Since the first edition of Se questo è un uomo published by De Silva in 1947 and almost completely overlooked by contemporary scholars, Primo Levi has been increasingly acclaimed as one of the few truly humanist personalities of the last century, resisting dehumanization even in the hell of Auschwitz.1 His work has been read as a direct inheritance of the Enlightenment: as the first anthology of Levi scholarship published in English suggests, his books bring reason and light not only to the black hole of the concentration camp but also to our own understanding of the very possibility of such horror.2 Levi thus became for some scholars almost a humanistic peak, whose “austere humanism” has been exemplarily summarized by Joseph Farrell in the introduction of the eponymous collections of essays:
The only philosophy or current of thought to which [Levi] owed allegiance is the culture which can be termed, broadly, ‘humanist,’ or perhaps ‘Enlightenment,’ in the sense that the eighteenth-century cult of reason represents the highest peak of that vision of human being as a ‘rational animal’ which has deep roots in European culture. (Farrell 2004, 9)3
This Aristotelian and almost statuesque interpretation of Levi has been gradually challenged in the last fifteen years. For instance, in his seminal study of Levi’s “ordinary virtues,” Robert Gordon has redirected our attention from the absolute power of reason to the complexity of the ethical values such as friendship or storytelling (Gordon 2001). More recently, other scholars such as Jonathan Druker and Charlotte Ross have instead read Levi’s legacy vis-à-vis the current debate on posthuman and posthumanistic philosophy (Druker 2009; Ross 2011). From these new interpretations, Primo Levi comes out as a more intricate and multifaceted figure, whose work questions any understandings of humanism based on what Tony Davies has called “the attraction of the Humpty Dumpty’s approach to the problem of definition” (2). As Davis has pointed out, one of the key terms in Farrell’s definition, namely “humanism,” has in fact a very complex history and an unusually wide range of meanings and contexts. We should thus pay attention any time this complexity seems to be reduced, almost as arbitrarily as in the speeches of the egg-shaped character in Through the Looking-Glass, to one straight line or continuum. In the case of Levi, different traditions concur to create what Tzvetan Todorov in a famous article for the tenth anniversary of Levi’s death has described as a rejection of any Manichaeism (Todorov 1997). As we will see, Levi in fact rejects any dualism that is based upon a sharp division between body and mind, or almost metonymically between the animal and the human, as an Aristotelian approach would instead suggests.
Yet, even in these more multifaceted accounts, at least one point of Farrell’s Aristotelian argument mentioned above has gone almost completely unchallenged, namely, the definition of the human as “the rational animal.” This definition is neither conceptually obvious nor ethically neutral; one would have thought that the Aristotelian model would have been already superseded, as his cosmology model has been about five hundred years ago. Instead, such a model is still the tip of a philosophical iceberg built upon the almost tacit belief according to which an abyss lies between the human and the other animals, leaving mankind as the solitary master and peak of creation. This distinction has not only deep roots but also continuity in European culture. In fact, it belongs to a lineage that goes from Aristotle to some of the major figures in Christian theology, from Descartes to Heidegger, and arrives at our contemporary relegation of animals to the status of metaphor or raw material (for consumption, entertainment, or experimentation).4 It is thus not surprising that this very tradition has been recalled and reiterated by Farrell in a recent volume devoted to Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism after Auschwitz (in Pugliese 2011, 87–102).
At the very beginning of his essay entitled “The Humanity and Humanism of Primo Levi,” Farrell comments upon what he calls “a wide-ranging polemical lecture” Primo Levi delivered in Turin in 1979. In this lecture, published only posthumously in the first volume of the Opere with the title “L’intolleranza razziale” [The racial intolerance], Levi discusses the roots and variations of racial prejudice in history. As Farrell correctly points out, one of Levi’s major ideas is that first and foremost racial prejudice has an animalistic origin (“di origine animalesca”). Levi believes that racial prejudice is something barely human: he thinks that racism is pre-human, preceding the human as it belongs to the animal world (BHA 109; “qualcosa di assai poco umano, penso che sia preumano, che precede l’uomo, che appartenga al mondo animalesco piuttosto che al mondo umano;” OI 1298). Farrell reads into this sentence “a dialectical opposition between the ‘animal’ or the bestial and the ‘human’” (Pugliese 2011, 87). According to him, this is a recurrent and deeply significant theme in Levi, “while the underlying fundamental, even fundamentalist, reassertion of a basic humanistic credo in the values of being human contained in these words represents his enduring and authentic voice as writer and intellectual” (87). Farrell’s essay then goes on unfolding in detail Levi’s humanism (surprisingly focusing only on Levi’s testimonial literature) but the foundation is set: the human-animal distinction, according to the scholar, is “a philosophical dogma” to which Levi tenaciously held all his life, “even in the face of the atrocities he himself had endured and had seen perpetrated by human beings” (88).
Farrell’s reading of Levi’s public lecture is particularly relevant because it epitomizes a specific topos within Levi scholarship, according to which Levi belongs to as well as embraces a humanistic tradition that not only establishes non-human animals as inferior creatures, but also ascertains that being confused or identified with an animal automatically means degradation. I will return shortly on this general overlap between animalization and degradation and on whether it is carried throughout the whole of Levi’s work as Farrell seems to believe. For now, I prefer to focus on this specific lecture and notice that, despite the unquestionable good faith of Farrell’s reading, there are nonetheless at least a couple of problems with his interpretation.
