of animals and objects and
3
╇D. Frede, ‘The question of being: Heidegger’s project’, The Cambridge ComÂ�
panion to Heidegger, ed. C.B. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
65.
4
╇ The reader would be repaid by consulting Arthur O. Lovejoy’s classic work
The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936; Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1990) for a discussion of the notion of a scale of nature
and hierarchical conception of reality in Western thought.
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it is the source of remarks that he made later in his career; remarks
such as:
The [human] hand is a peculiar thing… Apes, too, have organs that
can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different
from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss
of essence.5
This passage is from Heidegger’s lectures of 1951 and 1952 and is
generally representative of his later ‘being-historical’ position. So,
despite the move away from fundamental ontology and the ‘transcendental-horizonal’ position that he took in Being and Time,
Heidegger maintains his anthropocentric presupposition. The ultimate result of this presupposition is a philosophical ontology that
emphasises the differences between humans and animals (and
objects) to such an extent that it acts as a barrier to an adequate
conceptualisation of animality. Ultimately Heidegger’s account maintains, albeit in a new form, the traditional doctrine of the uniqueness
of human beings in contradistinction to animals, which is conceived
in terms of a scala naturae and a reappropriation of the metaphysical doctrine of the analogy of being.6
Phenomenology
Precisely because Heidegger outlines his account of animals’ poverty
in the world with reference to rich Dasein it will pay dividends to
spend some time discussing Heidegger’s account of Dasein in his
fundamental ontology. Before doing so, however, it will be useful to
place Heidegger’s project within the context from which it emerged,
from within the phenomenological movement. While this will involve
something of a journey, it nevertheless provides the intellectual background to Heidegger’s distinctive ‘take’ on animality, that we will
5
╇Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glen Gray (New York:
Harper and Row, 1968), 16.
6
╇T. Sheehan, ‘Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times’, Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Guignon; idem, ‘Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegomenon to Introduction to Metaphysics’, A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics,
ed. R. Polt and G. Fried (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); J. Taminiaux,
‘Philosophy of Existence I: Heidegger’, Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century,
vol. VIII, ed. R. Kearney (London and New York: Routledge); Philip Tonner,
Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being (London and New York: Continuum, 2010).
are animals poor in the world?
207
explore in relation to the history of metaphysics, bringing it sharply
into focus at the close of this paper. Phenomenology originated with
Husserl at the beginning of the twentieth century and in his hands
it combines a kind of psychology with a kind of logic: phenomenology develops a descriptive psychology that analyses our acts of consciousness while developing a theory of meaning/logical semantics
that analyses the objective (noematic) contents of consciousness
(concepts, ideas, images) that different acts of consciousness can
share. The term phenomenology retains an emphasis on description
since, most generally, phenomenology refers to a descriptive approach
to the structures of consciousness and experience as these are experienced as given, from a first-person point of view.7 In these terms,
what is essential to the structure of any experience (or intuition, the
two terms are synonymous in this context) is its ‘intentionality’. The
intentionality of an experience is the experience’s being ‘about’ some
object or other. Intentionality is perhaps the most central of all concepts in phenomenology: it is the distinctive nature of our mental
states and experiences that they are ‘about’ or are ‘directed towards’
some object in the world.
By 1913, Edmund Husserl’s first volume of Ideas had taken phenomenology in a transcendental direction. Despite his basic difference from Kant—Husserl rejects the Kantian distinction of
phenomena and noumena—Husserl borrowed the Kantian designation of transcendental idealism to designate his position.8 Husserl’s
transcendental turn involved the methodological epoché whereby we
‘bracket’ the question of the existence of the world and instead focus
upon the description of the structure of our conscious experience.9
Epoché thus reveals the subject matter of phenomenology: consciousness and its objects as they are given to it.
Husserl’s transcendental turn and his method of epoché were
immediately contested by his early followers. Both Reinach and
Ingarden resisted the epoché and the implication that questions of
7
╇ H.L. Dreyfus and M.A. Wrathall, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 2; David Woodruff Smith, ‘Phenomenology’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ed. Edward N. Zalta (Summer
2009 edn.), 1: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/phenomenology/.
8
╇ Woodruff Smith, ‘Phenomenology’; J.N. Mohanty, ‘Husserl’, The World’s Great
Philosophers, ed. R.L. Arrington (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003): 138–47.
9
╇ Woodruff Smith, ‘Phenomenology’; J. Smith, ‘Phenomenology’, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/phenom/. Last accessed
Sept. 9, 2009.
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ontology (i.e. questions relating to ‘what is’ or ‘being’) should be put
out of play. And, it is generally held (although the details of this are
complex) that it is Husserl’s epoché that Heidegger rejects. Heidegger’s
departure from Husserl was based upon the fact that he regarded our
fundamental relationship with the world to be practical and not cognitive, as Husserl had thought. Heidegger argued that our being is
fundamentally being-in-the-world and correlatively, to study our
activities we must not proceed by bracketing questions of existence.
Rather, we should interpret our activities in terms of their rootedness
in our practical engagement together with the meanings that things
(including objects, animals and events) have for us in terms of those
activities: doing this will involve focussing on the contextual relationship that we have with things (including humanly produced artefacts
and natural objects such as trees and mountains), with animals and
events and with other Daseins in our world.10
Heidegger’s thought combines both a phenomenological and hermeneutic dimension. Phenomenology was, for Heidegger, the
method of philosophy and philosophy was construed as ontology.
Phenomenology promised Heidegger a method for accessing the traditional problem of philosophy, the question of the meaning of being.
Partly because of this emphasis on meaning, phenomenological
description will be hermeneutic, involving interpretation; but it is
also hermeneutic in the sense that it involves the movement from the
first-person description of how things appear to a particular observer,
to a general understanding of how things can become present per se.11
Both of these dimensions of Heidegger’s thought take their point of
departure from the fundamental reorientation of inquiry toward the
description and interpretation of our basic state as Dasein and that
is, of our being-in-the-world.12
╇Smith, ‘Phenomenology’; Woodruff Smith, ‘Phenomenology’, 11.
╇ C. Cazeaux, ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), 68.
12
╇ There are some excellent resources available on Heidegger and phenome�
nology. See, for example, H.L. Dreyfus and M.A. Wrathall, ‘Martin Heidegger:
An Introduction to His Thought, Work and Life’, A Companion to Heidegger, ed.
H.L. Dreyfus and M.A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005): 1–15; Dreyfus and
Wrathall, Companion to Phenomenology; Woodruff Smith, ‘Phenomenology’; Smith,
‘Phenomenology’.
10
11
are animals poor in the world?
209
The Meaning of Being
The question of what occasions being to occur within human experience was the central problem that Heidegger explored in his long
career. Provisionally, his answer to this question was that it is our
finitude that makes us sensitive to being. Our understanding of being
is made possible by our finite temporality (finitude) and temporality
(time) is the meaning (meaning in the sense of ‘making possible’) of
all modes of being. It was the task of Heidegger’s magnum opus,
Being and Time, to raise the question of the meaning of being (die
Seinsfrage): the question of ‘that on the basis of which beings are
understood’.13
Heidegger never completed Being and Time, despite his suggestion
toward the end of the volume that time is the ‘horizon’ (that upon
which something is understood) of all being, and most of the extant
volume is taken up with what Heidegger called ‘fundamental ontology’—the project of analysing our mode of being as Dasein—an
inquiry that is, in an important sense, provisional to raising the question of being adequately.
Heidegger argues that the traditional approach to ontology and the
question of being in Western philosophy has passed over the distinction between ontic and ontological questions. Questions about the
various properties of beings are ontic questions whereas questions
about modes of being are ontological questions. The distinction
between the ontic and the ontological corresponds to the distinction
Heidegger draws between beings, on the one hand, and their being
on the other: this is what Heidegger calls the ontological difference.
The term ‘being’, for Heidegger, means that very relatedness to our
understanding and interest that things can have for us and it is this
‘being so related’ that is the ‘that on the basis of which’ beings are
understood.14 In other words, it is because things are related to us
that we understand them and we understand them only on the basis
of that interest. One of Heidegger’s key insights was that no matter
how many properties of a thing you discover in ontical enquiry, the
being of the thing, its ontological mode of being and ultimately its
relation to our understanding and interest, cannot be reduced to
something ontic.
13
╇Dreyfus and Wrathall, ‘Martin Heidegger’, 3; T. Sheehan, ‘Heidegger’, World’s
Great Philosophers, ed. Arrington, 105–6.
14
╇Dreyfus and Wrathall, ‘Martin Heidegger’, 3; Sheehan, ‘Heidegger’, 107.
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In Being and Time Heidegger distinguishes between the following
modes of being: Dasein, the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand.
Leaving Dasein to one side for a moment, let us explore the categories of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand by way of an
exploration of an everyday item, a memory stick, or more specifically,
my memory stick. My memory stick is an item of equipment that I
use in my daily work. If I want to know about the being of my memory stick, that is, if I want to investigate my memory stick ontologically, rather than ontically, where I might list all its properties (it’s
being black and white, its being about an inch and a half long, its
being plugged into my PC and so on), I will ask about those structures by virtue of which it is available to me (in terms of my understanding and interest). Such availability Heidegger calls the
ready-to-hand and an inquiry into the mode of being of the readyto-hand is an inquiry into the fundamental question of what it is to
be available to an agent in the first place, rather than to just occur as
present-at-hand and that is, to just occur without such a ‘worldly’
relationship to pragmatic use.15
The structures by virtue of which my memory stick is available to
me in terms of my understanding and interest include its belonging
to a context of equipment and to its referring to (or pointing at)
other items of equipment (such as computers, desks, pens and paper
and so on) within the world of my practical engagement. The category of equipment is a paradigm case of the available for Heidegger.
In contradistinction to such ready-to-hand items (items that are
structurally intelligible because of their reference to their use for and
by us) stands the mode of being of what Heidegger calls the presentat-hand, or, the occurrent. This is the mode of being that things
have when they have not been appropriated into a worldly context.
That is, present-at-hand things are things considered independently
of their relationship (or possible relationship) to our understanding
and interest. When things are taken as occurrent in such a way they
are regarded as discrete objects bearing certain properties, such as
colour, weight, height and so on. Such properties are the properties
that the objects possess independently of any reference to our pragmatic uses for them.
Ready-to-hand items can become present-at-hand when they
become objects of (quasi) scientific enquiry. For example, my
╇Dreyfus and Wrathall, ‘Martin Heidegger’, 3.
15
are animals poor in the world?
211
�
memory
stick breaks, perhaps because I’ve dropped and then stood
on it. In this situation my normally simple and fluid practical engagement with my useful tool that I use to accomplish my tasks is interrupted and I encounter a difficulty and an unanticipated situation.
The transition from ready-to-hand equipment to present-at-hand
object transpires when the sheer occurrentness of the object obtrudes
and the object presents itself as a discrete property bearing entity that
needs to be fixed.
Turning to Dasein: when Heidegger conducts his ontological
enquiry into human being he does not proceed by listing our objective properties, such as, for example, our Encephalisation Quotient
(observed brain volume) or our bipedal gait. Rather, he inquires after
those conditions or structures that make it possible to be human in
the first place. One such structure that Heidegger identifies is what
he calls being-in-the-world: human beings—or Dasein, literally
being-there—always already exist in a world and are practically
engaged with that world. Heidegger will argue that the tradition of
Western philosophy has passed over both Dasein and world in the
senses that he understands them. Despite Heidegger’s broadly transcendental analysis in Being and Time (the inquiry into the structures
making possible our interaction with available objects and into the
structures making possible our existence qua Dasein) Dasein is not a
subject in the traditional sense. That is, Dasein is not a subject that
‘has’ mental states and experiences, where such states and experiences are taken as quasi thing-like and self-identical in and of themselves and that are somehow added to (as in, had by) a subject ‘in
their mind’ that is itself considered independently of the configuration of that subject’s environing world. Such a perspective has developed out of intellectualist accounts of the nature of our engagement
with the world, a perspective that for Heidegger passes over our primary manner of being practically engaged and existentially immersed
in our world.
Co-ordinately, the tradition of philosophy has passed over the
world in Heidegger’s sense of the term. The reason for this is that the
tradition has concentrated on entities within the world in their present-at-hand state as objects with properties that are not intrinsically
meaningful, being essentially related to our understanding and interest. In this context, the world itself has been seen as just the totality
of such entities. However, phenomenological insight and ontological
analysis show us that objects, as they are encountered by us as useful
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to our projects and tasks, are constituted by our meaningful engagement with them and the reduction of worldly things to brute objects
with properties passes over their being so constituted. Because of
this, understanding entities satisfactorily will require a (transcendental) hermeneutico-phenomenological approach to them.
As Wrathall and Dreyfus understand availability, an object, such
as a piece of equipment, is available when it is ‘defined in terms of its
place in a context of equipment, typical activities in which it is used,
and typical purposes or goals for which it is used’ and when it ‘lends
itself to such use readily and easily, without need for reflection’.16
Getting over the idea that the world is just a totality of more or less
meaningless objects, and that we are discreet subjects who are supposed to come to know these objects independently of our practical
engagement with them as available, is constitutive of our readiness to
deal with the world and Dasein in Heidegger’s sense of these terms.
The world, as Heidegger understands it, is the very basis on which the
beings/entities that we meet in our experience can be involved with
one another and with us and it is our acquaintance with the world in
this sense that makes it possible for us to be engaged with (act on,
think about and even experience) the entities that we encounter; and
it is in precisely these terms that Heidegger will argue for the poverty
of animals in their environments and for the complete worldlessness
of objects, such as stones, trees and mountains.
Heidegger argues that we are ‘delivered over to’ or ‘thrown’ into
our world, which despite being ours is not simply or solely something
made by us. This is the other side of the transcendental coin for
Heidegger: while it is the case that we ‘constitute’ objects and the
world by virtue of our practical engagement within it, it is equally the
case that how we find ourselves in the world together with the world’s
cultural configuration is not simply and individually up to us. Our
moods play a part in determining how entities will matter to us in the
16
╇Dreyfus and Wrathall, ‘Martin Heidegger’, 1–15. This is the positive account of
objects that Heidegger offers from the point of view of fundamental ontology.
Objects considered with reference to Dasein’s understanding and interest are available qua ready-to-hand; objects considered independently of that understanding and
interest are present-to-hand. Later, when objects are understood as ‘worldless’
Heidegger does not mean that they are to be considered independently from our
understanding and interest and so as present-to-hand. What he means is that objects
are without world in the sense that they cannot form worlds; that is, they have no
intentional relatedness (and are not capable of intentional relatedness) to anything
whatsoever.
are animals poor in the world?
213
first place17 and Dasein’s basic state of being-in-the-world means that
because we (qua Dasein) are ‘always already’ in it, we will find ourselves in the world in a particular way.
As Da-sein, we have our ‘there’ (Da) ‘to be’ (sein): Dasein has its
world to act in and to inhabit in a particular way. Dasein’s general
state of being disposed to things in the world is structured by and
revealed to us by our moods. Our moods are ontological: they structure our comportment towards things by the way in which they dispose us towards them; this is called by Heidegger our ‘attunement’.
Our attunement goes hand in hand with our understanding of what
and how things are and our understanding is a manner of projecting
into possibilities of being (being a carpenter, a telephone operator, a
philosopher) rather than of conceptually grasping possibilities in the
form of an abstract idea. Such existential projective understanding
grounds our intellectual grasp and experiential take on things.
My action in the world reveals my general understanding of how
things relate to each other and to my possibilities; my action reveals
the general ‘know how’ (both in the sense of action and in the sense
of ‘knowing how’ things hang together) that inhabits my understanding. This is not a matter of an explicit conceptual grasp on things but
is rather a matter of practically engaged agency: our understanding,
in Heidegger’s sense, is manifest in our ‘projecting into’ or ‘pressing
into’ the possibilities for action that are afforded to me by how things
in general are related to each other as a meaningful whole.18 For
example, the possibility of being a teacher is a possibility that I find
myself in. But, while there are a variety of ways in which I might
practice my ‘teacher-being’, the range of ways that it is possible for
me to be a teacher in my historico-cultural context is limited; and in
being a teacher, the way I do, I ‘project into’ a variety of the possibilities of being a teacher that are ‘opened-up’ to me by my world. In
such a way, my attunement and understanding enable things to matter to me in my world.
Art and Truth
It might be useful to contextualise some of the foregoing discussion
in terms of that paradigmatically human achievement, art. Art, for
17
18
╇Dreyfus and Wrathall, ‘Martin Heidegger’, 5.
╇Dreyfus and Wrathall, ‘Martin Heidegger’, 6.
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Heidegger, is fundamentally historical and in his account of it he is
interested in the effect that art has—what art does that distinguishes
it from other practices—and his central answer to this is that the
work that art accomplishes is the ‘setting-into-work of truth’.19
I said that Heidegger’s central problematic is the question: what
occasions being to occur within human experience? The occurrence
of being within human experience is called by Heidegger the disclosure, emergence, unconcealment, truth of, and meaning of, being and
all of these refer to the same phenomenon: the occurrence of being
within finite human understanding.20 The notion of disclosure captures Heidegger’s meaning well and it happens at three levels starting
from the most fundamental to the least: ‘world-disclosure’, ‘pre-predicative disclosure’ and ‘predicative disclosure’. World-disclosure is
the original opening up of a field of significance (the Da, ‘the there’,
the world) for Dasein. It is this opening up of a field of significance
that allows the beings that we meet in our experience to be meaningfully present to us. That is, world-disclosure allows beings to be
known by us pre-predicatively (pre-linguistically or pre-conceptually) and to be used by us within the various worlds of our practical
engagement and concern. Combined, world-disclosure and the prepredicative disclosedness qua availability of beings, enables predicative disclosure. Such foundational levels of disclosure enable the kind
of disclosure characteristic of our conceptual judgements and theoretical comportment towards things (including ideas). ‘Truth’ in the
traditional sense of the correspondence between our ideas and states
of affairs in the world operates at this level. However, this traditional
correspondence theory of truth is inadequate and Heidegger argues
that there is a more profound ‘essence of truth’ qua world-disclosure
and that it is this world-disclosure that makes such conceptual truth
possible.21 Heidegger invokes the ancient Greek word for truth, aletheia (unconcealedness), to capture his sense of truth.
Important to understanding Heidegger’s take on art is his claim
that being—in the sense of the basic general structure of what there
is in the world—is only ever revealed to practically engaged agents
within a particular socio-historical context, and the truth in art is
evident when art displays what Heidegger calls the strife between
19
╇T.E. Wartenberg, ‘Heidegger’, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. B.
Gaut and D. McIver Lopes (2nd edn., London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 150.
20
╇Sheehan, ‘Heidegger’, 106.
21
╇Sheehan, ‘Heidegger’, 106–11.
are animals poor in the world?
215
world and earth. This is Heidegger’s way of expressing the tension
between disclosure and concealment as aspects of the work of art.22
The notion of world in play is that of a context of significance and of
practical agency. So, the notion of the world that Heidegger is
employing is the notion of the world that you come across in statements of the form ‘the world of the shop keeper’, ‘the world of the
industrialist’, ‘the world of the farmer’, where the notion of the world
takes in the basic features and dimensions of the lives of those shop
keepers, industrialists and farmers.
Let’s look at the most famous of Heidegger’s examples from his
essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1936), Van Gogh’s Pair of
Shoes (1887).23 In his reading of this painting Heidegger argues that
Van Gogh’s painting reveals the world of the peasant woman, whom
Heidegger has inferred to be the owner of the shoes represented by
Van Gogh. He says:
From out of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the shoes the
toil of the worker’s tread stares forth… The shoes vibrate with the silent
call of the earth, its silent gift of the ripening grain, its unexplained
self-refusal in the wintry field… This equipment [the shoes] belongs to
the earth and finds protection in the world of the peasant woman… In
virtue of this reliability the peasant woman is admitted into the silent
call of the earth; in virtue of the reliability of the equipment she is
certain of her world.24
Looking at the represented shoes we see them as work shoes of some
kind. They are hobnail boots. Heidegger’s view is that they belong to
a peasant woman presumably because they look like ones he’s seen
such women wearing in the Black Forest. These shoes refer to other
aspects of the woman’s life, and in fact to the entire world of the
peasant woman: how she goes about her daily business of sowing
plants, how she is aware of the subtle changes in the weather and
how such changes will impact on her life and so on. The shoes also
reveal themselves to be reliable in the life of this peasant woman.25
In sum, the world of the peasant woman is revealed to us as a hermeneutic totality as we read the painting and this reveals the basic
╇ Wartenberg, ‘Heidegger’.
╇Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1936), Poetry, Language,
Thought, Martin Heidegger, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row,
1971)
24
╇ Cited in Wartenberg, ‘Heidegger’, 151.
25
╇ Wartenberg, ‘Heidegger’, 152.
22
23
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character that the beings that the peasant woman meets in her experience have for her—their equipmentality—in her world.
Van Gogh’s painting reveals the world of the peasant woman to an
audience. But, it also reveals that world in terms of its emergence
from the earth. In this context we can think of the earth as that out
of which the world is fashioned, but not in terms that would relegate
the earth to passive matter. Rather, earth relates to concealment in
Heidegger’s terms and so, a little loosely, refers to the pre-cultural
ground that tends to resist our attempts to establish coherent worlds
upon it. For this reason, there is strife between world and earth,
unconcealment and concealment. In his later writings from the 1930s
on, Heidegger takes the view that there have been successive worlds
that have unfolded over the epochs of what he calls the ‘history of
being’. Each epoch is constituted by a different world in Heidegger’s
sense and the succession of different worlds is accounted for by the
fact that the earth continues to resist our collective attempts to subdue it and to incorporate it wholesale into a particular historical
world.26 In general, however, works of art illuminate the style of a
particular cultural-historical world.27
The Poverty of Animals
So what does this all have to do with animals and anthropocentrism?
Well, on the basis of his account of rich in the world, world-forming
Dasein, Heidegger constructs his account of impoverished worldpoor animals and worldless objects. The practice of creating art is a
central aspect of world-formation for Heidegger and it is just that
╇ Wartenberg, ‘Heidegger’, 154.
╇ H.L. Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger’s Ontology of Art’, A Companion to Heidegger, eds.
Dreyfus and Wrathall, 414. Interpretation and criticism of what I have intimated
here under the heading ‘Art and Truth’ tend to occur in discussions of Heidegger’s
so called ‘later philosophy’. As well as discussing these themes various authors also
critically address points of interpretation such as the ontico-ontological difference,
the question of language, poetry, technology, humanism and ethics, representational
thinking and the thorny issue of Heidegger’s politics. An excellent first port of call
on Heidegger generally, including on some of these issues, is Richard Polt’s
Heidegger: An Introduction, (London: UCL Press, 1999). For a discussion of
Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical anthropocentrism’ that picks up on some of these themes
the reader should consult M. Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from
Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
26
27
are animals poor in the world?
217
aspect that allows animals and objects to bear the meaning that they
do within a specific historico-cultural context:
Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging
above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence… Tree
and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive
shapes and thus come to appear as what they are… The temple-work,
standing there, opens up a world… The temple, in its standing there, first
gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.28
Art has a function in founding civilisations for Heidegger and, further to this, art enables the happening of truth. Great art, for
Heidegger, is political.29 Great works of art (including works of architecture) are events that are central to Dasein’s world formation. In
communal terms, works of art establish the meaning of being that
constitutes a community. Works of art have a ‘focal function’: they
focus and direct the lives of individuals in a community. For this
reason artworks on Heidegger’s account are what Dreyfus has called
cultural paradigms.30 Cultural paradigms define and determine how
beings can show up as meaningful for the individuals that make up
a historical community and their political role is to inaugurate the
history of such a community.
Insofar as art belongs to world-forming Dasein it is an existential
possibility that is not open to animals. That should be obvious.
However, it is the notion of the ‘focal’ that is central to my understanding of how Heidegger constructs his account of animals and of
╇ Heidegger, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, 42–43.
╇ In my Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being I suggest that ‘great’
art is political for Heidegger because it puts up for decision the ultimate values constitutive of a community. Naturally, a concern with so called ‘great’ art is something
that we are not entitled to remain silent on. Recently, LaCapra has suggested that
oppositions between ‘fine or high and popular culture’ has no place in Heidegger’s
‘Origin’ essay (Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 136). LaCapra also notes that animals are on
the side of ‘earth’ in Heidegger’s account of the ‘strife’ between world and earth,
unconcealment and concealment, in that work (135). In contrast to the animal that
is ‘open’ only by a small degree, Dasein is essentially open to being, to the ‘as’ structure of things (to their meaningful presence ‘as’ this or that to Dasein’s understanding and interest). As LaCapra notes, the other thinker who must be mentioned in
connection to ‘the open’ is Giorgio Agamben, author of a work bearing the title, The
Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002). See LaCapra, History and Its Limits, 128. For a discussion of Agamben see
Calarco, Zoographies.
30
╇ H.L. Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology,
and politics’, Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Guignon, 289–316.
28
29
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objects. The focal function of art—in that it stands at the centre of the
network of relations and possible understandings that Dasein has of
itself and of the objects, animals and events that it encounters in its
world—is analogous to the focal function that a particular being
takes on in the philosophy of analogy. A central aspect of Heidegger’s
approach to the history of philosophy was bound up with what he
called ‘destruction’. His destructive readings of thinkers in the history of philosophy is a positive method, intended to loosen up the
concepts that the tradition has produced in order to get to the ‘fundamental experiences’ from which these concepts arose. Destruction
enabled Heidegger to engage in discreet reappropriations of concepts
drawn from the history of philosophy mutatis mutandis in terms of
his own project. One such concept that Heidegger appropriated was
the scholastic concept of analogia entis (analogy of being). Heidegger
constructs his account of animals and objects on the basis of a reappropriation of the concept of analogy. This is the metaphysical
dimension of his anthropocentrism.
There are three broad kinds of analogical reasoning in Western
philosophy: analogy of proportionality, analogy of attribution and
analogy of participation.31 Analogy of proportionality operates in
terms of a similarity of relations. Thus, by analogy, ‘A is to B’ as ‘C is
to D’: so, the term ‘intelligence’ is used analogically in this sense
when we say that ‘the dog’s intelligence is to the dog as the man’s
intelligence is to the man’. Analogy of attribution involves a relation
between two things where one is primary and the other secondary.
The classic example of this kind of analogy is to do with health: that
is, the term ‘healthy’ is analogical when applied to an individual and
that individual’s medication: the individual has health in the primary
sense and the medication secondarily in that it contributes causally
to the health of the individual. In these terms the term ‘health’ has
just the kind of focal function that we saw above: it is the focal centre
of all instances of ‘health’; the man is healthy in the primary/focal
sense; his diet is healthy in that it promotes health; his activity is
healthy in that it promotes health and so on. Analogy of participation
operates in terms of the similarity of God and His creatures: so, God’s
31
╇E. Jennifer Ashworth, ‘Medieval Theories of Analogy’, Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2009 edn.), 1–2: http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/fall2009/entries/analogy-medieval/.
are animals poor in the world?
219
creatures are wise because their creaturely wisdom imperfectly
reflects the wisdom of God.32
The medieval scholastic philosophers established what they called
the ‘degrees of being’ in terms of an analogy between different kinds
of beings: the highest being in these terms was the divine being (summum ens), whose actuality contains no potentiality and whose
essence is identical with its existence. Fundamentally, it is just such
an analogical hierarchy that Heidegger establishes in his account of
Dasein, animals and objects, and such an analogy operates on the
basis of the focal nature of a particular being, in this case Dasein. On
Heidegger’s account, both the being of the animal and of the object
is determined by an analogy with Dasein’s way of being. Objects are
‘world-less’ and animals are ‘poor in world’ and the objects’ lack and
the animals poverty are to the object and animal just as Dasein’s
wealth is to it (analogy of proportionality) and both of these determinations can only operate in terms of an analogy with world-forming
Dasein.
Dasein is ‘world-forming’ and animals, by analogy to this, are
‘poor in the world’.33 Taken together animals constitute a ‘class’ in a
metaphysical sense in contradistinction to Dasein: as Heidegger says
‘Every animal and every species of animal as such is just as perfect
and complete as any other’.34 Metaphysically, animals do not admit
of variation and are not differentially sensitive to being. Again, by
analogy, stones and other such objects are worldless. Heidegger says:
Being worldless and being poor in world both represent a kind of nothaving of world. Poverty in world implies a deprivation of world.
Worldlessness on the other hand is constitutive of the stone in the
sense that the stone cannot even be deprived of something like world.35
‘Not-having’ is a relational concept and is intelligible only in terms
of ‘having’; animal-being and object-being are intelligible only in
terms of Dasein’s way of being as world-forming. The animal’s world
is to it as Dasein’s world is to Dasein but at a lower level (analogy of
proportionality): the animal’s world imperfectly reflects Dasein’s
world. In these terms Heidegger is scaling down to the animal just
╇ Ashworth, ‘Medieval Theories of Analogy’, 1–2.
╇Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 196.
34
╇ Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 194.
35
╇ Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 196.
32
33
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as the medieval theologian would scale up from humanity to God:
the animal is engaged with its world but in a less full way than Dasein
(analogy of participation). On these terms the stone isn’t engaged at
all and so by analogy is without world. Both animals and Dasein are
pragmatically engaged with their world but Dasein is capable of creating new worlds, by virtue of distinctive practices such as art and
politics, whereas the animal isn’t so enabled: for this reason, animals
are impoverished in relation to rich Dasein and Heidegger has constructed a hierarchical scala naturae, with Dasein holding pride of
place (analogy of attribution): Dasein ‘has’ world in the primary
sense; animals secondarily and objects not at all.
As I have previously asserted, Heidegger’s anthropocentric presupposition is that animals are understood by him to be impoverished precisely in terms of their inability to transcend the environment
of their immediate and pragmatic concerns. It is precisely in terms of
this presupposition that he constructs his hierarchical vision of reality. He says:
If we now look more closely at the distinction between poverty in world
and world-formation… this distinction reveals itself as one of degree
in terms of levels of completeness with respect to the accessibility of
beings in each case. And this immediately supplies us with a concept
of world: world initially signifies the sum total of beings accessible to
man or animals alike, variable as it is in range and depth of penetrability. Thus ‘poor in world’ is inferior with respect to the greater value of
‘world-forming’.36
Heidegger later defines ‘worldlessness’ in terms of not having access
‘to those beings (as beings) amongst which this particular being with
this specific manner of being is’: access to this ‘as’ dimension of
beings is Dasein’s priority.37 The distinction Heidegger articulates
between these three ‘classes’ of beings is constructed in terms of the
classes’ respective accessibility to beings as beings. Of the three
classes identified it is only Dasein that can relate to beings as beings:
that is, it is only Dasein who can relate to being. Because Dasein is
an incomplete ongoing project it has a relationship of being to being.
On Heidegger’s account animals remain open to a degree—determined analogically in relation to Dasein—but in their openness they
are taken in by and become absorbed in what Heidegger calls their
╇ Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 193.
╇ Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 197.
36
37
are animals poor in the world?
221
‘encircling ring’ of habitual and contextually defined activity. By contrast, Dasein remains ontologically open to beings in their being and
is able to transcend their immediate pragmatic engagement and form
worlds: only Dasein can be ‘the Da’, that place where being is
revealed. Dasein is ontological in a way that the animal and the object
cannot be.
speciesism as anthropocentrism
223
speciesism as a variety of anthropocentrism
Tony Milligan
The Ambiguities of ‘Speciesism’
If the charge of speciesism is to be more than an indication of strong
disapproval then its application will need to be constrained in various
respects.1 We might regard an account of these constraints as an
account of adequacy conditions for any acceptable theory of just
what speciesism involves. One obvious constraint is that the charge
is applicable only to genuine instances of prejudice (and prejudice
of a particular sort). It is not applicable to instances of justifiable
partiality (if there are any of the latter). When, for example, Colin
Blakemore defends animal experimentation by appeal to a form partiality that can be justified, and then accepts that this position is
‘speciesist’, he is attempting to use the term in a non-standard
(because value-free) way.2 Speciesism is, in what have become our
familiar ways of talking and writing about it, an indefensible bias.
In what follows I will attempt to make sense of speciesism more
specifically as a form of anthropocentrism, and anthropocentrism, in
turn, as a difficult-to-define prejudice in favour of humans. This
approach preserves the requirement that only prejudice is at issue, as
well as a requirement that the prejudice in question is of a restricted
and specialised sort. What may make this approach problematic is
that formal definitions of ‘speciesism’ are usually set out in terms that
are species-neutral. That is to say, in terms of a fault that could belong
to any sort of creature. And this level of availability would rule out
an equation with anthropocentrism on the grounds that the latter is,
by definition, very clearly a species-restricted fault. It is a human fault
and only a human fault.
Consider, for example, the single most influential deployment of
the concept of speciesism, in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation.
1
╇ The term ‘speciesism’ was originally used in a privately published pamphlet:
Richard Ryder Speciesism (Oxford, 1970).
2
╇ Colin Blakemore, ‘Animal Experimentation, Ethics and Medical Research’,
What Scientists Think, ed. Jeremy Stangroom (London: Routledge, 2005), 131.
224
tony milligan
‘Speciesism—the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no
better term—is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members
of other species’.3 This is clearly a species-neutral definition. Similarly,
Singer remarks that ‘speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species’.4
Again, it is clear that creatures other than humans could be guilty of
the fault in question.
Even so, the whole point of Singer’s work is to present a critique
of our flawed human attitudes and practice with the moral gravity of
the speciesist charge being conveyed by a series of analogies with
other specifically-human failings, notably racism and sexism and (a
familiar parallel that Singer understandably tends to be cautious
about) anti-Semitism.5 To point out this restricted application of
‘speciesism’ is not to deny that we might encounter interesting creatures from elsewhere, creatures who happened to be moral agents in
much the same way that we are moral agents, and that we might then
extend the application of some or all of these concepts (‘speciesism’,
‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ but probably not ‘anti-Semitism’) in order to
make sense of their beliefs and actions. But it is no great stretch of
the imagination to suggest that the sense of what would be said under
such fictional circumstances would largely depend upon how these
concepts are deployed in their more familiar human setting.
Other features of Singer’s definition, if accepted, make the classification of speciesism as a form of anthropocentrism more plausible.
Speciesism, according to Singer, is prejudice in favour of one’s own
species. And this would seem deliberately to exclude familiar forms
of non-anthropocentric prejudice or bias. For example, we might
regard it as a matter of prejudice that a pet owner happily eats cows,
pigs and sheep while being repelled by the idea of eating cats or dogs.
Similarly, an uneasy defender of animal experimentation might point
out that it is mostly rodents who are experimented upon (mice in
particular) and not the larger mammals that we treat more kindly,
╇Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (2nd edn., London: Pimlico, 1995), 6.
╇Singer, Animal Liberation, 9.
5
╇ At its most controversial the parallel between species prejudice and antiSemitism extends into a comparison between industrialised animal slaughter and the
Holocaust. See, for example chapters 3 and 4 of J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
(London: Vintage, 2004), especially 94, for this troubling comparison.
3
4
speciesism as anthropocentrism
225
such as livestock. Rodents, qua vermin, are regarded as a more
acceptable target.
