The Concept of the Animal and Modern Theories of Art

Roni Grén

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351671729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This book examines the importance of the animal in modern art theory, using classic texts of modern aesthetics and texts written by modern artists to explore the influence of the human-animal relationship on nineteenth and twentieth century artists and art theorists. The book is unique due to its focus on the concept of the animal, rather than on images of animals, and it aims towards a theoretical account of the connections between the notions of art and animality in the modern age. Roni Grén's book spans various disciplines, such as art theory, art history, animal studies, modernism, postmodernism, posthumanism, philosophy, and aesthetics.

1 The Exceptionality of the Human Spirit

All effects of art are merely effects of nature for the person who has not attained a perception of art that is free, that is, one that is both passive and active, both swept away and reflective. Such a person behaves merely as a creature of nature and has never really experienced and appreciated art as art.

—Friedrich Schelling, Philosophy of Art (1802–03)¹

With regard to the concept of the animal, the modern age could be characterized as an epoch of human exception. The ideas held about humanity were, for most of preceding time, determined by the view that man’s spiritual qualities are unique. One of these was man’s ability to make art. Since these abilities were often contrasted to those belonging to (other) animals, the concept of animality was strangely accented. As in the quotation above, animality loomed at the margin of art theory.

In this part, I will show how this tendency to mark the territory of art in contrast to animality reappeared in different philosophical contexts. While in the latter parts of my work, I am going to present how the concept of the animal resisted this exclusion, and how animal life even could be posited as a model for the modern avant-garde, this part strives above all to point out the qualifications of this exclusion and its extent. I will first rely on Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s analysis of the “thesis of human exception,” which I also will try to deepen a little in connection with our topic—a thesis that Schaeffer thinks has been dominating Western views about culture ever since the time of René Descartes. Afterwards, I will clarify how the German philosophical tradition, which dominated 19th-century aesthetics and mostly presented itself as hostile towards Cartesian dualism, still suppressed the possibility of the revaluation of the concept of the animal.²

The Human Exception

To begin with, Schaeffer claims in La fin de l’exception humaine (2007) that the Occidental thesis of human exceptionality is grounded on four postulates:

Firstly (1), by positing the ontic rupture, following Schaeffer, the thesis of human exception always tries to maintain that the “way of being human,” plain and simple, “can’t be reduced to animal life as taken as it is.”³

Secondly (2), the claim to ontological dualism —the driving force of Cartesian epistemology—asserts that there exists two ontologically separate layers. The argument does not concern itself only with the separation between animals and men, but touches also upon the integrity of the human being himself. Man becomes divided between two natures, which he himself more or less in vain tries to reconcile (animal and human, spiritual and material, etc.).⁴

Thirdly (3), the thesis of human exceptionality, in Schaeffer’s terms, always postulates a gnoseocentric viewpoint of humanity. Most clearly, the idea can be seen appearing in such conceptions as those arguing that man takes part in the divine reason (as in Descartes), or in those presenting man’s freedom as being based on his abilities to reason (most often, on his ability to be conscious of himself). Regardless of form, the gnoseocentrist thesis insists that the exclusively human characteristics can be found in the nature of man’s consciousness.⁵

Finally, the fourth postulate (4), according to Schaeffer, makes up an antinaturalist stance regarding the truth value of any given argument. This postulate is the most important for Schaeffer’s own work—maintaining that the thesis of human exception has led to the current segregationist attitudes that philosophers and cultural theorists hold against natural scientists and their methods—but it has also affected the field of art theory, at least from the period of Romanticism. To be sure, the postulate does not demand an invalidation of the whole construction of the given naturalist statements, whatever their character, but the statements themselves always need to be backed up by a deduction that is founded on some categorical premise leading to an “upper layer.” The postulate insists that the essential characteristics of human nature, and of the exclusively human way of having knowledge, must be defined as something that surpasses the conditions of animal cognition. Consequently, the postulate does not only separate the “upper layer” from the purely cognitive means that we or other animals possess, but also proscribes their value.⁶

The foundation of the thesis of human exception, as already stated, can be found in Cartesianism. Although Descartes’s thought may not carry within itself the ultimate form of the thesis, as Schaeffer tries to suggest,⁷ it certainly is quite harsh with regard to the animal. In his Discourse on the Method (1637), Descartes notoriously based his thinking on a dualism between man and the animal, between the divine soul to which man is connected and the machine-like life of the animal, and since then his idea of the “animal-machine”⁸—so suspect already during his own time⁹—implanted itself so deeply into the Western philosophical imagination that it loomed behind our notions of animal life even into the 20th century.

