The Animal and the Human in Ancient and Modern Thought

The 'Man Alone of Animals' Concept

Stephen Newmyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781135042844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

Ancient Greeks endeavored to define the human being vis-à-vis other animal species by isolating capacities and endowments which they considered to be unique to humans. This approach toward defining the human being still appears with surprising frequency, in modern philosophical treatises, in modern animal behavioral studies, and in animal rights literature, to argue both for and against the position that human beings are special and unique because of one or another attribute or skill that they are believed to possess. Some of the claims of man's unique endowments have in recent years become the subject of intensive investigation by cognitive ethologists carried out in non-laboratory contexts. The debate is as lively now as in classical times, and, what is of particular note, the examples and methods of argumentation used to prove one or another position on any issue relating to the unique status of human beings that one encounters in contemporary philosophical or ethological literature frequently recall ancient precedents.

This is the first book-length study of the 'man alone of animals' topos in classical literature, not restricting its analysis to Greco-Roman claims of man's intellectual uniqueness, but including classical assertions of man's physiological and emotional uniqueness. It supplements this analysis of ancient manifestations with an examination of how the commonplace survives and has been restated, transformed, and extended in contemporary ethological literature and in the literature of the animal rights and animal welfare movements. Author Stephen T. Newmyer demonstrates that the anthropocentrism detected in Greek applications of the 'man alone of animals' topos is not only alive and well in many facets of the current debate on human-animal relations, but that combating its negative effects is a stated aim of some modern philosophers and activists.

1 Introduction

“Man Alone of Animals”: An Ancient Formula and Its Survivals

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

(Shakespeare, Hamlet II. ii)

In 2010, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith published a book provocatively entitled A Rat Is A Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement.¹ As his subtitle makes clear, Smith’s work is intended as an exposé on what he judges to be the very real dangers to western civilization of a belief system that, he contends, attributes too much value to non-human animals while at the same time undervaluing human beings. The belief system that he specifically targets is that which he considers to be advanced by the American animal rights movement, represented for him by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), to whose President, Ingrid Newkirk, he attributes the grotesque equation of his book title.² In his effort to combat what he considers to be the anti-human ethical stance of the animal rights movement which, he charges, seeks to prove that a moral equivalency exists between human and non-human animals, Smith declares, “I will mount an unequivocal defense of the belief that human beings stand at the pinnacle of moral worth, a concept sometimes called ‘human exceptionalism.’”³ Smith fears that if the animal rights agenda prevails, the lives of human beings will be profoundly and negatively affected, with crippling restrictions imposed on medical research, food production and consumption, clothing choices and entertainment options, and that ultimately, “we will knock human beings off the pedestal of moral distinctiveness.”⁴

Near the end of his book, Smith enumerates what he reckons to be some of the signal achievements of humankind that reflect the human exceptionalism that he admires. He asks, “What other species builds civilizations, records history, creates art, makes music, thinks abstractly, communicates in language, envisions and fabricates machinery, improves life through science and engineering, or explores the deeper truths found in philosophy and religion?”⁵ Although Smith nowhere employs the formula verbatim, his book may justly be viewed as an elaborate defense of the concept of human uniqueness based upon repeated if implicit assertions of the “man alone of animals” type analyzed, in their classical manifestations, in Renehan’s study.

Smith’s catalogue of human achievements assumes, in the manner of the Greeks, that humankind’s uniquely favored position in the hierarchy of animalkind arises primarily from their superior intellectual capacities, and that, in the manner of at least some Greeks, this uniquely favored position in creation has moral consequences for human action: only human beings, precisely because they are human, possess moral agency which imparts both rights and duties uniquely to them. Humans must determine their obligations to other animal species but, in Smith’s view, one cannot correctly speak of rights or wrongs in connection with non-human animals. As irrational creatures, non-human animals can no more have rights or duties toward us or toward each other than we can toward them.⁶ Smith’s conviction that moral worth and intellectual superiority are closely intertwined becomes clear when he attempts to refute the potential objection that pre-rational infants and cognitively impaired humans cannot have rights, by asserting that the entire human species has moral worth and “not just individuals who happen to possess rational capacities.”⁷ He cites authorities who support his belief that human beings are by their nature rational beings who can neither acquire nor lose that nature. Humans either inhabit or could potentially inhabit the moral realm, and are therefore unlike any species that does not have even the capacity to develop rationality. Moral agency, in Smith’s view, is possessed by the human species and not just by its rationally functioning members.