Preferential treatment of the kind that is structured into our separation of animals into pets, livestock, lab animals, and vermin, is not
classified by Singer as speciesism, even though it involves a hierarchy
of favouring and disadvantaging. He treats it as a matter of holding
‘conflicting attitudes’, i.e. of cognitive dissonance.6 And there is a
good and obvious reason to make this move. The inconsistency or
fickleness involved in, for example, defending dogs but licensing
more unrestricted harm to creatures that we do not bond with so
readily, may be problematic but it is not closely analogous to either
racism or sexism.
Species prejudice that is anthropocentric provides a much closer
analogue to prejudice in favour of our own supposed kind. But, if we
follow this line of thought, we may then wonder just why we need to
have a concept of speciesism at all when the concept of anthropocentrism is already to hand. A terminology of ‘speciesism’ may strike us
as a refugee from the 1970s when philosophical debate became
entangled with various forms of political militancy that may now
seem remote. Admittedly, there are advocates of what Rob Boddice
calls ‘a politics of species egalitarianism’ for whom ‘speciesism’ is a
compelling charge.7 But Catherine Osborne is not alone in preferring
the terminology of ‘anthropocentric pride’, noting that ‘The popular
term is “speciesism”, but since the associations of that term (and the
analogies that go with it) are abhorrent to me, I shall repudiate it in
favour of more traditional vocabulary that does the job better’.8 A
partial answer to this concern may be given by flagging up the obvious difference between prejudicially favouring humans over other
creaturely species and prejudicially favouring humans over anything
whatsoever (creatures, trees, mountains, flora, and so on). A special
kind of work is done when we classify only the former as speciesism.
Our conceptual repertoire is added to rather than diminished.
Yet this classificatory move still leaves us with the thorny problem
of the appropriateness of the supporting and politically-laden
�analogies with racism and sexism, the analogies which are the real
target of Osborne’s terminological restriction. Even so, our under╇Singer, Animal Liberation, 214.
╇Rob Boddice ‘The End of Anthropocentrism’, this volume, 3.
8
╇ Catherine Osborne, Dumb Beasts & Dead Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23, 23n27.
6
7
226
tony milligan
standing of the narrower prejudice that is (or at least can be) involved
in humans favouring humans over other creatures, may be informed
by our appreciation of what makes any sort of prejudice a form of
anthropocentrism. Following Richard Sylvan and David Bennett, I
will, provisionally, formulate this as a matter of endorsing a Sole
Value Assumption (that humans are the only bearers of intrinsic
value) or endorsing a Greater Value Assumption (that humans are of
more value than anything else).9 The former entails the latter, but it
is so strong that an idiosyncratically dismissive opinion of the nonhuman is required for its endorsement. Be that as it may, I will take
it that the identification of these assumptions is a good starting point
for a theory of anthropocentrism, but it may be useful to revise the
formulation so that it covers actions or beliefs that are normatively
equivalent to endorsing either assumption. That is to say, anthropocentrism involves acting and reasoning as if at least one of these
assumptions held. We need not require that those who are anthropocentric must hold specific and unambiguous views on the philosophically vexed question of intrinsic value. In line with this, we might
provisionally regard speciesism as the endorsement of (or action in
line with) any belief whatsoever that is normatively equivalent to
regarding humans as the only creaturely bearers of value or as creatures whose value as humans systematically trumps the value of all
other creatures.
The Argument from Marginal Cases
So far I have largely taken it for granted that humans favouring
humans simply because they are humans really is a matter of prejudice and is not a rationally justifiable or defensible partiality. The
standard argument to establish this is the well-known argument from
marginal cases and variants can be found in the writings of Peter
Singer (a utilitarian formulation) and Tom Regan (a rights-based
formulation). Setting aside differences of detail, the crux of this argument runs as follows: in order to be rationally defensible the favouring of all humans over all non-humans must depend upon the
identification of some morally relevant property that all humans have
and that all non-humans lack. Or, in slightly more nuanced terms,
╇Richard Sylvan and David Bennett, The Greening of Ethics (Cambridge: White
Horse Press, 1993).
9
speciesism as anthropocentrism
227
it must depend upon the identification of a property that all humans
have to a greater degree than all non-humans. But, once we have
abandoned the idea that all humans have souls and that only humans
have souls we are in a position to recognise that there is no such
property. Humans are not all conscious, rational, strongly self-aware,
equipped for language use, and so on. In a terminology favoured by
Tom Regan, some humans are ‘moral patients’ rather than ‘moral
agents’.10 Whatever morally relevant property or group of properties
we happen to specify as the justification for treating all humans as if
they were more intrinsically important, we will always be able to find
some human who lacks it. Consequently, the treatment of all humans
as if they were bearers of greater value than all non-humans, is without a supporting reason. Some unsettling analogies with familiar
forms of prejudice may then be appropriate.
To put matters in more concrete terms, let us suppose that we
have the opportunity to save the life of a cognitively impaired human
(with a restricted capacity for thought, experience, appreciation of
time, and so on) or to save the life of a cognitively comparable cat or
dog. Unless we start to factor-in external considerations (such as the
distress of the human’s friends or relatives) our reasons for saving the
non-human will be just as good as those for saving the human. And
even if we do factor in such external considerations, it is possible that
some non-human animal may be missed by other creatures (of whatever sort) while some human may have no friends or relatives at all.
In the latter case favouring the non-human would seem warranted
and favouring the human would seem to be guided by a groundless
partiality or, more simply, a prejudice.
Even so, a focus upon marginal cases is consistent with acceptance
that, whenever there is a choice to be made, developmentally normal
humans with the usual set of cognitive competences (i.e. the usual set
of cognitive properties) ought to be saved at the expense of other
creatures who lack these same, morally important competences or at
least do not have them to the same degree. However, on this account,
the cognitively normal humans ought to be saved because of their
competences and not because they are humans.
This has not always struck supporters of animal rights, liberation
or emancipation as an adequate philosophical basis for a robust pro╇Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (2nd ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles:
California University Press, 2004), 151–6.
10
228
tony milligan
animal political platform. Singer’s position, in particular, has come
under attack as a recipe for mere ‘welfarism’ as opposed to the more
politically-ambitious ‘emancipationism’ associated with Gary
Francione.11 In sympathy with the latter, Joan Dunayer has suggested
that unless we revise our estimation of non-human competences the
Singer approach will yield a form of speciesism because the competences taken to be particularly important will be those characteristically associated with humans.12 But, while the valuing of such
competences could be, in some cases, a symptom of a species-based
prejudice in favour of humans, it seems a little odd to make it definitional of such a species-based prejudice as opposed to a prejudice of
some other (presumably competence-based) sort.
Moreover, in Singer’s case the attention to characteristically
human competences does not happen to involve such a competencebased prejudice. The competences in question do not turn out to be
important in their own right. They are taken to matter only because
of the impact that they have upon the formation of preferences and
upon the experiencing of pleasure and pain. And pleasure, pain and
preference are not associated by Singer with humans as opposed to
creatures in general. (In recent times Singer has suggested that even
fish may feel pain and any angler will testify that they have a preference not to be caught.)13 Here we might be inclined to say that there
is something different and more important about the preferences,
joys and pain of creatures with particularly complex neural structures, but this is not a move that Singer needs to make. His position
can be underpinned just as readily by appeal to the importance of
strictly species-neutral considerations.
A more widespread unease with the argument from marginal cases,
or at least with its ethico-political consequences, arises from its
undermining of appeals to humanity. But there are at least some
grounds for holding that a concern for humanity may be genuinely
unimportant. In support of such a view we might consider a fictional
situation in which humans and non-humans have significantly different genetic codes but similar competences. Under such circumstances
11
╇ For a contrast between ‘abolitionist’ and ‘welfarist’ positions see Gary
�
Francione’s
Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
12
╇ Joan Dunayer Speciesism (Derwood, MD: Ryce Publishing, 2004).
13
╇Peter Singer and Jim Mason, Eating: What We Eat and Why It Matters
(Â�London: Arrow Books, 2006), 130–1.
speciesism as anthropocentrism
229
the non-humans would clearly not be any less valuable than you and
I are now. And, in the light of this consideration, systematically
favouring all humans over all non-humans, by appeal to the special
standing of the former, may genuinely begin to look like a form of
prejudice.14
Considerations of this sort may make our humanity seem like the
wrong kind of consideration to focus upon. But while Singer and
Regan have been sympathetic to the marginalisation or dismissal of
appeals to humanity as morally-irrelevant, ethicists from other traditions have exercised caution. Favouring humans because they are
humans can be a matter of prejudice but there may still be room to
accept this and allow that, in some contexts, appeals to a shared
humanity may appropriately be made and need not amount to a
prejudice of any sort. This is a quite different position from Colin
Blakemore’s view cited above. It is not equivalent to the suggestion
that speciesism is not a matter of prejudice. It might instead be taken
to subvert the whole idea of speciesism (a view sympathetic to the
approach of Catherine Osborne) or else (the option I favour) to
require that it be constrained in ways that continue to allow familiar
appeals to humanity to play a legitimate role in at least some moral
deliberations.
In line with either of these alternatives, the relational property of
being human is itself to be regarded as a morally relevant property,
one that all humans have and that all other creatures lack. A familiar
point in support of this view, and one geared to appeal to those who
favour a radical (even emancipatory) change in our treatment of animals, is that some of the most appalling instances of mistreatment are
regularly condemned not simply as cruel but, more specifically, as
cruel and inhuman (or, in a modified form, inhumane). Condemnation
of this sort is premised not only upon the assumption that humanity
matters, but also upon the idea that it is in some respects vulnerable.
It may not be lost (after all, even moral monsters remain human) but
it can be compromised or betrayed, most notably by cruelty and a
hardening of our hearts towards extreme suffering. It would be easy
to dismiss this view as a beefed-up way for speciesists to show that
14
╇ This is a variation upon the scenario in C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
(London: Harper Collins, 2005). However, it should be noted that Lewis held that
our shared humanity was important in a special way and that certain kinds of action
involved its betrayal. For the latter, see his final volume in the same trilogy, That
Hideous Strength (London: Harper Collins, 2005).
230
tony milligan
they too can worry about animal welfare. And historically, it has been
associated with the unattractive view that what we are vulnerable to
is a reversion to the bestial. But such a prejudicial imagery (with its
inbuilt sense of animal inferiority) may miss the mundane and often
banal nature of cruelty, particularly in our own times, when dreadful
harms rarely require us to unleash ourselves like blonde beasts.
Virtue ethicists and Wittgensteinians such as Cora Diamond and
Raimond Gaita are among those who have situated a continuing concern for humanity within the broader context of a metaethical concern about the danger of a loss of concepts, or at least the danger that
concepts may be reduced to coded versions of claims about rights
and consequences.15 They have favoured a difficult-to-articulate view
that our humanity matters, that it is morally relevant and to be cherished. And they have done so while adopting significantly different
attitudes towards non-humans. Diamond is sympathetic to the idea
that speciesism is a serious ethical problem, one that may require a
personal response. Gaita’s attitude is more ambivalent.16 What they
share is unease with the argument from marginal cases and its rejection of our intuitions that being human and responding to humanity
matter. While we might be tempted to say that such intuitions are
only intuitions, this is a view that many ethicists who work on animals and/or the environment will be poorly placed to endorse. It is a
bad idea to reject the importance of intuitions if our concern is to
curtail anthropocentrism, given that much of the philosophical work
carried out within environmental and animal ethics over the past
forty years has relied heavily upon thought experiments of one sort
or another, and upon the related assumption that intuitions drawn
out and articulated by such thought experiments can play an important role in moral deliberation.17
Be that as it may, sharing unease about the argument from marginal cases is not the same as having a deep and effective objection to
╇ Cora Diamond ‘Losing your Concepts’, Ethics, 98 (1988), 255–77.
╇ Cora Diamond, ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, The Realistic Spirit:
�Witt��gen�stein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991);
�Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London: Routledge, 2004),
ch. 8, and also his more popular work, A Common Humanity (London: Routledge,
2002), 259ff.
17
╇ The classic example of an environmental ethicist appealing to thought expe�
riment and intuition is Richard Routley’s Last Man Argument in his paper ‘Is There
a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?’, Environmental Ethics: An Anthology,
eds. A. Light and H. Rolston (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
15
16
speciesism as anthropocentrism
231
it. Here, I speak of what is deep and suggest that this is the territory
that needs to be explored. What jars about the argument from marginal cases is not just the way that it cuts across familiar intuitions,
but rather, what jars is the way that it cuts across intuitions that are
of a particularly deep sort. They are intuitions of a kind that we could
only give up if we were prepared to accept a major upheaval in our
understanding of who we are. While we may be long-overdue such
an upheaval, it would nonetheless involve rethinking the whole of
our being.18 And to say this is to accept that while Singer, Regan and
other defenders of unreconstructed versions of the argument from
marginal cases have in recent years, been charged with mere ‘welfarism’ by ‘abolitionist’ critics, their alleged moderation is superficial.
Their challenge to the significance of being human runs deep.
In line with this view that what is at stake goes beyond the appropriateness of this or that politicised analogy, we can distinguish
between a class of standard responses to the argument from marginal
cases and a challenge of a deeper sort. The standard responses usually
involve one of two critical strategies. The first is stipulative and holds
that decisions in marginal cases ought to ignore the particularities of
the case in hand. Instead they should be based upon our assessment
of the general, regular or normal competences of humans by contrast
with those of non-humans.19 This position may have some justification of a precautionary sort. Inter-species comparisons are notoriously difficult to make and there may often be something that we can
miss about particular cognitively impaired humans when compared
to cognitively normal non-humans. But at least in some cases there
are no grounds for suspecting that the humans have any latent or
hidden properties. In some cases things are just as they seem to be
and the discovery of this need not be epistemically demanding.
Under such conditions (and they may be the norm) there will be no
need for a precautionary principle.
Against this, let us imagine that we have found what appears to be
a good reason for allowing that decisions should always be based
upon an assessment of the usual human competences by comparison
with the usual competences of various non-human creatures. Strange
consequences would then result, at least under hypothetical circum18
╇See De Jonge, ‘An Alternative to Anthropocentrism’, this volume, for one
approach to just such a rethinking.
19
╇Tibor Machan, Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature’s Favourite,
(�Lan�ham: Rowman &Littlefield, 2004).
232
tony milligan
stances. Let us suppose that we encounter a highly educated, literate,
urbane and witty ape, a character straight out of the pages of Kafka,
or else the product of some unusual sequence of events.20 We would
then be entitled to systematically discriminate against this creature in
favour of any human whatsoever, including the permanently comatose. The ape might protest in a suitably dignified manner by pointing out that she too can laugh, bleed, suffer and feel ashamed. And in
the light of such protest the basing of her subordination to all humans
upon an assessment of normal traits might then look suspiciously
like prejudice.
A second, and familiar, response to the argument from marginal
cases involves reversion to a special kind of religious ontology (and
the idea that we alone are ensouled) or, alternatively, searching out
some previously unthought-of and morally relevant property that all
and only humans share or possess to some favoured degree. The former option (an appeal to our ensoulment) may come at too high a
price. The latter option has at least the advantage of requiring no
special ontology. Instead it usually takes the form of an appeal to the
potential for selfhood, or rational moral agency that all humans possess, even if some possess it only in an unrealised manner. But a
stumbling block to this approach is that impairment may be genetic.
Some humans have never have had any such potential, even during
the earliest stages of their development. It is not an automatic feature
of being biologically human. Even so, this line of attack may give us
some reason to separate out the case of normal infants (who do have
such potential) from the case of humans who are cognitively
impaired. And so, from this point onwards, when considering marginal cases, I will focus upon trade-offs between non-humans and the
latter.
With this exception made, we may have more general grounds
for holding that an appeal to any sort of special and shared prop�erty, short of our humanity itself, will lead us nowhere. There are
surprisingly few properties that we absolutely need in order to be
human. This line of thought can flow out of a broader attitude
towards species, one that does not regard them as natural kinds.21
20
╇My example here draws upon Kafka’s character Red Peter from the short story
‘A Report to an Academy’.
21
╇ For the question of whether or not species are natural kinds see Maureen
Kearney, ‘Philosophy and Phylogenetics’, The Cambridge Companion to The Philosophy of Biology, eds. D. Hall and M. Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
speciesism as anthropocentrism
233
On this view, species may turn out simply to be interbreeding populations together with their offspring and counterparts (in the case
where two or more groupings have become isolated from one another
without loosing the potential to successfully inter-breed). Taking our
cue from this approach, the catalogued requirements for being biologically human may reduce to at most two entries: firstly, our parents must also have been human; and secondly, we must have a high
level of bodily resemblance to other humans. (Anything with the anatomical structure of a giant insect, for example, would not normally
be accepted as one of us, irrespective of its parentage.) There may
even be a case for the reduction of these requirements to allow that
the bodily resemblance condition on its own could be enough.
(Science fiction texts refer to humanoid life-forms in just this way.)
Be that as it may, none of the properties that are usually cited in justification of preferential treatment (cognitive sophistication, a complex awareness of time, a capacity for a certain kind of suffering, and
so on) seem to be at all necessary parts of the human property bundle.
They may all be stripped away while our species membership (however plausibly construed) remains intact.
An appeal to dna-sequencing as the key to our humanity might
provide an obvious and stricter account of what it takes to be biologically human, but it is not clear that we should regard such
sequences as more important than the bodily structures and behaviours for which at least some of them code. It is not obvious that the
possession of any particular gene sequence could in its own right
count as something that is, in any way, morally significant. At this
point I am, admittedly, in danger of entering into the territory of
arguments that shape the philosophy of biology as an independent
discipline and such arguments are themselves often driven by a
determination to uphold the uniqueness of being human. As such,
they cannot plausibly be appealed to as neutral arbiters of ethical
questions.
What I have labelled the ‘deeper’ challenge to the argument from
marginal cases involves trying to make sense of the intuition that
humanity itself, and not some other regular accompaniment of it, is
a morally relevant property that all and only humans have in common. But it is by no means obvious that this is anything other than a
222–6; and A. Rosenbury and D. McShea, Philosophy of Biology (London: Routledge,
2008), ch. 2, especially 37–46.
234
tony milligan
prejudice. It is, however, a noteworthy feature of attempts to challenge our best models of prejudice—of racism, anti-Semitism and
sexism—that they have, historically, involved appeals to this shared
humanity, the humanity that is held in common by slave owner and
slave, gentile and Jew, man and woman. The most obvious examples
here would be of the dominant terms in which the abolitionist antislavery campaigns of the late-eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth
century were waged, by politicised appeals to a human brotherhood.
We might also think, in more subtle but favourable terms, of
Shylock’s complaint about the treatment of his people: ‘Hath not a
Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same
winter and summer as a Christian is?’22 Shylock’s words still strike a
chord, appealing as they do to the familiar physical traits shared by
humans as well as the shared humanity they possess. Moreover, his
appeal figures in what we would normally take to be an acceptable
practice of justification.
After all, a practice of justification has to end somewhere. And this
is as true for supporters of the argument for marginal cases (however
formulated) as it is for those who think that humanity carries a special moral significance. Singer treats a capacity for suffering (from
pain and from the non-fulfilment of preferences) as what is of basic
moral importance in human/animal comparisons. ‘No matter what
the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that the suffering be counted equally with the like suffering—insofar as rough
comparisons can be made—of any other being’.23 But he accepts that
most (but not all) humans have a greater capacity for suffering than
most (but not all) non-humans. Regan opts instead for the idea that
being the subject-of-a-life, is what is most basic: ‘individuals are subjects-of-a-life if they have beliefs and desires; perception, memory,
and a sense of the future, including their own future…’, and he points
out that any criterion that will allow all humans to be subjects-of-alife will also allow various other mammals to be so.24 But in response
to both approaches we might ask just why the process of justification
should stop here?
╇ The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, 3:1.
╇Singer, Animal Liberation, 8.
24
╇Regan The Case for Animal Rights, 243.
22
23
speciesism as anthropocentrism
235
Why, for example, can we not gauge moral considerability in
terms that are geared to allow for the importance of non-creaturely
entities such as trees and eco-systems? Being the subject-of-a-life, or
having the capacity to suffer, has seemed no more basic to some environmental ethicists than considerations associated with harm to the
non-sentient.25 But even for environmental ethicists who do not
accord an absolute primacy to sentience and subjectivity, actual justification still ends somewhere, just not where Peter Singer and Tom
Regan take it to end. And to point this out is not to say that justification ought to end in precisely one place rather than another. In some
contexts, our best available practices of justification may end just
where Singer and Regan suggest. But in other contexts (combating
racism, sexism or anti-Semitism) we may be reluctant to abandon the
(deep) intuition that an appeal to a shared humanity can be just as
decisive. And even if we do find that the option of indexing justification to a single sovereign value remains a persistent temptation, any
actual cluster of practices may be liable to remain at least implicitly
pluralist about what matters.
This line of thought has considerable attraction because it may
allow us to preserve the intuition that humanity can be appealed to
as a morally relevant property that all and only humans possess. And
if it is placed within a thoroughly pluralist framework—one that
allows for a variety of considerations to impact legitimately upon
practical reason—recognition of the importance of a shared humanity will not amount to anthropocentric prejudice for the obvious reason that it will involve treating humanity as only one important
consideration among others. In this respect it will be at odds with
endorsement of the Greater Value Assumption with its according of
greater intrinsic value to humans than to anything else. Arguably,
it may also clash with any revised formulation of the latter. To say
this is to point out that anthropocentrism cannot be pluralist through
and through: it restricts the weighing of moral considerations in line
with a fundamental requirement not just to treat humanity as relevant, but rather to put humans first and to do so on a systematic
basis.
25
╇Robin Attfield, ‘The Good of Trees’, Journal of Value Inquiry, 15 (1981): 35–54.
236
tony milligan
Our Shared Humanity
Even given the above, an endorsement of the intuition that our
shared humanity matters could still be an endorsement of a prejudice
of some other non-anthropocentric sort. But what I want to do here
is to reduce the pull of this option by showing that there are ways of
taking our humanity seriously that do not look like prejudice at all.
In some cases, appeals to humanity may lead us to favour humans,
and in others cases such appeals may lead us to favour non-humans.
No judgement about greater value need be involved. Moreover, consideration of a shared humanity may be understood in ways that
simply do not reduce to species comparisons and that also do not
involve treating ‘human’ and ‘homo sapiens’ as synonymous or interchangeable.
Suppose that I say, along with a defender of animal experimentation such as Colin Blakemore, that it is natural and justifiable for
species members to look after their own. This gives us a rudimentary
defence for favouring humans over non-humans, a defence that
depends absolutely upon equating our deep intuition about the
importance of humanity with a commitment to the fundamental
importance of our species. Blakemore puts this position succinctly:
‘I think it is very important to hang on to one strong moral principle,
which is that there is a clear distinction between responsibilities to
our own species and our responsibilities to other species’. Similarly,
‘we have a responsibility to all species to minimise suffering, but on
top of this we have a primary obligation to our own species. This is a
very normal biological principle. You see it in virtually every species’.26
Two main assumptions are made here. The first involves an attractive metaethical commitment to a form of naturalism: we should
avoid alienation from our own species-being. But the other assumption involves a descriptive claim that happens to be false. Species
members do not typically or naturally show loyalty to one another in
the way that is claimed.27 Loyalty normally exists only at a geographically-restricted group level. Territorial animals, for example, are
╇ Blakemore ‘Animal Experimentation’, 130, 131.
╇Stephen R.L. Clark, ‘The Rights of Wild Things’ Animals and their Moral
Standing, (London, Routledge, 1997), 24–7. For a recent, but rather more strident,
restatement that species altruism is a cultural product rather than a natural given see
26
27
speciesism as anthropocentrism
237
notorious for regarding members of their own species as dangerous
interlopers while they may readily tolerate the local presence of creatures of other sorts. Inter-species bonding and same-species shunning is also a familiar part of farmyard experience under conditions
where different types of animals are thrown together rather than
physically segregated from one another.
Even so, it may still be tempting to accept the first assumption, to
embrace some form of naturalism and to try to couple it with other
and more plausible claims about species in general, or even about our
own species, assumptions that would justify the claim that humanity
matters in a special way. A special concern for humanity would then
turn out to be conveniently disanalogous to racism given that racism
tracks a socially constructed identity and not a natural boundary
(however loosely understood). By contrast with race, species have at
least some claim to belong to the fabric of the world. 28 However,
while the idea of tracking natural boundaries may help to undermine
an analogy with racism, it will do nothing at all to undermine an
analogy with sexism given that sexual divisions also belong to the
nature of things.
At a more basic level, the equation of a shared humanity with
shared species membership directs our attention away from the idea
of a human bond that is not a biological given but is a product of
social history. Downgrading an appeal to biological sameness in
favour of a historically-constructed humanity, may invite all sorts of
doubts about the significance of appeals to the human. Critics of the
concept, and more generally of anything that opens the door to liberal humanism, may regard a shift of attention away from a strictly
biological concept of humanity as an admission that the human is a
mere contrivance, ‘a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.
A little more substantially, a shared humanity may be regarded as a
fiction, albeit one with a long and interesting genealogy.29
A Foucaultian (or early-Foucaultian) line of argument may be run
along these lines, with the idea of a shared humanity that is �something
other and more than bodily similarity as one more form of powerRichard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (30th Anniversary edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
28
╇Mary Midgley, ‘The Significance of Species’, Animals and Why they Matter,
(Athens: Georgia University Press, 1983), 104.
29
╇Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an archaeology of the human sciences,
(Vintage, New York: 1970), 387.
238
tony milligan
knowledge that has no greater claim upon the truth than any other
discourse. However, quite apart from general philosophical objections that we may have to such an approach, there is the concern that
it yields a relativism that is not conducive to upholding robust value
claims about non-humans. It may remove special human standing
but do so at too high a price to all that is non-human but important.
Alternatively, we may claim that our best way of thinking about
our shared humanity may be analogous to our best ways of thinking
about the communities to which we belong. And here, we may need
to insist that real communities do exist, albeit only where there is
some history of connection, interests and norms. A mere biological
relation is not enough to bring about anything analogous to real
community in the relevant sense. A species may have its own his�tory but a community requires a history of a quite different sort.
Specifically, it requires a history out of which prescriptions and proscriptions of various kinds of action emerge. No community that we
know of is without its shared normative boundaries.30 And, however
much these historically-formed boundaries may be disputed, some
actions are always placed beyond the pale. This again gives force to
the idea that a betrayal of humanity is possible through cruelty or
through failure to recognise the standing of the other. But now such
betrayal may be regarded as a betrayal of the human ‘community’.
Consider once more the example of Shylock and his appeal to the
humanity that he shares with his persecutors. This appeal is not an
embryonic and scientifically naïve call upon species solidarity or
upon the possession of shared and biologically programmed reactive
pro�pensities (to laugh and to bleed). His appeal is to a value-laden,
i.e. normative, conception of humanity and to what it demands of us.
By treating his people in the way that his oppressors did, the latter
were not discriminating between different types of human; they were
failing to accept that his people really were human in the fullest sense
when it was obvious to all, and beyond reasonable doubt, that this
was the case.31 Similarly, the concept that is in play when we speak
(as we often do, albeit in various indirect ways) about humanity as a
30
╇To help avoid setting up a weak analogy, I use ‘community’ in a sense that is
stronger than that associated with ecological conceptions of ‘biotic community’. For
the latter, see Paul Taylor’s Respect for Nature (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1986).
31
╇See Dawson, ‘Modernity as Anthropolarity’, this volume, for a discussion of
what it might mean to be not ‘fully human’.
speciesism as anthropocentrism
239
shared bond, is a normative concept rather than a value-neutral and
strictly biological one.
To fully recognise someone else as a fellow human involves accepting that there are things that cannot be done to them: you cannot put
them into gas chambers; you must heed their calls for justice; they
should not be stripped of their dignity, and so on. To bring normativity into the discussion in this way may again seem to risk a charge
of entering into the realms of moral fiction. But a concept of humanity need be no more value-laden than concepts such as prejudice and
bigotry, concepts that are liable to figure in our best descriptions of
the world.
A worry that may be more troubling than Foucaultian unease at
the very idea of humanity, or of a human community, is the more
Derridaean concern that there is always an outside to any community. Norms and standards for inclusion are simultaneously norms
and standards for exclusion. And what would seem to be excluded
from the community in question, and excluded in a disadvantageous
manner, are non-humans. Again, the spectre of anthropocentric prejudice arises and with it the prospect that the prejudice in question
may merit the label of speciesism, albeit of a particularly cunning
sort.
It is tempting here simply to say that this is a danger that we must
live with. We are, after all social animals and we are human animals.
There can be no guaranteed prevention of our slippage from an
acknowledgement of a shared humanity into an anthropocentric
humanism. Clarity of moral vision and fairness of judgement do not
come without risks. Moreover, as a partial corrective to the danger in
question we might reflect that there is more than one way of not
being human and the fact that any particular animal is not a human,
and is not part of the human community, by itself tells us very little
about what an animal is or what it is due by way of recognition and
response.
This, I think, is one of Jacques Derrida’s own reasons for arguing
that it is far less misleading and more informative to think about
particular animals rather than ‘the Animal’ as such. Gaining a sense
of who we are, as particular individual humans, and as the animal
that each of us may say ‘I am’, and doing so through our encounters
with particular non-human creatures, may be a more promising
activity than defining ‘human’ by a rigid contrast with the abstraction
240
tony milligan
of ‘the Animal’ as embodied non-rationality.32 But here we may do
well to remember that the task Derrida favours is one of reflecting
upon being a human animal in the light of encounters with nonhuman others and in the light of a problematic tradition which we
cannot simply ignore.
To lend a little more plausibility to the claim that giving our
humanity its due need not automatically amount to a prejudice for us
and against them, let us reconsider the kind of case to which the
argument from marginal cases directs our attention. Let us suppose
that, as a matter of the allocation of limited resources, we have to
decide between saving the life of some human or saving the life of a
cognitively normal cat. Let both lives still be worth living and let the
cognitive competences of both be estimated as roughly equal. And let
us not look for any easy way out by appealing to epistemic problems
and to the precautionary idea that we should always save the human
because we can never be sure about the reliability of inter-species
comparisons. Let us simply specify that the true extent of the competences of each is known. Even with this equality of competences there
would still be an obvious reason to save the human because they are
human but not because they are a homo sapiens. As they are human,
they are already the victim of a great misfortune. But in order to
make sense of this misfortune we must appeal beyond their species
membership and consider instead the way in which they are blocked
off from any possibility of enjoying some of the most important lifeenriching goods that are not biologically given but are bound up with
membership of the human community at some particular point in
time.
By contrast, the only misfortune of the cat is that it too requires
treatment and that it too is caught up in a competition for resources.
In other respects it is not any worse off than other cats. All other
things being equal, those creatures who are already victims of a great
misfortune have a special standing. We try not to pile harm on top
of harm. And this gives us at least some reason to favour the human
over the cat in this particular case and to do so without appeal to
prejudice of any sort.
Against this, there are all manner of reasonable counter-considerations that might be brought into play. Someone might say that the
╇ Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
32
speciesism as anthropocentrism
241
cat could still enjoy what is a good life for a cat, while the human life
is irreparably damaged. But in making this move, humanity could
still be accepted as an important consideration in its own right. That
is to say, it could still be accepted as a morally important relational
property. And even if the appeal to humanity favoured the human it
need not do so in a way that generalises out into an endorsement of
prioritising humans across the board. Appeals to humanity that operate in this constrained and restricted way, even when they favour the
humans in question, do not look like instances of anthropocentrism.
Moreover, as consideration is given to the special standing of any
kind of creature who is already the victim of extreme misfortune,
there is no basis for claiming that some other (non-anthropocentric)
prejudice is at work.
As well as cases of this sort where consideration of humanity may
lead us, without prejudice, to favour a human, there are also cases
where matters will turn out differently; cases where an appeal to our
shared humanity may lead us to forgo or to sacrifice human interests
or to sacrifice some shared human advantage. To see how this can
happen, let us take the community analogy a step further. Insofar as
we are part of something akin to a shared human community the
usual standards for shared community membership will apply. There
must be a shared history of some sort; shared interests (up to a point);
at least some rudimentary mutual awareness of a connection on the
part of some community members; a degree of exclusiveness (there is
an outside to the community as well as an inside); and there must be
norms that are shaped by the shared history of community members
and which, to some extent, govern community life. (Certain things
are ruled in and other things are ruled out.) Insofar as the advocate
of the importance of a shared humanity accepts that these requirements are not just necessary but sufficient for the existence of a significant human bond, they may also have to accept that each of us
has a significant connection to other human agents who have perpetrated (and in some cases continue to perpetrate) great harm.
Such a connection can be a source of reasons for acting in the
interests of outside groups who are or have been damaged by members of our human community and to do so even at the expense of
the latter. Justifications of action along environmentally favoured
lines regularly take this same form. They involve an appeal to our
responsibility to make amends, to undo our harm and to make good
that which we humans have damaged. In the light of this, we can say
242
tony milligan
that the relationship between community membership and being
favoured, or being called upon to make sacrifices for the other, is not
at all a straightforward one and it needs no assumptions about members of our community possessing greater intrinsic value than that
possessed by non-members. An upshot is that even where a human
happens to be favoured over a non-human because they are human,
anthropocentric speciesism can be involved, but this need not automatically be the case. And sometimes the judgement may fall the
other way, in favour of the non-human, without misanthropy being
an issue. Humans may sometimes be due consideration qua human,
and they may sometimes be called upon to make sacrifices in the
interests of corrective justice and in the light of historic wrongs for
the same reason.
Similarly (although here I appeal to the bonds of family rather
than those of community) members of former slave-owning families
may feel (and have) obligations towards the descendants of slaves;
and the children and grandchildren of those who carried out the
Holocaust may have specially compelling reasons to speak out against
the rise of the far right in Germany. More prosaically, certain groups
of Campbells may have special reasons to avoid littering in Glencoe,
the site where their ancestors broke hospitality and massacred
MacDonalds. There is always an outside to community membership
and to family membership, but this paves the way for the possibility
of reasons for acting in the interests of those who are on the outside.
Communities whose members have at some time perpetrated dreadful acts in the pursuit of a shared advantage have at least some reason
to forego further advantages that could only be gained at the expense
of non-members. To state this is, again, to call upon an intuition of
a deep sort about the nature of justice, one whose abandonment
would involve giving up on our regular ways of thinking about moral
obligations and about the way in which they do not depend exclusively upon our actions as individuals.
Put in this way, it begins to be intelligible that an appeal to our
shared humanity can function as part of a rejection of speciesist and
anthropocentric practices such as intrusive animal experimentation.
Appeal can be made to the claim that we humans have (in all sorts of
ways) misused and mistreated non-humans to such an extent that we
have lost any moral authority to sacrifice their interests in the name
of some greater overall good.33 And what is appealed to here, as well
╇Tony Milligan, Beyond Animal Rights (London: Continuum, 2010), ch. 7.
33
speciesism as anthropocentrism
243
as our shared humanity, is a history of our human mistreatment and
its connection to the moral authority that must be in place before
deliberate and premeditated harm becomes a defensible option. An
argument constructed along these lines will not work unless we
regard our connection to a shared and abusive human history as a
sufficiently weighty consideration when set against the utilitarian
advantages of the experimental system. The more importance that we
accord to the connection to harm that is established through our
shared humanity, the stronger our reasons will be for rejecting further harm.
