Abstract
Over the past century, the research on animal subjectivity has had to face several obstacles. On various occasions, there have also been waves of anthropomorphism and projective (more than continuist) interpretations of the animal behaviour followed by reductionist or mechano-morphic reactions. Some authors have applied the reductionist explanation to both the human being and other species—think of Skinner’s behaviourism or Wilson’s sociobiology—filling humanists with indignation and arousing fierce criticism in most of the philosophical and anthropological community. Others, instead, have preferred to follow Descartes’ dichotomy, which allows one to explain animal expression through mechanistic coordinates without harming the sovereignty of anthropocentrism.
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Notes
- 1.
At a first sight, the two traditional accounts—as expressed by Skinner, on the one hand, and Tinbergen, on the other hand—describe mutually incompatible explanatory models: (1) according to behaviorism, the animal works as a trigger machine, (2) according to classical ethology, the animal is a pressure cooker. As we can see, these two explanatory models are predicated on a basic assumption that is not called into question, namely that the animal is a machine. The scientific explanation of animal behavior, in searching to define “how the animal machine functions” and restricting itself to defining features of animal mechanisms, has never problematized the Cartesian paradigm of the animal as automata. The only thing that has been problematized is whether that mechanism is an instinct or a conditioning. As in Kuhn’s view, science has only chosen the type of machine, remaining well anchored to the philosophical paradigm. For this reason, I believe that only a philosophical approach which problematizes the basic paradigm—namely the Cartesian idea of animal automata—can really overcome ontological anthropocentrism: unless the human being is viewed as nothing but a puppet deterministically moved by strings. The main principle is refusing mechanism, or, to put it differently, acknowledging animal subjectivity. In order to do so, a paradigmatic alternative to Descartes must be found. Cf. B.F. Skinner, Science and human behavior, New York, Macmillan, 1953 and E.O. Wilson , Sociobiology: the New Synthesis, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975.
- 2.
Martin Heidegger understood this aspect very well when he realized that the predicative explanation, still in vogue among the old humanists fascinated by the plasticity of the Vitruvian model, was not the crux of the matter because the difference between the human being and the animal otherness was ontological and thus meta-predicative. The animal machine can perform actions, take part in some functions, be comprised in a period of time, and so on. But if/until it remains a machine, it will never be really present, because a machine is in an isochronal state and does not own a hic-et-nunc. Cf. M. Heidegger, The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: world, finitude, solitude, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
- 3.
A. Gehlen, Der Mensch; seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Bonn, Athenäum-Verlag, 1950.
- 4.
W. Köhler , Gestalt psychology, an introduction to new concepts in modern psychology, New York, Liveright Pub. Corp. 1947, and D.R. Griffin , Animal minds: beyond cognition to consciousness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
- 5.
The child, for instance, uses processes of ex-aptation or assimilation-accommodation to build new representations, therefore the sympathetic elements give him the possibility to anchor the unknown elements and to extend the representational horizon of the child. The epiphany effect raised from the recognition in the non-human animal, the co-feeling in him, but at the same time in the being gradually projected in another dimension. S.J. Gould , and E.S. Vrba, Exaptation-A Missing Term in the Science of Form, «Paleobiology», Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter, 1982), pp. 4–15, and J. Piaget , Science of education and the psychology of the child, New York: Orion Press, 1970.
- 6.
Knowledge anticipates being able to use a foundation of stability-familiarity to project oneself into an unknown dimension, which in turn can construct a new “plane of reality”—to quote Speusippus as recorded by Aristotle—and so to begin a new adventure. Leaning out into an unknown dimension remains dizzying, and one cannot make the transition without the assistance of an other: to construct this dialectic, the hybridizing process, which can open new epistemic dimensions, is indispensable. Cf. R. Marchesini, Knowledge and Different Levels of Reality, in «Reading Philosophy, Special Issue on Realism and Anti-Realism: New Perspectives», edited by L. Caffo , S. de Sanctis, V. Santarcangelo, N. 2, 2014, pp. 53–64.
- 7.
Heidegger clarifies Descartes’ unsaid. The mechanical translation of animality created an unbridgeable gap between humans and other species and, simultaneously, it definitively sanctioned its operative freedom over the non-human universe. Since the seventeenth century, this paradigmatic development has been undoubtedly difficult and controversial: the point was to accentuate the dialectics of exclusion that was only in nuce in the early humanists. Therefore, it is no surprise that in addition to the hypothesis developed after Descartes’ death (which increasingly amounted to a reductionism of animal expressiveness), proposals to restore subjectivity in nature came back, albeit in an intermittent way. On the other hand, countless factors privileged the reductionism to which Descartes offered a particularly effective paradigmatic crux—first of all, the autocratic and autopoietic operation of the human being as the sole protagonist, a principle that had already been active in the Western humanist metamorphosis for two centuries.
- 8.
These two statements are misleading, but they offer themselves to reifying projections. Starting from statement (a), both Ernst Mayr, when talking of remote and proximal causal duality, and Nikolaas Tinbergen , in posing his four questions, exhorted us not to conflate evolutionary compatibility, dictated by the fitness of the subject, and elicitative compatibility governed by hedonic-elicitative principles that the individual is subject to. So if it can be proven that the fitness of altruistic behavior responds to the parameters of Hamilton’s coefficient of relatedness, then it is equally true that an individual possessing a given trait may express it toward any entity which is capable of eliciting it, for example the expression of maternal instinct by an adult female of one species toward a cub of a different species. The explanation that refers to fitness tells us only whether an attribute is compatible in individuals of a given species, not why an individual would express it. Cf. E. Mayr, This is Biology: The Science of the Living World. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1997, and N. Tinbergen, The study of Instinct, London and New York: Oxford University Press. 1951.
- 9.
K. Lorenz , On aggression, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966.
- 10.
G. Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity and the Human Sciences), Hampton Press 20002.
- 11.
J.J. von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men. A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds”. Instinctive Behavior. The Development of a Modern Concept. New York: International Universities Press, 1954, 5–80.
- 12.
T. Nagel, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat ?”.
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Marchesini, R. (2017). Steps Towards a Philosophical Ethology. In: Over the Human. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62581-2_6
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