Many aspects of life, which man celebrates himself as the pinnacle of, have shadows in animal life :
Animals do not have architecture, but they build. Animals do not have language, but they communicate.
They do not have art, yet they dance, they sing, and occasionally we train them to paint.
They do not have advanced mathematics, yet chimps solve math equations with gamer speed.
They do not have concepts but they operate in a proto-conceptual milieu.
They have their own understandings. If the lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand.1
More than mere abilities, human culture has painstakingly developed disciplines via which we transform our inner life in order to become the performers and vessels for higher values. Bravery is one of these higher values, things which—probably more so than painting—we understand to require a form of consciousness that is primarily human. We value bravery. We celebrate bravery. We monumentalize moments of bravery in public space. Representing the human lives which were vessels of bravery long after the influences of the brave event has invisibly become a part of the ground of the present.
But it seems there are exceptions to every rule.
What is in the heart of an elephant who gives his life for his herd? Through what discipline did he cultivate this capacity? Is this just some instance of a chimpanzee typing out Hamlet, or are we able to know him? It seems natural and obvious to want to know the heart of a brave man, why not an elephant? As Iris Murdoch points out;
“Public concepts are in this obvious sense sovereign over private objects; I can only ‘identify’ the inner, even for my own benefit, via my knowledge of the outer…”2
Surely intention matters when we are determining the good. But what if we are overstepping our bounds in this world. What if our jobs as humans are not to understand the hidden machinations nor to judge what is good, but merely to know the good and mark it, as we can.
What’s good:
Whales are hunting boats.
Dogs will save abandoned babies from tragic neglect
And they are unwaveringly loyal
I remember hearing about the following model for man’s special place among all of life—though I cannot recall from who:
The vegetable world collapses energy to matter.
The animal world collapses space to motion.
And the human world collapses time to narrative.
I think there is a valid thought experiment here. Suppose we take for granted that story—via ritual, ceremony, celebration, poetry and art—is how we participate in the complementarity of life. If this was true, then what would we expect to see? We would expect that our failure to uphold the story of the world, in myth and rite, would be to the detriment of non-human life. That a mass narcissism, which orients myth and rite only towards one species (our own)—or worse still, a mass abandonment, where most of the species had given up on producing myth and rite so as to be the consumers of it, would result in the decline of the rest of the natural living world.
The hypothesis fits what is readily observable, but like a lot of easily knowable hypothesis, we get caught on our impoverished understanding: There can be no mechanism. How would human veneration help or participate in biological life? Lions can't speak, remember?
Any child can see that wonder is an integral part of human livingness, spiritual and biological. It vivifies us at the very least. It brings energy out of material latency in literal bioelectric ways. In the week after an exhilarating festival we can see, as energy emerges in the renewed ambition of our moves, how myth and rite function in some unknown complementary—like the exchange of O2 and CO2 between plant and animal kingdoms—with our own biology. And taking on the discovery of the environmental sciences, that we are not biologically isolated and how we live is hugely impactful on our living ‘environment’. So it seems to follow that a disturbance in mythic life, invariably must relate in some way to this unseen ecology, which would show us correlations between ecocide and ethnocide, just like we do.
I think the lines between nature and culture are blurrier than our previous renaissance-enlightenment, and analytic frames could see. Which found no apparent bridge between the island of humanity and the supposed stupid, soulless, automaton of the nonhuman world: a world of wet machines, or a world of wet computers. But differences in general are never whole and complete, else the existences could not be whole. Even if we fail to answer concerns around the emergence of language and self-reflective/abstract thought in the ‘missing link’ between animal and man, what else but ‘nature’—a ‘thing’ that we define ourselves against—would have given us, or developed through us these affordances of mind. The very thing missing in animals which allow us to measure, to build, to tell, to compose, and to train? Is there really a gap between natural evolution and cultural evolution, if cultural evolution has no prior except natural evolution? Are genes the prime-mover? If so, what made genes?
Its best to be honest with what one sees, before we cram it into diagrams. And what I have seen is a world full of animals worth learning about humanity from. Not all of them, not all the time, but no amount of white swans will disprove the existence of black swans.
Wittgenstein-ism
The Sovereignty of Good, 15
banger
Incredible work, Sam, wow. I very much enjoyed this piece.