We may, in the face of other and rival considerations, be unwilling
to forego the advantages that such harm may offer, but the material
point is that appeals to our shared humanity can give reasons to go
against human interests. And this allows such appeals to operate in
ways that do not constitute anthropocentric, and more precisely,
speciesist, prejudice. They need not presuppose any assumption that
we are of greater intrinsic value and they need not presuppose any
other assumption that happens to be normatively equivalent to the
latter.
instrumentalisation of horses
245
the instrumentalisation of horses in
nineteenth-century paris
Peter Soppelsa*
Horses were the quintessential animals of nineteenth-century
Western cities. In this essay, I discuss why that was no longer true
in the twentieth century. Although city dwellers always live with animals—parasites like pigeons, companions like cats—nineteenthcentury Parisians distinguished the horse as ‘the most beautiful and
the best cared for of our domestic animals’,1 ‘the one that renders
the most services to man’,2 or ‘the first, without contradiction, of all
our servants’.3 Horses were also the most ubiquitous, everyday and
useful of urban animals. As the main motors for industrialising cities, horses saturated the streetscape, helping cities to operate and
helping to define the urban.
Social and economic historians have long recognised horses as
urban infrastructure in nineteenth-century Europe—powering
machines; transporting people, goods and information; completing
supply chains; and driving the urban economy—making the horse
market a major economic sector.4 More recently, historians of technology have connected detailed analysis of horse power with urbanisation and industrialisation, showing that nineteenth-century
*
╇ I wish to thank Clapperton Mavhunga, Ken Garner and Peggy McCracken for
stimulating conversations about this paper in 2009. Josh First and Rob Boddice generously read drafts of the essay and gave me notes which sharpened the prose and
argument.
1
╇Nicolas Jean-Baptiste G. Guibourt, Histoire naturelle des drogues simples: ou
Cours d’histoire naturelle professé à l’École supérieure de pharmacie de Paris, volume
4, edition 4 (J.B.€Baillière, 1851), 48–9.
2
╇ J. Minot, Appréciation du cheval, des qualités intrinsèques de cet animal pour
le travail et la reproduction: guide-pratique (Paris: Leneveu, 1853), 1.
3
╇ Antoine Laurent Apollinaire Fée. Les misères des animaux (Paris: Humbert,
1863), 100.
4
╇Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of
Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Ghislaine Bouchet, Le cheval à Paris de 1850 à 1914 (Paris and
Geneva: Droz, 1993); F.M.L.€Thompson, ‘Nineteenth-Century Horse Sense’, The Economic History Review, n.s. 29:1 (1976): 60–81.
246
peter soppelsa
industrialisation did not replace animal power with mechanical
power, instead increasing the use of horses as ‘prime movers’ or ‘living machines’.5 Meanwhile, scholars in literary and cultural studies
have analysed the cultural meanings produced in human-horse interactions, demonstrating that frequent human-horse contact in
Western cities compelled on-going reflection on the categories
‘human’ and ‘animal’, as well as other categories like race and gender.6
My essay builds on these literatures by connecting analysis of how
horses were used as a technology with analysis of the experience and
meaning of horses in nineteenth-century Paris. As most existing literature analyses British and American cities, Paris can help put horse
history in comparative perspective. I show that horse use saturated
nineteenth-century Paris, becoming a primary site for negotiating
human-animal relationships and the place of ‘nature’ in the city. As
the horse population grew from about 10,000 to 15,000 in 1800 to
98,000 in 1900, horse use paradoxically became more foreign in Paris,
contrary to changing concepts of humanity, urbanity, modernity,
hygiene and civilisation. Beginning in the 1870s, as the dominant
metaphors of city life shifted from organic to mechanical, horses
seemed increasingly out of place amidst more aggressive campaigns
for animal welfare, urban hygiene, and mechanical power. By 1913,
Paris’ horse population shrank to 55,000. In the twentieth century,
horses were no longer the main motors of urban life, replaced by
electricity and combustion engines.
My study of horse use must answer a deeper question: how were
horses constructed as a technology? Horse use was supported by
what I call ‘instrumentalisation’, the transformation of horses into
tools. To ‘instrumentalise’ means to objectify and evaluate, to assign
value and a normal or standard social use. Instrumentalisation constructs subjects and objects, calibrates means to ends, and scripts
relationships between humans, technology and nature. Across the
nineteenth century, instrumentalisation and use of horses inspired a
5
╇ Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, The
Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2007).
6
╇ Kathryn Miele, ‘Horse-Sense: Understanding the Working Horse in Victorian
London’ Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 (2009): 129–40; Kari Weil, ‘Purebreds
and Amazons: Saying Things with Horses in Late-Nineteenth-Century France’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 11:1 (1999): 1–37.
instrumentalisation of horses
247
thorough rethinking of human-animal relations and the place of animals in the city.
Instrumentalisation theory emerges from the tradition of German
critical theory running from Max Weber through the Frankfurt
School to Herbert Marcuse and his students Hannah Arendt and
Andrew Feenberg.7 Building on Weber’s and Horkheimer’s accounts
of a Western modernity ruled by instrumental rationality, Marcuse
and company highlighted technology (broadly, tools and instruments) as a primary site where instrumentalisation is articulated.
Driving this dialogue is the familiar humanist critique of instrumental rationality as a reversal and perversion of means and ends.
Contrary to Kantian ethics, which values humans as ends in themselves, industrial, capitalist and bureaucratic modernity makes
humans a means to uphold a fundamentally inhumane system, in
which workers are enslaved by their machines, bureaucrats by their
offices, and humanity enslaved by tools, institutions and environments of our own creation.8 This discourse thus revolves around the
concept of humanity, the relation between humans (ends) and our
instruments (means), bearing crucially on the question of anthropocentrism addressed in this volume. In modern cities where humans
were often instrumentalised (reduced to means), anthropocentric
instrumentalisation of animals and technologies allowed humans to
regain a measure of agency and control.
My analysis builds on Feenberg’s theory of the instrumentalisation
of technology. For Feenberg, instrumentalisation happens at two
‘moments’ or ‘levels’. In primary instrumentalisation, everyday
objects are removed from their native context (‘decontextualised’)
and reduced to their useful qualities. Applied to urban workhorses,
this corresponds to domestication, the separation of horses from
their mothers, stabling and training. In secondary instrumentalisation, the decontextualised tools are reintegrated into a new social setting, linked with other devices in a socio-technical system to be
employed in a ‘typical’ way. This happens when urban workhorses
leave the stables, are hitched to vehicles or other machinery and put
to work. The two ‘moments’ are not chronologically, but analytically,
distinct; each day, workhorses were both subject to stabling and
7
╇ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958),
144–59. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 182–98.
8
╇See Dawson, ‘Modernity as Anthropolarity’, this volume.
248
peter soppelsa
training that re-inscribed their tool status, and led into the street to
be used as tools.9
Although useful for understanding the mechanics of instrumentalisation, Feenberg’s theory (especially the term ‘decontextualisation’) reifies a binary distinction between the natural or ‘native’ (the
object) and the socially constructed (the object as tool). But workhorses are ‘envirotech’10 embodied. The line between nature and society is irrelevant for horses born in captivity and bred for work.
Further, horses and humans have co-evolved for millennia; even the
line between wild and domestic horses is weak.11
Thus, this essay historicises the instrumentalisation process and
adds empirical substance to instrumentalisation theory. I locate horse
use in nineteenth-century Paris streets to watch it work ‘on the
ground’ in a concrete historical context, showing how horses’ status
as instrumental and/or natural changed over time. Parisian debates
about instrumentalisation concerned much more than horses and
their treatment, negotiating broader distinctions like urban/rural,
human/animal, ends/means and artificial/natural.12 As I narrate the
shift from horses as an indispensable technology to horses as a ‘natural’ (and therefore foreign) presence in the artificial and mechanical
city, I ‘green’ urban history and the history of technology by historicising the relationships between humans, technology and nature.13
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Parisians gradually traded
the anthropocentric instrumentalisation of horses for an anthropocentric instrumentalisation of mechanical and electrical technologies
that better fit with changing conceptions of urban modernity.
9
╇ Andrew Feenberg, ‘Critical Theory of Technology: an Overview’, Tailoring Biotechnologies, 1:1 (2005): 47–64; A.P. Bos, ‘Instrumentalization Theory and Reflexive
Design in Animal Husbandry’, Social Epistemology, 22:1 (2008): 29–50.
10
╇Philip Scranton and Susan R. Schrepfer, eds., Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
11
╇ J. Edward Chamberlain, Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations (New
York: Blue Bridge, 2006); Pita Kelenka, The Horse in Human History (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
12
╇ Horses have also proven useful for scholars interested in questioning other
category distinctions. Natalie Corinne Hansen, ‘Humans, Horses and Hormones:
(Trans) Gendering Cross-Species Relationships’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36:3–4
(2008): 87–105; Sandra Swart, ‘“But Where’s the Bloody Horse?” Textuality and
Â�Corporeality in the “Animal Turn”’, Journal of Literary Studies, 23:3 (2007): 271–92.
13
╇ William Cronin, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1991), xvi: ‘We carefully partition our national landscape into urban
places, rural places, and wilderness… [but] we rarely reflect on how tightly bound
together they really are’.
instrumentalisation of horses
249
My story begins amidst the dramatic urbanisation and modernisation of 1815–48, when Paris’ human and horse populations boomed.
Although unable to count horses accurately, Prefect of Police Delavau
(and commissioners including hygienist Parent-Duchâtelet) estimated at least 16,382 in 1827, based on interviewing veterinarians
and measuring oat consumption.14 That year Delavau created a new
centralised program and facilities for removal and use of dead horses
to improve Parisian hygiene and industry. Slaughteryards scattered
across the city were removed and concentrated on the urban periphery: the waste disposal campus at Montfaucon, near La Villette in
north-east Paris. Contemporary accounts of horse disposal are
graphic at best, lurid at worst, couched in the language of civilisation
and barbarism, replete with details of sights, sounds and smells.
Writer-critic Jules Janin toured Montfaucon in 1836, finding a
hellish place washed in blood, picked over by pigs, dogs, cats, rats,
chickens, ducks and maggots, soon to become flies. Janin found little
left for these scavengers, writing, ‘Noble cadaver, we don’t bury it, we
eat it. What we don’t eat, we sell. Each part of this dead horse has its
commercial value, from the hoof to the mane’. Horsehair was saved
for mattresses and fabrics, hides saved for tanners, blood and flesh
processed as animal food and fertiliser. Fat was saved for lamps and
heaters, brains and tongues for gourmets, and connective tissue for
glue-makers. Hooves were made into combs, Prussian blue for dye
and paint, and ammonia salts. Bones were made into fans and knives,
burnt in furnaces or made into charcoal, and ground into meal for
gelatine and fertiliser. Maggots were collected for fishing bait and
horseshoes were recycled, nails and all. Janin colourfully depicted the
gruesome practices of the men who worked amid this carnage and
stench and soberly listed the going price for each part of the animal.15
Recycling dead horses became more urgent in the 1820s-30s
because live horses were becoming increasingly important in Paris.
╇Départment de la Seine, Commission sur l’enlevement et emploi des chevaux
morts. Recherches et considérations sur l’enlèvement et l’emploi des chevaux morts
(Paris: Bachelier, 1827).
15
╇ Jules Janin, ‘Les Égouts’, La Revue de Paris, 33 (1836): 225–54, esp. 242–9; see
also Guibourt (1851), 50: ‘But with reason, in major cities, one uses the meat of
horses worn out by old age, work or sickness, to transform it into fertiliser, their
bones for the fabrication of boot black (noir animal), and their skin to make strong
hides, good for boot and shoe uppers. Horsehair is also of a good enough quality for
the fabrication of mattresses, furniture, rugs and the various cloths used in the arts.
There is nothing, down to the horse’s manure, which is not a precious fertiliser,
which one uses principally for the cultivation of gardens and composition of soil’.
14
250
peter soppelsa
In 1828 horse-drawn omnibuses, Paris’ first public transportation,
were introduced. By 1835, one author reported 100,000 passengers
per day, amounting to a traffic ‘revolution’.16 With so many vehicles
in Paris, another contemporary was surprised to see any pedestrians
on the sidewalks. For him, Paris, long called the ‘paradise of women’,
could just as well be called ‘hell for horses’, because the ‘feverish
activity’ of modern street life was horse powered.17 Horses powered
the whirlwind of urban modernisation described so memorably by
Honoré de Balzac, Louis Chevalier and David Harvey.18
So, urban modernisation arrived on horseback. Along with more
intense traffic and hygienic problems, more horse-cars also inspired
increased awareness of the condition and treatment of horses. In
1845 the French Society for the Protection of Animals (spa) was
founded. In 1850 they pushed through the Grammont Law, specifying fines for public acts of cruelty against animals. Horses were the
main victims of animal cruelty in Huré’s 1855 work The Zoophile.19
While they commonly worked outdoors in all weather, pulling heavy
loads, Huré also documented horses beaten and verbally abused,
bloodied in bullfights for human amusement, even tortured: an ear
sheared off in anger, hacked with a hatchet, or burned alive still
hitched to the cart. If their daily labours did not make Paris streets
‘hell for horses’, surely such callous treatment did.
Yet protecting horses was controversial, owing to France’s longstanding Cartesian view of animals as non-sentient machines. This
view had special resonance in the horse-powered city. Horses were
valuable commodities, and by all accounts Paris horse markets were
rife with fraud. Minot’s 1853 work Appreciation of the Horse was a
practical guide to the ‘intrinsic qualities’ of horses relevant to work
16
╇Ulysse Tencé, Annuaire historique universel pour 1835 (Paris: ThoisnierDesplaces, 1836), 174–5.
17
╇ Louis Huart, ‘Les voitures publiques’, Nouveau tableau de Paris, au XIXme
siècle, ed. Henri Martin (Paris: Charles-Béchet, 1834), IV, 161–81.
18
╇ Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the
First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Howard Fertig, 1973); David
�Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003); Nicholas
�Papayanis, Planning Paris Before Haussmann (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
Â�University Press, 2004); Karen Bowie, ed., La Modernité avant Haussmann: Formes
de l’espace urbaine à Paris 1801–53 (Paris: Editions Recherches, 2001); Bernard
Marchand, Paris, Histoire d’une ville (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993).
19
╇ Huré, Le zoophile, ou Le défenseur des animaux: recueil d’histoires et faits anecdotiques. Précédé d’une notice sur les séances de la Société protectrice des animaux
(Paris: Huré, 1855). The book details over 20 incidents involving horses.
instrumentalisation of horses
251
and reproduction, outlining a two-part technique for consumers to
evaluate horses. First was a physical examination of the ‘forms and
exterior habitudes that account for the construction of the animal
machine’ (la machine animale). Minot likened the horse’s body to
‘springs and levers’. Second was taking the horse’s pulse, providing a
basic measure of health, vitality and potential for work. Minot
showed a frank awareness of the horse’s status as a technology, and
the widespread objectification that prevented animal advocates from
raising awareness of horses’ subjective suffering. In a market where
maximising work, minimising cost and avoiding fraud were top priorities, hard-nosed anthropocentrism that maintained horses as
instruments dominated the scene.20
That same year (1853), Prefect of the Seine Haussmann began his
celebrated and controversial modernisation of Paris’ built environment and infrastructure, the grands travaux (major works), which
demanded more horses to haul equipment, materials and debris.21 In
1855, Haussmann brokered the consolidation of Paris’ many small
omnibus companies into the General Omnibus Company (cgo), a
corporation with a citywide monopoly on horse-powered public
transport. This centralised and standardised the omnibuses in time
for Paris’1855 Universal Exposition.22
David Harvey argued that Haussmannisation ‘compressed’ space
and time, intensifying circulation of goods, information, capital, and
people. Haussmann began wiring Paris for globalisation, expanding
markets, making the world smaller and Paris more cosmopolitan.
Patrice Higonnet identified ‘the two critical elements’ in Haussmann’s
city plans as ‘horse-drawn traffic and rail traffic’. Railroads accelerated commerce between cities, while horses accelerated commerce
within cities. From 1854 to 1867, annual omnibus passengers grew
from 34 to 122 million, while the cgo’s fleet grew from 4,671 horses
to 10,198.23 Between 1849 and 1880, Paris’ horse population more
20
╇ J. Minot, Appréciation du cheval, des qualités intrinsèques de cet animal pour le
travail et la reproduction: guide-pratique (Paris: Leneveu, 1853), 6–7.
21
╇ Antoine Laurent Apollinaire Fée, Les misères des animaux (Paris: Humbert,
1863), 107.
22
╇Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of
Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge, MD: Louisiana State
University Press, 1996).
23
╇Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs and Omnibuses, 119–20; Harvey, Paris: Capital
of Modernity, 12, 109, 113, 135; Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 186.
252
peter soppelsa
than doubled, reaching about 65,000.24 As Haussmann’s new boulevards filled with horse-cars, horses were associated with expanding
mobility and penetration of technology into everyday life. They were
drawn into a symbolic trinity of boulevards-omnibuses-horses, which
defined Parisian urban modernity.25
Late in the Second Empire conservative author Maxime du Camp
began his landmark, six-volume study of Haussmann’s modernised
city as a giant complex organism with functionally interdependent
‘organs’ like the post office, central market, railways and the Seine:
Paris, Its Organs, Its Functions and Its Life. Du Camp used the words
‘horse’ and ‘horses’ almost two hundred times, more than half of
them in Volume 1, in the section on Paris’ coaches and omnibuses.26
Du Camp marvelled at the transit companies’ size and complexity.
The coach company owned over 10,000 horses, whose diet and schedule were carefully regimented to extract the most work. In 1866, the
company spent 25,000 francs daily on fodder and owned 19 depots
covering 173,600 square meters, worth 13 million francs.27
24
╇Reliable horse counts are difficult for Paris before 1880, year of the first horse
census. Thereafter, the Annuaire statistique de la ville de Paris provides an official, if
not reliable, count (Annuaire statistique 1880, published 1881, 544). This 1849 figure
from Ghislaine Bouchet, Le cheval à Paris de 1850 à 1914, 45–53. See also Sabine
Barles, La ville délétère: Médecins et ingénieurs dans l’espace urbain, XVIIIe-XIXe
siècle (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1999), 244. The Revue indépendent (vol. 11, p. 340)
counted 148,000 horses in 1847. Barles counts 16,400 in 1821, 21,000 in 1830 and
18,000 in 1849. Papayanis estimated about 34,000 horses in the 1820s: Horse-Drawn
Cabs and Omnibuses, 49.
25
╇Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988); Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early
Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1998); Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century
Paris and London (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1999). Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Elland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Victoria Thompson, ‘Review Essay:
Boulevard Dreams: Paris and the Myths of Modernity’, Journal of Urban History, 33
(2007): 664–9; Masha Belenky, ‘From Transit to Transitoire: The Omnibus and
Modernity’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 35:2 (2007): 408–20. French artists
from Géricault and Delacroix to Meissonier, Renoir, Manet, Degas and Gaugin made
horses an important theme in nineteenth-century painting from Romanticism to
Post-Impressionism. Kari Weil, ‘Purebreds and Amazons’, and John Baskett, The
Horse in Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 124–68.
26
╇Maxime du Camp, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la second
moitié du XIXe siècle: vol. 1, ed. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1869), vol. 2, ed. 1 (Hachette,
1870), vol. 3, ed. 1 (Hachette, 1872), vol. 4, ed. 1 (Hachette, 1873), vol. 5, ed. 1
(Hachette, 1874), vol. 6, ed. 1 (Hachette, 1875).
27
╇Du Camp, Paris, vol. 1, 207–23.
instrumentalisation of horses
253
Even more remarkable for Du Camp was the ‘inconceivable docility’ and ‘extraordinary intelligence’ of workhorses.28 Like many contemporaries, he stressed their hard work: ‘always being outdoors,
eating at irregular hours, walking on pavement through sun, rain,
dust and snow, resting fallen half-asleep between the blinders’.
Horses’ docility under such difficult conditions was maintained by
specialised training, socialising them from birth. Omnibus horses, for
example, were stabled in pairs, hitched to the same vehicles and
driven by the same coachmen each day. The omnibus linked drivers,
horses and vehicle in a consistent unity of human, animal and
machine: the team. The team was technologically necessary, because
‘A horse, however willing, cannot be used for work without being
attached to another device’. But the team also exploited the horse’s
social temperament, because ‘Drivers and horses were coworkers that
formed a small horse-human herd in which drivers played the role of
a dominant horse’.29 Keeping teams together instrumentalised horses
and maintained anthropocentrism by making drivers the centre of
the team. Du Camp’s thick description of working, training, feeding
and stabling conditions thus illustrates the instrumentalisation of
horses in progress, their ongoing reconstruction as useful objects,
docile bodies.
Even animal welfare advocate A.L.A. Fée argued that a well-trained
horse ‘can make us admire its intelligence and docility’.30 Whether
analysing the workings of the city like Du Camp, or arguing for animal welfare like Fée, Second Empire Parisians pinpointed those qualities that made urban workhorses an indispensible technology:
intelligence and docility. But unlike Du Camp, Fée recognised instrumentalisation as such, a social process in which human intervention
‘reduced’ workhorses to technology. Mill horses were ‘veritably the
living machine of Descartes, reduced to the most complete automatism’, while canal horses on the towpath became ‘living tugboats’.31
Where training failed, there were other ways to ensure docility. Du
Camp related an ‘old proverb full of truth’, which remained current
in Paris stables: ‘a drunken horse is never meagre’. Parisian slang
called these drunken horses bohèmes (Â�bohemians), like the Latin
╇Du Camp, Paris, vol. 1, 266–7.
╇Greene, Horses at Work, 23, 26.
30
╇ Fée, Les misères des animaux (Paris: Humbert, 1863), 97.
31
╇ Fée, Les misères des animaux, 109–11.
28
29
254
peter soppelsa
Quarter’s drunken students and artists.32 An 1830s advice journal
recommended a mixture of five litres of ‘strong beer’ and a splash of
absinthe as a diuretic to cure horses of dropsy.33 Alcohol served many
purposes for trainers; it could ensure docility, kill the mental and
physical pains of work, and add carbohydrates to the diet (hence the
word maigre in the proverb, connoting both skinny and weak).
From 1855 to 1873, Paris remained defined by its boulevards and
horse-cars. Although horse-drawn railways were available, they were
slowly adopted. Until 1873, the cgo operated the city’s only horsetram as a novelty, connecting the city centre with the Bois de
Boulogne, a fashionable park in western Paris. In this era, Parisians
called horse-trams ‘American railways’ (chemins de fer américains)
after the contemporary U.S. streetcar boom,34 casting horse-trams as
new and foreign. Like training, alcohol, and other techniques of
docility, putting horse-cars on rails maximised the work horses could
do, in this case by reducing friction or drag.
This was impossible until French engineer Alphonse Loubat developed the grooved rail (patented 1852), which sat flush with the pavement, thus not compromising existing street traffic. Loubat’s
invention, applied early in New York and Paris, spurred a mid-century global tramway boom that led many to hail the horse-tram as
the new standard and future of urban locomotion.35 But Parisians
continued to think of ‘American railways’ as foreign. Some referred
back to previous technology (the omnibus) to make horse-trams
comprehensible, one source describing ‘Omnibuses of a particular
kind, pulled by horses on iron rails’.36 When local authorities finally
began planning horse-drawn tramways in 1871–2, one journalist
╇Du Camp, Paris, vol. 1, 236.
╇ Journal des connaissances usuelles et pratiques, year 10 (Paris: Bureau du journal, Jan. 1834), 177.
34
╇See Tarr and McShane, The Horse in the City, and Greene, Horses at Work.
35
╇ Hubert Demory, ‘Le premier tramway de Paris’, Le Village, no. 578 (2006),
online: http://mapage.noos.fr/hubert.demory/loubat.htm; Norma Evenson, Paris:
A Century of Change 1878–1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 80; John
P. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys: the Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 14; Milner Gibson, Observations
on Street Railways (London: Sampson Low, Son and Co., 1860), 1: ‘The age of Omnibuses in crowded cities has passed. The age of Horse Railways has commenced’.
36
╇ Liste alphabétique des rues de Paris contenant les avenues, les barrières, les
boulevards, [etc.]: compris dans l’enceinte des fortifications et la concordance des noms
nouveaux avec les noms anciens et indiquant leur situation avec renvoi au plan (Paris:
Hachette et Cie, 1867), xii.
32
33
instrumentalisation of horses
255
claimed Paris was twenty-five years behind American tramway development.37
Paris’ first horse-drawn tramway network opened in 1873, but it
was not long before engineers saw horse traction as obsolete. By
1878, Paris’ tramway companies were struggling financially, bogged
down by rising demand, the cost of fodder, and competition from
omnibuses. Furthermore, steam, compressed air and funicular (cable)
traction were already available. Tramway engineers enthusiastically
predicted that mechanical traction would reduce costs and remove
many hassles of horse-traction (e.g. manure).38 Such criticism of
horses and appeal to machines, however, represented wishful thinking. Between 1874 and 1894, Paris opened 70 new tramway lines, 59
of which were horse-powered.39 Hence the horse population grew
gradually from 65,000 in 1880 to its peak at 98,000 in 1900.40 As in
the United States, horses remained the standard in urban locomotion
until the advent of electric traction (1895–1900 in Paris).41 After 1901
Paris’ horse population steadily declined to 55,000 in 1912.42 Between
1873 and 1895, efforts to increase the efficiency of traction included
several faltering attempts at mechanical power, but revolved around
more efficient exploitation of horses.
In the early 1870s scientist Etienne-Jules Marey began his wellknown studies of animal locomotion, referring like Minot to la
machine animale. These studies centred around horses, and aimed at
╇ ‘Communications et avis divers’ Le Temps, Sept. 6, 1872.
╇Prefect’s Commission on Mechanical Motors, 1876: Locomotive Avec Foyer
(Harding), Archives Nationales F/14/9189. Hector de Backer, Tramways: la traction
par chevaux et la traction par machines sur les tramways: aperçu comparatif (Paris:
Auguste Ghio, 1877); Léon Francq, Chemin de fer métropolitain: recueil des articles
publiés dans le journal le Métropolitain à propos de la traction du métropolitain parisien (Paris: E. Bernard er Cie., 1892); Émile Gauthier, L’Année scientifique et industrielle yr. 39, 1895 (Paris: Hachette, 1896), 310; John P. McKay, Tramways and
Trolleys; Alain Beltran and Patrice A. Carré, La fée et la servante: la société francaise
face à l’électricité XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris: Belin, 1991), 77.
39
╇See 1894 Tramway Statistics, Archives Nationales, F/14/8588. Pierre Lanthier,
‘The Relationship between State and Private Electric Industry, France 1880–1920’ in
Norbert Horn and Jürgen Kocka, eds. Law and the Formation of the Big Enterprises
in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979),
590–603, esp. 593.
40
╇Préfecture de la Seine, Secrétariat générale, Service de la statistique municipale,
Annuaire statistique de la ville de Paris, 1880 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1881),
544; Annuaire statistique 1900 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1901), 789.
41
╇Greene, Horses at Work, 186–9.
42
╇Ghislaine Bouchet, Le Cheval à Paris, 45–6.
37
38
256
peter soppelsa
optimising use of animal power. Marey mounted electrical sensors
on horses’ hooves to measure the force of their steps, and used photography and other graphic means to measure and represent the
speed and rhythm of the horse’s gait. His aim was to show ‘at what
gait an animal furnishes the best service’ and ‘the harnessing conditions which are most appropriate for the good use of animal forces’.43
Good use meant ‘to draw from the animal the greatest force possible,
[while] sparing it fatigue and suffering as much as possible’. For
Marey, reducing animal suffering made the animal machine more
efficient; hence he aspired to influence harnessing techniques and
construction of vehicles,44 envisioning devices that could be placed
between horses and vehicles ‘in order to attenuate the violence of
collar pressure and better utilise the horse’s force’.45
Marey demonstrates that Cartesian animal mechanism was not
always incompatible with animal welfare. Many books on animal
welfare and horse handling recommended more humane treatment
as a way to maximise the work horses could do. Hence concern for
animal welfare might maximise rather than reduce animal exploitation. Unlike twentieth-century animal rights discourses, which
became increasingly animal-centred, across nineteenth-century Paris
animal advocacy remained overwhelmingly anthropocentric. The
principal reasons for treating horses properly were upholding one’s
own humanity and extracting the greatest possible value and work.
A. Edouard Roche’s 1880 animal handling manual The Martyrs of
Work was endorsed by the spa, and argued ‘that good treatment of
animals cannot but usefully serve our interests’.46 Roche argued that
animal work increased human welfare, but it could not be ‘durable’
or ‘profitable’ unless humans learned to ‘employ their forces with
wisdom and moderation’. His self-styled ‘little book of protection
and morality’ was thus an anthropocentric manual for proper
�instrumentalisation that rejected animal cruelty as impractical and
43
╇ Étienne-Jules Marey, La machine animale; locomotion terrestre et aérienne
(Paris: Librarie Germer Bailliere, 1873), vii-viii.
44
╇E.J. Marey, ‘Moteurs animés. Expériences de physiologie graphique’, La
Nature, no. 278 (Sept. 28, 1878), 273–8 (for quote see 273) and ‘Moteurs animés.
Expériences de physiologie graphique’, La Nature, no. 279 (Oct. 5, 1878), 289–95.
45
╇Marey, La machine animale, 129; Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor:
Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1992), 97–108.
46
╇ A. Edouard Roche, Les martyrs du travail: Manuel du propriétaire et du conducteur d’animaux de trait: Le cheval (4th edn., Paris: Librarie Delagrave, 1880), xv.
instrumentalisation of horses
257
wasteful. For him, animals were friends and family, not ‘slaves’. He
even used the phrase ‘inferior brothers’, recalling contemporary
French terms for colonial subjects.47 Indeed, there was a rich political
subtext to Roche’s work, which recommended human-horse relations as a school of morality where citizens could improve human
relations, cultivating the brotherly solidarity that cemented France’s
Third Republic. These politics won his book endorsements from the
Archbishop of Bordeaux and the High Commission for Public
Instruction, who recommended it for all public schools and libraries.
For Roche, good handling began with ‘compassion’, because emotional attachment bred more obedient horses. He provided detailed
instructions for ‘paying close attention’ to animals, 48 arguing that
good drivers knew when to detach harnesses and reins under problem conditions, constantly monitoring equipment and horses’ reactions to it. He recommended preventing blinders from blocking
horses’ vision or rubbing their eyes, and keeping mechanical parts of
vehicles well oiled. Drivers should always brake on slopes, avoid
bumps, stones and ruts in the road, yield to oncoming traffic and
drive after dark with a lantern or other source of light.49 Similar concerns shaped standard practice; Du Camp reported thirty-one places
in Paris where slopes were so steep that extra horses were temporarily hitched to omnibuses.50
Paris transit companies conducted frequent studies of horse efficiency. cgo president Lavalard reported results for 1878 to 1883: cgo
horses travelled an average of seventeen kilometres per day, at nine
to twelve kilometres per hour, pulling 1,600–1,900 kilograms. Roundtrip tramway and omnibus routes averaged 90 minutes, and horses
normally worked two routes, about three to four hours, per day. By
measuring kilograms moved per second, the cgo determined that
horses could produce one fifth to one seventh as much work daily as
steam engines, which could run continuously for 24 hours.
Commenting on Lavalard’s report, popular science magazine La
Nature concluded ‘...we are just about at the maximum of what one
can demand from horses’.51
╇Roche, Les martyrs du travail, xi-xv.
╇ Compare to Miele, ‘Horse-Sense’.
49
╇Roche, Les Martyrs du Travail, 6–7.
50
╇Du Camp, Paris, vol. 1, 266.
51
╇ ‘La Traction par Chevaux pour les Omnibus et Tramways’ La Nature, no. 601
(Dec. 6, 1884), 10.
47
48
258
peter soppelsa
While scientists, engineers and animal advocates debated the efficiency of mechanical and animal traction, horse traction remained
standard. But the horse’s meaning had already started to change.
Former carrier of Parisian modernity, the horse was gradually coded
as a thing of the past. The hygienic élan around Pasteur and France’s
crusading social reform movement stigmatised the horse as a dirty,
foreign presence in the humanised space of the city, a persistent
source of filth, and a public health risk. In 1874 and 1875, residents
of the industrial neighbourhood Javel complained that the river was
polluted, partly because many horses bathed in it. This concern resurfaced in 1900.52 In the 1890s, as bacteriology and epidemiology
boomed, doctors and scientists researched diseases transmitted
from horses to people, often correlated with working with horses.53
Meanwhile Parisians complained that omnibus and tramway stops
were soiled by horse urine and manure, driving the Municipal Coun�
cil to consider new paving and street cleaning standards.54
Agronomist Achille Muntz counted horses as the largest urban
waste producers after humans, often citing the cgo’s fleet.55 DeÂ�Â�
pending on whether horses ate corn or oats, Muntz estimated that
they produced twenty to twenty-four kilograms of manure daily.
With over 90,000 horses in the 1890s, this meant over two-million
kilograms of manure produced in Paris each day.56 Manure was both
filth to be promptly removed and a precious fertiliser to be collected,
recycled and sold (like dead horses). As producers of energy and
waste, horses were part of an elaborate urban recycling program.
Adopting mechanical traction would clean up streets, but not without
compromising waste-collection jobs and the fertiliser industry, cutting long-standing economic and ecological circuits.
Joining these hygienic problems were traffic problems. Parisians
debated whether horses were compatible with the late nineteenth
52
╇Service de la Navigation: Rapport de l’ingénieur ordinaire, M. Pigeaud (‘Etat
d’infection de la Seine en aval de Paris’, Sept. 21, 1900), Archives de Paris, D1 S8 6.
53
╇ Charles Edward Shelly, Transactions of the Seventh International Congress
of Hygiene and Demography (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1892), 88; ‘Revue des
journaux’, Revue d’hygiène et de police sanitaire, 18 (1896), 556.
54
╇ Archives de Paris V.ONC 1350: Letter from M. Michelin to Municipal Council (Sept. 4, 1895); Archives Nationales F/14/14999: Gauthier, Rapport de l’ingenieur
ordinaire (Paris, Nov. 18, 1896).
55
╇ A. Muntz and A.-Ch. Girard, Les Engrais (Paris: Librarie Firmin-Didot, 1891),
I, 353–66.
56
╇New York’s 131,000 horses in 1900 produced 1,300–3,300 tons of manure
daily. Greene, Horses at Work, 174.
instrumentalisation of horses
259
century’s intensifying urban circulation. Amidst denser and faster
traffic, many worried that horses would be too slow, frightened by
other vehicles, overworked or mistreated.57 Although horse power
intensified Paris’ traffic throughout the nineteenth century, horses
now ironically seemed unsuited to the demands of modern traffic.
Meanwhile, demonstrations at the 1881 Paris Electrical Exhibition
and the 1889 and 1900 Universal Expositions helped mechanical
traction replace the horse as a symbol of modernity. The Métro, for
example, was opened for the 1900 Exposition: a demonstration of
electricity’s power and its bright twentieth-century future as a carrier
of the Second Industrial Revolution.
As industrial technology became more identified with modernity,
the horse’s status changed both practically and symbolically.
