The Magic and Mystery of Animals

On the psycho-physical empathy between animals and humans.

Across the world and throughout history animals have been a source of fascination for human beings. They have been loved and feared, venerated and domesticated, studied and used for food or labour. 

World philosophies and religions give various theoretical expressions to this range of attitudes, telling us what different cultures have taken animals to be. 

For the Native American Hopi people, for example, certain animals are thought to be intermediaries between the physical and the spiritual world. According to Hinduism, by comparison, there’s a fundamental connection between humans and animals, in that it’s possible for a soul (Ātman) to move between human and animal bodies via the process of reincarnation. In Islam, by contrast, animals are held to be essentially different from human beings, since only the latter partake of Allah’s spirit. Yet Islam nevertheless holds that all animals were created by Allah, possess sentience, and are objects of His love.

For the most part, and whatever else they disagree on, the major world religions agree that animals are similar to us in certain respects. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism agree that animals are sentient, meaning that they have a subjective viewpoint onto the world – even if this subjectivity is quite different to our own. 

In the modern West, however, there is a very different understanding of animals, which plenty of people subscribed to until quite recently. This is that animals are essentially living mechanisms, possessing no inner sentience and accordingly no true feelings or experiences of the world in which they live. 

This mechanistic view represents, as we’ve seen, a radical break with most religious thinking from around the world. Certainly, on this basis, it becomes much harder to see animals as sacred, as for the Hopi, or as objects of love, as in Islam.

So where did the idea come from – and is it defensible?

Animal-machines

According to some scholars, the Western European form of Christianity laid the theoretical groundwork for the mechanistic interpretation of animals. The notion that human beings alone were made in the image of God, while animals were created by God only to serve us, presents animals in a very different light to human beings, as something other and lesser. Even so, this is still a far cry from thinking of animals as mere mechanisms.

The latter idea really took hold in early modern philosophy and science. By the seventeenth century, following the development of intricate figurine clocks and mechanical puppets (automata), it had become easier to think of animals as mechanisms. Since these machines, made of pulleys and levers, moved in such a lifelike fashion, it was perfectly plausible to think that animals worked in just the same way, only biologically.

This was the conclusion drawn by the ‘father of modern philosophy’, René Descartes, in the 1640s. Descartes reasoned that, since humans alone possessed souls (as per his Catholic faith), the behaviour of animals should be understood as the same as that of automata – simply the result of organic versions of pulleys and levers. An animal’s calls and cries certainly sounded meaningful, he admitted, as though animals possessed an inner life – but in reality, such cries were no more evidence of subjectivity than the clamour of bells and whistles.

This, it seemed to Descartes, was the simplest way to make sense of how animals could appear intelligent at the same time as lacking souls – they were bête-machines, animal-machines, and only sentimentality could convince us otherwise.

Thinking again

Descartes’ philosophy both drew on and heavily influenced, the modern sciences in their infancy. Indeed, his theories have cast a very long shadow over the modern Western mind, one that science and philosophy have only really begun to escape in the last century. 

The reasons for this gradual rejection of Descartes' ideas are twofold. 

On the one hand, zoology and ethology have supplied ample evidence that animals have complex lives, involving varied emotions and social structures. The picture that has emerged not only of mammalian life but of birds, reptiles, and even insects, is too overwhelmingly rich for many people to accept the mechanistic understanding of animals any longer.

Philosophically speaking, however, this evidence does not by itself disprove Descartes’ argument. After all, he might respond by saying that the evidence only shows that animals are very convincing automata.

The second reason, therefore, for the decline of the idea of animals as machines is philosophical. 

Modern philosophy has in various ways sought to challenge Descartes’ theory of the mind, and his view that animals lack subjectivity is no exception. Probably the most common way that modern philosophers criticise Descartes on this front is to reject his theological assumption that human beings alone have souls. 

This isn’t the only way, however, and it’s not the one I want to explore here. Another way is to try to suspend any theoretical preconceptions we have about animals and view the latter again anew. This is the approach taken by phenomenologists. In the phenomenological approach to philosophy, the philosopher attempts to give a rich, first-person description of a given thing (or ‘phenomenon’), exactly as it appears here and now while suspending or ‘bracketing out' any theoretical preconceptions we may have about it. For instance, this wouldn’t mean denying that humans alone have souls – plenty of phenomenologists have been practicing Christians, and believed just that – but instead temporarily sidelining any such beliefs.

The presence of animality

Image: Rosie in the Highlands

So if we try to see animals anew, describing them exactly as they appear to us in given instances and without theoretical prejudices, what do we see? 

Here's one example. I recently took my Border Collie, Rosie, hiking in the Scottish Highlands. Walking with her was not the same as walking alone, only with an added element, but instead different altogether: it was a shared enterprise. As we trudged up the mountains and back down the glen, weaving through streams and the tree line, I followed her lead. We formed a unit, she drawing me on ahead, finding footholds and the pathway, which I unthinkingly followed or adapted to a human stride.

Occasionally she would confront a section of the path that was impassable for her, and she’d scurry this way and that, trying to find an alternative. If she ultimately failed to find a way through, she would whimper if I’d moved ahead, a summons and plea that of course called me back.

Whenever we had to take a break this was always at my insistence, and she would stand waiting for me up ahead, or else explore the surrounds, following the trails of other creatures – very probably those of the sheep watching on warily from a distance, and which her forebears had been bred to herd. Even at the end of several hours ascent and descent she still brimmed with energy, her enthusiasm pulling me along as though an invisible cord tied us together.

What emerges from these first-person reflections is a psycho-physical empathy between Rosie and me. The movements of our bodies revealed each other’s internal world to one another, in a dialogue of mutual (albeit limited) understanding. While I can’t fully enter her world, in which smell and hearing likely play a great role, and while she presumably has no ability for abstract thinking, on a certain level our bodies display our subjectivity to one another, such that the external and the internal appear as two sides of the same coin.

The mystery of animality

If this account holds true more broadly, even in different circumstances and with different animals, then it would give us reason to think that animals are no more machines than we are. We can understand, through their behaviour, some of what they feel toward the world around them: and if this is so, then they evidently do have an inner life, whatever Descartes claimed to the contrary.

Of course, and as indicated, an animal will always to some degree remain ‘other’ to us. We can divine some of their inner life, but – depending on the animal in question – a varying degree will always remain opaque to us. This is the ultimate source, I think, of the great power that animals have over the human imagination. It’s not necessarily a result of the difference in size or bodily form between us and them, or their different species-specific behaviour, but rather the thing that these differences amount to a sense that they are both very much alike and unlike us at the same time. 

Moreover, the phenomenological account brings us back closer to and gives an additional justification for, the position that is upheld in the central world religions. The inner life of animals is evident in their every movement, gesture, and sound. Not all of it, to be sure, but enough to feel confident in rejecting Descartes’ mechanistic view – and rediscovering the magic and mystery of animals.