What is an Animal? A Comparative Epistemology of Animals

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts”. Those are the words of the horrible teacher Gradgrind in Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854/1974) who, upon being informed that Sissy’s father is a horsebreaker, demands her to give him the definition of a horse. Although Sissy (due to her daily companionship with them) is intimately acquainted with horses, she is nevertheless startled by the question and unable to answer it. “Girl number twenty unable to define a horse! Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals!”, Gradgrind exclaims, and passes the question over to a boy who perhaps never so much as touched a horse, but who produces the perfect answer right away: “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in spring …” (1974, p. 5).

It goes without saying that “girl number twenty”, because of her silence, is Dickens’s heroine. She knows too much about horses, about their way of being-inthe- world, to force her knowledge of them into a factual definition. That is, she refuses to become a “reasoning animal” in Gradgrind’s fashion, someone who defines the world in objective, factual terms. She seems to realize that such a language will not allow us to articulate what horses really are. The animal’s way of being is obscured rather than brought to light by the restricted and impoverished language of facts, quantities and definitions. Rather than allowing us to understand them, it is bound to estrange us from them.