Throughout the 1890s, popular newspaper the Petit Journal published sensational illustrations of animals attacking people.58 One
1898 image depicted a bourgeois lady kicked by a horse. The image’s
rural setting, contrasting wild horse with civilised urban lady, shows
how urban popular culture gradually coded animals as a foreign,
even dangerous, presence. That same year, writer Jules Claretie connected bicycles and automobiles with a ‘radical transformation of
modern life’ that was leaving horses behind. Claretie saw horses as
safer, more elegant and humane than mechanised vehicles, but still
mourned their disappearance as inevitable.59 As contemporary
Georges Avenel put it, ‘This century, democratic for men, is aristocratic for horses’, pinning horses to the dying world of the European
aristocracy. The horse, he argued, was one of humanity’s oldest companions, long associated with military applications (cavalry), but ‘in
our era of peace and automobiles’, the horse was losing its prestige
and prowess, becoming, like aristocrats, a ‘chic’ novelty.60
More famous was journalist Pierre Giffard’s 1899 work The End of
the Horse, illustrated by Albert Robida.61 Giffard was an automobile
╇ H. Blerzy, ‘Etudes sur les travaux publics: routes, chemins et tramways’, Revue
des deux mondes, 27 (1878), 657; Joseph Barberet, Le travail en France: monographies
professionnelles (1877; Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1887), 249.
58
╇ Petit journal supplément illustré: 4: 25, 7: 11 and 10: 10, 1891; 8: 6 and 12: 30,
1894; 6: 2, 8: 18 and 9: 29, 1895; 8: 15, 1897; 6: 26 and 7: 3, 1898.
59
╇ Jules Claretie, La vie à Paris (1898; Paris: Charpentier, 1899), 237–43, 308–9,
385–7.
60
╇Georges Avenel, Le mécanisme de la vie moderne, vol. 3, ed. 3 (Paris: A. Colin,
1906), 237–43.
61
╇Pierre Giffard and Albert Robida, La fin du cheval (Paris: Armand Colin,
1899).
57
260
peter soppelsa
and bicycle fan, pioneering sports journalist, and organiser of
France’s first long-distance cycle races in the early 1890s, precursors
of the Tour de France. He had long argued that horses were ‘unintelligent and costly’, but in The End of the Horse he and Robida exaggerated the view to parodic effect, showing that the bicycle and the
automobile would inevitably replace the horse, cutting costs and
increasing individual mobility. They called the bicycle a ‘beast in
iron’ and ‘a horse that doesn’t eat’, a new and superior mechanical
creature. Prefiguring Avenel’s vocabulary, one Robida illustration
depicted a mounted knight facing off against a young, modern cyclist.
In the rush to prepare for the 1900 Exposition, Paris was equipped
with several electric tramways powered by surface contact systems.
These systems were vulnerable to humidity: rainwater flooded the
underground electrical equipment, causing short circuits and fires. In
addition, the electrical contacts on the road surface proved especially
dangerous for horses because horseshoes made good conductors.
While horse-powered and mechanical trams crisscrossed Paris’
streets, sometimes sharing the same rails, accidents became more frequent. Parisians debated whether the two systems of traction, one
organic and associated with the nineteenth century, the other electric
and associated with the twentieth, could coexist. In 1900, newspaper
Le Petit Parisien argued that horse-powered and mechanical vehicles
should not share the same rails, writing: ‘Tramways and carriages
could never mix well. The one excludes the other’.62 A municipal
councillor added, ‘I know well that mechanical traction is destined to
replace animal traction: “the one will kill the other”’.63 As if to prove
his point, surface contacts killed 57 horses between July, 1900 and
January, 1901.64 That year, Paris’ horse population declined for the
first time since 1880.
These accidents helped solidify the view that electric traction
was historically destined or inevitable.65 By extension, the horse was
╇ ‘Les tramways meurtrières’ Le Petit Parisien, Oct. 5, 1900, 1.
╇ Councillor Duval-Arnould, Dec. 15, 1900. See Bulletin municipal officiel, Dec.
16, 1900, 4081.
64
╇ ‘Mésaventures électriques’ Le Temps, Oct. 19, 1900, 2; Bulletin municipal officiel, Dec. 16, 1900, 4081–96; Rapport de l’ingénieur ordinaire (Paris le 25 Décembre
1900), Archives Nationales F/14/14999.
65
╇N.N. Petitjean, Les grandes travaux de Paris (Paris: L. Thouvenin, 1895), 19;
Paul Vibert, La concurrence étrangère, les transports par terre et par mer (Paris:
Berger-Levrault, 1896–7), II, 107; Georges d’Avenel, Le mécanisme de la vie moderne
(Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1905), V, 182.
62
63
instrumentalisation of horses
261
obsolete, already visibly in decline. In 1904, newspaper Le Temps
connected declining numbers of horses with the automobile’s rise;
similar reports in 1909 and 1910 confirmed the trend, documenting
the same pattern in American, British and German cities as well.66
Some Parisians complained that the shift to mechanical traction was
not fast enough.67 One author wanted ‘… mechanical traction to
replace horses and thereby manure and its drawbacks’, calling cgo
vehicles ‘horrible mastodons with three horses’.68 This prehistoric
imagery reveals the horse-car’s fading popularity, indispensability
and modernity. It was becoming a monster, a fearsome beast from a
bygone age.
Around the turn of the century, horses began to lose their place
as the quintessential motors of urban life. Bicycles, electricity and
automobiles were now cheaper, and seemed more efficient, powerful,
and accessible; they more adequately symbolised urban modernity.
As dominant urban metaphors shifted from Du Camp’s mid nineÂ�
teenth-century image of Paris as an organism, to Avenel’s early
�twentieth-century image of Paris as a machine, nature was progressively banished from the city. Horses seemed increasingly out of
place in a modern urban environment increasingly defined by artifice.
Another indication of the horse’s fading modernity was a boom in
horse welfare campaigns. Mechanical traction threw inefficient animal use into stark relief; horses’ suffering now seemed pointless and
immoral faced with amoral, mechanised alternatives. The spa was
joined by two new associations: Assistance to Animals (founded
1900) and the French League for the Protection of Horses against
Mistreatment (founded 1909).69 Assistance to Animals petitioned the
Prefecture of the Seine in 1903–4, protesting the condition of horses
used by road and sanitation crews, highlighting overloaded carts
and use of the whip: ‘a veritable instrument of torture’. In 1909–10,
The League’s pamphlets argued that horses were ‘starved, beaten,
66
╇ ‘Au jour le jour: Le cheval et l’automobilisme à Paris’, Le Temps, July 28, 1904;
‘Fewer Horses in Paris’, The New York Times, July 28, 1904; ‘Paris Using Fewer
Horses’, The New York Times, May 23, 1909; ‘Horse Versus Automobile: a French
View’ The American Review of Reviews (Sept., 1910), 368.
67
╇One American visitor in 1900 did, too. Edmund James, ‘The Inadequate Street
Car System of Paris’, Chicago Daily (Apr. 22, 1900), 51.
68
╇ Jules Armegnaud, Nettoyons Paris (Paris: Librarie Moderne, 1907), 68.
69
╇Ghislaine Bouchet, Le Cheval à Paris de 1850 à 1914, 161–189; SPA website:
http://www.spa.asso.fr/.
262
peter soppelsa
overworked’, adorned with Pierre Falize’s illustrations of frail and
fallen horses. The League demanded four reforms: removing blinders
from harnesses because they were ‘useless and cruel’; improving
workhorse food; limiting the weight they hauled; and regulating use
of the whip. They also petitioned the authorities for 100 lamppost
signs to remind citizens of the Grammont law.70
The harshest critique of horse use came from the radical satirical
magazine L’Assiette au Beurre, affiliated with Montmartre’s anarchists, cabarets and avant-gardists, who mercilessly mocked bourgeois life. A 1905 special issue called ‘The Misery of the Horse’
featured cartoons by celebrated illustrator Théophile Alexandre
Steinlen and poetry by famed animal advocate Victor Hugo.71 Steinlen
and company went further than mainstream animal advocates,
reversing the human-animal hierarchy by depicting horses as morally
superior to humans, sometimes even resisting human domination.
Two cartoons depicted the horse-driver relationship. In the first, a
drunken coachman stops his vehicle at the curb to vomit in the gutter, the snide caption reading ‘and we call them our “inferior brothers”’. In the second, a cart pulled by a single horse is shown about to
run over a little girl. While the horse rears up to avoid trampling her
under hoof, the furious driver urges him on with the whip, the caption reading ‘Which one’s the brute?’ Another cartoon depicted two
urban horses talking. When one asks ‘Have you ever asked yourself
why, when the manure in rural sheds smells so good, that of our
stables stinks so?’ the other replies, ‘Yes, it’s because us, we live closer
to humans’. The cartoon suggested that the city was an unnatural and
unhealthy place for horses, where they would be degraded by contact
with humans. In a final cartoon, a horse bucks off its rider during the
hunt rather than help kill its biological cousin, a deer.
These cartoons cast horses as ‘noble savages’, superior to humans
in the purity and innocence of their moral vision. They cast the city
as an unnatural place for horses, estranging horses from the city
much like the Petit Journal’s images of animal attacks. While these
images make no clear argument or recommendation, it is clear that
their view of human-animal relations would suggest ending urban
horse use altogether. Unlike engineers and hygienists, who argued
horses were no longer adequate for the modern city, Paris animal
╇ Archives de Paris V.ONC 132.
╇ L’Assiette au Beurre (‘Misère du cheval’), June 1905.
70
71
instrumentalisation of horses
263
advocates suggested that heavy, technological use of horses was inhumane. For them, it was not horses that were insufficiently modern,
but rather the ways humans used them. By saying that urban treatment of horses was backward or barbaric, animal advocates inadvertently supported the same cause as engineers and hygienists: reducing
the use of horses for urban locomotion.
After 1900 the horse lost its status as an indispensable technology,
fixture of street life, and symbol of urban modernity. In March of
1913, the last horse-drawn omnibus circulated in Paris, marking the
end of an era that opened in 1828. Electric streetcars and the Métro
now set the technological standard, while the autobus was replacing
the omnibus. There were half as many horses in Paris as there had
been in 1900. Horses did not disappear, but faded into the past, an
‘outdated’ technology no longer endorsed by engineers or major
transit companies, left to be used by modest workers, merchants, and
coach drivers.
Across the nineteenth century, horses went from motors of modernisation, growing by the thousands each year and defining urban
modernity, to outcasts in the city. After 1900, the instrumentalisation
of horses, so essential for the nineteenth-century city, was cast as
inadequate, inappropriate and inhumane. As Parisians defined the
urban more in terms of machines and artifice, the horse, consistently
placed in the categories of ‘animal’ and ‘nature’, seemed increasingly
foreign. Today, as scholars like Tarr, McShane, Greene and myself
work to re-establish the importance of horses in nineteenth-century
cities, we face similar category problems. Greene wrote, ‘So powerful
is the association of horses with nature that to many, horses seem
inherently incompatible with urban life’.72 In this essay, I have argued
that the horse’s incompatibility with urban life was not ‘inherent’.
The horse’s gradual estrangement from the city shows how porous
are the boundaries of the category ‘urban’, and reveals the historical
origins of this seeming inherency. The case of Paris shows that horses
were gradually constructed as non-urban after 1870. This narrative
helps us historicise the relationships between humans, our tools and
nature, thus greening urban history and the history of technology.
It also shows how anthropocentrism changed over time. Horses
were valued for their human utility: just as anthropocentrism
increased horse use and encouraged horse welfare earlier in the cen72
╇Greene, Horses at Work, 169.
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peter soppelsa
tury, it later drove horse displacement as animal power became
‘obsolete’. In order to ‘save’ anthropocentrism in the twentieth century, horses were replaced with machines. Machines were equally
compatible with anthropocentric instrumentalisation, but more compatible with changing concepts of urban modernity, hygiene, efficiency and morality. To preserve the city as a humanised space of
artifice, and to soften the instrumentalisation of humans, Parisians
estranged ‘nature’ and enlisted machines to replace animals.
anthropomorphism and the animal subject
265
anthropomorphism and the animal subject
Nik Taylor
This chapter borrows from social theory in order to investigate ways
in which humans ‘think about’ animals. Throughout, I argue that
anthropomorphism is unavoidable given that humans interpret the
natural world and other animals (and indeed other humans) through
their own embodied materiality. Precisely because of this inevitability
it is my contention that we can adopt a different way of ‘seeing
animals’: Anthropo-interpretivism. Thus, it is my contention, that
while the human element cannot be avoided in any human
interpretation of others (and this includes interpretations of other
humans) it need not necessarily lead to, or stem from, an assumption
of human superiority.
The central premise of this chapter is that there is a need to create
spaces where we can see—and record—what it is that humans and
non-humans do when they interact—not presume the very phenomena we claim to be investigating in the first place. This involves
adopting a post-humanist approach toward human-animal relations.
This approach takes as its starting point the idea that social action is
relational and that acknowledging this has the value of allowing us to
study the relatings rather than the relators. In essence this shifts the
focus away from knotty problems like who (or what) is conceived as
an actor or as having agency. It also serves to bring back to a level
playing field all those things that aren’t human. Instead of prioritising
human perspectives and thus writing out any other perspective (animal, environmental, etc.) it is an approach that sees all perspectives
as (epistemologically) equal and also allows an analysis of the power
imbalances inherent in traditional thought. A further cornerstone of
this approach is that of process, of fluidity. Instead of seeing the
world and its inhabitants in terms of static structures there is a stress
on the need to see the processes, the immanence, of things. This is an
attempt to break away from structure-agency arguments and an
attempt to clear a new epistemological space where anthropo�mor�
phism is largely accepted. So, for example, if human companion animal ‘owners’ relate to their animals by anthropomorphising them,
266
nik taylor
instead of taking this as a point of critique it becomes a point of
explication. Sociologists can then describe exactly how anthropomorphism operates as a necessary part of the co-constitutive nature of
human-companion animal relationships. Thus, this chapter not only
starts from an acceptance of anthropomorphism but also calls into
question debates about anthropomorphism as a cultural practice.
Anthropomorphism—the Dirty Word: Brief History
Anthropomorphism, from the Greek anthropos and morphe meaning
‘human’ and ‘form’ respectively, is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects, which include both ‘other’ animals
and innate objects. Originally objected to when it pertained to attributing human characteristics to Gods, anthropomorphism has come,
in the modern era, to be a dirty word, specifically in scientific discourse.1 From seventeenth-century philosophic objections from the
likes of Bacon and Spinoza through to the Cartesian idea that animals
are merely machinic beings operating only at the level of impulse,
and finally finding its pinnacle of expression in the radical behaviourism of Loeb, Watson and Skinner, anthropomorphism has come to
be synonymous with un-scientific practices, with the attribution of
emotions and mental states to animals that cannot be proven by
scientific standards.2 Despite these objections anthropomorphism
remains a consistent and persistent part of modern human cultures
and can be seen in folklore, cultural representations and the everyday
practices of those who interact with animals.
Thus, while contested in scientific discourse, anthropomorphism
is a widely accepted cultural practice, even if its scientific status is
somewhat more cloudy. Think for example of the myriad anthro�
pomorphic representations of animals in entertainment, from icons
1
╇ Xenophanes, Fragments, trans. J.H. Lesher (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1992), fr. 7, 18–9. See Sax, ‘What is this Quintessence of Dust?’ and Silverman,
‘Anthropocentrism and the Medieval Problem of Religious Language’ this volume,
for a more detailed overview.
2
╇See respectively, A. Horowitz, ‘Anthropomorphism’, Encyclopedia of HumanAnimal Relationships, ed. M. Bekoff (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group,
2007), 60–6; J.S. Kennedy, The New Anthropomorphism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992); E. Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal
Mind (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999), for a more detailed argument.
anthropomorphism and the animal subject
267
like Skippy and Flipper, through to Nemo and Babe. Similarly,
emerging research points to the fact that those who regularly interact
with animals do so anthropomorphically. This includes companion
animal owners who attribute mindedness to their non-human companions, animal shelter workers who imbue their animal charges
with per�sonhood, laboratory animal technicians who see evidence of
animal mindedness and co-presence in the animals they routinely
care for, and ethologists’ analyses of animal behaviour.3 In short,
anthropomorphism as a cultural practice is alive and well. Instead of
analysing anthropomorphism in terms of its accuracy, or inaccuracy,
then, this chapter seeks to analyse the functions of anthropomorphism as a set of cultural practices and discourses. Eschewing debates
regarding its scientific merit—or lack thereof—this chapter sidesteps
many of these issues and starts from the acceptance of the fact that
anthropomorphism exists in practice. Therefore it needs to be analysed as a situated cultural and social practice.
Anthropomorphism and Practice
Given the routine occurrence of anthropomorphism, and the increasing admission of anthropomorphism in daily life, why are anthropomorphic practices so frowned upon? One answer to this is that
such practices threaten careful boundary maintenance. Latour points
out that we live in a world where ‘pure’ categories are assumed in
theory but missing in practice; where the boundaries between, say,
human and animal are taken for granted theoretically, but are contested and negotiated in practice.4 Anthropomorphism is where
much of this negotiation and contesting takes place. Anthropo�
morphism (and its partner in crime, hybridisation), makes murky
the previously assumed clear delineations between human and
3
╇See respectively, C. Sanders, ‘Understanding Dogs: Caretakers’ Attributions of
Mindedness in Canine-Human Relationships’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22:2 (1993): 205–26; N. Taylor, ‘“Never an It”: Intersubjectivity and the Creation of Animal Personhood in Animal Shelters’, Qualitative Sociology Review, 3:1
(2007): 59–73; D.L. Weider, ‘Behaviouralistic Operationalism and the Life-World:
Chimpanzees and Chimpanzee Researchers in Face to Face Interaction’, Sociological
Inquiry, 50:3/4 (1980): 75–103; M. Bekoff and J. Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives
of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
4
╇ Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005).
268
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non-human, between human and animal, or even between human
and the broader category of everything that isn’t humanity—nature.
In doing so, it calls into question the superiority of humans. In particular, anthropomorphic practices allow non-human animals agency
and in turn this moves them from being object to being subject. Not
only does this blur the carefully erected and maintained boundaries
between humans and other animals, but it leads to tricky questions:
if animals do feel in similar ways to humans then how do we justify
current (ab)uses of them? The age old justifications based on difference—that they do not feel pain and so on—no longer apply and we
find ourselves with a set of social practices (meat eating, for example), the morality of which is no longer clear cut. In this way, then,
the discourse surrounding anthropomorphism itself can be seen as
a form of boundary maintenance. In arguing that it defiles true,
objective knowledge, we are in fact arguing for the superiority of
humanity as well as for the superiority of scientific discourse, a science based primarily (at least historically) on the use of animal bodies. Thus we have boundary maintenance at two levels: between
human and animal and between science and common sense. In effect
then, discourses regarding anthropomorphism—as well as maintaining the divide between human and animal—maintain the epistemic
privilege of science. In turn this gives the ‘voice’ of science more
power, and arguments regarding the illegitimacy of anthropomorphism are given more weight.
This means, then, that to progress we need to do two things. The
first is to recognise and deconstruct this particular function of discourses about anthropomorphism, and the second is to clear a space
where what actually happens between humans and other animals in
practice can be seen. Traditional discourses surrounding the appropriateness of anthropomorphism in scientific endeavours and as a
methodological approach serve only to cloud what actually happens
when humans and animals interact. Here, I am proposing an alternate view. Instead of getting caught up in what ought to be (methodologically speaking) I believe we should look at what actually is.
Often, this will involve accepting anthropomorphism as a cultural
practice. Weider makes this very clear in his study of interactions
between laboratory chimpanzees and their carers, so-called ‘chimpers’.5 Weider points out that through various daily practices the
5
╇ Weider, ‘Behaviouralistic Operationalism’.
anthropomorphism and the animal subject
269
chimpers assume a co-presence with their chimps; assume their
chimps have various qualities routinely reserved for humans alone—
self awareness, co-presence and so on.
Moreover Weider points out that these very anthropomorphic
practices are literally written out when it comes to producing scientific documents, a process Law refers to as ‘distorting into clarity’.6
This a perfect example of how the assumptions about the supposed
inadequacy of anthropomorphism as a scientific tool distort accounts
of what happens in the practice of human-animal interactions and
thus maintain fictional, pure/clean boundaries between human and
animal. In other words ‘the problem is not so much lack of variety in
the practice of method, as the hegemonic and dominatory pretensions of certain versions or accounts of method’.7 Accepting this line
of argument means that the question then becomes, what are we
�losing by this constant writing out of actual practices? This can be
analysed fruitfully in a number of ways. But only by seeing anthropomorphism as a cultural practice are we are able to analyse it as
such. This opens the door not only to analyses that point to the political intent of such discourses—to maintain human superiority—but
to alternate ways of thinking about it. For example, if anthropomorphism is a common social practice, what good does it serve? how is
it used? by whom? why? These are just some of the questions going
begging once we accept its cultural commonplace-ness. To begin to
investigate such issues means that we need to start by thinking differently, to see the practice for what it is and move on from there. This
means that we need to create a space where such questions can be
asked. Current binaristic paradigms essentially close this off to us,
ending the debate by pointing out the unsuitability of anthropomorphism as scientific practice. Essentially then, there is a need to create
an epistemological and theoretical space where such questions can be
asked—and potentially answered. The question becomes how? One
way forward is to adopt the standpoint of actor-network theory
(ant).
6
╇ J. Law, ‘After ant: Complexity, Naming and Typology’, Actor Network Theory
and After, eds. J. Law and J. Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 2.
7
╇ Law, ‘After ant’, 4.
270
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Actor-Network Theory
Practices of anthropomorphism lead to hybridity, i.e. an unselfconscious mixing of human and animal traits where animals are often
endowed with characteristics assumed to be human specific, such as
emotion and free will. Take, for example, the a priori assumption of
animal personality that animal shelter workers demonstrate.8 Such
practices and their outcomes essentially disrupt the Enlightenment
logic that proclaims essential differences between human and animal,
between human and non-human. ant is a natural partner in this
disruption given that it starts from the premise that actors in any
given situation come to be; they are not pre-given. The focus of much
ant is on the methods by which actors come to be, and as such, there
is a focus on the relating which happens between people and animals,
objects and so on, as opposed to a focus on persons.
Emerging from the sociology of science to study how taken-forgranted scientific realities come into being, ant has burgeoned as a
methodological and theoretical approach and is now routinely used
in disciplines/subjects as diverse as geography, sociology, health and
medicine, and science studies.9 Its appeal often lies in the paradigmatic challenge it offers to existing hierarchies of knowledge as well
as with its insistence of a level playing field for all actors involved in
the given network under investigation. It is particularly this latter
focus that makes ant so attractive to human-animal studies. Ac��
cording to Law ant is an approach ‘that treats entities and materialities as enacted and relational effects, and explores the configuration
and reconfiguration of these relations. Its relationality means that
major ontological categories (for instance “technology” and “society”,
or “human” and “non-human”) are treated as effects or outcomes’.10
The instant appeal of this to human-animal scholars seems obvious—
it allows the inclusion of animals into human spaces; it opens up
╇Taylor, ‘Never an It’.
╇Respectively, S. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces
(London: Sage, 2002); M. Woods, ‘Researching Rural Conflicts: Hunting, Local Politics and Actor-Networks’, Journal of Rural Studies, 14:3 (1998): 321–40; A. Mol and
M. Berg, ‘Principles and Practices of Medicine: the Coexistence of Various Anaemias’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 18 (1994): 247–65; Bruno Latour and S.
Woolgar, Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverley Hills,
CA. and London: Sage, 1979).
10
╇ John Law, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (Abingdon: Rout�
ledge, 2004), 157.
8
9
anthropomorphism and the animal subject
271
study of the relatings that go on in practice between humans and
animals because it starts from the assumption that ontological
hybridity is the norm. ant as a starting place for our investigation of
human-animal relations, however, has more appeal than simply
acknowledging that animals can be included in our ‘social’ science
studies.
Castree points to four particular strengths/areas within ant that
explain its challenge—and appeal—to traditional modes of thought
re human-nature/human-animal relationships: (i) binarism, (ii)
asymmetry, (iii) conceptions of actors/action and (iv) a ‘centred’
understanding of power, and here I demonstrate why they are particularly appealing to human-animal scholars.11
Binarisms
Traditionally social thought has been based on the dualist post
Cartesian legacy which denies corporeality and posits a distinction
between objective and subjective worlds. This has ultimately led to a
post-Enlightenment tradition which sees ‘itself in terms of man’s
ascent from animality’.12 This tradition has led to the entrenchment
of the belief that animals are not a part of the social world and are
therefore not a legitimate topic of inquiry for social scientists.13 For
example, Mead argued that symbolic interaction could only take
place when the interactants possessed a sense of self and moreover
that only (adult) humans could possess this necessary sense of self.14
Hence he drew a sharp, and thus far enduring, distinction between
humans and other animals. By extension, this was both predicated
upon and served to maintain, the classical distinction between the
natural and the social.
This distinction remains to be fully challenged as yet, even within
literature that addresses the human-animal bond, seemingly one of
the natural places to do so. For instance, previous theories addressing
the ways in which humans apply personhood to animals (and thus
grant their entry into social life) simply maintain such dualist
11
╇N. Castree, ‘False Antitheses: Marxism, Nature and Actor-Networks’, Antipode, 34:1 (2002): 111–46.
12
╇R. Murphy, ‘Sociology as if Nature did not Matter: an Ecological Critique’,
British Journal of Sociology, 46:4 (1995): 688–707.
13
╇See Nimmo, ‘The Making of the Human’, this volume.
14
╇R. Collins, ‘Toward a Neo-Meadian Sociology of Mind’, Symbolic Interaction,
12:1 (1989): 1–32.
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�
conceptions
while moving the boundary slightly (i.e. from human/
social v. animal/natural to human and (some) animals/social v. natural). That is, such arguments operate firmly within traditional epistemologies and do little to challenge the ‘pure’ categories these are built
upon. Such pure categories are fictional narratives designed to maintain human superiority. As Haraway points out, ‘beings do not preexist their relating… Biological and cultural determinism are both
instances of misplaced concreteness—i.e. the mistake of, first, taking
provisional and local category abstractions like “nature” and “culture” for the world and, second, mistaking potent consequences to be
pre-existing foundations’.15 The trick, then, is to learn how to study—
think about, and narrate—the relating done between actors in any
given network.16
The inclusion of animals into social studies forces us to do this by
demanding that we consider the eradication of the distinction
between the social and the natural and instead adopt the idea of heterogeneous networks and fluidity when approaching social life.17 This
is a theory that starts from the point of view that ‘entities take their
form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relations with
other entities’.18 Therefore the ‘order of things’ does not exist: there
is no tangible objective reality, rather society is emergent and performatively constructed by the relational interactions of its members,
which in turn constitute networks. In other words, approaching the
world as a set of relations in networks assumes a lack of pure categories—of binarisms—while at the same time allowing a detailed analysis of the power games inherent in purification processes.
Asymmetry
As Castree points out, accepting a binarist approach to the analysis
of social life involves choosing to prioritise one particular ontological/epistemological point of view: in this case, the human or the animal. This is precisely what discourses surrounding anthropomorphism
15
╇Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 6.
16
╇See Law, After Method, for a detailed analysis of the methodological ramifications of ANT.
17
╇ Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
18
╇ J. Law, ‘After ant: Topology, Naming and Complexity’, Actor Network Theory
and After, eds. J. Law and J. Hassard (Oxford and Keele: Blackwell, 1999), 3.
anthropomorphism and the animal subject
273
achieve—the prioritising of humans as opposed to an acceptance of
human-animal entanglements. As Castree argues, this leads to ‘a certain asymmetry, in that the natural is seen as merely a construct of
the social… The corollary is an anthropocentrism in which, ultimately, nature can only be understood and valued in human (sic)
terms’.19
By eschewing this and pointing instead, toward the fluidity and
messiness of social life and, in particular, towards the entanglements
of human, technological, animal, inert and environmental, ant
allows recognition of the fact that the purification of categories is a
power-game in a Foucauldian sense. Foucault pointed out that the
supposed rationality of sexuality/psychiatry and so on is a pretence
and a dangerous pretence at that—it is these discourses that produced the very subjects that modern social sciences thought were
irreducible agents and allowed for the realisation of power in-andthrough them: hence heterosexuality is ‘superior’ to homosexuality
(because it is ‘normal’); human is superior to animal etc.20 Modern
separation of disciplines and the by-and-large taken-for-granted,
assumed objectivity of such disciplines does the same to animals (e.g.
biology). As Lyotard points out, the guarantee that Reason leads to
liberation is yet another ideological fiction that obscures the fact that
we deal not with the discovery of the ‘truth’ but with the augmentation of power through a purification of ‘deviant categories’.21 Thus a
Lyotardian ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ does not imply a negative turn towards the subjective and the relativist but a positive
move away from the embedded and axiomatic exercise of power
within societies by allowing us to move away from an obsession with:
‘1) the relation between what counts as nature and what counts as
culture in Western discourse and its cousins, and 2) the correlated
issue of who and what counts as an actor’.22
In counterpoint to modernist ideas regarding objectivity and the
purification of hybrid categories (itself an ideological product of the
modernity project), an accounting of (rather than for) naturecultures
and the relatings within them offers not an unavoidable spiral into
╇ Castree, ‘False Antitheses’, 120.
╇Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1976; London: Penguin, 1998),
vol. 1.
21
╇D. Lyon, Postmodernity (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), 54.
22
╇ Lyotard quoted in Lyon, Postmodernity, 96; Haraway, Companion Species
Manifesto, 27.
19
20
274
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Nietzschean nihilism, but the emancipation claimed to be on offer
through the application of absolutist principles. As Lyon argues ‘liberty should be sought in disorientation… the discovery of the finitude, historicity and contingency of our own values and value
systems’.23 ant’s epistemological foundations allow for precisely
this. By eschewing binarisms and thus recognising asymmetrical
approaches that construct the social world purely on human terms,
ant offers a very different way forward for human-animal scholars:
to give an accounting of the practices of human-animal relations that
inevitably includes anthropomorphic tendencies and explanations of
animal subjectivity.
Impoverished Conceptions of Actors/Action
Castree points out that traditional approaches to social life assume
that only humans can be subjects because only humans have agency.
In other words, ‘that actors’ capacities to act are defined by their
intrinsic powers and liabilities; that the significant actors are human;
and that action is associated with intentionality and linguistic
competence (logocentrism)’.24 However, if we accept the central
premise of ant, that the ‘social’ is intersubjectively constituted, then
the next logical step is to see, as Law argues, ‘what counts as a person
is an effect generated by a network of heterogeneous, interacting,
materials… social agents are never located in bodies and bodies
alone, but rather… an actor is a patterned network of heterogeneous
relations, or an effect produced by such a network’.25 Such network
theories lend themselves to the study of human-animal relationships:
they are predicated on the lack of a distinction between the social
and the natural and thus an eradication of dualist ways of thinking.
This eradication is necessary if we are to become open to the idea of
anything other than humans having agency and thus being designated
as social actors. Latour prefers the term ‘actant’, precisely to move
away from notions of human exclusivity and, instead of assuming
that humans are the only part that matters in any social activity,
argues instead that ‘work’ gets done through the conduit of a complex
series of negotiations between human and non-human actants.
╇ Lyon, Postmodernity, 61.
╇ Castree, ‘False Antitheses’, 121.
25
╇ J. Law, ‘Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and
Heterogeneity’, Systems Practice, 5 (1992): 379–93, at 383–4.
23
24
anthropomorphism and the animal subject
275
Moreover, it is this very negotiation between actants that leads ultimately to the definition of their qualities and identities: they emerge
from a fluid process of interaction between various (human and nonhuman) components. This constitutes translation, that is, ‘the way
in which the components of a coherent actor are assembled’.26
A ‘Centred’ Understanding of Power
Castree argues that most attempts to bring nature ‘back into’ social
theory suffer from ‘a conception of power which is anthropomorphic
and overly centred. In other words, power is seen to be “held” and
projected by particular social actors or to otherwise reside within a
distinct social system (like “capitalism” or “patriarchy”)’.27 Moreover
the actors who are seen to hold power are always and irreducibly
human because in these particular epistemological approaches power
is either the outcome of human manoeuvrings or is invested—by
humans—in a particular human way of working. Again, animals and
other non-human entities are written firmly out of the equation and
left as passive recipients of the abuses of such power. The alternate
conception of ant is that ‘power, like society, is the final result of a
process and not a reservoir, a stock, or a capital that will automatically
provide an explanation. Power and domination have to be produced,
made up, composed’.28 In essence then, the decentred approach to
power inherent in ant allows animals to have agency and to play a
part in human-animal interactions in ways that traditional thought
negates. Traditional thought tends to study the humans in humananimal interactions and ignore the animal side of things. In itself this
is the outcome of imbalanced power relations that are embedded and
re-enacted through clinging to a particular epistemological paradigm.
The de-centring of power that ant insists on is necessary to allow
animals a role in human-animal interactions, however that may
manifest itself. Ironically, this insistence on the de-centring of power
is also necessary if we are to analyse the ways in which power is
manifest in human-animal relations, whereby animals tend always
to lose out. Rather than imbuing institutions with power, the
processes by which power comes to be made manifest should be
analysed. This also offers a way for us to counter hegemonic practices
╇ Woods, ‘Researching Rural Conflicts’, 322.
╇ Castree, ‘False Antitheses’, 122.
28
╇ Latour, Reassembling the Social, 64.
26
27
276
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with regard to animals. By allowing them a space within our
epistemologies that isn’t relegated simply to passive object, we begin
to deconstruct the very modes of thought that write them out of our
thinking in the first place.
A Word of Caution
While ant does offer one way forward for those of us who want to
see animals included in social thought (and life) and who want to
analyse the functions of anthropomorphism as a cultural practice, it
is not without its problems. ant insists on a completely level playing
field for all actants enrolled in interaction—humans, animals, technologies, objects and so on. In particular ant and its successors, such
as feminist technoscience studies, have embraced the conceptual idea
of the hybrid. That is, a machine-human hybrid whose very presence
threatens to disrupt carefully maintained boundaries between human
and other.29 While to be celebrated precisely for these disruptions,
the human-machine/human-technological hybrid often over-writes
any sense of ‘animals’ as living beings. According to Molloy, ‘arguing
for the recognition of the revolutionary and often utopian aspects of
the cyborg, critical assessment of the cybernetic paradigm has not
reproduced traditional distinctions between human and non-human
animal, but erased the animal other altogether’.30
That said, ant and such alternate epistemologies as feminist technoscience may also offer a way to think about animals that offers
them some form of ‘protection’ (through equality not paternalism)
that isn’t rights based and again, allows sidestepping of rights-based
practices, which are themselves an outcome of masculinist, rationalist principles.31
29
╇See, for example, Donna Haraway’s seminal work on cyborgs, ‘A Cyborg
�Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century’, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 149–81.
30
╇ C. Molloy, ‘Marking Territories’, Limen: Journal for Theory and Practice of
Liminal Phenomena, 1 (2001), np.