Smith winds up this somewhat abstract line of argument with a reminder to his readers that the overriding purpose of his book is a practical one, namely, to defeat the anti-human agenda of the animal rights movement which would topple humankind from its favored place in creation if it is allowed to prevail. The animal rights debate is, in his estimation, a human debate about the nature of our responsibilities toward other animal species that arise exclusively from our nature as humans. Ironically, he concludes, the animal rights debate provides “proof of the unique nature of the human species, or what some call ‘human exceptionalism.’”⁸

An earlier, more logically rigorous presentation of some of the ideas introduced in Smith is offered in philosopher Mortimer J. Adler’s treatise, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, the title of which suggests that its author may already at the outset have come down on the side of “human exceptionalism.” This conclusion is reinforced by Adler’s assurance that his book seeks to determine “how man differs from everything else in the universe . . . ”⁹ Central to Adler’s inquiry is the determination of whether humans differ from other animals in kind or in degree, since the answer to this fundamental question may have practical consequences for humans’ treatment of other species.¹⁰ Although Adler asserts that the answer to his question will require input from both science and philosophy since neither is, in his time, by itself adequate to the task, his argument owes very little to animal behavioral studies and relies rather heavily upon logical deduction, as he grapples with issues of superficiality and radicality of difference in kind between animal species.

In Adler’s explanation of the concept, one creature differs from another in kind if it possesses a property that other creatures do not. Hence vertebrates have some bodily structures that differ in kind from those of invertebrates. Conversely, if one thing has more of a quality that another does possess, the one is said to differ from the other only in degree, as one bird differs from another in speed of flight. To assert that humankind differs only in degree from other animals, one would need to provide evidence that all other creatures, and even machines, in Adler’s view, can perform all actions that humans can, in either a greater or lesser degree than is the case with humankind.¹¹ To prove, however, that humankind differs radically in kind, one must demonstrate that humans perform some acts not performed at all by other living beings, in consequence of the presence in humans of some unique power or factor. At this point in his argument, Adler shows his debt to Greek speculation on the place of humankind in animal creation, as he observes that Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics including Marcus Aurelius, and Saint Augustine all taught that humankind differs radically in kind from other creatures.¹² All of these thinkers, he continues, attributed the radical difference in kind to the intellect, reason, thought and understanding of human beings, as these are manifested in their achievements in the arts, sciences, law and literature. Adler’s catalogue of unique achievements that derive from human intellect bears a striking similarity to that of Smith, as Adler declares,

Only men make laws; only men make sentences; only men read, write and make speeches; only men build and operate machines; only men paint pictures that have some representative meaning; only men engage in religious worship; only men cook their food; only men walk erect; and so on.¹³

This radical difference in kind is attributable, in Adler’s view, specifically to humankind’s possession of what the philosopher terms “propositional language,” which allows for their unique capacity for conceptual thought.¹⁴ Adler is willing to allow that other animal species may have perceptual thought, which prompts their conditioned responses to life situations, and may have as well some degree of memory which prompts their reactions to stimuli, but he insists that only humans employ symbolic language that allows them to draw conclusions from their surroundings and to think abstractly.

The possibility that humans differ radically in kind from all other animal species has profound theoretical and practical consequences for Adler that recall Smith’s conclusions. If humans are unique in kind in the animal world, they deserve special treatment that is based on their difference from other species. Humans cannot be used as a means, and their liberty and life must be respected.¹⁵ Adler claims that humans have always interpreted the “observation that they alone have the power of speech as signifying not only a psychological difference in kind between themselves and the brutes, but also the psychological superiority of their own kind.”¹⁶ An inferior creation ought to be controlled by a superior creation, he maintains, and to be treated as a means to an end, as instruments of human welfare. Again, he cites Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the early Christians, as advocates of this position, bringing his argument back around to the Greeks whom he had early on in his work cited in de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Animal and the Human in Ancient and Modern Thought
• Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: “Man Alone of Animals”: An Ancient Formula and Its Survivals
• 2 First Steps Toward a “Man Alone of Animals” Concept in Greek Thought
• 3 “Man Alone of Animals”: Three Classic Ancient Texts
• 4 What Makes Humans Human?: The Reign of Logos
• 5 The Importance of Being Rational: Logos and Moral Value
• 6 Body Image: Physiology and the Rise of Civilization
• 7 Animal Affect: Is “Man” Alone of Animals Emotional?
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index locurum