The first one lies at the very core of Levi’s lecture. Farrell does not mention in his article what is the source of Levi’s convictions about racial prejudice. They are in fact not Levi’s autonomous production. Instead, as Levi explicitly states, they come from one of his favorite readings:
Nei libri di Konrad Lorenz, premio nobel fondatore dell’etologia, che ha scritto dei bellissimi libri di divulgazione soprattutto in quello che si intitola in italiano Il cosidetto male, dove si parla dell’aggressione, c’è un capitolo dove si parla dei ratti che secondo me può servire perfettamente come base per spiegarci, per giustificare quella mia affermazione, cioé che l’intolleranza razziale ha origini lontanissime, non solo preistoriche, ma addirittura preumane, addirittura è incorporata in certi istinti primordiali che sono dei mammiferi e non solo dei mammiferi. (OI 1299)[In the book of Konrad Lorenz, Nobel Prize winner, founder of ethology and writer of some wonderful books of popular science, especially On Aggression, is a chapter on rats which I think will serve perfectly to explain and justify my statement that racial intolerance has long-lost origins that are not only prehistoric but pre-human, and that is indeed enmeshed in particular primordial instincts of mammals, but not only mammals. (BHA 110)]
This passage is remarkable for several reasons. For instance, we become aware of Levi’s interest in ethology (i.e., the study of animal behavior) and fascination for animals, as well as his implicit belief in evolution. It is this latter conviction that also seems to force him to point out, immediately afterward, that being human is couched precisely in learning how to “contravvenire, ostacolare certi istinti che sono la nostra eredità animale” [transgress, to put an obstacle in the way of certain instincts that are our animal inheritance]: a sentence that indeed goes in the same direction outlined by Farrell. The problem does not in fact lie in Levi’s formulation per se—challenged nonetheless by more recent ethological studies5—but it is hidden in his source, namely, Konrad Lorenz’s theory of aggression.
Although a widespread controversy arose around Lorenz’s past when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1973, we cannot say whether Levi knew about the former life of the man who is considered the father of modern ethology. He actually makes an explicit, but very casual, connection between Lorenz and the gas chambers in an interview he gave in 1981. Responding to a question about the animal presence in his work, Levi first confesses his interest toward “quanto c’è di animale in noi, quanto c’era di animale nei nazisti” [how much animal is in us, how much animal there was in the Nazis], and then states that what Lorenz tells about aggression among different tribes of rats “è agghiacciante, son le camere a gas insomma” (Belpoliti 1997, 77) [it is appalling, in conclusion it is the gas chambers]. Given the overall sober tone of the reference, we may infer that he probably did not know very much, for otherwise he would have been at least as suspicious as he was toward other intellectuals who had had any kind of official involvement with the Nazi regime. Specifically, he would have been more careful in quoting a book, Il cosidetto male, which so evidently carries ideas that suspiciously recall a series of articles that Lorenz wrote immediately after his voluntary affiliation with the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) in 1938.
According to Friedlander’s Origins of Nazi Genocide, Konrad Lorenz’s affiliation with the Nazi Party after the Anschluss was more a matter of opportunism than real political faith. When the doctrine of racial hygiene became a prerequisite for advancement, the then young Austrian researcher Lorenz, whose studies on animal behavior had already attracted the attention of the German scientific establishment, simply declared loyalty to the Nazi ideology to have access to research grants and job opportunities (Friedlander, 126–127). Whether Lorenz truly believed in the new doctrine proposed by Hitler or not, his ideas indeed gained popularity in the new regime, and Lorenz became an important public speaker during the years 1939–1943, before he was captured in Poland and then imprisoned by the Russian army until 1948. Specifically, the most appreciated part of his work, and the part which Lorenz himself was keen on promoting, dealt with two important topics. The first of them is the homology between characteristics that animals have acquired during domestication and that humans have acquired through civilizing processes. As Deichmann writes, for Lorenz such homology “was proven:” as animal domestication leads to disturbance in instinctive behavior and therefore genetic decline, so human civilization as a result faces decadence and degeneration (179).6 The second topic is the associated “biological justification for the value of pure racial stock” (189), namely, the attempt to preserve racial purity to fight the negative effect of civilization. These two theories found a unique expression in an article Lorenz devoted to “The Inborn Forms of Possible Experience” [“Die angeborener Formen möglicher Erfahrung”] completed in July 1942 and then published a year later in what was one of the most important scientific journals of Nazi Germany, the Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie (Burkhardt, 270–275). In this long article Lorenz’s ideas about domestication, racial policy, and National Socialist ideology, met in what Kalikow has called a “process of reciprocal legitimation, whereby the Nazis lent political power to ideas which were already part of Lorenz’s world view” (56). In fact, Lorenz never fully abandoned some of these ideas, and they are still present in more subtle forms even in publications Lorenz wrote long after the end of the Second World War. Particularly, in a book he published in 1963 Lorenz seemed to insist on what Vogel called a “mysterious principle of species preservation” (quoted in Deichmann, 197). This volume was entitled Das sogenannte Böse [The so-called evil], and it is indeed the same book on aggression Levi quotes in his lecture sixteen years later.
Pointing out uncanny correspondences within certain parts of Konrad Lorenz’s work allows us neither to nullify what he and other eminent ethologists have discovered in the field of comparative animal behavior, nor to disregard Levi’s theory about racial prejudice. Nonetheless, it underlines how problematic it is to move from particular observations to general statements, or, to be precise, from the observation of animal behaviors to biological theory and then to social and, more importantly, moral evaluation. As Deichmann simply puts it, “one cannot deduce from modern theories of selection a moral value of egotism or the favoring of kin. Ethical norms for how humans ought to live together cannot be drawn up through scientific analyses” (198). Furthermore...