On-line forum “On the Human”
The structure of this on-line forum, as implied by the distribution of its editors, posits animals and machines as equivalent boundaries of the human. Since the ways that humans resemble animals are not completely analogous to the ways that they resemble machines, this further suggests that the most important similarities and differences are abstract. Of course, abstract analogies are important and interesting—but they are not alone in possessing these qualities. And the consequences of thinking about concrete animals (and machines) can be very different from the consequences of thinking about notional ones: for example, a post-human future dominated or determined by (other?) machines would not be the same as one dominated or determined by other animals.

To some extent, inclination toward the abstract or the concrete is disciplinary. As a historian I am drawn by the concrete; philosophers and literary theorists often prefer abstraction (which is not to say that they prefer the same kinds of abstraction). Wai Chee Dimock points out the traditional power of imaginative literature to consider boundary issues. The examples she gives tend to produce a still more powerful abstraction—boundary or difference per se. Enkidu is a human who associates inappropriately with non-humans; the Cyclops is not particularly human, but he is not recognizably animal either. (Of course the humans don’t treat each other very well in Homer, and there is no particular reason to think that the gods, though literally anthropomorphic, necessarily value every human above every non-human.) It would be anachronistic to wonder whether the works of ancient writers were intended or perceived as bridges between the sciences or other ways of knowing, but some modern literature certainly has been so conceived and so understood (for example, Frankenstein or The Island of Dr. Moreau among many others).

The growing field sometimes called “animal studies” has internalized the disciplinary division: within it historians tend to pay more attention difference between animals (or kinds of animals) in particular, and scholars in literary and cultural studies tend to consider “the animal” in some comprehensive general sense. Aslihan Sanal suggests a possible way of reconciling these perspectives, while she also suggests the challenges that such reconciliation would pose. The notion of “the human” obviates numerous fine (and not-so-fine) distinctions, which may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view. The notion of “the animal” obviates many more distinctions, most of which are not fine at all. As Leigh Van Valen points out, there is no single boundary between people and other organisms; instead there are many points of contact and many complex gradations.

The reasons for acknowledging and honoring these gradations are practical as well as intellectual. Over the last two centuries, every attempt to extend the legal protections accorded to animals, or to alter the political or religious attitudes that determine their standing, has been strenuously resisted. Arguments that do not recognize the general preference for pets over livestock are not likely to persuade. Pigs and goats are probably the intellectual and emotional peers of cats and dogs, but their position in our society is very different. Similar disjunctions exist with regard to wild animals, who are, as a category, treated very differently from domesticates. Unless they are captives (in menageries or laboratories), they are protected, if at all, as species rather than as individuals. In this context the special emotional connection to humans enjoyed by pet dogs and cats is paralleled by the special physical resemblance to humans enjoyed (or not) by monkeys and especially apes. As John Dupré predicts, I completely agree with him that phylogenetic proximity is not the appropriate standard for judging the emotional lives of other animals. But history suggests that it is the likeliest to serve as the thin edge of the wedge of consideration (and, probably, that it will be a very thin edge indeed).

But I find phylogeny more compelling than he does. Historically, people have been more inclined to wonder about their relation to chimpanzees and orangutans than about their relation to dolphins and elephants, and also more inclined to attempt to integrate apes into their lives, whether in fact or in imagination. There is no question that this inclination has been anthropocentric (as has been most other human thinking and acting). But most historical research deals with subjects who would not measure up to current moral or intellectual standards; as Anita Guerrini illustrates, they can be, nevertheless, well worth studying.

Like Leigh Van Valen, I am especially concerned with the current devaluation of the humanities (which, interestingly, has no entry in the OED). I agree that the idea of value is one way the humanities can intervene in current discourses. But I think it will take more than goodwill to keep the humanities from simply disappearing from many universities. Giorgio Agamben has argued (in The Open) that recognition of the essential identity between human and animal will result in a post-historical, post-humanistic era. I don’t think we’re past history yet, and Ritvo’s essay opens up a space where human and natural histories intersect. Science needs the values and critique of the humanities, and the humanities, as Ritvo eloquently concludes, need to look beyond the human.

It’s usual in such discussions to consider only animals that are still alive. After all, we can have no ethical responsibilities to the extinct, even if we have regrets. Evolution is a continuum, though, and it’s appropriate to consider where in this ancestral continuum humanness began.

From this perspective it’s obvious that any distinction between human and nonhuman can’t be sharp. We can propose many criteria that distinguish us from mice, baboons, amoebas, and/or bonobos. A set of distinctions from amoebas will presumably be larger than one for baboons. The criteria themselves are often fuzzy: thus some humans can’t speak, and bonobos walk bipedally about half the time. Groups of chimpanzees differ from each other in their material and behavioral culture. We gradually became human.

An appropriate context for humanness is that of fuzzy sets. Some individual animals are fully human, others are not human, and others are or have been partly human. How partly this is for a particular individual will depend on the criteria used.

A monist perspective implies the theoretical possibility of our constructing intelligent and even emotional entities. Would they be human? Here again absolute demarcations fail us.

Ethical responsibilities, too, have fuzzy boundaries. They probably evolved to enhance the survival of small groups of our ancestors. We now have broader contexts. In the words of Jesus of Nazareth, Who is thy brother? Does the recent evidence that fish feel pain make the holiday fisherman a moral monster? Ethical responsibilities come in degrees, not in dichotomies.

How much weight should we give to different criteria? There is again no unique answer.

On a different note, I see the distinctiveness of the humanities as an approach, or a set of related approaches, rather than a set of subjects to be explored. Linguistics is a science, but it is one with a humanistic context and implications, rather like cultural anthropology in this way. Art history, like any history, is partly a science. Despite the repeated removal of parts of its domain over the centuries, what remains of philosophy merges with mathematics via logic and with all sciences via conceptual and other analyses.

Thus the humanities in part flow into the sciences, but the perspectives of the two are nonetheless different. Unlike science per se, the humanities incorporate and are built around values. What, in a nonmaterial way, brings value to the human condition? The humanities reach, or try to reach, into the soul. Such metadisciplinary analysis, as I once called it (in a literary journal), has the potential to clarify by comparison rather than by introspection.

But people differ from each other. There is no fully universal core, nor should we pretend to find one. Let a hundred flowers bloom; some propagate widely, others narrowly or not at all. Some flourish in a culture-specific way, others more generally. Personalities themselves constrain paths to the soul.

In some parts of the humanities there has come to be a dictatorship of fads; in some others the superficial seems to have become paramount. These are, I think, the real crises of the humanities. Goodwill and determination should suffice to find paths from the mire.

My final worry is one with which I expect Ritvo would sympathise. The Declaration on Great Apes is surely intolerably anthropocentric. Surely these animals are singled out only because they are phylogenetically related to us. I have no idea whether their lives are emotionally or socially richer than those of an elephant, a dolphin or a baboon. Surely a proper reading of contemporary biology should be to give up on hereditary privilege, and work out how to treat all animals on their merits.

It is also possible that we be able to use computers to relate to animals, for example by simulating their perspectives on the world. The posthumanism which I believe lays the most comprehensive framework to address these various possibilities is that of Roberto Marchesini, who believes the defining quality of human beings is not a fixed quality but rather the tendency to affiliate with other entities, including animals, machines, and ideas. (See my summary at http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue02/sax.html)