Abstract
Although developing from different aspects, the three parts of this chapter is motivated by the same thought: the classical definition of “rational animals” brings out a very strict and narrow notion of rationality. We are speaking animals, which not only can formulate a propositional attitude or make explicit assertion, but also manifest in our implicit exercise of perceptual attentions such as taking things as things, recognition, discrimination, and other pre-linguistic adoption in effective practice (Part I). In Part II, the author makes rational defense for desire: desire is no longer just the object of rational thinking to suppress; it can contribute to our deliberation and let the agent to be motivated by the right reason authentically and intrinsically. The hallmark of mature deliberator is to act on reason and his own purpose independently. In part III, the author demonstrates that this miraculous achievement of intellect, however, has its pre-history and infantile roots. Its acquisition depends on the fostering from mother and some other persons, and its improvement depends on the trust of other deliberators.
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Notes
- 1.
Wolfgang Welsch, 2011. Anthropologie im Umbruch-Das Paradigma der Emergenz, in Wolfgang Welsch, Immer nur der Mensch?: Entwürfe zu einer anderen Anthropologie, Walter de Gruyter. p. 237.
- 2.
These consequently philosophical dilemmas are various and manifested in different contexts, and many philosophical debates can be traced back the division of human (intellectual being) and animal (natural being). For example, according to John McDowell’s diagnoses, roughly speaking, if we are tempted to place ourselves outside the animal kingdom through unique human rationality, it would produce the separation between thought and reality, reason and nature, understanding and sensibility, even the mind and world these notorious impasses which prevails in modern philosophical thinking (see John McDowell 1996, lecture VI). While MacIntyre points out that the neglect of continuity between human body and animal body brings out the ignorance of our bodily fragility such as disability, disfigurement and mental illness (MacIntyre 1999, pp. 8–9), and this ignorance is partly the reason that modern moral philosophy pays so little attention to the issue of affliction and dependence.
- 3.
Nussbaum (2001, p. 265).
- 4.
MacIntyre (1999).
- 5.
Williams (1976).
- 6.
By using the small case of the President’s dog above, based on Williams’ analysis, I want to deliver the idea that having a belief is not necessarily conditioned by asserting that “I have a belief that…” or even saying “I believe that….” In Can Animals Without Language Have Beliefs, through the case of a young cat learning to prey on a mouse, MacIntyre wants to illustrate that speechless animals can not only be spoken of in terms of “belief” but also are able to change, correct, and improve the beliefs. Here is the case that he learned from an expert: …when a young cat first encounters a shrew, it characteristically and generally treats the shrew [a small mouse-like mammal with a long snout] exactly as it would a mouse. That is, it tries to catch it, and, if it does so, plays with it, kills it, partly skins it, and eats some. That cat will then become violently ill. Thereafter it will leave shrews severely alone. It now distinguishes between shrews and mice. What its actions show it to believe about shrews is no longer the same as what its actions show it to believe about mice. (MacIntyre 1999, p. 37).
- 7.
This is John McDowell’s words who has learned well from Gadamer. One central point said by Gadamer is, “When we acquire conceptual powers, our lives come to embrace not just coping with problems and exploiting opportunities, constituted as such by immediate biological imperatives, but exercising spontaneity, deciding what to think and do. …To acquire the spontaneity of the understanding is to become able, as Gadamer puts it, to ‘rise above the pressure of what impinges on us from the world’ (Gadamer 2004 p. 444)—that succession of problems and opportunities constituted as such by biological imperatives—into a ‘free, distanced orientation’” (McDowell 1996, p. 115).
- 8.
English translation: “Coming to an understanding as such…It is a life process in which a community of life is lived out. To that extent, coming to an understanding through human conversation is no different from the understanding that occurs between animals.” (Gadamer 2004, p. 443).
- 9.
English translation: “This is immediately obvious as long as reading means reading aloud…Reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction, performance, and interpretation. Emphasis, rhythmic ordering, and the like are part of wholly silent reading too.” (Gadamer 2004, p. 153).
- 10.
Herder (1966) English translation: “While still an animal, man already has language. All violent sensations of his body, and among the violent the most violent, those which cause him pain, and all strong passions of his soul express themselves directly in screams, in sounds, in wild inarticulate tones.” (Herder 1966).
- 11.
In 2015, the University of Tokyo erected a bronze statue for Professor Ueno, the dead master of dog Hachikō, beside of the loyal dog’s statue. Now they are “meeting” at the station.
