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THE STONE

Humans Are Animals. Let’s Get Over It.

It’s astonishing how relentlessly Western philosophy has strained to prove we are not squirrels.
Feb. 23, 2021

By Crispin Sartwell
Mr. Sartwell is a professor of philosophy.

If one were to read through the prefaces and first paragraphs of the canonical works of Western philosophy, one might assume the
discipline’s primary question to be this: What makes us humans so much better than all the other animals? Really, it’s astonishing
how relentless this theme is in the whole history of philosophy. The separation of people from, and the superiority of people to,
members of other species is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.

The Great Philosopher will, before addressing himself to the deep ethical and metaphysical questions, pause for the conventional,
ground-clearing declaration: “I am definitely not a squirrel.” This is evidently something that needs continual emphasizing.

Rationality and self-control, as philosophers underline again and again, give humans a value that squirrels lack (let’s just stick with
this species for the time being), a moral status unique to us. We are conscious, and squirrels, allegedly, are not; we are rational, and
squirrels are not; we are free, and squirrels are not.

We can congratulate ourselves on the threat averted. But if we truly believed we were so much better than squirrels, why have we
spent thousands of years driving home the point?

It’s almost as though the existence of animals, and their various similarities to humans, constituted insults. Like a squirrel, I have
eyes and ears, scurry about on the ground and occasionally climb a tree. (One of us does this better than the other does.) Our shared
qualities — the fact that we are both hairy or that we have eyes or we poop, for example — are disconcerting if I am an immortal being
created in the image of God and the squirrel just a physical organism, a bundle of instincts.

One difficult thing to face about our animality is that it entails our deaths; being an animal is associated throughout philosophy with
dying purposelessly, and so with living meaninglessly. It is rationality that gives us dignity, that makes a claim to moral respect that
no mere animal can deserve. “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality,” writes Immanuel Kant in “Critique of
Practical Reason.” In this assertion, at least, the Western intellectual tradition has been remarkably consistent.

The connection of such ideas to the way we treat animals — for example, in our food chain — is too obvious to need repeating. And the
devaluation of animals and disconnection of us from them reflect a deeper devaluation of the material universe in general. In this
scheme of things, we owe nature nothing; it is to yield us everything. This is the ideology of species annihilation and environmental
destruction, and also of technological development.

Further trouble is caused when the distinctions between humans and animals are then used to draw distinctions among human
beings. Some humans, according to this line of thinking, are self-conscious, rational and free, and some are driven by beastly desires.
Some of us transcend our environment: Reason alone moves us to action. But some of us are pushed around by physical
circumstances, by our bodies. Some of us, in short, are animals — and some of us are better than that. This, it turns out, is a useful
justification for colonialism, slavery and racism.

The classical source for this distinction is certainly Aristotle. In the “Politics,” he writes, “Where then there is such a difference as that
between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do
nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves.” The conclusion is final. “It is better for them as for all inferiors to be under the
rule.”

Every human hierarchy, insofar as it can be justified philosophically, is treated by Aristotle by analogy to the relation of people to
animals. One might be forgiven for thinking that Aristotle’s real goal is not to establish the superiority of humans to animals, but the
superiority of some people to others.

“The savage people in many places of America,” writes Thomas Hobbes in “Leviathan,” responding to the charge that human beings
have never lived in a state of nature, “have no government at all, and live in this brutish manner.” Like Plato, Hobbes associates
anarchy with animality and civilization with the state, which gives to our merely animal motion moral content for the first time and
orders us into a definite hierarchy. But this line of thought also happens to justify colonizing or even extirpating the “savage,” the
beast in human form.
Our supposed fundamental distinction from “beasts, “brutes” and “savages” is used to divide us from nature, from one another and,
finally, from ourselves. In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates divides the human soul into two parts. The soul of the thirsty person, he says,
“wishes for nothing else than to drink.” But we can restrain ourselves. “That which inhibits such actions,” he concludes, “arises from
the calculations of reason.” When we restrain or control ourselves, Plato argues, a rational being restrains an animal.

In this view, each of us is both a beast and a person — and the point of human life is to constrain our desires with rationality and purify
ourselves of animality. These sorts of systematic self-divisions come to be refigured in Cartesian dualism, which separates the mind
from the body, or in Sigmund Freud’s distinction between id and ego, or in the neurological contrast between the functions of the
amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.

I’d like to publicly identify this dualistic view as a disaster, but I don’t know how to refute it, exactly, except to say that I don’t feel
myself to be a logic program running on an animal body; I’d like to consider myself a lot more integrated than that. And I’d like to
repudiate every political and environmental conclusion ever drawn by our supposed transcendence of the order of nature. I don’t see
how we could cease to be mammals and remain ourselves.

There is no doubt that human beings are distinct from other animals, though not necessarily more distinct than other animals are
from one another. But maybe we’ve been too focused on the differences for too long. Maybe we should emphasize what all us animals
have in common.

Our resemblance to squirrels doesn’t have to be interpreted as a threat to our self-image. Instead, it could be seen as a hopeful sign
that we will someday be better at tree leaping.
Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. His most recent book is “Entanglements: A System of Philosophy.”

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and
Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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