31
╇ For further discussion see Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies, ch. 7; Haraway,
Companion Species Manifesto; eadem, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008); C. Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the
Animal (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); idem, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How
anthropomorphism and the animal subject
277
Conclusion
If we sidestep debates about the methodological problems assumed
to be inherent in anthropomorphism we are then able to see it as a
cultural practice. This allows an analysis of it as practice. One of the
functions it serves through its practice—and here I am including the
discourse surrounding it (i.e. those very debates about its methodological inadequacy)—is boundary maintenance: the maintaining of
boundaries between human and non-human, culture and nature, and
scientific and common sense knowledges. In this respect, then, it
both comes out of, and contributes to binaristic thinking. There is a
need to think differently, to see the practice for what it is and move
on from there. If this kind of processual, emergent social theory is
to be achieved—and with it the comparative liberty gained from a
negation of binary classification—then difficult epistemic questions
are their prelude. What is involved is the literal and figurative ‘clearing of a space’ from where we can begin to ask questions that are not
constitutive of, and embedded in, binary oppositions and their corelated power-games.
It should come as no surprise that this call to arms to re-establish
and (re)recognise hybridity itself adopts a hybrid methodological and
empirical approach, starting from the point of view that we currently
have few (if any) appropriate ways with which to ‘think about’ animals. For the most part it is a hybridity of phenomenology, ethnomethodology and actor network theory but also borrows happily
from philosophy and other disciplines. A truly trans-species ‘way of
knowing’ and methodology necessitates a truly trans-disciplinary
approach. If we really want to study human-animal relationships,
relations, and relatings, then we must do so by borrowing key ideas
from any and all applicable disciplines. After all, the separation of
knowledge into discrete disciplines is itself a process of purification
with its attendant power-games. Current asymmetrical methodologies fail both sides. In stubbornly clinging to the notion that the natural sciences (e.g. biology) can adequately account for non-human
animals, and that the social sciences (e.g. sociology) can adequately
account for human animals, we are left with an ontological, epistemological and methodological void: just who ‘should’ or ‘can’ study
to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004).
278
nik taylor
human-animal relations? We are also left with the assumption that
the two are entirely separate, as well as an inability to recognise the
myriad ways that humans and animal lives overlap and interact. In
some ways this can be seen in the new (but burgeoning) field of
human-animal studies, where the majority of work, adopting a traditional epistemological approach, tends to focus on ‘obvious’ humananimal interactions such as companion animals and their ‘owners’.
Traditional conceptions of human-animal relations see either animal
behaviour or human benefit but this fails to grasp the depths of the
relationships between humans and animals. And here I do not simply
mean human and domesticated, companion animal. The term ‘companion animals’ has come to mean those domesticated animals who
share human family life (cats, dogs, small rodents and so on), which
is a very narrow interpretation. As Haraway points out, ‘companion
animals’ are those who accompany humans—‘a story of co-habitation, co-evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality’—and thus
may include animals we currently live with but also includes animals
who shared human evolution.32 Think here of other domesticated
species such as goats, who are held to have changed the savannahs
and made them habitable for humans; think also of parasites who
have played fundamental roles in the development of embodied
humanity, whether negatively or positively; and think finally of those
animals with whom we share our so-called ‘urban’ spaces—foxes,
rabbits, a plethora of bird species and so on—all of whom implicitly
‘affect’ these hitherto assumed human-only spaces and human-only
lives.
In summary, then, I am advocating the clearing of a space which
allows us to think anew—to rethink?—taken-for-granted assumptions
about the world and its inhabitants. It is an epistemologically radical
alternative because of its insistence that human superiority and
perspectives not be prioritised and it leads to some radical
conclusions, not least of which are the methodological prescripts/
questions. Actor-network theory is not so much a theory as it is a
philosophical/epistemological position. In post-humanist thought
the very idea of a ‘theory’ becomes irrelevant, as it suggests a fixed
end point that one can attain. Given the stress on becoming, on
process, ant can never be a theory in that vein. Rather, it is a
standpoint, somewhere to start from as opposed to somewhere to
╇ Haraway, Species Manifesto, 4.
32
anthropomorphism and the animal subject
279
end. This standpoint has real-world implications, not only about the
way we think as outlined above, but also about the way we do. ant,
then, is a method rather than a theory, a starting point, a paradigm,
a philosophical position, a spatial-temporal-material quagmire of
un�doing which allows us to acknowledge the ways in which anthro�
pomorphism is used to recognise animals as ‘subjects’.
part four
human and non-human environments
social history, religion and technology
283
social history, religion and technology:
an interdisciplinary investigation into
white’s ‘roots’
Robin Attfield
Lynn White’s famous and controversial 1967 essay, ‘The Historical
Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’1 has had a widespread influence, permeating not only scholarly circles in the disciplines of history, theology and philosophy, but also youth organisations and many other
branches of semi-popular culture, being reprinted in numerous publications including The Boy Scout Handbook and the hippie newsletter The Oracle, and being reprised in Time Magazine and in The New
York Times.2 By now, the influence of ‘Roots’ has become a cultural
given, unlikely to be modified by journal articles, however broad or
scholarly. To cite one prominent example, the history of Western
attitudes to animals and to nature in the chapter entitled ‘Man’s
Dominion: A Short History of Speciesism’ of Peter Singer’s seminal
and in many ways admirable 1976 work Animal Liberation was
almost certainly written under the influence of ‘Roots’ (among other
sources), and has long been exercising a powerful influence of its
own.3 By now, the genie of White’s impact can hardly be put back
in its bottle.
Nevertheless, forty years on a re-assessment is in place. For example, environmentalists and ethicists need to take a view on whether
White’s claims should figure in their understanding of the causes of
ecological problems, and whether their solutions should be influ╇ Lynn White, Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, first published in
Science, 155:37 (1967): 1203–7. This essay had been reprinted in many places, for
example in John Barr, ed., The Environmental Handbook (London: Ballantine, 1971):
3–16. White himself reprinted it in Lynn White Jr., Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT
Press, 1968): 75–94; page references here will refer to the page numbers of this
republication.
2
╇Elspeth Whitney, ‘Lynn White, Ecotheology, and History’, Environmental Ethics, 15:2 (1993): 151–69, at 157f.
3
╇Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1976).
1
284
robin attfield
enced in turn by what they conclude about such causes. Theologians,
many of whom have developed overtly new approaches to ecological
issues (ecotheologians), albeit ones often held to be rooted in theological traditions, need to reflect on the extent to which White was
ascribing blame to Christian beliefs, not least so as to be able to attain
clarity about the correctives that would be necessary if this is what he
was doing, and if he was doing so justifiably. Alternatively, different
correctives could be in place if his remarks were theologically misleading. Historians too need to relate the claims made by White in
‘Roots’ to his own parallel studies of medieval history in more sustained works, and also to reflect on his methodological stance. In
short, nothing less than an inter-disciplinary review is needed.
No single essay can supply conclusive answers to all the above
questions. But that is not a conclusive reason against attempting
inter-disciplinary study, particularly where (as in this case) recent
research prepares the way, throwing light on many of the key issues.
Fortuitously, White’s own works on medieval history, or so I shall
claim, allow for a more nuanced approach to medieval technology
than is found in ‘Roots’, and relatedly for a rather different interpretation of cultural history; and all this may turn out to have a bearing
both on history, on methodology, and on addressing ecological problems. First, however, an attempt to retrieve his message is in place,
since only on this basis can it be judged whether this message was
historical, theological or both.
In section 2, I present an overview of ‘Roots’. Section 3 appraises
certain historical claims made in ‘Roots’, initially by comparing
‘Roots’ with parallel passages in White’s earlier Medieval Technology
and Social Change, where a much more qualified, if vulnerable, historical narrative is supplied. Section 4 considers whether the central
message of ‘Roots’ was historical as opposed to theological, as has
been claimed, or whether White’s claims extend to both these fields.
Some earlier research on the reliability of his theological claims is
also summarised. Section 5 turns to issues of methodology, from his
determinism to his interpretative assumptions, and introduces some
of the findings (historical, theological and methodological) of Elspeth
Whitney, who criticises both White and his critics for ignoring systemic explanations of ecological problems. The Afterword (Section 6)
comments on the relation of systemic explanations and explanations
like those implicit both in White and in his ecotheological critics that
stress individual beliefs and values, suggesting that both are needed.
social history, religion and technology
285
An Overview of ‘Roots’
At the core of White’s ‘Roots’ article, connected theses are presented
concerning medieval technology, cultural history and the relations
between (on the one hand) religious beliefs and values and (on the
other) technology and attitudes to it. Commentators divide between
those who construe White’s message as relating to medieval history
rather than to theology, and those who take seriously White’s apparent portrayal of Christianity as the cause of our ecological problems
and take his message to be theological as much as anything else.
White’s eminence as an historian of medieval technology helps
explain the former view, while the appearance, partly in response to
White, of a considerable body of writing in the field of ecotheology
helps explain how the latter view is also credible. My own view,
defended below, is that significant theses are present both about history and about theology, together with significant assumptions about
the causal role of individual values.
By this stage the conclusion has become undeniable that an inquiry
aiming to understand and appraise White’s message (and indirectly
his influence too) would be bound to fail if it did not seek to be interdisciplinary. This helps explain how the current essay comes to have
sections on medieval agriculture and technology, on theological
themes and also on historical methodology. But first it is appropriate
to present readers with some key themes and moments from ‘Roots’
itself.
The following extract shows how claims about a new kind of
plough are used to illustrate a supposedly distinctive change of cultural attitude towards nature.
By the latter part of the seventh century after Christ, however, following
obscure beginnings, certain northern peasants were using an entirely new
kind of plough… Thus, distribution of land was based no longer on the
needs of the family but, rather, on the capacity of a power machine to till
the earth. Man’s relation to the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly
man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature. Nowhere
else in the world did farmers develop any analogous agricultural implement. Is it coincidence that modern technology, with its ruthlessness
towards nature, has so largely been produced by descendants of these peasants of northern Europe?4
4
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 83f.
286
robin attfield
White reinforces this interpretation, and amplifies its scope, further
down the same page: ‘The victory of Christianity over paganism was
the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture’.5 White
proceeds to explicate this verdict by attempting to answer the question ‘What did Christianity tell people about their relations with the
environment?’ Christianity is not initially characterised here as
Western, although some of his claims are qualified by the expression
‘Especially in its Western form…’ Nor is his subject-matter qualified
as medieval Christianity: for it is here that he cites the second-century
church fathers, Tertullian and Irenaeus. Writing, then, of the conversion of Europe and the whole Mediterranean region from paganism
to Christianity, he states that: ‘The spirits in natural objects, which
formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated. Man’s effective
monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled’.6
Seeking to summarise the paragraphs that follow, Peter Harrison
has produced the following paraphrase: ‘The Christian doctrine of
the creation sets the human being apart from nature, advocates
human control of nature, and implies that the natural world was created solely for our use’.7 This passage well captures what White is
saying here, despite Harrison’s later claim that White’s message concerns the medieval reception of Christianity rather than its central
message.
Nevertheless White later attempts to limit the scope of his claims,
or rather to apply them more particularly to the West than to the
East of Europe, although not exclusively so.
What I have said may well apply to the medieval West, where in fact
technology made spectacular advances. But the Greek East, a highly
civilised realm of equal Christian devotion, seems to have produced no
marked technological innovation after the late seventh century, when
Greek fire was invented… Eastern theology has been intellectualist.
Western theology has been voluntarist. The implications for the conquest of nature would emerge more easily in the Western atmosphere.8
White develops this theological distinction with further historical
claims, summarised as follows by Harrison:
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 84.
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 87.
7
╇Peter Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth: Genesis 1, Early Modern Science, and the
Exploitation of Nature’, Journal of Religion, 79 (1999): 86–109, at 86.
8
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 87f.
5
6
social history, religion and technology
287
In the Christian Middle Ages, according to White, we already encounter evidence of attempts at the technological mastery of nature, and of
those incipient exploitative tendencies that come to full flower in scientific and technological revolutions of later eras. All of this is attributed to the influence of Judeo-Christian conceptions of creation.
Christianity, White concludes, ‘bears a huge burden of guilt for environmental deterioration’.9
Thus Christianity is substantially to blame for the nineteenth-century
alliance of science and technology (offshoots both, in White’s
account, of Christianity) and for their ‘ecologic effects’.10
It is at this stage that White suggests that we either find a new
religion, or rethink our old one.11 In the first connection, White considers Zen Buddhism and Hinduism, but expresses doubt about ‘their
viability among us’ (Westerners, presumably). His preferred alternative is to adopt the non-anthropocentric values of the ‘heretical’ St.
Francis, whom he proposes as a patron saint for ecologists,12 and to
reject what he depicts as ‘the Christian axiom’ that ‘nature has no
reason for existence save to serve man’.13
Some immediate remarks are in place. First, White can hardly be
interpreted as having nothing to say about theology. Second, his
advocacy of a non-anthropocentric metaphysic (and implicitly of a
non-anthropocentric value-theory) will be a welcome one to many
environmental ethicists, whether or not the success of such advocacy
would be sufficient even to begin to cure ecological problems. Third,
his interpretations of Christianity (and also of Francis as a heretic)
are open to legitimate questioning. But fourth, this is also true of his
interpretations of cultural history, the topic which should next be
addressed.
The Roots of ‘Roots’ and its Historical Message
White’s 1962 book Medieval Technology and Social Change (mtsc)
includes a chapter on medieval agriculture, of which a large section
relates to the introduction of heavy ploughing, its social impacts and
what it symbolises.14 A comparison of this section with relevant para╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 86.
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 90.
11
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 91.
12
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 91–4.
13
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 93.
14
╇ Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1962), 41–57.
9
10
288
robin attfield
graphs in ‘Roots’ (which was, of course, first published in 1967) suggests that this section was his direct source for those paragraphs,
particularly in view of the considerable verbal similarities. Some of
his more striking sentences in ‘Roots’ are in fact direct quotations
from this section.
It is worth comparing the two passages. The earlier (mtsc) passage
is full of qualifications. The ‘Roots’ passage turns out to be nuanced
in places to reflect the need for such qualifications, but the lessons
drawn are neither nuanced nor, I shall argue, compatible with the
qualifications of mtsc. Further, the mtsc passages that were subsequently quoted in ‘Roots’ prove to be rhetorical sentences that appear
to conflict with the style and to some extent the content of their 1962
contexts.
One of these is a passage about the ‘new’ plough and its impacts.
‘No more fundamental change in the idea of man’s relation to the soil
can be imagined: once man had been part of nature; now he became
her exploiter’.15 How far does the section on heavy ploughing bear
out either this summary, or the general implication of ‘Roots’ that it
was the conversion of northern Europe to Christianity that explains
the new ‘exploitation of nature’?
The claim in ‘Roots’ that the eight-oxen plough was new is actually
undermined by White himself, who in mtsc cites the younger Pliny
as describing such a plough as in use in Italy (in the Po Valley, White
suggests) in the second century ce.16 White proceeds to discuss the
gradual introduction of heavy ploughing in various places in Europe
(far from all of them in Northern Europe) over the period up to the
eleventh century. Marc Bloch, who in 1931 synthesised and promulgated the theory that heavy ploughing produced a new field-system
and social system in Northern Europe (and to whose memory mtsc
is dedicated), did so with wide-ranging reservations and doubts, and
these qualifications are summarised here by White.17 For example,
strip-fields of the kind supposedly resulting from the introduction of
the heavy plough are to be found in places where the old kind of
plough remains in use (Syria and Sardinia), while open fields of the
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 56.
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 42; R.H. Hilton goes further, and claims that the
heavy plough was in use among the Belgae in the first century bce. See R.H. Hilton
and P.H. Sawyer, ‘Technical Determinism: The Stirrup and the Plough’, Past and
Present, 24 (1963): 90–100, at 97.
17
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 41.
15
16
social history, religion and technology
289
kind supposed to result from this agricultural revolution are to be
found in pre-conquest Mexico, where no ploughs were in use at all.18
In any case, the open-field system, as also found in Sardinia, served
equally ‘to increase the facilities for rearing cattle’ as well as ‘putting
maximum arable into grain’, and was thus likely to be introduced
when either of these motives was present, rather than specifically
requiring the one relating to ploughing.19
Further evidence shows that the heavy plough was in use among
Slavs (Western, Eastern and Southern ones alike) prior to the Avar
invasion of 568 ce, which separated Southern Slavs from the others.20
But this would seem to suggest that heavy ploughing was widespread
in the sixth century among ethnic groups who were either (just possibly) Christians of the Eastern variety (contrary to White’s thesis
exempting Eastern Christianity from the ‘exploitative’ tendencies
epitomised in his view of the new kind of ploughing) or more probably pagans (whose inhibitions to ‘the exploitation of nature’ were yet
‘to crumble’, since this crumbling was to take place, according to
‘Roots’, with the adoption of Christianity).
As for England, the balance of evidence suggests, according to
White, that heavy ploughing was introduced into the Danelaw by the
Viking invaders of the later ninth and early tenth centuries, from
whom the English word ‘plough’ (spelt thus in British English) seems
to derive (from the Old Norse term ‘plogr’).21 If so, there can scarcely
have been an agricultural revolution across Northern Europe in the
seventh century. Further, given that some of the ninth- and tenthcentury Vikings were pagan, not even at this late stage in the history
of the heavy plough can it be regarded as a Christian innovation.
The evidence does support changed methods of agriculture in the
Rhineland in the seventh century, suited to supporting a greatly
enlarged population there, although this interpretation has been
challenged.22 But not even White believed that it spread to the Norse
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 47.
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 55; Hilton supplies convincing evidence of the
existence of open fields in England in the seventh century, before the arrival of the
Danes; see Hilton and Sawyer, ‘Technical Determinism’, 98.
20
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 49–50.
21
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 51.
22
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 54; Hilton suggests that rather than increased
food causing population growth, the reverse may have been the case: see Hilton and
Sawyer, ‘Technical Determinism’, 99–100.
18
19
290
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until somewhat later, maybe shortly before they brought it in the
ninth century to England and to Normandy.23
The overall picture, then, is that while it is true that ‘certain northern peasants’ were using heavy ploughs in the seventh century, these
ploughs were not new, not distinctively Western (but derived from
places further south and east), not distinctively or characteristicalÂ�ly Christian, and only sometimes associated with changes in fieldsystems or in the organisation of society. White’s claim about the
uniqueness of the plough of these northern peasants is cast into
doubt by his own evidence about its presence many centuries earlier
both in Italy (as attested by Pliny) and in the northern Balkans or
Danube valley (among the Slavs). Further, White’s remark in ‘Roots’
about modern technology originating in the descendants of these
peasants,24 far from reflecting an obvious truism, is itself either
untestable or implausible, since we scarcely know who these peasants
were, and, to the extent that we are confident that they were Rhenish
Franks, since his remark hardly fits the geographical distribution of
subsequent technological inventions. For the same reasons, while
White proceeds to show (not least in mtsc) that there was considerable technological development in Northern and Western Europe in
the later middle ages, we are utterly unable to correlate the attitudes
concerned (whether ‘exploitative’ or otherwise) with those of the
peasants who introduced the ‘new’ plough.
Similar reservations are in place about White’s claim about a
changed relation of humanity to the soil. If there can be strip-field
systems and open fields run on a communal basis either with or without heavy ploughs, then the introduction of these ploughs can hardly
have significantly changed the relation to the soil of humanity, or
even of the Northern European segment of humanity. The suggestion
that there was such a dramatic change might begin to make sense if,
as used to be supposed, the heavy plough was introduced very quickly
over a significant area, e.g. with the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England;
but it is White himself who discounts such a theory.25 Peter Harrison
credits the interpretation of ‘Roots’ about heavy ploughing: ‘The
introduction of the heavy plough into northern Europe made �possible
the large-scale cultivation of land and lifted agricultural production
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 54.
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 84.
25
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 43.
23
24
social history, religion and technology
291
above the level of subsistence farming. This technological innovation
thus revolutionised the relationship between human beings and the
land that they inhabited…’.26 However, this interpretation hardly
coheres with the facts insofar as they are disclosed in White’s fuller
and earlier 1962 text.
But in any case, how credible is it that users of the scratch-plough,
unlike users of the heavy plough, were parts of nature (as White
seems to imply, both in mtsc and in ‘Roots’)?27 As we have seen, the
scratch-plough was compatible with the same land systems and social
systems as Bloch’s theory attributes to the heavy plough. Besides, is
ploughing of any kind best described or understood as ‘being part of
nature’? Are Hesiod and Varro, Columella and Vergil best described
as parts of nature, with no traces or tendencies towards its mastery?
More plausibly the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture
was a far more significant transition even than that from hoeing to
ploughing. If, however, deployers of the scratch-plough can be considered ‘parts of nature’, perhaps through living in some kind of harmony with natural forces and cycles, then why are things so very
different with the introduction of the eight-oxen plough with its
share and mouldboard? The change hardly warrants White’s claim
that ‘now’ (in the seventh century, apparently) man became nature’s
‘exploiter’.28
Yet this is the phrasing used by White in mtsc as well as in ‘Roots’,
immediately after regaling his readers (in mtsc, albeit not in ‘Roots’)
with all the qualifications cited above, and with more. As will be seen,
White seems to have had a hankering after aphorisms, particularly
double-barrelled ones, such as the one about man, who was formerly
part of nature, becoming nature’s exploiter. These aphorisms are
somewhat reminiscent of that Hebrew parallelism to be found in the
Old Testament Psalms and other poetic writings. White could have
come across this literary form in Christian worship (for, despite his
apparent criticism of the legacy of Christianity, he was himself a
believing Christian);29 or he could have encountered it in the aphorisms of Francis Bacon’s New Organon. He also seems to have judged
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 94–5.
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 56; ‘Roots’, 84 (these two passages are all but
identical).
28
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 56; ‘Roots’, 84.
29
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 154, where she cites White, Dynamo, 33–55.
26
27
292
robin attfield
that this particular trope has much greater effect if employed sparingly, unexpectedly and suddenly.30
However, White used another such double-barrelled aphorism on
the next page of mtsc and at the end of the next paragraph of ‘Roots’,
after describing the new style of illustrations of the calendars of
Charlemagne’s reign. Instead of passive personifications of the
months, the new illustrations relate to human activities, and were
said by H. Stern (whom White here quotes) to show a ‘coercive attitude towards natural resources’. (The new activities include ploughing, harvesting, wood-chopping and pig-slaughtering). At this point,
White inserts his further aphorism: ‘Man and nature are now two
things, and man is master’, replicated in ‘Roots’ with the omission of
‘now’.31 The omission of ‘now’ marginally assists his case, since he is
here writing of the ninth century, rather than of the seventh, as in the
previous paragraph. But similar reservations are again in place. Was
man really part of nature at any time since the year was reflectively
divided into a calendar of months by the Greeks and the Romans, or
by their predecessors, the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians? On the
other hand, can any creature dependent on nature’s seasons (and
thus the calendar) be altogether nature’s master, or even see themselves as such?
In both the case of ploughing and that of calendar illustrations,
White magnifies a phenomenon of the early middle ages so as to
confer on it something approaching cosmic significance. Whitney
cites a later passage of White which throws light on this tendency: ‘It
is better for a historian to be wrong than to be timid’.32 White’s sparing employment of sonorous aphorisms, intermingled with an amazing array of well-honed scholarship, seems to have persuaded many
readers to treat them as gospel.
Harrison’s eventual interpretation of technological innovations
such as heavy ploughing (which is also applicable to Carolingian calendar illustrations) is far more appropriate. ‘Yet in none of this’, he
affirms (in a passage about early medieval practices), ‘do we encounter the explicit articulation of an attitude of indifference to, or hostility toward, nature. Indeed, there seems to be no compelling reason
to view these developments as anything more than particular expres╇ As at White, Medieval Technology, 56.
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 57; White, ‘Roots’, 84.
32
╇ White, Medieval Technology, xx, cited by Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 168.
30
31
social history, religion and technology
293
sions of the universal tendency of all cultures to seek efficient means
to provide for basic human needs’.33 As he adds, there is, in this analysis, no ‘religiously motivated ideology of exploitation, explicitly
informed by the Christian doctrine of creation’.34
The Messages of ‘Roots’: Historical, Theological, or Both?
In this section, I discuss whether White’s thesis is really about the
historical reception of Christian texts, as Peter Harrison has
suggested,35 as opposed to concerning, in part, their meaning and
theological interpretation. I shall suggest that White was propounding not only an historical thesis but also an interpretation of
Christianity.
Harrison has some distinctive insights about what White’s thesis
consists in. He maintains that what is relevant to White’s thesis is not
the meaning of Genesis 1 but its reception in different periods, and
proceeds to supply interesting and original interpretations of the different receptions of Genesis in the middle ages and in the seventeenth century.
White’s thesis is not concerned with the meaning of the text as such,
with how it was understood by the community in which it first
appeared, or with what modern biblical scholars have made of it, but
rather with what the text was taken to mean at certain periods of history, how it motivated specific activities, and how it came to sanction
a particular attitude toward the natural world… White’s thesis does
not therefore lie within the ambit of biblical criticism or hermeneutics
but in the sphere of history.36
However, while the reception of Genesis is certainly relevant (as he
proceeds to show), the meaning of Genesis and other Old Testament
books is far from obviously irrelevant, despite Harrison’s claims that
attention to the meaning of these texts involves ‘a common but misplaced line of argument’, undertaken by a wide range of historians,
theologians and philosophers.37 ‘… it is the reception of the text, and
not its presumed meaning, which is at issue here’, he concludes.38
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 95.
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 95.
35
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 89.
36
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 89.
37
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 88.
38
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 89.
33
34
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Harrison finds a passage in Whitney that appears to say much the
same:
White’s claim that the Bible had inspired the development of Western
technology and control of nature rested not on the biblical text per se
or on any ‘timeless’ theological explication of it… The crucial question,
therefore, was not so much what the writers of the Old and New Testaments had meant about technology, or even how their world might
be construed by modern readers, but how the Bible had been interpreted in the Middle Ages and after.39
Yet Whitney nevertheless goes on to consider seriously (in my view
to her credit) the stances of the various ecotheologians as responses
to White that carry both merits and demerits, including assumptions
that they and White hold in common.
I shall argue here that the meaning of Genesis and related works is
just as important in White’s thesis as their historical reception, in
view of White’s claims about the message and perennial impact of
Christianity (and implicitly about those of Judaism as well). If so,
considerable doubt is cast on Harrison’s claim (quoted above) that
‘White’s thesis does not lie within the ambit of biblical criticism or
hermeneutics but in the sphere of history’.40 Further, while White
seeks (in ‘Roots’) to exempt Orthodox Christianity from his
interpretations,41 it is far from clear that he can consistently do so; for
if Christianity is anthropocentric and supports a despotic role for
humanity (according to which human beings may treat nature as
they please: see below) these interpretations will be equally applicable
to all traditions that subscribe to Christian theology, even if some
were linked to a less ‘voluntarist’42 (activist) cultural attitude than
others.
White, for example, asserts that ‘Especially in its Western form,
Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen’.43
But an anthropocentric religion is one that either regards the entire
material creation as created for human benefit (metaphysical anthropocentrism), or that treats none but human beings (plus maybe God)
as having moral standing, and none but human interests (plus perhaps God’s) as warranting moral consideration (normative or ethical
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 162; Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 90n13.
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 89.
41
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 87f.
42
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 88.
43
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 86.
39
40
social history, religion and technology
295
anthropocentrism). White’s text suggests that he intended more particularly the former interpretation (although the former is often
treated as an obvious basis for adherence to the latter as well), for he
wrote later in ‘Roots’ that ‘we shall continue to have a worsening
ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no
reason for existence save to serve man’.44 But this is a claim about a
(supposed) fundamental tenet of Christianity in general, and not
only of medieval or Western Christianity. (Here it is worth remarking that for neither of these interpretations does White offer a shred
of evidence, despite the accuracy of most of his other claims. The
evidence that he cites, from Tertullian and Irenaeus,45 discloses a high
view of humanity as embedded in Christianity (Christ being the
‘Second Adam’), but does not begin to bear out anthropocentric
interpretations, whether metaphysical or normative.) In any case it is
becoming clear already that White was deeply in the business of
theological interpretation, and that his theological interpretations are
going to be crucial to his claims about historical impacts.
This view is strongly supported by the content of the programmatic single-sentence paragraph which opens this phase of his argument: ‘What did Christianity tell people about their relations with the
environment?’46 His use of the past tense here does not relate solely
to the medieval period, let alone to the reception of Christian teaching in that period, for in the next paragraph he writes of what
Christianity inherited from Judaism through texts such as Genesis,47
and it is in the paragraph following that he cites Tertullian and
Irenaeus (of the second century ce).48 His use of the past tense concerns, then, what Christianity was teaching all along and from earliest times.
In case it is suggested that White had in mind something less than
metaphysical or normative anthropocentrism, it should be remarked
that he proceeds, in the same paragraph as that in which this term is
used of Christianity, to illustrate his claim with the supposed implication that Christianity ‘insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit
nature for his proper ends’.49 Yet this further claim, besides implicitly
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 93.
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 86.
46
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 85.
47
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 85.
48
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 86.
49
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 86.
44
45
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robin attfield
ascribing to the Christianity of all periods both metaphysical and
normative anthropocentrism of a rather Aristotelian kind, goes further by suggesting that it teaches that human beings are authorised
to treat the natural world as they please, as long as the treatment is
related to ‘their proper ends’, an Aristotelian or Stoic phrase that
White neglects to explain, let alone defensibly relate to Christianity
in general. Indeed this further claim amounts to what John Passmore,
writing in 1974, was to call ‘the despotic view’.50 White attempts to
illustrate this further claim by asserting that ‘By destroying pagan
animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of
indifference to the feelings of natural objects’, but once again no evidence is cited.51 Indeed, as Whitney has remarked, White’s claim that
Christianity banished animism in the West clashes with evidence of
pagan survivals in popular religion in the Middle Ages, and with the
conception of the universe as a living organism that survived into the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.52
The main point, though, is that in ‘Roots’ White presents not only
a thesis about the reception of Christian doctrines in the Middle
Ages, and about this reception comprising the roots or origin of subsequent ecological problems, but also the further thesis that those
doctrines have all along been both anthropocentric and despotic,
especially in the West, and that this is where the real roots of the
problems are to be found. (Indeed these further theological claims
are crucial to his overall case. To the extent that White is concerned
with medieval interpretations of Christianity, his theological claims
permitted him to imply that the exploitative attitudes to nature that
he purported to discover arose naturally from the axioms of the
Christian religion, which contrasted strongly in relevant respects
with, for example, the religions of pre-Christian paganism). Much of
this account is confirmed as accurate in Harrison’s summary of
‘Roots’, despite Harrison’s claims a few pages later about White’s
main message. The following sentence figures in Harrison’s paraphrase: ‘The Christian doctrine of the creation sets the human being
apart from nature, advocates human control of nature, and implies
that the natural world was created solely for our use’.53 (Needless to
50
╇ John Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and
Western Traditions (London: Duckworth, 1974), 9.
51
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 86.
52
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 166f.
53
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 86.
social history, religion and technology
297
say, Harrison by no means endorses White’s view, and in due course
implies that considerable scepticism is in place).54
These being the claims that White was making, it is entirely reasonable for theologians and philosophers (insofar as philosophers
discuss metaphysical and normative anthropocentrism) to debate
White’s claims, and not only historians. While theologians must be
free to contest White’s interpretations of Christianity (Western,
Orthodox or ecumenical), philosophers must also be free to debate
his methodology in looking for explanations of ecological problems.
Thus the debate needs to be conducted through all these disciplines,
and not only through the discipline of history. Once again, it emerges
that the debate about ‘Roots’ needs to be interdisciplinary—just like
White’s own writings.
Some years ago, I published an essay called ‘Christian Attitudes to
Nature’ in Journal of the History of Ideas, which contested White’s
theological claims, as well as some of his historical interpretations,
and some related claims of John Passmore and of William Coleman.55
Some parallel research was also included in my book The Ethics of
Environmental Concern.56 Since the central conclusions of this
research have not, to my awareness, been contested, there is no need
to recapitulate them in detail here, let alone to add a detailed defence.
But it may be appropriate to specify here some of the conclusions of
‘Christian Attitudes to Nature’, of a companion-piece entitled
‘Western Traditions and Environmental Ethics’,57 and of The Ethics
of Environmental Concern, since they have a bearing on several of the
claims shown above to be made by White. These conclusions include
the following: The Old Testament is neither metaphysically nor
�normatively anthropocentric (as Passmore had already argued);58
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 95.
╇Robin Attfield, ‘Christian Attitudes to Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas,
44 (1983): 369–86. Together with a companion essay discussing parallel themes of
Passmore and of Peter Singer, called ‘Western Traditions and Environmental Ethics’
(see note 57), this essay can be found in Robin Attfield, Environmental Philosophy:
Principles and Prospects (Aldershot: Avebury (now Ashgate), 1994). ‘Christian Attitudes to Nature’ is reprinted at 21–39.
56
╇Robin Attfield, The Ethics of Environmental Concern (2nd edn., Athens, GA
and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991): see chapters 2 and 3.
57
╇Robin Attfield, ‘Western Traditions and Environmental Ethics’, first published
in Robert Elliot and Arran Gare (eds.), Environmental Philosophy: A Collection of
Readings (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press; Milton Keynes: Open University Press; University Park, MD: Penn State Press, 1983), 201–30; reprinted in Robin
Attfield, Environmental Philosophy: Principles and Prospects, 41–68.
58
╇Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, 11–17.
54
55
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robin attfield
passages such as Psalm 104 and Job, chapters 39 to 41 reflect quite
different attitudes, as do Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Proverbs. Nor
is the New Testament anthropocentric either, when enough passages
are considered. There again, the ‘despotic view’, endorsed by
Passmore as the stance of most Christians and generally of the Stoics,59
does not fit the Bible any more than anthropocentrism does; the most
appropriate interpretation is what Passmore called ‘the stewardship
view’,60 which is actually itself ascribed by Passmore’s (deservedly)
most favoured source, C.J. Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore, to
the Bible and to most of the church fathers alike.61 Indeed this tradition, regarded (in company with the ‘co-operation with nature’ tradition) by Passmore as a minority tradition,62 was arguably (and like
the ‘co-operative view’) as significant and influential as any other
attitude to nature from the early centuries of Christianity onwards.
In any case, Christianity has been much more varied in its attitudes
than most commentators acknowledge (a point also made, as it happens, by White).63
If these conclusions are granted (even in part), then White’s theological claims have to be regarded as a distortion of Christianity. It
would not follow, however, that Christianity was not received as
anthropocentric, despotic and exploitative in the medieval period;
and it would certainly not follow that there were not links between
theology and technological developments. Issues surrounding these
links will be considered in the next section. But in view of White’s
explicit appeal to Genesis,64 it is appropriate to cite here, as Harrison
does, ‘the one extensive study that has been carried out on the history
of the interpretation of the crucial text, Genesis 1:28 (‘be fruitful and
multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion’)’, that
of Jeremy Cohen.65
59
╇Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, 17. More recently, grounds have
emerged to cast doubt on Passmore’s ascription of anthropocentrism and of a
Â�despotic view to the Stoics. See Carmen Velayos Castelo, ‘Reflections on Stoic
Â�Logocentrism’, Environmental Ethics, 18:3 (1996): 291–6.
60
╇Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, 28–32.
61
╇ C.J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, Nature and Culture in Western
Thought from Ancient Tines to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967).
62
╇Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature, 39.