- 12.
One of the characteristics of “immoralists” that Plato wants to amend is the person who indulges in bodily pleasure or self-interest. “Socrates (in Gorgias) wants to say, first, that if we think solely in terms of desire-satisfaction, there will be no basis for value, nothing to admire at all, and, moreover, life will not be worth living, since it will be a mess” (B. Williams 2008, p. 105).
- 13.
Arpaly and Schroeder (2014, p. 5).
- 14.
Nussbaum (1994, p. 103).
- 15.
For example, how to link our reasons or beliefs with actual action in realization, since a single idea in mind is still distant from effective practice in reality. (Taking a young nurse who believes that it is her duty to be responsible for the health of patients, there is crucial gap between her consciousness of responsibility and true action of caring and healing.) Another typical difficulty is the mysterious transformation from brutish desire (e.g., children wanting to get toy or sweets) to the normative desire (e.g., he finds it a creditable thing to share the favorite with others). In this writing, I would like to suggest that it is the knot of desire to remedy the absent link between our kinds of deliberative thinking and our realized actions.
- 16.
One of the objects on which Nussbaum criticizes is the biological account of desire and the relevant animals’ motion, which is rooted in the tradition of natural science and marked by (1) scientific reductionism and (2) materialism. It is a systemic account which explains the phenomena of animals from the impulsive desire to the structure of muscle and skeleton in service of kinematic movement. Nussbaum herself thinks that this physiological account “depicted the animal as a kind of puppet,” and therefore “without its own interest,” she tends to treat it as “not the sort of thing we inclined to count as an explanation of movement” (see Nussbaum 2001, pp. 268–269). This evaluation is very close to the stance that John McDowell holds when he treats the inheritance of natural science. For him, the account of natural science provides some kind of intelligibility, but is a special kind, for his second nature and should expand beyond scientific naturalism of the realm of law which contains only “empty of meaning” (see John McDowell 1996, pp. 109–110). However, in this writing I cannot unfold this aspect of discussion, for the present concern, I would like to just stress that my explanation of desire is neither physiological nor psychological but based on Aristotelian zoological kinematics which rehabilitate the desire and integrates human action into the animal motion in general.
- 17.
Interpreting “desire” as an “effective mode in describing succession of motions” can be seen a theoretical attempt of mine. However it is encouraged by Nussbaum’s investigation in Rational Animals and the Explanation of Action (Nussbaum 2001, Chap. 9) in which she likely more tends to stress active, positive, and enterprising aspect of desire as motivation of actions. I will discuss it in the last part.
- 18.
Nussbaum (2001, p. 274).
- 19.
Nussbaum (2001, p. 276).
- 20.
Nussbaum (2001, p. 275).
- 21.
Just as Nussbaum says, “appetites cannot be simple and brutish as Plato has alleged, mere pushes responding to other pushes, like the movements of the digestive system” (Nussbaum, 2001. 286–391). She even says that human “desire”—via the reading of Aristotle—is not only selective but also intentional. While another Aristotelian, Anscombe, simply applies the “intention” upon animals’ desire satisfaction behavior, the description such as “the cat is stalking a bird in crouching,” she says, is “quite characteristic of description of intention in acting” (Anscombe 2000, p. 86). And another claim reveals that against which background she thinks about this, “The characteristically animal movements are movements with a normal role in the sensitive, and therefore appetitive, life of animals” (Ibid. p. 86).
- 22.
“It does not follow, however, that each and every such desire of necessity takes the form of an explicit desire towards or is contingent upon some objective, or the fulfilment of some existing project.” (Savulescu et al. 2011).
- 23.
“Even if we agreed with Aristotle and possibly Prof. Ryle that pleasure in the standard case consists in or accompanies zestful activity, it would have to be the activity, if anything, that constituted the object of the pleasure” (B. Williams 2008, p. 36).
- 24.
Corcilius (2008, p. 56).
- 25.
According to Corcilius, there are two or three ways to divide the field of “desire”: “Aristoteles unterteilt Strebungen gelegentlich in zwei und gelegentlich in drei Arten. Die Zweiteilung teilt in rationale und nicht-rationale, die Dreiteilung in Begierde (epithymia), den nur schwer übersetzbaren thymos (hier ‚Mut‘) und die rationale Strebung (boulêsis)”; see (Klaus Corcilius 2008, p. 62).