Descartes’s argument, about which there has been much fuss, consists of the idea that since animals do not possess immortal souls they neither exist as reasonable creatures nor have the capacity to experience consciously any sentiments (like joy or pain).¹⁰ The view—so hard to accept—was founded on his thought that since animals do not possess incorporeal souls, they are not capable of expressing or communicating rationally any active state that would give us any knowledge about their subjectivity or their feelings. Thus, as animals lacked speech, there was no convincing evidence that could make Descartes believe that they ever possessed such qualities.¹¹ Since we have no proof of the soulful sentiments belonging to animals, according to him, we can regard them as being just like machines—“mechanical and corporeal.” Descartes himself puts the thesis in the following terms, affirming the principles of ontic rupture and ontological dualism:

[T]here are two different principles causing our movements. The first is purely mechanical and corporeal, and depends solely on the force of the spirits and the structure of our organs, and can be called the corporeal soul. The other, an incorporeal principle, is the mind or that soul which I have defined as a thinking substance. Thereupon I investigated very carefully whether the movements of animals originated from both of these principles or from one only. I soon perceived clearly that they could all originate from the corporeal and mechanical principle, and I regarded it as certain and demonstrated that we cannot at all prove the presence of a thinking soul in animals.¹²

Thus, Descartes may state that animals are like clocks that have been set mechanically to work after the intentions of their maker, God. Though humans have been produced the same way with respect to their bodies, they are different than animals, since men are created to take part in the immortal and divine soul. The only, but definitive, difference between men and God, in connection with the question of the animal, is therefore the human inability to build such complex mechanical structures as animals.¹³

It is true that Descartes’s argument on human exceptionality, grounded on divine principles, may have contained nothing new to some critics of the Western attitude, since the whole Judeo-Christian tradition has taken as a given that man was made in the image of God, and highlighted that animals were innocent creatures living under the guidance of God’s providence, unaffected by original sin—for the same reason excluded from the protection of the religious community, the Church.¹⁴ The difference is in Cartesianism’s strict gnoseocentric essentialism. Although the gnoseocentric viewpoint can be traced to Aristotle, who also maintained that while men had logos, the other animals didn’t,¹⁵ the argument that the difference is essential and not of degree becomes a cornerstone of a philosophical construction in Cartesianism. The reason is that the Cartesian belief marks a rupture between the modern philosophies and the medieval systems by imparting the idea that there is a distance between the model and the image, the medieval distance between man and God, by interiorizing the model into the image and suggesting a point of collision between the immanent and the transcendent.¹⁶ This sort of gnoseocentric argument has been, in the 19th and in the 20th century, taken to its ultimate measures in the existentialist philosophies in which the human spirit has come to be considered free and autonomous, a subject constituted by and for itself.¹⁷

The gnoseocentric view of humanity is in one sense the nucleus of the whole thesis of man’s exceptionality, since it makes the construction hard to attack from the inside. Traditionally, Cartesian dualism has been resisted either by more or less empirical evidence or by a subversion of its radical dualism, but neither of these attacks has had much effect on the gnoseocentrist view. “The reductionist naturalism,” Schaeffer notes, “serves quite simply the reductionist strategy that Descartes had employed for the non-human world before developing it to an internal dualism living inside man,” since “to reduce a pole to another there needs to be already a frame that is made out of these two poles of which the other one will be afterwards considered to be empty of life.”¹⁸ In truth, the “reductionist” theses could make arriving at conclusions on the differences between men and animal just as hard. Spinoza, from his position, easily concluded that “we can use animals at our pleasure,” since “their affects are different in nature from human affects.”¹⁹

The difference in the affects—or whatever the point of distinction—was almost always gnoseocentric. To take a couple of classical examples, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and John Locke, both of whom considered “animal spirits”²⁰ to be essential for an artistic production of the feeling of “beauty and harmony”²¹ nonetheless reduced these concessions to a secondary position. Leibniz, according to whom the “animal spirits” testified of a “perfection that shows itself in great freedom and power of action”²²—and who had resisted the Cartesian thesis by admitting that animals did have souls, and that they even took part in the divine spirit²³ (or saying that they at least could appear so if only the Cartesianists could “take greater pains to teach animals”²⁴)—argued, in spite of this, that animals, in contrast with men, were not capable of “apperception.” The term signified for Leibniz a sufficient condition of rationality that included perception, sensation, and consciousness of self (animals being capable only of the first two).²⁵ Locke, in his turn, considered “animal spirits” in humans as being only “trains of motion”²⁶—trains of “customs settling the habits of understanding and determining the will”²⁷—evidently returning to the metaphor of animal mechanics of which Descartes had made extensive use.²⁸

On the whole, one could almost say that Descartes’s influence can most of all be proved by the resistance that it aroused. Many indeed resisted the extremity of his claims, but the counter-arguments often could not help but affirm the idea that man’s life was thoroughly gnoseocentrist, a proposition leading to the fourth postulate: the true meaning of things, fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Exceptionality of the Human Spirit
• 2 The Animal and the Image
• 3 Art and Evolution
• 4 The Poetic Lie
• 5 Conclusion: The Modern Other
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index