63
╇ White, ‘Roots’ 87.
64
╇ White, ‘Roots’ 85f.
65
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 95, referring to Jeremy Cohen, ‘Be Fertile and
Increase, Fill the earth and Master It’: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical
Text (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
social history, religion and technology
299
This text sounds likely, if any text was going to be used in support
of exploitative practices, to be the one that would be selected. But this
is not the interpretation that Cohen finds. Instead, he relates that ‘the
primary meaning of Gen. 1:28 during the period we have studied
[ancient and medieval times, that is] [consists in] an assurance of
divine commitment and election, and a corresponding challenge to
overcome the ostensive contradiction between the terrestrial and the
heavenly inherent in every human being’.66 For the Middle Ages, he
adds, this text ‘touched only secondarily on conquering the natural
order’.67 Instead, this text was given psychological and spiritual interpretations. Thus in a period when attempts to tame or domesticate
nature were much in evidence (for White is in general right about the
progress of medieval technology),68 such practices were not standardly justified by reference to the most obvious Biblical passage.69
Cohen, indeed, concludes, insofar as the medieval period is at issue,
that ‘with regard to Gen. 1:28 itself, the ecologically oriented thesis of
Lynn White and others can now be laid to rest’.70 So we should entertain doubts about whether Christianity was used as a central justification for such practices in that period. Not even its reception in the
middle ages suggests otherwise, any more than the message that it
embodied from earliest times.
As Harrison proceeds to show, things were somewhat different in
the seventeenth century, including the uses to which Christianity was
newly put, although in that century the texts were not interpreted
anthropocentrically, even if they had sometimes been so interpreted
previously.71 But that period is not discussed by White, and is not
relevant here, while I have commented elsewhere on Harrison’s
account and verdicts about the Early Modern period,72 and there is
no current need to repeat those comments. So we can now turn, as
promised, to links between theology and technology, and to issues of
historical causation.
66
╇ This is Harrison’s quotation, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 95f., from Cohen, ‘Be
Â�Fertile’, 313.
67
╇ Cohen, ‘Be Fertile’, 313.
68
╇See, for example, Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected
Essays (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978).
69
╇ Here I am paraphrasing Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 96.
70
╇ Cohen, ‘Be Fertile’, 5, quoted in Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 165.
71
╇ Harrison, ‘Subduing the Earth’, 96–107.
72
╇Robin Attfield, Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-First
Â�Century (Oxford: Polity Press , 2003), 34–6.
300
robin attfield
Methodology, Causation and Whitney’s Critique
Ever since soon after the publication of mtsc, historians have raised
sceptical problems about White’s methodology. In the joint introduction to their separate reviews of mtsc, R.H. Hilton and P.H. Sawyer
wrote:
Technical determinism in historical studies has often been combined
with adventurous speculations particularly attractive to those who like
to have complex developments explained by simple causes. The technical determinism of Professor Lynn White Jr., however, is peculiar in
that… he gives a misleadingly adventurist cast to old-fashioned platitudes by supporting them with a chain of obscure and dubious deductions from scanty evidence about the progress of technology.73
While these strictures were written about mtsc (at a time when
‘Roots’ was unwritten), it is worth considering what these writers
had in mind when using the phrase ‘technical determinism’. This is
most clearly elucidated by Sawyer, in his reply to White’s view that
the introduction of the stirrup explains a change in methods of warfare (towards the superiority of cavalry) in the early medieval period.
To this theory, Sawyer replies: ‘The most serious weakness in this
argument is that the introduction of the stirrup is not in itself an
adequate explanation for any changes that may have occurred. The
stirrup made new methods possible, not inevitable’.74
Yet, as Sawyer shows through a quotation from mtsc,75 White had
used, of such changes, the term ‘inevitably’, even though in other
passages he had accepted that societies do not respond automatically
to technological change.76 Thus the criticisms of Hilton and Sawyer
seem to be on target in this particular regard. But should it be held
that White proceeded to allege too deterministic a relation not only
between technology and social change, but also between theology and
technology? Hilton and Sawyer evince no interest in this aspect of
mtsc, but the issue has recently been investigated in the context of
‘Roots’ by Elspeth Whitney.
Whitney, besides supplying numerous valuable historical qua�
lifications and correctives to White’s account of medieval culture
(too many for most to be cited here), raises a number of important
╇ Hilton and Sawyer, ‘Technical Determinism’, 90.
╇Sawyer, in Hilton and Sawyer, ‘Technical Determinism’, 91.
75
╇ White, Medieval Technology, 38.
76
╇ As at White, Medieval Technology, 28.
73
74
social history, religion and technology
301
methodological issues. One of these concerns the aura of inevitability
cast by White upon the West’s rise to technological dominance, represented by White as ‘our nature and destiny’.77 Here Whitney
accuses White of an essentialist view of medieval culture,78 but
whether or not this accusation holds good, she seems justified in
claiming that in ‘Roots’ Western culture ‘takes on a life of its own, as
if culture existed independently of social, economic, political and
other factors and remains essentially unchanged through time’.79
Whitney introduces here her emphasis on the need to introduce
institutional factors into explanations; in the absence of this, culture
is inappropriately endowed with tendencies (as just mentioned) to
inevitable development, which are liable to be falsified (as she proceeds to show) when more detailed studies are conducted and taken
into account. Insofar as the inevitability of White’s account ascribes
a causal role to religious values, there may be some justification in
finding here a form of cultural determinism in White, parallel to the
technical determinism alleged by Hilton and Sawyer.
A related methodological problem, raised by Whitney on the next
page, concerns the move from what she regards as the undisputable
association between religious values and technology in the West to
White’s implicit claim of a causal relationship.80 Later she adds that,
while White supplies ample evidence (for the Middle Ages) of this
association, he sheds little light on ‘the more difficult problem of
causality’.81 She adds that by 1978 he had resiled from ascribing
causal influence to religious values, writing that the reasons for the
medieval development of technology were ‘by no means clear’.82 In
any case, in the Middle Ages religious terminology was bound to be
used in the justification of technology; as Jacques Le Goff puts it:
‘nothing could become an object of conscious reflection in the Middle
Ages except by way of religion’.83 Besides, as Le Goff’s research has
also shown, the more favourable attitude to labour in the late Middle
╇ White, ‘Roots’, 93.
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 155f.
79
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 156.
80
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 157.
81
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 167.
82
╇ White, ‘The Future of Compassion’, The Ecumenical Review, 30 (1978), 101;
quoted Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 157.
83
╇ Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 109; cited
Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 167f.
77
78
302
robin attfield
Ages remarked by White was probably due to social change rather
than to inherent attitudes of Christianity.84 But this all casts serious
doubt on the ‘single-cause theory’ of ‘Roots’,85 particularly where a
‘more nuanced interpretation’ is in place, as recent medieval research
warrants, an interpretation such as that ‘religious values provided
some encouragement, but, equally importantly, a justification for
activity that most likely was taking place for other reasons’.86 This
claim chimes well with Harrison’s remark, cited above, about people
simply doing their best in the circumstances to satisfy human needs.
Whitney (as has been mentioned above) also appraises the
responses to White of ecotheologians (including myself), partly on
theological grounds. Thus they ‘had a well-documented argument
against certain aspects of White’s thesis, and could argue persuasively
that the Christian tradition provided a readily accessible and convincing statement in favour of a sensitive and responsible attitude to
the environment’. They also had liabilities, such as that stewardship
interpretations preclude ‘Deep Ecology’ (hardly, I suggest, a problem
for those not wishing to be associated with that movement), and the
constraints of Christian orthodoxy (pollution having to be interpreted as ‘sin’), which discouraged ‘independent human agency’ (but
if so, I suggest, Christian orthodoxy should be either modified or
disowned).87
Whitney’s willingness to discuss these responses betokens her recognition that White’s thesis was in part an exercise in theological
interpretation. Thus when she wrote that ‘The crucial question, therefore, was not so much what the writers of the Old and New
Testaments had meant about technology, or even how their world
might be construed by modern readers, but how the Bible had been
interpreted in the Middle Ages and after’,88 her point was that this
was the basis on which White had argued (and on which he should
therefore be replied to, at least in part), and not that the meaning and
message of the Bible were irrelevant.
It is appropriate to introduce here Whitney’s implicit criticism of
White’s proposed solution (adoption of the values of the heretical St.
Francis). Citing the research of Susan Power Bratton, she relates that
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 166; Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture, 114–21.
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 168.
86
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 169.
87
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 161.
88
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 162.
84
85
social history, religion and technology
303
detailed medieval studies show that Francis, ‘far from standing alone,
is only one figure among a fully developed tradition of Christian
appreciation of nature as God’s Creation… human use of nature and
animals was almost always conceived of as being governed by human
spiritual and moral obligations’.89 Further, Bratton’s and others’
research suggests that the large differences of attitude between Greek
and Latin values were less absolute than White claims.90 Thus not
only does White misrepresent the problem as concerning distinctively Western values, but his solution of adopting the supposedly
heretical values of St. Francis turns out to consist, it could fairly be
commented, in advocacy of little more than the adoption of a different tradition of still recognisably Christian values.
However, Whitney’s main criticism of the ecotheologians concerns ‘how much they had in common with him’ [White]. ‘White and
his ecotheological critics all accepted religion as the common denominator or human action, and all therefore found the solution to the
environmental crisis in personal and religious values’.91 Such assumptions incline those holding them to ignore economic and institutional
factors. Indeed, while the ecotheologians rejected White’s particular
causal thesis, they ‘showed little interest in’ where else the explanation really was to be found.92 Since the current writer is included
among the ecotheologians, it might be reasonable here to cite the
opening chapter of The Ethics of Environmental Concern as an exception to this generalisation, a chapter which considers to what extent
capitalism, among other possible explanations, underlies the problems.93 But Whitney’s point must be acknowledged to be largely on
target, and prepares the way for her eventual methodological claims.
For Whitney concludes that White’s thesis is both attractive,
beguiling and dangerous, however illusory. Through ascribing the
problems to our deep-seated values and the unfolding of our ideological destiny, it supplies a solution that does not require significant
changes either of behaviour or of structure. At the same time, it
leaves large corporations and international agencies untouched. Its
89
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 163, citing Susan Power Bratton, ‘The Original Desert
Solitaire: Early Christian Monasticism and Wilderness’, Environmental Ethics, 10
(1988): 31–53.
90
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 163f.
91
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 161. Whitney identifies the relevant ecotheologians
and their works in notes 36 to 38 (160) and note 41 (162).
92
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 161.
93
╇ Attfield, Ethics of Environmental Concern, 1–19.
304
robin attfield
ascription of the problems to individual values thus diverts us from
the kinds of action that are needed. To quote Whitney’s final passage:
White’s single-visioned reading of the past, however, encourages us
similarly to oversimplify our understanding of the present by emphasising one value, the legitimacy of human domination of nature in the
name of spiritual progress, to the exclusion not only of other, nonreligious values, but also of any consideration of how economic and
political systems help create or reinforce values and provide the means
for implementing those values. If White is incorrect in his analysis of
the causes of the environmental crisis, and we continue to follow his
prescription for a solution, we may be at the mercy of forces we are
not even considering.94
Besides concluding in this passage that White’s thesis should be
rejected, Whitney also persuasively explains here its continuing ideological role. White’s explanation is of the wrong type, and this is
due to methodological assumptions that his theological and philosophical critics have done too little to expose.
This being so, it is important to adduce both historical, theological
and philosophical critiques of White’s claims (as attempted above),
without losing sight of the large and systemic nature of the problems
(both past and present), and the need to understand the present as
well as the past accordingly. At the same time we need not to lose
sight of the importance of multi-dimensional explanations to explain
both how ecological problems have arisen and how they can be overcome.
Afterword
Solutions, then, need to be economic and political, and to be global
as well as national and local. Yet, while Whitney’s critique is to be
applauded, can White’s approach be entirely written off? His historical claims have been shown to be open to serious criticism, as
have his theological interpretations. But what of his assumption that
values and attitudes make a difference and can be historically significant? As a ‘single-visioned reading of the past’, this assumption
too is open to question. But, construed as a claim about attitudes and
values having a contributory role both in causing problems and in
their capacity to contribute to solutions, and to play a part in people’s
╇ Whitney, ‘Lynn White’, 169.
94
social history, religion and technology
305
motivation to implement them, his assumption is less obviously misguided, and may even contribute to a defensible approach.
This more nuanced approach may seem a far cry from White’s
dalliance with determinism, but coheres well with elements of his
overall stance, such as his view that adopting the beliefs and values of
St. Francis could make a difference. It is more clearly consistent with
the message of the ecotheologians, whether or not they specifically
recognised the role of systemic factors. Indeed their characteristic
claim that an ethics and a metaphysics of stewardship (whether religious or secular) are needed and can contribute to resolute action as
well as to desirable attitudes emerges, despite criticisms,95 as not only
a salutary corrective to White, but a positive contribution to resolving current problems. Beliefs and values prove also to be central to
Harrison’s account of early modern culture, and potentially to his
view of the spirit in which solutions to current problems could be
approached.
Beliefs, values and attitudes, then, should be integrated with systemic factors both in explaining the past, understanding contemporary problems, and in generating proposals for solutions. For
example, a replacement of anthropocentric values with more biocentric ones arguably has an important role to play in moulding social
and environmental policies. White’s thesis in ‘Roots’ was of little
direct help in any of these regards, but because of the debate that he
was proud of generating, and the awareness both of historical, ethical
and ecological problems that it helped to arouse, his historical contribution should not be regarded as negligible or insignificant, let
alone as a dangerous distraction.
╇ For criticisms, see Attfield, The Ethics of the Global Environment, (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 45–55.
95
deep ecology and the metaphysical turn
307
an alternative to anthropocentrism:
deep ecology and the metaphysical turn
Eccy de Jonge
Deep ecology is a branch of philosophy which asks ‘deeper questions’
concerning our relationship to the environment. The ‘deepness’
is seen as analogous to discovering metaphysical foundations for a
�philosophy of ecology that might otherwise be subsumed under a
branch of environmental ethics. Since environmental ethics depends
on applying an existing moral theory to the non-human world and
such theories are regarded as anthropocentric, deep ecologists argue
that we need a non-anthropocentric philosophy of care to counter
the view that human beings are ‘nature’s only morally considerable
beings’.1 Even though moral theories, such as Bentham’s utilitarianism and Kant’s deontology have regarded non-human animals as
worthy of moral consideration, they have done so from the position
of setting normative guidelines. In contrast to a moral theory, however, deep ecology aims to show not why we ought to care for the
non-human realm but how the concern we show towards those who
are closest to us can be developed to include all beings, through
realising that our nature is interrelated to all others.
Deep Ecology and Anthropocentrism
Anthropocentrism is regarded by deep ecologists not merely in its
literal sense as ‘human centredness’ but as the view that humanity
has been conditioned to regard itself as a superior species. Deep
ecologists have sought to focus on criticising ‘the dominant worldview’ which sees human centredness as the underlying cause of the
ecological crisis. As I have argued elsewhere, however, this position
is too general, for not all humans play an equal part in the domination of the natural environment. Anthropocentrism represents the
╇ Frederic L. Bender, The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep
Ecology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 71.
1
308
eccy de jonge
human will to dominate and threatens the human world as much as
the non-human world.2 This raises the question of how a change in
attitude from one of domination to one of deep concern can be
achieved, which shifts the focus from concentrating on the symptoms
of the environmental crisis, such as pollution, urban expansion and
global warming, to understanding why we see ourselves as separate
and superior to both the natural environment and other human
beings.
The historian Lynn White Jr. was one of the first environmentalists
to link the root cause of the environmental crisis to the doctrine of
anthropocentrism, which he saw as deeply rooted in the JudaeoChristian tradition of domination.3 In this tradition, humans are seen
as guardians of the Earth, superior to non-human beings who exist
not for their own sake but for the sake of humanity. In this sense,
‘anthropocentrism’ denotes humanity’s superiority over the nonhuman world, on the basis that humans occupy a higher position on
the Great Chain of Being.
Taking Lynn White Jr.’s thesis a step further, Bill Devall and
George Sessions identified anthropocentrism as being the dominant
worldview of technocratic-industrialised societies. Devall and
Sessions argued that our understanding of human nature has been so
conditioned by the paradigm of domination—a paradigm that
regards humans as isolated and fundamentally separate and superior
to the rest of nature—that it has come to include all aspects of domination, e.g. masculine over feminine, the powerful over the poor,
Western cultures over non-Western cultures, and so on.4 If anthropocentrism covers all forms of domination, then it would seem that
focusing on any one form of domination, for example, racism or sexism, would help to root out the underlying cause of domination in
general. However, while the dominant worldview is to be rejected,
any counter-movements or criticisms of this view are seen by deep
ecologists to exist only as the result of the dominant paradigm, which,
while worthy as causes in their own right, only help to reinforce the
paradigm they are opposing. Deep ecologists thus object to focusing
2
╇Eccy de Jonge, Spinoza and Deep Ecology: Challenging Traditional Approaches
to Environmentalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 10.
3
╇ Lynn White, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, Science, 155: 3767
(1967): 1203–7; See Attfield, ‘Social History, Religion and Technology’, this volume.
4
╇ Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered
(Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985), 66.
deep ecology and the metaphysical turn
309
on counter-movements, which they see as reinforcing anthropocentrism by privileging only their own cause: instead of dispelling the
dominant paradigm, they hope to be able to integrate their own cause
into the paradigm itself. However, to dismiss counter movements to
the dominant paradigm as being ‘just like’ those members of the
paradigm who proclaim themselves as superior rather than oppressed,
risks alienating those humans who have, historically and interculturally, been sidelined in a similar (though clearly not identical) way to
non-human nature. While non-anthropocentrists may wish to hold
a basic attitude in relation to environmental catastrophe, they fail to
recognise that the problem of domination applies equally to fellow
humans.
The reason why anthropocentrism needs to be challenged is therefore more complex than one which seeks to confront the human/
nature divide. It must recognise that our notions of the ‘other’
include counter-cultures, sub groups and members of the anthropocentric paradigm itself. And here we encounter a dilemma. If the
reason why human beings are able to dominate non-human nature is
because this ‘nature’ is not like us, we need to explain how this applies
to human beings over whom others feel superior. What discerning
attributes does the other need to hold to not be worthy of moral consideration? Irrationality? One-leggedness? A bad temper? Or does the
issue depend not on who we are but what we do, so we can discount
the serial killer perhaps? Or will visiting a mosque or an abortion
clinic do? The underlying problem with defining the essence of ‘otherness’ is not easily dismissed in the context of anthropocentrism, for
any discernible attributes that can be found to privilege the morally
considerable, e.g. rationality, self-awareness and so on, exclude not
only most non-human beings but also certain humans: imbeciles,
infants and the senile.5 Likewise, if those others who are not ‘like us’
are discriminated against merely because of physical appearance,
consenting acts or instrumental values, then the anthropocentrist
faces the further problem of where to draw the line.
While anthropocentrism may not be all-inclusive in a practical
sense, it is theoretically an attitude that all of us share, whenever we
see ourselves—in terms of our particular associations—as better,
superior, above or separate from others, for whatever reason. As a
view, not of human centredness but supremacy the advocate of non5
╇ de Jonge, Spinoza and Deep Ecology, 12.
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eccy de jonge
anthropocentrism needs to ask: superior to whom, over what? The
response depends on what each of us regards as the defining feature
of humanity. If we are part of the non-human world, as most deep
ecologists maintain, then ‘superiority’ will differ from a view which
sees us as epistemologically and metaphysically separate from others—as solipsistic egos, for instance. If each of us is merely an isolated individual with no relation to the other, at either a narrow level
(the level of consumption say), or a deeper level (the level of intrinsic
value or essence), then it will (again) be difficult to maintain a nonanthropocentric view of human nature, for moral egoism will be
paramount. Whether we can ever entirely escape from some form of
anthropocentrism or whether a non-anthropocentric world can ever
be anything more than a vision of utopia does not, however, diminish
the necessity to challenge the dominating stance of certain humans
including, it should be said, environmental dogmatists. Rather, it
makes it vital. Placing interhuman concerns at the forefront of ecology does not necessarily uphold an attitude of domination over the
non-human world but can form a starting point for understanding
the whys and wherefores of human domination in general. It is no
longer sufficient to question, what is the matter with them; we must
ask, what is the matter with us?
Non-anthropocentricism, then, is at heart paradoxical, for any
criticisms of the ‘dominant worldview’ also reject those groups who
are seeking to challenge the status quo. But without the dissenting
voices of anti-racists, feminists, homosexuals, anti-war protestors
and so on, it is arguable whether anything would ever have changed,
for even here ‘change’ has only taken place on a small scale. The
rights of women and homosexuals, while socially and culturally
improved in the West, since the 1950s, remain heavily undermined
in countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and many
African states. By dismissing interhuman concerns, non-anthropocentrists remain in danger of undermining the voices of those dissenters whom, they argue, make changes to the so-called paradigm of
domination while maintaining its hegemony. Whatever class of social
actors one identifies as being most responsible for social domination
and ecological destruction (e.g. men, capitalists, whites, Westerners),
one tends at the most fundamental level to find a common kind of
legitimisation for the alleged superiority of these classes over others
and hence, for the assumed rightfulness of their domination of these
others. Specifically, these classes of social agents have not sought to
deep ecology and the metaphysical turn
311
legitimate their position on the grounds that they are, for example,
men, capitalists, white, or Western per se, but rather on the grounds
that they have most exemplified whatever it is that has been taken to
constitute the essence of humanness (e.g. being favoured by God or
possessing rationality). The current state of affairs in Afghanistan
provides a classic example.
The Case of War
In 2001, the United States attacked Afghanistan in retaliation for the
destruction of the World Trade Centre, believed to be initiated by
Al Qaeda. Although the US claimed to have destroyed the Taliban—
the ‘students of Islam’ who had seized power in Kabul in 1996—by
2009, United Nation statistics revealed that the Taliban had gained
control over 54% of the country, holding a major influence over
gov�ernmental forces.6 While retaliation was the original reason for
invading Afghanistan, it has been the moral indignation of the
Taliban’s treatment of women, ethnic minorities, children and homosexuals that has been at the forefront of justifications for attack.
However, invasion by the West, including persistent bombing, has
had devastating consequences.
In 2008 the United Nations recorded 2,118 civilian casualties, the
highest civilian death toll of any year since 2001, the majority of
whom were killed by coalition forces.7 In addition to civilian losses,
Afghanistan has suffered environmental catastrophe with ‘surface
and ground water scarcity and contamination, desertification of
important wetlands, soil erosion, air pollution, and depleted wildlife
populations’ leading to as few as 23% of Afghans having access to
clean drinking water, and turning thousands of people into environmental refugees.8
╇ Christa Meindersma, ‘Afghanistan’, Encyclopedia of Human Rights, ed. David
P. Forsythe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), I, 2; Patrick Cockburn, ‘Deaths
bring whole Afghan Strategy into question’, Independent, Nov. 5, 2009.
7
╇United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), Annual Report
on Protection of Civilians in Armed Combat, January 2009.
8
╇UNAMA, Annual Report; United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP),
Afghanistan’s Environmental Recovery: a post-conflict plan for people and their
�natural resources, Kabul, January, 2006 (as of November 2009, United Nations
�Environmental Programme); World Health Organisation (WHO), Report on country
by country mortality rates for Afghanistan, 2009: http://www.who.int/quantifying
_ehimpacts/national/countryprofile/afghanistan.pdf.
6
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Where moral superiority is heralded as a reason for conflict,
anthropocentrists should take note. As early as 2001, the US government heralded the invasion of Afghanistan as a victory even though
Hamid Karzai, the US sanctioned leader, had failed to establish effective control over the country.9 This led reporters, led by the
Independent’s Patrick Cockburn, to argue that the insurgence had
given rise to ‘a mood of extraordinary imperial arrogance’ that more
recent effects and United Nations statistics verify.10
While there has been condemnation and outrage over the death of
US and UK soldiers in the Western press, there have been limited
reports of civilian deaths or environmental catastrophe, due to the
US government spending millions of dollars buying up ‘civilian satellite imagery of the effect of the bombardment, so as to limit its
dissemination’.11 As Hill states: ‘the absence of imagery of the destruction produced by the assault can be seen to have created a blind spot
in Western perceptions of Afghanistan, at once serving to cover up
the destruction wrought by the assault, and the scale of the reconstruction effort needed’.12
While it may seem inconsistent to focus on the insurgencies of the
west while ignoring the treacheries of the Taliban, it is predominantly
the US/UK governments that have made the case for the moral high
ground. Since many deep ecologists insist that the root cause of
anthropocentrism is the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with its acceptance that God commanded the human race to have dominion over
all the earth, it is somewhat ironic that both George W. Bush and
Tony Blair, both instrumental in the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan,
have declared God’s influence in their decisions.13
If we take the anthropocentrist attitude as indicative of human
dominance, it is clear that the environment and human lives have
suffered equally in Afghanistan under dominating sources, with the
only case made against the invasion by mainstream Western media
being the relatively small casualties—in comparison to the civilian
population—of Western soldiers. Though arguments are posed for
9
╇ Andrew Hill, Re-Imagining the War on Terror: Seeing, Waiting, Travelling
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 28.
10
╇UNEP, Afghanistan’s Environmental Recovery.
11
╇ Hill, Re-Imagining the War on Terror, 29.
12
╇ Hill, Re-Imagining the War on Terror, 29.
13
╇ Al Kamen, ‘George W. Bush and the G-word’, Washington Post, Oct. 14, 2005;
Jonathan Wynne-Jones, ‘Tony Blair believed God wanted him to go to war to fight
evil, claims his mentor’, Telegraph, May 23, 2009.
deep ecology and the metaphysical turn
313
remaining in Afghanistan, the destruction of the landscape, the use
of depleted uranium, the destruction of Afghan villages and village
life rarely makes the UK papers.
To reject anthropocentrism as human centredness is thus less
important than recognising the tendency to place a set of given moral
attitudes and beliefs at the centre of concern. Although it is difficult
to drop the idea that human life takes precedence, where genocide is
prevalent and human beings continue to be tortured, imprisoned,
raped and murdered by more powerful groups, there is a huge difference between the geo-politics carried out by the war in Afghanistan
(with its creepy resemblance to George Orwell’s ‘War in Eurasia’ as
depicted in the novel 1984) justified in the name of ‘liberation’, and
the reasons given for destruction of the environment that are, predictably, only considered when it poses a threat to human life.
Anthropocentrism is much more than some generalised attribute;
it must, by necessity, be a strategy that some humans adopt for their
own purposes: an intersubjective egoism which many, but not all,
humans possess. Yet again, however, this view of anthropocentrism
does not put human beings at the centre of the universe but only
certain humans: those who, for one reason or another, choose to
dominate others. But is anthropocentrism a competition? If I can
reason better than a child with Down’s Syndrome but the child can
love more, which of us wins in the superiority stakes? Without an
ingrained metaphysics which seeks to define the actual essence of
human beings, the alternative to anthropocentrism is doomed to failure, on the grounds that a dismissal of anthropocentrism often
includes elements of human nature that play into the anthropocentrists’ court. For instance, Gary Steiner regards as deeply prejudicial
those philosophers who maintain that humans (as opposed to the
non-human world) are the only beings who can perfect their nature.14
A philosophy that hopes to argue against an attitude of domination
by getting rid of traits and values that most of us consider to be
quintessentially human is deeply problematic.
Anthropocentrism is problematic equally for the non-human
world. The attitude of domination is responsible for the harm done
to the non-human world, based, as it is, on a view of human beings
14
╇Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy, (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University
Press, 2005), 1; and cf., Steiner, ‘Toward a Non-Anthropocentric Cosmopolitanism’,
this volume.
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as distinct isolated subjects. It is this recognition that has led deep
ecologists away from questioning the view in which human beings
are seen as subjects in relation to objects, to adopting instead a metaphysics of care that includes humans as well as the non-human environment. This metaphysics, which recognises ‘difference’ as an
exterior factor, focuses on the similarities between beings (nonhuman as well as human), particularly on a human essence. While
the very mention of ‘essence’ may preclude those who readily dismiss
metaphysical approaches, we might also adopt a phenomenological
or existentialist philosophy. For instance, Martin Heidegger claimed
that our being is one of care—we care for ourselves and for those
with whom we live precisely because, far from being isolated egos, we
are situated in a world alongside others with whom we share a deep
concern.15 In the philosophy of Spinoza, the power of our nature is
not only identical in essence, to all beings, it is a modification of one
substance that is itself non moral. Any claims to superiority, in
Spinoza’s view, stem from a failure to recognise ourselves as active,
believing instead that we are subject to external laws of cause and
effect, driven by contingent factors to feel pain and in turn to
destroy—a scenario that requires a deep analysis of both our mental
and physical states to recognise and defuse.
Whether existentialist, metaphysical or spiritual—and deep ecologists have, at one time or another, turned to the philosophies of
Spinoza, Gandhi, Meister Eckhart, Selesius, Heidegger, Daoism or
Vedanta, to draw inspiration—what is clear is that advocates of
anthropocentrism have put the onus on non-anthropocentrists, such
as deep ecologists, to prove the case. And yet, the alternative position
to non-anthropocentrism—the adoption of a normative moral theory—would return us to accept anthropocentrism as a defining feature of humanity, for all moral theories are by necessity dominating
strategies (whether or not non-humans are considered) since they are
given to telling us what we ought to do, rather than persuading us to
rethink our attitudes of who we are. By focusing on just one philosopher, Spinoza, it shall be seen how anthropocentrism can be refuted
as a basis for legitimising human superiority.
╇Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
�Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 235.
15
deep ecology and the metaphysical turn
315
An Ingrained Metaphysics
Although Spinoza is drawn on to help establish a non-anthropocentric philosophy of care, deep ecologists demand much more than
an analysis of nature to ground their core thesis. Instead they seek
to show how a gain in knowledge of reality can lead to a deeper
concern for non-human beings, in order to demonstrate that ethics
is grounded in metaphysics. The seventeenth-century philosopher,
Spinoza, shows how every being is affected by causes outside itself
on whom it depends for its own self-preservation. Through a process
of self-knowledge, humans can understand that far from depending
on others for our psychological well-being, we can recognise our
deepest feeling of pleasure (love or concern) originates from our
selves, i.e. from our own endeavour (conatus) to persevere. The outcome of this process of realisation reveals a nature whose level of
self-contentment, while centred in-itself, is not anthropocentric,
since this ‘self’ is a modification of the whole of reality. Since human
actions stem either from this mode of reality (our active essence) or
from outside forces (as passive reactions), rational choices (morals)
are seen as ideas that are not merely abstract concepts, but feelings—
we feel hatred, anger, resentment, pity at the same time as we conceive
them in terms of ‘outrage’, ‘indignation’ and ‘injustice’. When these
affects/ideas are subject to external forces over which we have no
control (so pain can occur at any time) we live, as it were, in a state
of self-defence and exhibit attitudes of superiority that are clearly
anthropocentric. Only when our own active power to persevere is
not subject to fluctuating forces, do we become self-assertive, nondominating and filled with a feeling of joy that is both stable and
exuberant. To reach this level of self-awareness, however, requires
an analysis of our mental and physical states, an analysis that fulfils
the requirement of deep questioning espoused by deep ecologists.
While feeling lies at the root of action, Spinoza maintains that only
hatred stems from an external cause, while love may stem from both
external and inner causes. When we realise our ‘inner self’ (conatus)
as the ‘power to persevere’ that exists in all beings, we do not need to
dominate others in order to experience a deep rooted sensation of joy
for, as Spinoza espouses, we then recognise the highest object for
which we can wish: self-approval. While questioning ourselves at an
emotional level may not lead us to immediately adopt a philosophy
of care that is non-anthropocentric in essence, it can lead to a more
316
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harmonious relationship with others whom we no longer condemn
for being ‘different’ since we are no longer reliant on these others to
provide feelings of well-being and thus we no longer need to feel
morally superior.
The difference between a self or being that regards its species as
anthropocentric, that is, as human centred, superior, or powerful,
and a self that sees itself as part of the natural world, as a being
among many, is not a difference in reality but perception, determined
by our level of (self) understanding. Although a human essence is
di
basic analysis, is a particular finite being with desires, aims and goals.
We may admit that this precludes certain humans (who are not able
to become aware of themselves as individuals) from having a sense of
identity, but we know what it means to be mentally and physically
healthy, and to be able to form opinions of our own mental and emotional states. Since deep ecologists judge us according to the kinds of
identifications we make, the anthropocentric self represents the way
we behave or think of ourselves before or aside from the realisation
that we are a modification of the whole of Nature, a realisation which
best describes the ‘non-anthropocentric’ self.
The anthropocentric self is founded upon inadequate ideas. The
reason these ideas are inadequate is because there is no isolated thing
in nature, that is, in reality. Though each of us, as individuals, is
unique, our ‘uniqueness’ lies in the fact that each of us is constituted
by a body and mind, which interprets the world, through itself, and
recognises it is moving towards its own death. The narrow self who
holds anthropocentric concerns fails to recognise the whole because
the cause of the affects, i.e. the emotions, is so difficult to pin down.
How we conceive of the world thereby shapes our experiences of the
world. Since experience is linked to ideas, understanding the nature
of ideas elucidates our ethical positions.
If ethics follows from our experiences and beliefs, then our actions,
e.g. killing, presuppose certain kinds of ideas; in the case of anthropocentrism, these are based on a quest for self-empowerment that
conceives an external object as its cause of fulfilment or destruction.
If we are inclined to hold a non-anthropocentric philosophy of care
we will attempt to remove the cause of superiority, which will curb
any inclination to dominate others. But this can only be achieved
once we recognise our intrinsic nature as one of care. We all have
desires, we all rationalise our actions and we all attempt to define
deep ecology and the metaphysical turn
317
what is right for us to do. In order to ascertain why we should be
tempted to pursue a deeper sense of self, we all need to understand
why it is that the anthropocentric concerns of the self are self problematic. In order to develop wider identifications with the human
and non-human world, the anthropocentric self needs to realise that
there is no distinction between our selves and others, no separation
between our essence and nature in a wider sense, and no need to
make an effort to consciously identify with other beings in order to
feel whole, for we realise our previous desire to dominate others, is
in reality, a desire to take full possession of our selves.
If we live only according to opinion or belief, attitudes of domination are maintained in egoistic self-interest. Since everything is
viewed as determined for us and for our benefit, we regard ourselves
as the ‘centre of being’. Anything that happens in the world that we
do not understand is guaranteed by a belief in a God who acts only
in our best interests, which, in the twenty-first century, may be transferred to science or global capitalism.
Seen in this light, anthropocentrism is not the result of any particular religious, Western, or political conditioning, but our most
basic conditioned state. In this state, we do not consider others but
are driven to persevere and to preserve ourselves by whatever means
are available. In order to move beyond this narrow outlook we need
to obtain knowledge of our actual essence: first through understanding ourselves as we exist in time, i.e. as psychological beings living
alongside others on whom we depend; second under the aspect of
eternity, i.e. in reality, in which we accept that our deepest feelings of
care or concern originate within ourselves, of which we are responsible. Of course, if the possibility of transcending the state of ignorance is only available to human beings who are rational, it might be
argued that this posits a kind of anthropocentrism, the kind where
human ‘centredness’ is equated with a particular human essence,
excluding others from the equation. However, if we regard ourselves
as ‘great’, i.e. as privileged by God, we limit our potential to know
ourselves and are prone to become self-satisfied, i.e. egoists. By the
same token, the anthropocentric attitude is bound to fail in achieving
its desired end since it leads to a greater need for gratification (hedonism), power and domination, and ultimately to failure and suffering
in a never ending circle of human bondage.