- 26.
see Corcilius 2008, Teil I, §4. Die Arten der Strebung.
- 27.
Hegel (1994).
- 28.
In Warheit und Methode, where interpreting Aristole’s “actrual hermaneutics,” from another perspective Gadamer confirms this translation: “In der Richtung sich die Gleichsetzung von Tugend and Wissen, von „Arete“ und „Logos“, wie sie der sokratisch-platonischen Tugendlehre zugrunde liegt, als eine Übertreibung. Aristoteles bringt sie auf das richtige Maß zurück, indem er als das tragende Element des sittlichen Wissens des Menschen die orexis, das „Strebe“, and dessen Ausformung zu einer festen Haltung ( hexis ) aufweist. Der Begriff der Ethik tragt schon im Namen den Bezug auf diese aristotelische Grundlegung der „Arete“ im übung und „Ethos“ ” (Gadamer 1990, p. 318). In this statement, Gadamer briefly and intensively, by collocating several key words Arête, orexis, hexis, and ethos, depicts a conceptual cluster, among them the notion of orexis.
- 29.
Moulton (1979).
- 30.
Homer (2010).
- 31.
The Iliad Book XXII (Homer 2010).
- 32.
In the theoretical context, generally speaking, rationality possibly is marked by “consider, test, reject, and accept hypotheses” as Davidson later says and other capabilities in employing intellectual faculty such as arguments, demonstrations, exemplifying, justification, etc.
- 33.
MacIntyre makes this progress by illustrating the gradual improvement from “What do I want?,” “What do I most want?,” and “What is it best for me?” (MacIntyre 1999, p. 70). To prove it requires more empirical evidences in child psychology, but at present I do agree with his idea although with significant differences: at first, MacIntyre seems to exaggerate the capability of child’s capability of cognition and confuses the capability of formulating a questions with the responding to the questions; secondly, the cognitive span from “What do I want?” to “What is it best for me?” is highly greater than that of “What is it best for me?,” since to respond to the question of “What is it best for me?” requires a distinctive capability of reflection.
- 34.
Krämer (2005). My translation.
- 35.
Hegel (1986, p. 505).
- 36.
Moran (1999).
- 37.
MacIntyre presents the essential dependent relation by describing its exhibition in the equal relationship between two people or friends. In addition to this dependent relationship, I would like to offer another kind of dependent relationship in which the personal intelligence is enhanced, and this aspect is discussed by both of Gadamer and Polanyi. I call it as “dependence on authority” as specific type of “deliberative dependence”: “Das eben ist in der menschlichen Grundverfassung begründet, daß wir auch im Falle einer vollendetern Aufklärung nicht alles, was wir für wahr halten müssen, auf stichhaltige Beweise und auf zwingende Deduktionen gründen können. Wir sind ständig genötigt, uns auf etwas—und zuletzt auf jemanden—zu verlassen, dem wir Vertrauen entgegenbringen. Unser ganzes kommunikatives Leben beruht darauf.” (Gadamer 2010, p. 153. English translation see Gadamer 1996, p. 121: “This example from my own experience reveals something deeply rooted in human nature: that even in a state of perfect enlightenment we cannot ground everything we hold to be true through strict proof or conclusive deduction. Rather, we must permanently rely on something, and ultimately on someone, in whom we have trust. Our entire communicative life rests on this.”)
- 38.
See Henning and Schweikard (2013).
- 39.
Krämer (2011, p. 132).
- 40.
Cited from MacIntyre (1999, p. 22).
- 41.
However, by saying “biologically,” we don’t mean that there is some kind of “social gene” implanted in some place in our body or that our neuro-system is socially programmed through experimental proof. We look at this issue more through ancient “natural teleology” than modern biological science. I believe MacIntyre himself sometimes confuses these two dimensions. I think why do we study dolphin’s collective life, not because we want to provide a theory to demonstrate or argue the solidarity of dolphins’ society or how moral dolphin is; our concern is always philosophically concerned with the self-understanding of mankind and a want to explore an approach to explain human collective life in the scale of species—via the investigation of animals.
- 42.
As Nussbaum states, Aristotle complains that other philosophers “isolate human beings too much” from the studies in other living beings in general (Nussbaum 2001. p. 264).
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Yuan, C. (2018). Animal Rationale: Revised Reading. In: Practical Intellect and Substantial Deliberation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8651-9_5
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