One of the characters that define our age is the radical breakdown of the human and animal distinction. We are often shown by the mainstream media and scholarly scientific literature with the new pieces of evidence that show the barriers that separate humans from animals are not as impermeable as we once thought them to be. A lot of behaviors and capacities that are believed by many to be unique among human beings are also found in animals.
The fundamental breakdown as one of the efforts to delimit human beings from animals has become an important development for philosophers and theories. One of the philosophers that try to delimit these two is named Aristotle.
What makes humans different from animals according to Aristotle? According to Aristotle, what makes humans different from animals is that they have life, perception with addition of the rationality, while animals only have life and perception. In his schema, it is also stated that plants have only life. Furthermore, he said that animals are best understood as a naturalistic schema in which they are situated between plants and human beings and being ultimately, if not entirely, placed in the service of human beings.
While thinking of this ascending scale of the complexity of life and the nature makes nothing in vain, the philosopher named Aristotle suggested Book I, Part VIII of Politics. In the book, there is an evident that plants are for the sake of animals while the animals are for the sake of the human beings. These animals can be used by the human beings for using and eating. As most but not all wild animals can be eaten, they can be used to make clothes and to produce the other things.
Aristotle’s opinion about animals that only exist for the sake of the human beings does not mean such service is necessarily exhaustive of animal being as a whole on his account, even though it is the sign that the number of thoughts of human regarding animals have been evolved and the time keeps decreasing day by day.
Talking about the things that make humans and animals different and the ethical worth of animals, we cannot rely on philosophy as it has frequently failed to live up to its more admirable ideals.
The next well-known philosopher that influences the views about human and animal distinction is Rene Descartes. He was known as a modern philosophy from French. According to him, animals are essentially indistinguishable from machines and that their behavior is able to be fully explained without resources to notions such as mind and self-awareness. He said that animals are complex automata. They are beings that are able to react to external stimuli. However, they lack the ability to know that such reactions are taking place.
Just like by Aristotle, many people are also disappointed by Rene Descartes. People think that both of them failed to imagine the subjectivity of non-human animal life, which results in the failure to critically engage questions about how human beings relate to animals. Aside from repeating many of the anthropocentric tendencies of the dominant culture, many influential philosophers have also sought to provide a rigorous justification for a number of most violent modes of interactions with animals.
On the brighter side, contemporary theories in animal studies think differently. The approaches done by some of them such as Gilles Delauze, Donna Haraway, and Giorgio Agamben de-emphasize the human or animal dichotomy as a point of departure for thinking through animal studies. These ones prefer to interrogate some other possibilities that might be there when we no longer take distinctions between human beings and animals as the unchallenged starting premise for thought and practice on the subject.
There are some biopolitical reasons offered by a philosopher from Italy named Giorgio Agamben for rethinking our reliance on the human and animal distinction and switch over to a mode of thought that is known as indistinction. For those who are not familiar with the term “biopolitical” it derives from the work of Michel Foucault, the man that his influential work has helped people to uncover the methods in which dominant modes of politics have come increasingly to take the form of the governing, controlling, and shaping of life and not just wielding the sovereign power to kill.
Apparently, there are some deep roots of the biopolitical trend in western culture for this philosopher. It goes back to the ancient Greeks and their ideas about the nature of what constitutes proper political life. According to Agamben, one of the foundation acts of western politics is the effort to separate animal life from properly political human life. This kind of process is referred by him in The Open: Man and Animal as anthropogenesis. He thinks that this process of separation takes place in and through human beings themselves, with the purpose of delimiting those aspects of human life that belong to the political sphere.
Thus, it is not simply a descriptive set of concepts and institutions. The separation of human life from animal life should not be just read off of the natural world, as if people come to this world disctributed into various categories and attributes. Instead of that, the anthropological machine is the name that will be used by the philosophers to call performative apparatus because it enacts and calls into being a specific reality. This kind of machine is the one that creates, reproduces, and maintains the distinction between human life and animal life. Due to the existence of the political effect, it can be seen that the anthropological machine is hard to be valued neutrally. If one is insufficiently human, they can find themselves vulnerable to being killed with impunity. Giorgio Agamben thinks that it will be needed for us to aim to stop this machine and make an effort to think more carefully about the indistinction of human and animal life, before thinking about the methods to separate these two.
A bookworm and researcher especially related to law and citizenship education. I spend time every day in front of the internet and the campus library.