Although Spinoza does not use the term ‘anthropocentrism’, it is
clear that the underlying belief associated with the doctrine of anthro-
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pocentrism—human superiority—is rejected by Spinoza. Since all
finite beings are modifications of one substance, there is no ontological or essential difference between us and other beings, nor are
human beings subjects in relation to an objective world. The change
from an attitude of domination (anthropocentrism) to one which is
non- or anti-anthropocentric, begins and ends however, with the
same foundation: ‘seeking one’s own true interest’.16 If we are able to
control our erroneous desires, it is because we have obtained knowledge of our active essence, not that we arrive at such knowledge
through exacting normative principles, i.e. through exhorting moral
pressure on ourselves or others. The more we recognise that all things
that exist are determined to exist and to operate by their own essence
or power, the less emotional we feel towards things-in-themselves.17
While this rejects sentimentality (anthropomorphism), at the same
time it dissolves the attitude of domination.
An increase in self-knowledge makes it possible for us to view the
world in a non-anthropocentric light: to recognise that human development and success in terms of power over the external world is a far
cry from an increase of power within. As long as we act for some
external gain, we think of ourselves under the aspect of duration (as
beings who will die). If we think that the happiness or pleasure we
experience from anything outside ourselves can lead to true knowledge or virtue, we are deluding ourselves, living by imagination or
fantasy.18 Our attitude is therefore anthropocentric, when it is limited
by our narrow perceptions and imaginings, i.e. when it depends on
others for sensations of pleasure, which a deeper analysis reveals to
be superficial.
Conclusion
A philosophy of care recognises, without apology, that it is us, human
beings, who, as well as committing atrocities against both the human
and the non-human world, also express alarm at the very idea of
environmental disaster, wars, and paradigms of domination. To feel
16
╇ Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955),
part V, proposition 41, proof.
17
╇Spinoza, Ethics, part V, proposition 6, proof.
18
╇ Benedict de Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, trans.
and ed., A. Wolf (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1910), 79
deep ecology and the metaphysical turn
319
for the plight of human and non human beings is not anthropocentric if it does not seek to place any particular being at the centre or
make any cause prevalent over any other. Recognising that the essential quality of our humanity is love or care does not require a moral
imposition but rather an internal subjugation of all our own pre�
judices, that we, as humans, share. Though deep ecologists are not
unanimous in how best to approach the subject of ‘care,’ all agree
that the prevailing attitude of anthropocentrism lies at the root of
ecological devastation, the main reason being that anthropocentrism
encompasses not merely one particular critique, e.g. blaming capitalists or Muslims or the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but the entire outlook of domination. Since an attitude is responsible for harm, rather
than some essential quality, it is thus possible to change our per�
ception of the way things are, rather than developing a bigger and
better normative ethics. A philosophy concerned with criticising
anthropocentrism in general is not interested in any particular environmental issue but with offering an alternative to the prevalent view
that regards humans as superior to nature, recognising, as I have
shown, that interhuman concerns must not be ignored.
That we can arrive at a philosophy of care through a greater understanding of self, without requiring moral theories, lies in the fact that
self-knowledge leads us to seek satisfaction within ourselves and not
through dominating others, including the non-human world. Though
such an analysis should, in theory, appeal to both anthropocentrists
and non-anthropocentrists alike, this is only the case when anthropocentrism is taken in its literal sense as human centredness, which,
as I have shown, is rarely, if ever, the case, since ‘centredness’ is taken
to mean superiority and separateness.
anthropocentrism and reason
321
anthropocentrism and reason in dialectic of
enlightenment: environmental crisis and
animal subject
André Krebber*
From the seventh to the eighteenth of December 2009 the world
came together in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the United Nations
Climate Change Conference (COP 15) to discuss measures for saving
nature and humanity from impending disaster: anthropogenic climate change. Connie Hedegaard, President of COP 15, sent the message out to the participants that ‘failure in Copenhagen is not an
option’. ‘If the world fails to deliver a political agreement at the UN
climate conference in December, it will be “the whole global democratic system not being able to deliver results in one of the defining
challenges of our century”’.1 This challenge, however, is not new. In
1972 the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm,
Sweden, paid attention to problems humanity faced in its relationship to nature. Since then the environmental crisis has become a
constant companion for humanity. It has been approached on various levels by scientific, political, jurisdictional and even cultural
means.2 Yet despite intensively addressing the problem, alarming
calls have not eased down but instead even intensified, as Hedegaard’s
warning exemplifies.
Bruno Latour stresses that instead of sheltering nature from
anthropogenic impact, the crisis has evoked even more human
╇ I thank Rob Boddice, Philip Armstrong and Thom Page for their substantive
comments, which have considerably contributed to the development of this chapter.
It is dedicated to Liane Schulz and Jochen Hanisch, for their support.
1
╇ ‘Failure in Copenhagen is not an option’, Business Today, 611, Dec. 9, 2009,
available at http://www.businesstoday.com.mt/2009/12/09/t11.html, accessed Dec.
24, 2009.
2
╇See, for example, the Live Earth company and its Concerts for a Climate Crisis:
‘A for-profit company, Live Earth seeks to leverage the power of entertainment
through integrated events, media, and the live experience to ignite a global movement aimed at solving the most critical environmental issues of our time’. http://
liveearth.org/en/liveearth, accessed Dec. 13, 2009
*
322
andré krebber
involvement ‘with a still more invasive scientific apparatus’.3 This
involvement follows in general the logic of rational, enlightened reason. The mechanistic Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe
strove to establish human domination of nature. The obstacle nature
presented for human self-preservation was to be overcome once and
for all. Human bonds with nature were rejected. Nature was interpreted as a mere mechanism, put at humans’ disposal. The project’s
anthropocentrism is obvious. Humanity would eventually re-establish paradisiacal circumstances in the world through the rational
operation of this natural machinery. To be able to do so nature had
to be disenchanted; its mechanical workings had to be laid open. This
venture was undertaken by means of a reorganisation of the sciences
and through a specific methodological approach to building knowledge, for which mathematics provided the universal language. These
tendencies are epitomised in the works of Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
and René Descartes (1596–1650).
Since then, science has been successful in manipulating nature to
human aims. Simultaneously, as the environmental crisis shows,
humans are far from commanding nature. Instead of being under
control and expelled outside the gates of society, nature pushes into
society on all fronts. In relation to maintaining sound ecological living conditions for humans and other species on earth the enlightened
sciences ultimately seem to fail. That we still face the same threat after
forty years of tackling modern ecological problems is another indication of such failure.
We find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. While on the one
hand the hopes of the Enlightenment to control nature have been
dashed, on the other hand industrialised, capitalistic society holds on
to Enlightenment legacies in order to solve the crisis. This chapter
argues that the environmental crisis challenges the human subject of
the European mechanistic Enlightenment in its claims for superiority
and mastery of nature. Relinquishing these claims would require a
letting-go of what today’s post-Enlightenment cultures consider to
constitute human dignity. However, human culture, and instrumental reason in particular, form a socio-psychological barrier to overcoming the ideology of the human subject and its reaching for the
domination of nature. The key challenge to this ideology lies in the
╇ Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 20.
3
anthropocentrism and reason
323
human-animal relationship. Animals have served historically as
human dominion’s objectified other, and as living proof of human
dignity. The aim of this article is thus to explore how solving the
ecological crisis of the present leads through the human-animal relationship. I hereby challenge anthropocentrism by encouraging the
spirit of humility towards animals to promote a human culture that
accepts being different from nature without subjugating nature.
This approach draws on the social theory of the Frankfurt School,
which is commonly known by the term Critical Theory.4 In particular,
I will use the works of Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor
Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–69).5 In Dialectic of Enlightenment they
present a critique of the dominant course of European Enlightenment,
seeking to gain ‘greater understanding of the intertwinement of rationality and social reality, as well as of the intertwinement, inseparable
from the former, of nature and the mastery of nature’.6 Of course,
Adorno and Horkheimer were not concerned with an environmental
crisis. Yet they traced the decline of the individual in modern times,
which found its horrible manifestation in the German gas chambers,
back to the domination of nature. In the foreword to a reprint of
Dialectic of Enlightenment from 1969, Adorno and Horkheimer
stated: ‘The conflicts in the Third World and the renewed growth of
totalitarianism are not mere historical interludes any more than,
according to Dialectic, fascism at that time’.7 For them, fascism, as
well as totalitarianism, were symptoms of the struggle for the mastery
of nature. In a similar vein, I suggest that humanity’s inability to
resolve the environmental crisis is, ‘according to Dialectic’, another
such episode. Today, however, it is external nature that revolts
against human rule, rather than the repressed nature within the individual. By incorporating nature into social theory, Adorno and
Horkheimer presented a theoretical approach to the interconnection
of humans and nature rather than approaching both as entities in
4
╇ In the following, the term Critical Theory will be used exclusively in relation
to the classical Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This will be emphasised by its
capitalisation.
5
╇ A third scholar of special interest is Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). However,
since I focus in this chapter on Dialectic of Enlightenment he will not be taken into
account.
6
╇Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2002), xviii.
7
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xi.
324
andré krebber
themselves—an interconnection that becomes noticeable in the contemporary crisis.
The thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment describes human history
as a continuous anthropocentric struggle for the mastery of nature,
in order to secure and self-preserve the human. Thought and reason
function as humans’ means to achieve this. With the European
Enlightenment, however, a change in technique appeared that eventually laid the ground for a massive expansion of human power over
nature. What was previously attempted through the imitation of
nature (mimesis), turned into material domination with the En��light�
enment. Nature was reduced to mere material for satisfying human
needs and humans came to be regarded as the central element of the
universe. This was repeatedly justified by the idea of human ‘dignity
as self-raising of the human animal above the animal being’.8 AcÂ�Â�
cording to Horkheimer and Adorno, instead of freeing humans from
natural mastery this led to further domination: the domination of
external nature brings about the domination of the inner nature of
humans, which leads in turn to the domination of humans over
humans.9 This means that any ‘attempt to break the compulsion of
nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that com��
pulsion’.10 In order to transcend the wheel of domination, Adorno
and Horkheimer criticised human domination of external nature.
Such criticism is, especially in the wake of the environmental crisis, not unique. For example, Latour argues that nature needs to be
taken into account as a protagonist in human politics, thus implying
that humans and nature have to share the world equally.11 He links
this approach to phenomena such as the hole in the ozone layer,
which, for him, is a hybrid of human and natural origin, proving that
humans and nature create the world collectively and equally.
According to Latour, the dualistic thinking in general, and the
�dualistic conceptualisation of humans and nature in particular, are
responsible for not recognising nature as an equal partner. To avoid
this problem he rejects the dualism in favour of a multiplicity and
8
╇ Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London;
New York: Continuum, 2004), 82.
9
╇Moshe Zuckermann, ‘Kunst als Moment von Naturgedenken in der klassiÂ�schen
Kritischen Theorie’, Kritische Theorie der Technik und der Natur, eds. Gernot Böhme
and Alexandra Manzei (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003).
10
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9.
11
╇ Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
anthropocentrism and reason
325
unites all actors in a ‘parliament of things’. By doing so he levels the
difference between society and nature, thus creating a new totality of
the space in between nature and society (the same criticism can be
extended to the works of Donna Haraway and Michel Serres).12
Asserting equalness and making humans one actor among many disregards the powerful, invasive and far-reaching grip human culture
exerts on nature. The extent to which humans manipulate nature and
have changed it accounts for the understanding of a nature to which
humans are opposed. To attempt to escape the dualism leaves the
problem—the domination of nature by humans—beyond the reach
of criticism. According to Horkheimer, to ‘assert the unity of nature
and spirit is to attempt to break out of the present situation by an
impotent coup de force, instead of transcending it intellectually in
conformity with the potentialities and tendencies inherent in it’.13
In contrast, the Frankfurt School, and dialectical thinking in general, holds on to the differentiation between nature and society while
at the same time resisting raising the human above nature. Thus, it is
not the dualism that comes into focus but the specific human practice
through which societies relate to nature. To transcend domination as
the central principle of civilisation, a reconciliation of humans with
nature is necessary instead of unification. Yet indeed, reconciliation
requires from us, as humans, humility towards nature and an abandonment of claims to superiority over nature; in short, reconciliation
requires the overcoming of humanity’s anthropocentrism.
In today’s highly fragmented reality, or at least in those discourses
influenced by poststructuralism and postmodernism, universal claims
are regarded with suspicion. Adorno and Horkheimer claimed to
offer in Dialectic of Enlightenment a trans-historical and universal
critique of Civilisation; that is, one that spanned all human cultures
throughout history. Accordingly, Critical Theory in general and
Dialectic of Enlightenment in particular are highly controversial. For
some people, Adorno and Horkheimer’s work is of no philosophical
relevance, while for others it is the most important philosophical
work of the twentieth century.
In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer did recognise the fragmented
nature of reality; the subtitle of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is after
12
╇Uta von Winterfeld, Naturpatriarchen: Geburt und Dilemma der Naturbeherr�
schung bei geistigen Vätern der Neuzeit (Munich: oekom, 2006).
13
╇Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press,
1947), 169.
326
andré krebber
all ‘Philosophical Fragments’. Yet they regarded fragmentation of
society as drawn from the dialectic of enlightenment, which has a
determining influence on the development of human civilisation.
They used historical analyses to build a theory that was capable of
explaining the specific historical situation they encountered. How�
ever, developing a theory does not mean ignoring ‘deviations and
resistance’, but identifying the commonalities alongside the difÂ�
ferences:
General concepts coined by means of abstraction or axiomatically by
individual sciences form the material of representation no less than the
names of individual objects. Opposition to general concepts is absurd.
There is more to be said, however, about the status of the general. What
many individual things have in common, or what constantly recurs in
one individual thing, needs not be more stable, eternal, or deep than
the particular. The scale of categories is not the same as that of significance. That was precisely the error of the Eleatics and all who followed
them… The world is unique… Classification is a condition of knowledge, not knowledge itself, and knowledge in turn dissolves classification.14
Abstraction or, in this case, identifying commonalities across cul�tures and histories in relation to the specificities of historical constellations, is necessary to explain what is happening, and why, in a
specific historical situation, and thus to find ways to improve it.
Adorno and Horkheimer had been intellectual companions since
the 1920s, later working alongside each other at the Institut für
Sozialforschung. Horkheimer was assigned to head the institute in
1931 while it was still located in Frankfurt/Main, and Adorno joined
it in 1938, after his emigration to New York. The Institute’s work was
based on Marx’s analysis of society in terms of continuous human
alienation from nature and the critique of political economy. Revising
Marx, the institute was preoccupied with the question of why the
continuous capitalisation of society had not led to revolution, as
Marx had expected. Marx’s analysis was not rejected, but was developed in relation to the specific historical situation and circumstances
of the first half of the twentieth century.15 Later, historical events
caused this focus to broaden. Dialectic of Enlightenment was written
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 182.
╇Marco Maurizi, ‘Marxismus und Tierbefreiung’, Das steinerne Herz der
Unendlichkeit erweichen: Beiträge zu einer kritischen Theorie für die Befreiung der
Tiere, ed. Susann Witt-Stahl (Aschaffenburg: Alibri Verlag, 2007).
14
15
anthropocentrism and reason
327
in American exile during the Nazi regime in Germany, and was selfconfessedly ‘shaped by the social conditions in which it was written’.16
The first half of the twentieth century, with its two World Wars,
totalitarian dictatorships, the industrialised killing in the Third Reich
and the atomic bomb, revealed the full destructive and self-destructive potentials of post-Enlightenment civilisation. The reduction of
the human individual to a specimen disclosed the interconnection
between progress and exploitation, and ultimately destruction. The
mass killing of Jews presented the most extreme and horrific breach
of civilisation in terms of progressive thought, as it could not be
explained in terms of reason. Auschwitz became the universal metaphor for what happened. How was it possible that in modern times,
in the centre of the enlightened world, something like Auschwitz
could happen? This became the crucial question for Adorno and
Horkheimer. In more general terms they wondered why ‘humanity,
instead of entering a truly human state, [was] sinking into a new kind
of barbarism’17 and why ‘the wholly enlightened earth [was] radiant
with triumphant calamity’.18 Having sought to establish better living
conditions for humanity, the Enlightenment project had terminated
in tragedy and catastrophe. For Adorno and Horkheimer Enlighten�
ment reason, at least in its Western, capitalistic form, could not be
trusted anymore. Yet, they state, hope has to rely on reason:
The aporia which faced us in our work thus proved to be the first matter we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment. We
have no doubt—and herein lies our petitio principii—that freedom in
society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have
perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that
thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of
society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the
regression which is taking place everywhere today. If enlightenment
does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its
own fate.19
Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s original insights into the history of
civilisation, the Enlightenment and the human-nature relationship,
once they are re-evaluated in the light of the contemporary crisis,
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiii.
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiv.
18
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1.
19
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi.
16
17
328
andré krebber
will help reach an understanding of that crisis, and thereafter will
lead to new approaches to solving it.
Reason and the Domination of Nature
Just like any other species, humans rely on reproducing their existence in interaction with an environment that is indifferent with
respect to individual life. The first Homo sapiens faced presumably
the same difficulties in this as their ‘sister’ species and other hominids. Specific to the former, however, ‘the major pattern [in primitive
humans] that emerges during the Pleistocene is one of technical
progress closely linked with biological development’.20 The regular
manufacturing of standardised stone tools ‘suggests a major advance
in intellectual capacity’.21 In line with this conclusion, Horkheimer
and Adorno consider reason—cognition, and the capability of utilising appropriated knowledge—as the human’s special feature to
reproduce their life. Correspondingly, they understand enlightenment
‘in the widest sense as the advance of thought’22 and thus distinguish
it from the Enlightenment, which denotes a specific historical epoch.23
The former is the engine of civilisation:
A philosophical interpretation of world history would have to show
how the rational domination of nature comes increasingly to win the
day, in spite of all deviations and resistance, and integrates all human
characteristics. Forms of economy, rule, and culture would also be
derived from this position.24
This concept of history traces human culture back to its relationship
with nature and is characterised by the alienation of humans from
nature by human practice, which manifests itself in the ability to
succeed at goal-oriented manipulation of nature and in longing for
its domination. As productive forces developed with the mechanistic
20
╇ John Bower, ‘The Origin and Evolution of Humankind’, Did the Devil Make
Darwin Do It? Modern Perspectives on the Creation-Evolution Controversy, eds.
David B. Wilson and Warren D. Dolphin (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1985),
123.
21
╇ Bower, ‘Origin and Evolution’, 120.
22
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1.
23
╇ The two meanings of the word are distinguished in the following by a small
letter e and a capital E and/or the.
24
╇Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 235.
anthropocentrism and reason
329
Enlightenment, the alienation of humans from nature was increased.
The distance between culture and nature, mind and matter, subject
and object, human and animal, grew until humans arrogated themselves the right to be above nature and finally broke the bond. Reason
no longer sought to dominate nature through establishing conformity with it, instead opting for the adjustment of nature to meet
human needs and aims. Francis Bacon expressed the persuasion
behind this qualitative change: ‘Let the human race only be given the
chance to regain its God-given authority over nature, then indeed
will right reason and true religion govern the way we exert it’.25
The ‘Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the
world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge… [T]he mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature’.26 With this, the Enlightenment was set against
Animism. Nature had been feared because its forces could not be
readily seen or understood, leading to the false ascription of subjectivity to things, in the form of spirits and demons. The Enlightenment
revealed such explanations to be a result of mythological anthropomorphism. Mysticism was convicted for its projection of subjectivity
from the human onto its natural opponent.27 Bacon proposed to
overcome superstition and aimlessness in human knowledge production and thus eradicate such ‘foolish’ fears once and for all.
According to Dialectic of Enlightenment, the big change of the
Enlightenment was the move from a cultural relationship with nature
based on mimetic technique to one based on the use and modification of material nature through scientific enquiry. Instead of seeing
the object as an object in itself and then trying to influence it, reason
and thought became agents of rebuilding, reproducing and, eventually, creating the natural objects. In contrast to mystical understanding, the Enlightenment was conscious of nature only in relation to
humans’ own needs. It was Bacon’s ‘main intention’ that ‘nature
serves human affairs and interests’.28 The world existed only in
Â�relation to the meaning the human subject ascribed to it: ‘The manifold affinities between existing things are supplanted by the single
relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the
25
╇ Francis Bacon and Graham Rees, The Instauratio Magna Part II: Novum Organum and Associated Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 197.
26
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2.
27
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4.
28
╇ Bacon and Rees, The Instauratio Magna Part II, 301.
330
andré krebber
�meaningless object, between rational significance and its accidental
bearer’.29
Enlightened perception ossified the manifoldness or multiplicity of
the world and the differences of objects in a complementary dichotomy of humans versus nature that turned nature into ‘mere
objectivity’.30 Nature coalesces into a oneness of material for human
production. The commonness of the natural objects, and thus their
classification as nature, is constituted by their characteristic of being
at human disposal. The ‘rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory
is seen not as a representative [of its species] but, mistakenly, as a
mere example’.31 It is not recognised as an individual that shares certain commonalities with other individuals of its species, but only
consists of the commonalities of the species. This rabbit is stripped of
its individuality.
Nature was imagined as a mechanism. Bacon proposed that
through scientifically guided use of natural laws men would finally
re-establish paradise-like living conditions. Through close and determined observation, knowledge of nature’s functionalities was to be
gained. To be capable of this knowledge production had to be restructured following two fundamental principles: a form of reason that
considered only certain aspects of nature (those that could be mathematically objectified); and a unitary organisation of the sciences that
allowed for logical connecting knowledge, in which everything and
anything follows from one system and all objects are interchangeable.
Systematisation of the world became the keynote of the Enlightenment,
represented in the science of the eighteenth century. Humans were to
venture into nature’s inside; nature was to be dissected. Every hidden
characteristic of natural things had to be laid open. In fact, not even
magical procedures, such as the witch doctor’s dance to attract rain,
were to be spared, although they were in general rejected by the
Enlightenment, for ‘although things of this kind are buried in a great
mass of lies and fables, they should nevertheless be examined a little
just in case any natural operation lurks or subsists in any of them’.32
Bacon expected that ‘from this an improvement in man’s lot is bound
to follow, and an enlargement of his power over nature. For by his
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7.
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6.
31
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 7.
32
╇ Bacon and Rees, The Instauratio Magna Part II, 305.
29
30
anthropocentrism and reason
331
fall man lost both his state of innocence and his command over created things’.33
The Enlightenment and the Environmental Crisis
Bacon’s scientific concept has been thoroughly applied in modern
culture. Science builds the base for the practical organisation of
Western societies’ relationships to nature. Manipulation and modification of nature has extended vastly since the seventeenth century.
Our knowledge extends to the molecular level and beyond. Even the
weather system, generally considered unpredictable, is targeted for
manipulation. To depress possible rainfall during the opening ceremony, a weather modification team was part of the preparations for
the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008:
It is yet another attempt by man to triumph over nature. Determined
not to let anything spoil their party, organizers of the 2008 Summer
Olympics said Wednesday that they will take control over the most
unpredictable element of all—the weather.34
The China Meteorological Administration called it contentedly ‘the
first successful operation [of this kind] in the Olympic history’.35 One
year later their attempts were not as satisfying, as meteorologists
covered Beijing in snow ‘in an effort to combat a lingering drought’.36
Despite our great knowledge of and power to manipulate nature, we
do not seem to ‘triumph over nature’. Instead of creating paradiselike conditions, on the contrary, we are threatened by the changes
our manipulation of nature has caused. Bacon’s intention ‘that nature
serve human affairs and interest’ instead promises to turn into an
ecological disaster.
The ‘ecological crisis’ is characterised by change and deterioration
in living conditions for human societies due to societal activities. It
╇ Bacon and Rees, The Instauratio Magna Part II, 447.
╇ Barbara Demick, ‘China plans to halt rain for Beijing Olympics’, L.A. Times,
Jan. 31, 2008, available at: http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-trw-rain31jan31, ac��
cessed Dec. 24, 2009
35
╇ http://www.cma.gov.cn/en/speeial/2009special/60th/majorservice/200909/
t20090-925_46065.html, accessed: Dec. 24, 2009
36
╇ ‘Chinese government makes it snow in order to fight drought’, Telegraph,
Nov. 1, 2009, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/
6481650/Chinese-government-makes-it-snow-in-Beijing-in-order-to-fight-drought
.html, accessed: Dec. 24, 2009
33
34
332
andré krebber
has global ecological effects that have massive implications for society. For millennia human societies have relied on nature as a source
for reproduction. Nature appeared as inexhaustible. This basic condition is being shattered, as natural resources become scarce, and ecological living conditions worsen. Human societies face an increasingly
uncertain future.
The crisis is neither unnoticed nor is it unanswered; it is commonly acknowledged and has its place in public awareness. Ecological
problems have been discussed for decades now and green technologies have been invented to an impressive extent. A broad and lively
discussion about the right strategies to address the problems continues today. Yet, the more importance and urgency is directed to the
problem, the more it verifies the invariable failure of those efforts.
The threat appears only to increase with succeeding attention. The
alarming calls on society have not eased over the last forty years.
There has been little improvement in the basic situation: humans are
as threatened by destruction of their living environment as before,
maybe even more. In spite of the tremendous efforts that have been
undertaken in the last decades one must ask what all the money spent
on colossal conferences and shiny publicity campaigns was worth in
the end, when the decades of work have only led to ever more urgent
calls on society and more alarming prognoses on the state of the
environment. In spite of this inefficiency, it seems ‘the global democratic system’ has already ‘failed to deliver’. COP 15 turned out to be
another missed chance for a change in human habits.
The inherent contradiction within Bacon’s utopia has been
exposed. The Enlightenment has achieved its goals and missed them
at the same time. Although Bacon’s concept has been applied to an
impressive extent, it hasn’t brought us the benefits promised. Just as
Bacon predicted, humans have appropriated the power to manipulate
nature; but this power has not given humans the hoped-for authority
over nature. In fact, the more scientific knowledge and power to
manipulate nature we gain, the worse the ecological situation seems
to get. Nature defies the Enlightenment’s hopes. At the same time,
the ‘global democratic system’, despite increasing attention, struggles
to resolve the crisis. What Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in Dialectic
of Enlightenment becomes more and more a possibility:
Anthropomorphism contains a measure of truth in that natural history
did not reckon with the play of chance which led to the development
of men. Their destructive capacity risks becoming so great that a clean
anthropocentrism and reason
333
sweep will be made if the race is ever exhausted. Either men will tear
each other to pieces or they will take all the flora and fauna of the earth
with them; and if the earth is then still young enough, the whole thing
will have to be started again at a much lower stage.37
Challenging Anthropocentric Reason: Mediating Animals and
Subject↜38
This diagnosis implies that while domination of nature is not promising for the sustenance of human culture, at least not anymore,
humans are struggling to overcome this element in their relationship
to nature. Drawing on Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s work, my assumption is that this dilemma hinges on the particular development of
human reason: it has been solemnly focussed on the domination of
nature and formalised to a mere instrument of such a task; hereby
it gave up its entitlement to transcend what is directly at hand and
instead regressed to adjusting to the given, thus reproducing it for
the better or the worse.39
The movie Avatar exemplifies, through the human-animal relationship, how the very idea of being in tune with nature in Western,
capitalistic thought, is self-evidently equal to the subjugation of
nature. An initiation rite for hunters of an alien tribe consists in finding a dragon-like flying reptile as companion. The process is introduced as hunter and animal choosing one another, and from that
moment on being loyal to each other to the grave. This appears as an
emancipated relationship between two equal individuals of different
species. Animal and person trust and care for each other and communicate on the same level. However, the movie fails to accept the
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1973), 224.
╇ The following marks a first attempt in challenging anthropocentrism on behalf
of classical Critical Theory and from a human-animal studies perspective, to address
humanity’s contemporary crisis. Accordingly, it remains fragmented and incomplete
in both accessing the voluminous works of the Frankfurt School and in proposing
applicable conclusions. In this context, I thank an anonymous peer-reviewer for
drawing my attention to Adorno’s advocacy of objectivity and his attempt to access
the dualism through his negative dialectic as well as the purpose of critique as rigorous negativity, the concept of the nonidentical, and the limitation of reason. These
areas are touched upon here, but their more substantial incorporation will be the
inevitable task of amplifying the suggested approach in the future.
39
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 18ff; Horkheimer,
Eclipse of Reason.
37
38
334
andré krebber
animal respectfully as partner: the process of choosing each other is
revealed to be a violent taming of a ‘beast’ by a hunter. Through a
physically established connection between the two opponents’ minds
the hunter achieves full control over the animal. Instead of an object
in its own right that enters voluntarily into a mutual relationship
with the humanoid aliens, the animal is depicted as a thing that needs
to be brought under (human) power.
Reason reveals itself to be trapped in circular reference: even when
we intend to tune-in with nature it only reproduces domination of
nature. In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer trace
this momentum to dominate nature. From their perspective, reason
developed in relation to the intertwinement of humans with nature.
Western enlightened reason ‘has always aimed at liberating human
beings from fear and installing them as masters’.40 Reason thus stems
from the experience of nature as hostile to human life, and developed
as a means to sustain human life through the domination of nature.
Adorno and Horkheimer identify the socio-psychological cause for
this development: ‘Humans believe themselves free of fear when
there is no longer anything unknown… Nothing is allowed to remain
outside, since the mere idea of the “outside” is the real source of
fear’.41 It is herein that the Enlightenment coincided with Animism,
although it provided an understanding of nature that is diametrically
opposed to that of the latter. Both the Enlightenment and Animism
attempted to influence nature to achieve human aims. Thus, Animism
carried the enlightened thought already within itself, while ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’ in the Enlightenment.42 The shared
goal was to sublate the outside.
Yet, humans overestimated the ability to capture and manage the
outside.43 Adorno and Horkheimer describe the interconnection of
nature and society as a dialectical movement of human and natural
history, wherein humans are nature and opposed to nature at the
same time. The relationship between humans and nature is dynamic,
constituting a constant conflict between them: ‘The process of
so�ciety is neither just society nor just nature, but the exchange of
matter by humans with the latter, the permanent mediation of both
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1.
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11.
42
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xviii.
43
╇ Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1973), 24.
40
41
anthropocentrism and reason
335
momentums’.44 Both humans and nature are productive parts in this
relationship. In other words, humans constantly change nature by
their actions to which nature reacts, which then requires human
reaction and so on. However, the contemporary crisis reveals the
givenness of the objective and its shaping power on the subject;
nature returns as a threat to human self-preservation. Instead of a
subject that constitutes the world, the objective occurs as constitutive
of the subjective.45
From this perspective it becomes more obvious why the dualism
itself is not the problem for the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, so
much as the antagonism of culture and nature is an historical consequence of the ‘alienation of human consciousness from extrahuman
and human nature, which is in turn a consequence of civilisation’.46
Nor is the sole problem the ‘analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection’47 of enlightened science, as critical perspectives have often stressed. Enlightenment’s
untruth consists ‘in the fact that for enlightenment the process [of
deciphering the object or nature] is always decided from the start’.48
Nature is assumed as mathematically registerable in a complete,
given system. By insisting upon the principal finiteness of this process, Western enlightened civilisation has continuously tried to overthrow nature, thereby annulling the historicity of the process as well
as the conditionality of the subject on the objective. To achieve this,
reason, in the scientific knowledge-production model, has falsely
reduced nature to a mere object and defined human spirit as a subject
of power, thus stripping the human of any natural characteristics,
while suppressing and ignoring nature’s differences and diversity.
Every attempt to identify nature and culture, object and subject,
�continues to ignore the non-identicality of the object with the concept of it and is nothing more than longing for the mastery of nature.
Even subordinating humans under nature is revealed simply as an
44
╇ ‘Der gesellschaftliche Prozess ist weder bloß Gesellschaft noch bloße Natur,
sondern Stoffwechsel der Menschen mit dieser, die permanente Vermittlung beider
Momente’. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 8: Soziologische Schriften 1,
ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990), 221 (author’s own translation).
45
╇ Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York:
Seabury Press, 1973).
46
╇ Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 169.
47
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 18.
48
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1973), 24.
336
andré krebber
Â�artifice—a mask for human claims for world domination—because
‘the assertion of the primacy of nature conceals within itself the
assertion of the absolute sovereignty of spirit, because it is spirit that
conceives this primacy of nature and subordinates everything to it’.49
Ultimately, it is the attempt to overcome the dualism (by making
demands on the object) that becomes the problem.
Instead, in Eclipse of Reason Horkheimer describes reason as
infested by a disease, identified in the fact that it ‘was born from
man’s urge to dominate nature’.50 To ‘recover’ reason and thus transcend it, according to Horkheimer, we do not need to address the
latest symptoms, but to cure reason from the disease at its root: the
urge to abolish the outside and to subjugate nature to human mastery. To heal the original disease of reason, we thus have to keep up
the tension between the two antagonists without subjugating one to
the other. According to Adorno, instead of domination we need to
achieve ‘mediation’ between humans and nature.51 Such mediation
accepts two aspects in the relation between subject and object: first,
the subject realises that it is nothing without an object, thus not
detaching itself from the object. Second, the object is mediated, which
means it can only be comprehended in its intertwining with the subject, thus resisting its static hypostatisation.52 The antagonists are in
constant motion. At the same time the hierarchy between them is
sublated. Horkheimer describes this as ‘reconciliation of man with
nature’.53
Since the mastery of the spirit over nature is not only expressed in
relation to extrahuman nature but also within the human, reconciliation relies on the remembering of nature in the subject (Eingedenken
der Natur im Subjekt). Yet the origin of the repressing of nature
within the subject is hidden under layers and layers of cultural debris.
Animals might prove to be key to the reconnection to nature within
the subject. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, in Western
thought human superiority is justified by distinguishing the human
from animals: ‘The idea of man in European history is expressed in
the way in which he is distinguished from the animal. Animal irrationality is adduced as proof of human dignity’. In fact, only a ‘few
╇ Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 169.
╇ Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 176.
51
╇ Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.
52
╇ Winterfeld, Naturpatriarchen.
53
╇ Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason.
49
50
anthropocentrism and reason
337
ideas have taken such a hold on Western anthropology’.54 Not by
chance is the last test of courage for the warrior in Avatar the fighting
and taming of an animal. The film’s representation of the humananimal relationship relies entirely on a Western ideology of superiority and domination, and the primacy of the spirit. However, rather
than defining what humans are it seems that animals challenge the
ideology of a subject that consists in spirit and is detached from
nature, and superior to animals. Humans have never wholly subscribed to this difference. In physically encountering animals, something makes us uncertain of our supremacy over them. For Adorno,
the experience of animals and the gaze of an animal reveals to us its
dignity: ‘Human beings have not succeeded in so thoroughly repressing their likeness to animals that they are unable in an instant to
recapture it’.55 This implies that in encountering animals we remember that the subject is not detached from nature and set in opposition
to it, but is in fact nature in itself. Thus, the animal promises to be a
last resort for humans to remember their nature. In order to transcend reason, the challenge, however, is to not react to this remembering by domination and oppression of animals, but to kindle the
spirit of humility towards animals and insist on the priority of the
object over the subject. My assumption and hope is that from accepting the experience we gain from animals, reason might breach the
principle of domination in Western civilisation.
