THE INVISIBLE LINE: From political bees to talking pigs, how ancient thinkers saw the human-animal divide
What makes us human? What, if anything, sets us apart from all other creatures? Humanity's entanglement with the non-human has a venerable and long history. Ancient authors like Pythagoras, Pliny, Plutarch, Porphyry and others have dedicated whole books or treatises to this topic, pushing back on the notion of animals as merely “dumb beasts”. Their views anticipated the modern debate by attributing animals not only with forms of reason; they also highlighted their capacity to suffer, to feel pain and to feel empathy towards each other and, occasionally, even towards members of the human species.
JULIA KINDT: What makes us human? What (if anything) sets us apart from all other creatures? Ever since Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the answer to these questions has pointed us back to our own animal nature.
Yet the idea that, in one way or another, our humanity is entangled with the non-human has a much longer and more venerable history. In the West, it goes all the way back to Classical antiquity – to Greek and Roman views about humans and animals…
Who or what is man? The arguments these philosophers came up with verged from the obscure to the outright bizarre: The human alone has the capacity to have sex at all seasons and well into old age; the human alone can sit comfortably on his hip bones; the human alone has hands that can build altars to the gods and craft divine statues. No observation seemed too far-fetched or outlandish…
The idea of an insurmountable gap between humans and other animals soon became the dominant paradigm, informing, for instance, the 18th century naturalist Carl Linnaeus’s influential classification of the human as homo sapiens (literally: the “wise”, or “rational man”).
The practical implications of this idea cannot be underestimated. What has been termed “the moral status of animals” – the question of whether they should be included in considerations of justice – has traditionally been linked to the question of whether they have logos. Because animals differ from humans in lacking both speech and reason (so this line of argument goes) they cannot themselves formulate moral positions. Therefore, they do not warrant inclusion in our moral considerations, or at least not in the same way as humans.
Increasingly, of course, as many contemporary philosophers have pointed out, this idea seems too simple. New research in the behavioural sciences illustrates the at times astonishing capacities of certain animals: crows and otters using tools to crack open nuts or shells to make their contents available for consumption; octopuses lifting the lids to their tanks and successfully escaping to the ocean through pipes; bees optimising their flight path on repeated trips to a food source.
Ancient Greek and Roman worlds showcasing the complex behaviours of different kinds of animals. Ancient authors like Pliny, Plutarch, Oppian, Aelian, Porphyry, Athenaeus and others have dedicated whole books or treatises to this topic, pushing back on the notion of animals as merely “dumb beasts”.
Their views anticipated the modern debate by attributing animals not only with forms of reason; they also highlighted their capacity to suffer, to feel pain and to feel empathy towards each other and, occasionally, even towards members of the human species…
In the end, there is no hard and fast boundary separating us from all other creatures – notwithstanding all efforts to dress ourselves up as different. Rather, it is the negotiations between different facets of our identity which make us human. SOURCE…
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