Traces of Descartes’s ideas are found in many existing practices and discourses concerning animal sentience, cognition, and language. Here I will focus on two: the concept of “instinct” and the practice of animal experimentation, both of which I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter. It is commonplace to accept the distinction between instinct and intelligence, and to associate “animal” with “instinct” and “human” with “intelligence” (Brentari 2016).5 So-called “lower desires” are seen as instinctual and as an expression of the animal side of mankind, and instinct is considered a kind of automatic, mechanical drive that is built in to various animals. As with other concepts, however, this concept has a history, and it expresses and has shaped how we view humans and other animals. Seneca wrote about complex animal acts that took place without reflection (Beach 1955), and in early Christian theological work the concept of instinct began to play a role in developing a normative distinction between body and soul (ibid.). We find an early example of this in the work of Thomas Aquinas (Brentari 2016), where the concept was, however, not used exclusively to understand animal behavior, but rather as a motivational term, pointing to an external source of motivation that might range from heavenly inspiration to the influence of the stars. This meaning changed under the influence of Descartes, who as we have seen made a distinction between body and soul, and saw other animals as mechanical beings. This model of two functional systems (Brentari 2016) has led to the view of instinct that we have today, and has also contributed to our view of other animals as automata, who lack thought and act only on passions. This has led not only to privileging humans, and to a too-sharp distinction between human and animal; it has also led to spontaneous behavior being seen as less valuable—in both humans and other animals—while current studies in moral psychology show that much of our moral behavior is habitual and instinctive (see also Donaldson and Kymlicka 2015b). Philosopher Brian Massumi (2014) further nuances the concept of “instinct” by arguing that all so-called “instinctive” behaviors also necessarily have an element of creativity; for example, flight behavior must have an element of improvisation, because if every animal of a certain species were to flee in exactly the same way, predators could learn this and would be able to anticipate it. Expression, or the power of variation and improvisation, is in this view equiprimordial with instinct.
Viewing other animals as mechanical objects has also led humans to develop practices in which using them as such for human goals is acceptable. According to Descartes, non-human animals have no reason and no soul, and are not therefore able to experience pain. He compares them to clockwork: when one sticks a knife into a living dog, the dog will scream, but this is simply a mechanical response. Descartes thus saw no harm in dissecting living non-human animals for the sake of science, and was a proponent of vivisection. Furthermore, his views on non-human animal sentience legitimized certain experiments by scientists of his time (Adams and Donovan 1995, 221; Guerrini 2003). Laboratory animals are still seen and used today as objects that can provide humans with information about human subjects, even though few currently doubt that they are sentient. While scientists need to become attuned to their objects of study and pay close attention to their behavior in order to obtain meaningful results (Haraway 2008), it is the results that primarily matter to humans, and the animals studied are not formally recognized as subjects, so the interaction is asymmetrical (chapter 6). The non-human animals studied are treated as resources, not as co-beings. Viewing other animals as objects whose bodies and minds can be used to answer questions about human subjects also has an effect on the research questions formulated, which in turn has an effect on how we view them, because these questions set the scope for the space in which the other animals can answer. An illustration of this can be found in language research, which I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter. Because humans are taken as the standard, and human language seen as the one authentic language, the capacity for language use in other animals has long been investigated by trying to establish how well the non-human animals in question can learn to speak or understand human language. This served only to reinforce stereotypical views about their ability to speak and think, because many of them obviously did not do well. It also closed off possibilities of finding out about their languages, cultures, and inner lives.
In order to adequately challenge these practices and the views of non-human animals that underpin them, we need to do more than simply argue that other animals are sentient, or similar to humans in significant respects. We must also critically review existing ideas about non-human animal cognition, languages, and cultures, and the role that anthropocentrism has played in how they were constructed. This also implies reconsidering our view of “the human” and exploring the differences and similarities between humans and other animals, a project begun by writers such as Montaigne.
Language and World
One of the things that human and non-human animals have in common is that we share a world—a real world, the planet Earth on which we all live. Other things that we have in common are that we have bodies, are vulnerable, were all born, and that we will all die. In The Beast and the Sovereign II, Derrida writes that no one will seriously deny animals the possibility of inhabiting the world, or of co-inhabiting the world with humans (2011, 365). Because of their phenomenological differences, however, humans and other animals often perceive the world differently. Combined with the view discussed above that humans are the only species to possess logos, to have reason and the ability to speak, this has led many philosophers in the humanist tradition to argue that humans have a privileged understanding of the world. One of the most prominent proponents of this position was Martin Heidegger, who saw a sharp distinction between humans and other animals, which according to him was interconnected with their perceived lack of language, with clear consequences for their relation to being in the world and our relation to them.
In his lecture series The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude ([1929] 1995), Heidegger put forward a threefold thesis: the stone is worldless, the animal is poor-in-world, and the human is world-forming.6 Stones do not have access to the world at all. Animals have access to the world in that they experience it, but they do not have access to the world as such. Heidegger gives the example of a lizard lying on a rock: the lizard experiences lying on something, but “we ought to cross out the word ‘rock’ in order to indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way for the lizard, and yet is not known to the lizard as a rock” (1995, 198). Drawing on the work of biologists of his time, most notably Hans Driesch and Jakob von Uexküll, Heidegger argued that non-human animals are captive in their environment; they cannot break out of the ring that forms their environment because they are absorbed by it. In contrast, (human) Dasein can relate to the world as world, to the Being of things, and to itself as Dasein. Dasein exists, where non-human animals merely live; therefore Dasein can die, while animals simply perish. Because other animals lack the as-such, they also lack logos, and, linked to that, language, since logos is founded on (or in the possibility of) the as-such.7 Thus, non-human and human animals are separated