It is hard to imagine what this could mean or how it could be
applied in practice. The work of nature-researcher and artist Maria
Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) substantiates the abstract concept of reconciliation with nature. Merian’s scientific interest and observations
were focussed on the metamorphosis of butterflies. The outcomes
were beautiful watercolours and prints accompanied by textual
descriptions of her observations, which she published as books. The
furthest developed and most famous one is Metamorphosis Insectorum
Surinamensium, a result of Merian’s trip to Surinam in 1699.56
Merian embodies an example of a scientific approach to animals
that avoids the dominating attitude towards the objects of �mechanistic
╇ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 245.
╇ Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 159.
56
╇Maria Sibylla Merian and Helmut Deckert, Das Insektenbuch: Metamorphosis
Insectorum Surinamensium, (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1991); Kurt Wettengl, ed., Maria
Sibylla Merian, 1647–1717: Artist and Naturalist (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd
Hatje, 1998).
54
55
338
andré krebber
Enlightenment. She gained her knowledge through observation, just
as her mechanistic colleagues did, and it can thus be counted as part
of the Enlightenment. Her representations, however, differ significantly from other entomological drawings of her time. A comparison
of Merian’s pictures and the ones from Metamorphosis Naturalis by
Johannes Goedart (1617–68), which was one of the most important
entomological works of the seventeenth century, highlights the differences. Goedart concentrated on the development from caterpillar
to butterfly and in most cases did not represent the eggs. The objects
were detached from their natural context, optically dissected and
reorganised schematically. His representations resemble Merian’s
preliminary studies, although even in those she usually collected
broader information of the objects. Merian however stepped beyond
this type of representation and composed paintings from the single
observations. She placed the different stages of the insect’s metaÂ�
morphosis on the plant on which they were feeding and oriented her
composition according to the correct representation of the objects as
well as to aesthetic considerations. Wettengl stresses that this results
from the different interests of Goedart and Merian in respect to their
production of knowledge. While Goedart was interested in separating species, Merian focussed on the lifecycles and the foundations for
the reproduction of the insects. Thus, instead of dissecting and separating the objects from their context, she staged the metamorphosis
in the context of the plants. Additionally, she integrated broad
knowledge of the insects and the process of metamorphosis, as well
as of the plants, into her textual representation: the connection
between the depicted objects and the material conditions for their
reproduction; local knowledge and usage of the plants and insects;
the process of how she gained her knowledge; sensual and comparing
descriptions; justifications of her procedures, etc.57
Merian wove her observations into comprehensive representations
of her objects of research. The objects were not only represented and
comprehended in relation to or from the perspective of human interest of domination. Certainly, the representation exceeded purely
instrumental concerns, in which objects would be reduced to those
parts and characteristics that fitted into the concept of mechanistic
57
╇ André Krebber, ‘Bezaubernde Erkenntnis: Naturerkenntnis und -beschreiÂ�bung
bei Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717)’ (unpublished Dipl. thesis, Univ. Lueneburg,
2007).
anthropocentrism and reason
339
sciences. Instead of reducing her perception to quantitative aspects
of the objects, she used all her senses to create unique representations
of them. She created representations that were both enchanting and
informative. In her paintings and texts the insects were almost
brought to life. She went beyond representing the insects as mere
objects of domination, depicting them instead as beings for themselves. Her paintings connected, rather than diverted, the viewer with
the foreign world of Surinam. Moreover, Merian’s representations
invited the viewer to indulge in the objects, yet without romantically
surrendering to the butterflies.58 Throughout her descriptions she
focuses on the utilisation of the plants and caterpillars. Thus, she kept
the balance between being enchanted by the objects and being rationally interested in them. Merian’s approach seems to provide a starting point for developing an epistemological methodology to transfer
anthropocentric anthropology into a dialectical anthropology that
mediates with, rather than dominates, the other. In the light of
Merian’s work, the use of artistic methods to build knowledge about
animals and nature would be central to such a project. Today, it
appears to be urgent to start working on it: the environmental crisis
is not only the latest, but promises also to be the last catastrophe
induced by Western civilisation.
╇Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, ‘Metamorphoses of Perspective: “Merian” as a
Subject of Feminist Discourse’, Maria Sibylla Merian, ed. Wettengl.
58
index
341
INDEX
Actor-network theory╇ 16, 63, 269-78
Adam╇ 23, 25, 140, 149, 162, 295
Adorno, Theodor╇ 17, 323-34, 336-7
Dialectic of Enlightenment╇ 17, 321,
323-30, 332-5, 337
Advocacy, Advocates╇ 6, 8-10, 98, 107-8,
113, 136, 225, 251, 253, 256, 258,
262-3, 287, 309, 314
Aeschylus╇ 41
Aesthetics╇ 157, 165
Afghanistan╇ 310-13
Agamben, Giorgio╇ 2, 5, 8, 180
Agency╇ 3, 9, 16, 47, 66-7, 75, 78-9, 93,
100, 105, 213, 215, 232, 247, 265,
268, 274-5, 302
Aldini, Giovanni╇ 172
Alienation╇ 7, 15, 21, 27, 162-3, 165-6,
177, 179, 236, 309, 326, 328-9, 335
Analogy╇ 6, 67, 118-19, 126-37, 141, 162,
178, 181, 194, 205-6, 218-20, 2245, 231, 237-8, 241
Animals╇ 1-17, 21-36, 37-8, 40-3, 45-7,
51-4, 57, 63, 69-71, 74-9, 81-108,
112-14, 117, 119-20, 133, 135-7,
140, 142-5, 149-53, 159, 167-9,
172-3, 183-98, 203-206, 208, 212,
216-21, 223-5, 227-30, 234, 23640, 242, 245-51, 253, 255-64,
�265-79, 283, 303, 307, 321-4, 329,
333-4, 336-9
Apes╇ 2, 27, 29, 197, 206, 232
Babe (pig)╇ 267
Bats╇ 119-20, 136, 150
Birds╇ 21, 25, 52, 54-5, 143, 150, 278
Camels╇ 26, 147-8
Cats╇ 26, 224, 227, 240-1, 245, 249,
278
Chickens╇ 21, 27, 30, 35-6, 249
Chimpanzees╇ 26, 195-6, 267-8
Cows╇ 53, 149, 152, 224
Dogs╇ 26, 170, 218, 224-5, 227, 249,
278,
Ducks╇ 249
Flipper (dolphin)╇ 267
Fish╇ 25, 52, 228
Foxes╇ 278
Horses╇ 16, 52-3, 103, 245-64
Insects╇ 51, 120, 150, 225, 325-6
Lizards╇ 26, 150
Mammals╇ 32, 119, 140, 150, 224, 234
Monkeys╇ 196-7
Nemo (fish)╇ 267
Pigeons╇ 245
Pigs╇ 224, 249, 292
Pterodactyls╇ 150-2
Rabbits╇ 52, 170, 278, 330
Rodents╇ 224-5, 278
Sheep╇ 224
Skippy (kangaroo)╇ 267
Animism╇ 296, 329, 334
Anthropocentrism (explicit references)
1-18, 25, 29, 35-6, 37-57, 59-62,
70-2, 75, 77-9, 81, 86-7, 89, 91-4,
96-8, 100-108, 114, 117-22, 124,
126, 131-2, 134-7, 183, 190, 203-6,
216, 218, 220, 223-7, 230, 235-6,
239, 241-3, 247-8, 251, 253, 256,
263-4, 273, 287, 294-9, 305, 307319, 321-5, 333, 339
Anthropo-interpretivism╇ 265
Anthropology╇ 110, 183, 189-90, 195,
337, 339
Cultural Anthropology╇ 15, 183, 18899
Social Anthropology╇ 15, 64, 183
Anthropomorphism╇ 17, 31, 265-70, 272,
276-7, 279, 318, 329, 332
Anthropos╇ 1, 23, 156, 180, 184, 266
Antiquity╇ 13, 22, 33, 90
Anti-Semitism╇ 224, 234-5
Appadurai, Arjun╇ 198
Appiah, Kwame Anthony╇ 104-5
Aquinas, Thomas╇ 14, 86-7, 89, 118-19,
126-37, 192n, 203
Summa Contra Gentiles╇ 131
Summa Theologicae╇ 132
Architecture╇ 139-53, 217
Ontological architecture╇ 62, 70
Arendt, Hannah╇ 180, 247
Origins of Totalitarianism╇ 180
Aristotle╇ 30, 39-42, 84, 97, 121, 203
De anima╇ 84
Politics╇ 39, 84
342
index
Art╇ 10, 16, 143-4, 174, 189, 213-18, 220
Asymmetry╇ 93, 271-3
Athena╇ 24, 28
Augustine, Saint╇ 86, 203
Auschwitz╇ 327
Automata╇ 159, 168-9, 173-6, 186, 197,
243
Avatar╇ 333, 337
Bacon, Francis╇ 266, 322, 329-32
Balguy, John╇ 46
Balzac, Honoré de╇ 149, 250
Basil, Saint╇ 86
Behaviourism╇ 266
Belief╇ 17, 33, 37, 50, 84, 121, 123, 189,
226, 234, 284-5, 305, 313, 316-7
Benedict, Ruth╇ 190
Benhabib, Seyla╇ 105-8
Bennett, David╇ 226
Bentham, Jeremy╇ 307
Besonnenheit (see Reflexivity)
Beulé, Charles-Ernest╇ 144
Bible╇ 23-4, 294, 298, 302
Book of Job╇ 24
Book of Proverbs╇ 24
Deuteronomy╇ 298
Genesis╇ 162, 293-5, 298
Leviticus╇ 298
New Testament╇ 162, 298
Old Testament╇ 291, 293, 297
Proverbs╇ 24, 298
Binary opposition╇ 4, 10, 16, 109, 156,
184, 191, 194, 248, 269, 271-4, 277
Dichotomy╇ 2, 6, 56, 62-3, 70, 184,
195, 330
Dualism╇ 60-4, 67-8, 71-7, 79, 135-6,
271, 274, 324-5, 335-6
Biocentrism╇ 17, 305
Biology╇ 12, 67, 74, 169-71, 189-90, 198,
233, 273, 277
Blair, Tony╇ 312
Blakemore, Colin╇ 223, 229, 236
Blasphemy╇ 14, 122
Bloch, Marc╇ 288, 291
Boas, Franz╇ 183, 189-91
Body╇ 14, 61, 73, 131, 140-2, 146-7, 150,
152-3, 162, 172-4, 176-7, 191, 251,
316
Boia, Lucian╇ 26
Boileau, Louis-Auguste╇ 139-41, 146-8
Bratton, Susan Power╇ 302
Brink, David╇ 48
Brown, John╇ 172
Buchez, Phillipe╇ 146
Bulliet, Richard╇ 9-10
Bush, George W.╇ 312
Capitalism╇ 75, 153, 156-60, 165-7, 1739, 247, 251, 275, 303, 310-11, 317,
319, 322, 326-7, 333
Carrithers, Michael╇ 195
Cartesianism (see Descartes, René)
Castree, N.╇ 271-5
Chauvinism╇ 1, 13
Chesterton, G.K.╇ 135
Chevalier, Louis╇ 250
China Meteorological Administration
331
Chomsky, Noam╇ 30
Chrysostom, John╇ 86
Cicero╇ 85, 99
Citizenship╇ 10, 101, 103, 165, 180, 257
City (Polis)╇ 6, 16, 31, 149, 245-54, 25864
Civil society╇ 81, 107
Civilisation╇ 9, 31, 114, 143, 145, 246,
249, 325-8, 335, 337, 339
Civility╇ 9
Claims╇ 3-5, 11, 106-7, 322, 325, 336
Claretie, Jules╇ 259
Cohen, Jeremy╇ 298-9
Coleman, William╇ 297
Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus
291
Compassion╇ 44, 89, 257
Consciousness╇ 12, 61, 70-1, 73, 79, 96-9,
110, 119-20, 136, 140, 153, 194,
207, 227, 317, 329, 335
Constructivism╇ 77
Cosmology╇ 1, 7, 37, 42, 79, 86, 141, 187,
194
Cosmopolitanism╇ 14, 43, 81-114
Creation╇ 24-5, 27, 86, 119, 126-32, 134,
153, 156-63, 165, 167, 190, 205,
247, 286-7, 293-4, 296, 303
Critical Theory╇ 247, 323, 325
Cruelty╇ 46, 87-89, 105, 203, 229-30, 238,
250, 256, 262
Cullen, William╇ 172
Cuvier, Georges╇ 140, 148-52
Cyborgs╇ 153, 276
Daoism╇ 13, 38, 51-7, 314
Zhuangzi╇ 51-7
index
343
Darwin, Charles and Darwinism╇ 66-7,
152, 184n
Origin of Species╇ 66, 184n
Death╇ 22, 54, 94-6, 102, 148, 160, 31112, 316
Deep ecology╇ 17, 302, 307-19
Deities (see God)
Democracy╇ 35, 42, 106-7, 259, 321, 332
Derrida, Jacques╇ 5, 26, 94-5, 167, 239-40
Descartes, René╇ 29-30, 42, 62, 81, 97,
143-5, 186, 203, 253, 322
Cartesianism╇ 61, 70, 73, 191-2n, 250,
256, 266, 271
Recherche de la vérité par la lumière
naturelle╇ 144
Descola, Philippe╇ 193-4, 198
Devall, Bill╇ 308
Diamond, Cora╇ 230
Dichotomies (see Binary oppositions)
Diderot, Denis╇ 45
Didron, Alphonse-Nicolas╇ 139-40, 1478
Dignity╇ 88, 99, 102-3, 239, 322-4, 336-7
Diogenes Laertius╇ 41
Diogenes of Sinope╇ 21, 27, 30, 35-6
Distinction╇ 3, 6-8, 11-12, 16, 31, 60, 65,
69-71, 74-9, 88, 156-8, 190-7, 209,
220, 236, 248, 271-6, 317
Divinity, the Divine╇ 4, 8, 86-7, 90-91,
96-7, 118-9, 121-31, 135, 162, 186,
219, 299
DNA╇ 34, 233
Domesticity╇ 9-10, 26, 31, 78, 149, 245-8,
278, 299
Dominion╇ 7, 9-10, 91, 184, 186, 283,
298, 312, 323
Down’s Syndrome╇ 313
Dreyfus, H.L.╇ 212, 217
Du Camp, Maxime╇ 252-3, 257, 261
Dualism (see Binary opposition)
Dunayer, Joan╇ 228
Durkheim, Emile╇ 66, 72-7
Rules of Sociological Method╇ 72
Duty╇ 11, 47, 87-90, 93, 96, 99
Dwelling╇ 65, 92-3, 96, 144, 152-3, 186
Environment╇ 1-2, 5-6, 11, 31, 35, 92,
194, 205, 212, 230, 235, 241, 247,
251, 261, 283, 286-7, 295-7, 302-5,
307-14, 318-19, 321-4, 328, 331-2,
339
Climate change╇ 321
Crisis╇ 303-4, 308, 321-4, 331-9
Global Warming╇ 35, 308
Epic of Gilgamesh╇ 24, 27, 31
Epimetheus╇ 24-5, 28
Epistemology╇ 1, 13, 15, 17, 37, 42, 48,
50, 59, 65, 67, 75-9, 157, 169, 1989, 265, 269, 272-8, 310, 339
Ethics╇ 1-3, 6-13, 37-9, 41-57, 89-93, 102,
106-13, 117, 136-7, 203, 228-30,
233, 235-6, 247, 283, 287, 294,
297-8, 305, 307, 315-16, 319
Ethnocentrism╇ 11, 108, 110
Ethnography╇ 194, 196, 197n
Animal Ethnography╇ 196
Ethology╇ 193, 195, 267
Eve╇ 25
Evernden, Neil╇ 31
Evolution╇ 12, 30, 60, 67, 74, 184n, 185-6,
191, 193, 197, 278, 328
Exceptionalism╇ 5, 7-9, 12, 78
Ecology (see also Deep ecology)╇ 12, 16,
307
Electricity╇ 32, 172-3, 246, 259, 261
Engels, Friedrich╇ 66-7, 160
Enlightenment╇ 10, 14, 17, 43-4, 46-7, 57,
76, 81, 87, 109, 177, 270-1, 321-39
Gaita, Raimond╇ 230
Galdikas, Biruté╇ 196
Galvani, Luigi╇ 172
Gandhi, Mohandas╇ 118, 314
Gassendi, Pierre╇ 97
Geertz, Clifford╇ 183, 192-3
Factories╇ 31, 152, 159-60, 173-8, 181
Farming╇ 8, 215, 237, 285, 288-91
Fée, A.L.A.╇ 253
Feeling╇ 33, 178, 181, 296, 315-17
Feenberg, Andrew╇ 247-8
Fellenz, Marc╇ 10, 17
Ficino, Marsilio╇ 186
Field systems╇ 288-90
Filarete, Antonia Averlino╇ 141
Fossey, Dian╇ 196
Foucault, Michel╇ 109, 158, 168-9, 174-5,
237-9, 273
Security, Territory, Population╇ 168
Francione, Gary╇ 228
Francis of Assisi, Saint╇ 86, 135, 287, 3023, 305
Frankfurt School╇ 247, 323, 325, 333n,
335
344
index
Genetics╇ 31, 34, 192-3, 228, 232
Giddens, Anthony╇ 76
Giffard, Pierre╇ 259
The End of the Horse╇ 259-60
Glacken, C.J.╇ 298
God(s)╇ 14, 23-5, 27-9, 33, 59, 82-7,
89-91, 96-99, 117-19, 121-35, 140,
142, 162, 203, 218-20, 266, 294-5,
303, 311-12, 317, 329
Goedart, Johannes╇ 338
Metamorphosis Naturalis╇ 338
Goodall, Jane╇ 195
Gothic╇ 141-2, 147, 152
Grammont Law╇ 250, 262
Great Chain of Being (see Scala naturae)
Greene, Ann Norton╇ 263
Habermas, Jürgen╇ 112
Haller, Albrecht╇ 171-2
Haraway, Donna╇ 153, 272, 278, 325
Harrison, Peter╇ 286, 290, 292-4, 296-9,
302, 305
Harvey, David╇ 111, 250-1
Haussmann, Georges-Eugène╇ 250-2
Haussmannisation╇ 251
Hawkins, Mike╇ 74
Heavy plough╇ 287-92
Hedegaard, Connie╇ 321
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich╇ 164,
167, 171
Heidegger, Martin╇ 15-16, 84, 92-7, 111,
152, 203-20, 314
Being and Time╇ 204, 206, 209-11
Dasein╇ 92, 204-14, 216-21
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics╇ 205
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics╇ 205
‘The Origin of the Work of Art’╇ 215
Held, David╇ 108
Hephaestus╇ 24, 28
Herder, Johann Gottfried╇ 95, 183, 188
Herodotus╇ 41
Hesiod╇ 24, 27n, 82, 291
Works and Days╇ 24
Hierarchy╇ 8, 83-5, 88, 219, 225, 262, 336
Hill, Andrew╇ 312
Hilton, R.H.╇ 300-1
Hobbes, Thomas╇ 43
Homer╇ 24
Homo Sapiens (see Human)
Horkheimer, Max╇ 17, 247, 323-8, 332-6
Dialectic of Enlightenment (see under
Adorno, Theodor)
Eclipse of Reason╇ 336
Horse power╇ 245, 250-1, 255, 259-60
Hugo, Victor╇ 147, 262
Human nature╇ 42-5, 74, 93, 119, 145,
186, 193, 308-10, 313, 335-6
Human-animal relation╇ 8, 10-11, 15, 91,
136, 153, 246-7, 262, 265, 269-71,
273-8, 323, 333, 336-9
Humanism (see also Post-humanism)
14-15, 33-4, 59-62, 64-6, 68, 70-2,
76-7, 79, 81, 96, 111n, 159, 185-9,
197, 237-9, 247
Hume, David╇ 44-5, 50, 203
Huré╇ 250
The Zoophile╇ 250
Husserl, Edmund╇ 204, 207-8
Ideas╇ 207
Hybridity, Hybridisation╇ 149, 169, 267,
270-1, 273, 276-7, 324
Ideology╇ 3, 7, 42, 112, 167, 173, 273, 293,
303-4, 322, 337
Idolatry╇ 122, 124, 126
Imanishi, Kinji╇ 196
Immortality╇ 24, 26, 29
Industrial Revolution╇ 31, 158-60, 176,
178, 245, 259
Instinct╇ 28-9, 45, 69-71, 74, 78, 143, 178,
186-7, 188n, 189-90, 193
Instrumentalisation╇ 16-17, 85, 88, 1024, 177, 245-8, 253, 256, 263-4, 322,
338
Intentionality╇ 207, 274
Interpretivism╇ 72, 76-7, 265
Judaeo-Christian tradition╇ 163, 308,
312, 319
Justice╇ 46-7, 82-3, 86, 92-3, 97-8, 100-3,
105-114, 239, 242, 315
Cosmic justice╇ 14, 91, 97, 114
Kant, Immanuel╇ 45, 76, 81, 87-93, 97,
101, 111, 169, 203, 205-7, 247, 307
Kielmeyer, Carl Friedrich╇ 177
Killing (Slaughter)╇ 8-9, 36, 82, 86-7, 94,
98, 102-3, 105, 141, 149, 170, 249,
260, 262, 311-2, 316, 327
Kinship (Oikeiosis)╇ 6, 8, 14, 97-100, 187,
188n
Kroeber, Alfred L.╇ 183, 189, 191-2
The Superorganic╇ 191
index
Laboratories╇ 160-1, 178, 267-8, 330
Labour╇ 67-71, 76, 147, 159-63, 165-7,
173-5, 177, 250, 301
LaCapra, Dominick╇ 3-5, 217n
Language╇ 12, 14, 22-3, 30, 33, 37, 40-1,
45, 47-8, 54, 61, 91, 118-19, 121-2,
124-36, 193, 219
Latour, Bruno╇ 6-8, 65, 267, 274, 321, 324
Law, John.╇ 269-70, 274
Law, legality╇ 6-7, 11-12, 21-22, 30, 33,
39, 74, 89, 106-7, 180, 189
Le Goff, Jacques╇ 301
Legendre, George╇ 153
Lévi-Strauss, Claude╇ 193-95
Les structures élémentaires de la
parenté╇ 193
Race et Histoire, Race et Culture╇ 194
Liberalism╇ 43, 103-4, 109, 111-12
Liberty╇ 274, 277
Linnaeus╇ 2
Loeb, Jacques╇ 266
Logos (see Reason)
Lorenz, Konrad╇ 29
Loubat, Alphonse╇ 254
Love╇ 78, 89, 99, 102-3n, 162-4, 166, 313,
315, 319
Lowie, Robert╇ 189
Löwith, Karl╇ 92
Luther, Martin╇ 42
Lyon, D.╇ 274
Lyotard, Jean-François╇ 273
Machines╇ 2, 16, 29n, 31-4, 142, 145, 166,
176-8, 245-7, 250-1, 253, 255-6,
261, 263-4, 276, 285, 322
Mackie, J.L.╇ 48
Maimonides, Moses╇ 14, 118-33, 136
Commentary on the Mishnah╇ 121
Guide for the Perplexed╇ 118
Mandeville, Bernard╇ 43
Marchesini, Roberto╇ 27, 36n, 193
Marcuse, Herbert╇ 247
Marey, Etienne-Jules╇ 255-6
Marginality╇ 61, 77, 93, 110-11, 113, 22634, 240
Marx, Karl╇ 15, 66-72, 74, 76-7, 160-1,
164-5, 167, 173-6, 326
Capital╇ 160n, 161 and n, 165, 173,
175n, 177n
Matsuzawa, Testuro╇ 197
McShane, Clay╇ 263
Mead, George Herbert╇ 78, 271
345
Mediation╇ 17-18, 34, 67-8, 71, 106, 169,
334-6, 339
Meister Eckhart (Eckhart von Hochheim)╇ 314
Ménuret, Jean Joseph╇ 167
Merian, Maria Sibylla╇ 337-9
Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium╇ 337
Metaphor╇ 36n, 52, 62, 127-8, 130-2, 179,
185-6, 193, 246, 261, 327
Metaphysics╇ 17, 37, 41, 43, 49, 61, 70,
76, 87, 94, 103, 108, 128-9, 134-5,
190, 204-7, 218-19, 287, 294-7,
305, 307, 310, 313-15
Michael, Mike╇ 73
Middleton, Robin╇ 141, 142n
Mill, John Stuart╇ 117
Utilitarianism╇ 117
Mimesis╇ 324
Minot, J.╇ 250-1, 255
Appreciation of the Horse╇ 250
Misanthropy╇ 35, 242
Mitchell, Timothy╇ 66
Molloy, C.╇ 276
Monotheism╇ 121-2
Monsters, Monstrosity╇ 14-15, 145, 1479, 155-67, 169, 174, 178-81, 229,
261
Montaigne, Michel de╇ 203
Moore, G.E.╇ 48
Morality╇ 11, 36, 37-8, 43-7, 50, 56-7,
90-93, 256-7, 264, 268
Moral judgement╇ 38, 91
Moral realism╇ 37, 48-51, 56-7
Moral relativism╇ 37
Moral status╇ 1, 12, 15, 41, 46, 54, 83, 87,
90, 94, 97, 103, 107, 120, 136
Moretti, Franco╇ 159-60, 166
Signs Taken for Wonders╇ 159
Morgan, Lewis Henry╇ 190-1
Muntz, Achille╇ 258
Myth╇ 22-9, 36, 55, 143, 145, 149, 329,
334
Nagel, Thomas╇ 49-50, 55-6, 119-20
Nazism╇ 30, 94, 155, 327
Neo-Platonism╇ 97-8
Normality╇ 175
Nussbaum, Martha╇ 101-5, 107-9
Objectivity╇ 43, 48-50, 56, 76, 169, 273,
330, 330n
346
index
Oikeiosis (see Kinship)
Oikos╇ 6, 40
Ontogeny╇ 15, 176, 183, 193, 196, 197n
Ontology╇ 1, 7-8, 13, 16, 48, 51, 59-77,
79, 149, 153, 165, 169, 191, 194,
203-11, 212n, 213, 216n, 221, 232,
270-2, 277, 307, 318
Origen╇ 86
Orwell, George╇ 313
Osborne, Catherine╇ 225, 229
Ovid╇ 82
Pain (see Suffering)
Pandora╇ 24-5
Paris╇ 147-8, 245-63
Passmore, John╇ 296-8
Pasteur, Louis╇ 258
Paul, Saint╇ 203
Perception╇ 85, 97-8, 103n, 234, 316, 31819, 330, 339
Personhood╇ 10, 40, 267, 271
Personification╇ 26, 35-6, 292
Petrarch╇ 33, 186-7
Pets╇ 31, 153, 224-5
Phenomenology╇ 16, 94, 204-8, 211-12,
277, 314
Philip, Wilson╇ 170
Phusis╇ 6, 191n
Phylogeny╇ 15, 176, 183, 185, 195, 197n
Plato╇ 21, 27-30, 35, 41
Protagoras╇ 27-8
Republic╇ 41
Platonism╇ 48, 135
Pliny the Elder╇ 28
Pliny the Younger╇ 288, 290
Polis (see City)
Politics╇ 1-7, 22, 39-40, 42-3, 62, 67, 74,
81, 84, 100-113, 139, 153, 157-8,
169, 177, 217, 220, 225-8, 257, 269,
301, 304, 313, 317, 321, 324, 326
Porphyry╇ 14, 97-100
Positivism╇ 67, 72, 77
Postdomesticity╇ 9
Post-humanism╇ 15-16, 193, 265, 278
Postmodernism╇ 108-14, 325
Poststructuralism╇ 72n, 109-10, 325
Prejudice╇ 13, 39, 85-7, 91-4, 96, 108-10,
114, 223-30, 232, 234-6, 239-41,
243, 313, 319
Primatology╇ 195-6
Prometheus╇ 24-5, 28, 178
Pythagoreanism╇ 41-2
Quesnay, François╇ 168
Physical Essay on Animal Economy
168
Rabinow, Paul╇ 109
Race, racism╇ 30, 39-40, 144, 157, 189-90,
224-5, 234-5, 237, 246, 308, 310
Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan╇ 2, 109
Railton, Peter╇ 49
Rawls, John╇ 46-7, 50, 83, 92, 101-5, 112
Realism╇ 37-8, 48-51, 56-7, 72, 77
Reason (Logos)╇ 6, 40, 47, 84-8, 90-1, 93,
97, 100, 104-5, 140-1, 143-4, 146,
235, 273, 313, 321-2, 324, 327-30,
333-7
Reflexivity (Besonnenheit)╇ 2-5, 14, 65,
75, 78, 95, 158-9, 169, 172, 174,
178-9, 181
Regan, Tom╇ 226-7, 229, 231, 234-5
Relationality (relators, relatings)╇ 1, 3-4,
10, 16, 111, 219, 229, 241, 265,
270-3, 277
Religion╇ 1, 14, 22, 24, 33, 37, 42-3, 51n,
61, 87, 101, 103-4, 117-37, 147,
232, 283, 285, 287, 293, 294, 296,
301-5, 317, 329
Buddhism╇ 135, 287
Catholicism╇ 127, 135
Christianity╇ 42, 81, 86-7, 123, 126-7,
134-5, 141, 162, 167, 181, 192n,
203, 284-99, 302-3, 308.
Hinduism╇ 287
Islam╇ 34, 311, 319
Judaism╇ 121-7, 234, 294-5
Orthodox Christianity╇ 294, 297, 302
Renaissance╇ 13, 22, 31, 42, 81, 141
Representation╇ 40, 47, 109, 112, 123,
141, 152, 184-5, 194, 216n, 266,
326, 337-9
Rhetoric╇ 1-11, 185, 188, 198, 288
Rights╇ 4-7, 9-12, 17, 86, 93, 96, 106-7,
180, 226-7, 230, 256, 276, 310
Robida, Albert╇ 259-60
Roche, A. Edouard╇ 256-7
The Martyrs of Work╇ 256
Rodríguez-Garavito, César╇ 112
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques╇ 45
Sacrifice╇ 53n, 102, 140, 241-2
Sanders, Clinton╇ 78
Sawyer, P.H.╇ 300-1
Scala naturae (Great Chain of Being)╇ 16,
33, 134-5, 205-6, 220, 308
index
Schaffer, Simon╇ 168
Schopenhauer, Arthur╇ 95
Selesius, Angelus╇ 314
Selfhood╇ 232
Self-interest╇ 43, 47, 317
Seneca╇ 85
Sentience╇ 8, 102-3, 107-8, 114, 235, 250
Serres, Michel╇ 325
Sessions, George╇ 308
Sexism╇ 39-40, 224-5, 234-7, 308
Shelley, Mary╇ 15, 155-6, 163, 167, 172,
180
Frankenstein╇ 15, 155-69, 172-4, 17881
Shylock╇ 234, 238
Singer, Peter╇ 17, 117, 203, 223-31, 2345, 283
Animal Liberation╇ 16, 223, 283
Animal Philosophy╇ 203
Skinner, B.F.╇ 266
Slaughter (see Killing)
Smart, J.J.C.╇ 49
Smith, Adam╇ 44-5, 50
Societies for the prevention of cruelty to
animals╇ 94, 165, 250, 261
Assistance to Animals╇ 261
French League for the Protection of
Horses against Mistreatment╇ 261
French Society for the Protection of
Animals╇ 250, 256, 261
Royal Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA)╇ 165
Sociology╇ 17, 43, 63-6, 72-9, 159, 190,
266, 270, 277
Souls╇ 12, 14, 29, 41-2, 61, 70, 86, 94, 98,
140, 142, 144, 148, 165-6, 169-71,
181, 188, 191, 227, 232
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de╇ 111-12
Sovereignty╇ 4-5, 106-7, 109, 169, 175,
177, 235, 336
Speciesism╇ 3, 16, 93, 223-6, 228-30, 239,
242-3, 283
Spinoza, Baruch╇ 266, 314-8
Stephen, Leslie╇ 43
Stern, H.╇ 292
Stoicism╇ 14, 82-7, 90-2, 97, 99-101, 296,
298
Strathern, Marilyn╇ 109
Subjectivity╇ 15, 43-7, 49-51, 55-7, 61, 73,
75-9, 112, 120, 136, 158, 179, 188,
197, 235, 251, 271, 273-4, 313, 329,
335
347
Suffering (Pain)╇ 10-12, 53, 86, 102-3,
107, 117, 120, 203, 228-9, 232-6,
251, 256, 261, 268, 314-5, 317, 330
Sylvan, Richard╇ 226
Symbolism╇ 21, 78, 127, 156, 187, 194,
197, 252, 259, 261, 263, 271, 287
Taboo╇ 22, 26, 198
Taliban╇ 311-12
Tarr, Joel╇ 263
Technology╇ 16, 22, 30-6, 68, 74, 153,
169, 174, 176, 178, 245-8, 251-4,
259, 263, 270, 276, 283-7, 290-2,
294, 298-302, 332
Teresa, Mother╇ 118
Theology╇ 14, 21, 42, 61, 117, 127, 159,
162, 180n, 220, 283-7, 293-305
Ecotheology╇ 284-5, 294, 302-5
Tools╇ 22, 195, 211, 246-8, 263, 328
Torah╇ 123
Tulp, Nicolaas╇ 29
Tylor, Edward Burnett╇ 183, 189
United Nations╇ 311-12, 321
Urbanisation╇ 245, 249
Ure, Andrew╇ 173-5, 178
Philosophy of Manufacture╇ 173
Utilitarianism, Utility╇ 11, 117, 174, 177,
203, 226, 243, 263, 307
Van Gogh, Vincent╇ 215
Varro, Marcus Terentius╇ 291
Vedanta╇ 314
Veganism╇ 94
Vegetarianism╇ 8-9, 34, 41, 94, 98
Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro)╇ 291
Vermin╇ 225
Vinci, Leonardo da╇ 141
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene-Emmanuel╇ 141,
143-4, 147, 149-50, 152
Vitalism╇ 162-3, 165, 167
Vitruvius╇ 141
Vivisection (animal experimentation)
9n, 46n, 171, 223-5, 236, 242
Volition╇ 12, 67, 159, 169-71, 174
War╇ 24, 35-6, 310-313
Watson, John B.╇ 266
Weather╇ 215, 250, 331
Weber, Max╇ 66, 72, 75-8, 247
Weider, D.L.╇ 268-9
Wettengl, Kurt╇ 338
348
index
White Jr., Lynn╇ 17, 283-305, 308
Medieval Technology and Social
Change╇ 284, 287-8, 290-2, 300
‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic
Crisis’╇ 17, 283-305
Whitney, Elspeth╇ 284, 292, 294, 296,
300-4,
Whytt, Robert╇ 172
Wiggins, David╇ 43, 50
Wildness╇ 153
Williams, Bernard╇ 49
Wissler, Carl╇ 189
Wrathall, M.A.╇ 212
Xenophanes╇ 41
Young, Iris Marion╇ 113
Zoos╇ 26, 153