Let’s consider some definitions as represented by the Oxford
English Dictionary applicable here but excluding Indigenous people. Tautologically,
humanism is that which is solely focused on the interests of humans; there is little
concern for other life forms. With humanism, attention is given to human
culture, not to the natural world. Abstractly, humanity has a nature, which
includes certain feelings and characteristics; but this definition excludes our
remaining, evolved animal instincts and traits. There are uses of the word
humanity that point to how people can be disposed to treat others, including
animals, with kindness. Historical and contemporary events demonstrate that
humanity often acts maliciously to animals and other humans.
The word animal, deriving from forms like animus and anima,
can refer to or mean life or spirit, for that which is an animal breathes and grows.
That definition seems to exclude plants. The word animal can be used
contemptuously when referring to a person who acts out of the bounds of
humanity. With spite, we attach animal names to those we dislike (e.g., eats
like a pig, fat as a cow, a horse’s ass, etc.), and such language ricochets
degradingly back onto our fellow creatures. Animal connotes, but should not,
physicality and sensations over intellect and thinking. Whatever the case, it’s
clear that in modern usage, the word animal usually refers to an entity
inferior to what’s human.
Now we come to the more controversial term of nature. The
word could refer to one’s character, whether human or animal. In fact, it could
refer to a human/animal quality. Nature could be unwittingly associated with,
in the Anthropocene, physical force against humanity. However, while humans
don’t control nature, they have influenced its synergies through global
warming. There are also, as philosophers, biologists, and physicists say, laws
of nature. Consider how the course of nature, whatever that might be, has been
altered by humanity. Nature is not the world of mass manufactured consumer
goods made for humans at its expense and to the detriment of much wildlife and
forests. Thus, in anthropocentric thinking, nature is often believed to be subordinate
to the high arts of creation by humanity.
Anthropology, as the Greek root suggests, is the study of
“man.” Humans believe they are the only ones capable of introspection and
self-reflection. Maybe that’s so because they can be deliberately vindictive,
as philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points out, in contrast to animals. Like the
adaptable body, the mind reacts to its environment; consider how the wolf has
become a dog. The only ones with sense, understanding, and reason are humans,
we are repeatedly told. Again, Schopenhauer might disagree, as he notes that
elephants won’t cross a rope bridge. In debating animal politics, primatologists
like Frans de Waal might disagree that humans alone are capable of reason and
free will. Eighteenth-century moralist and economist Adam Smith writes how only
humans barter, but this conclusion comes before extensive field observations of
animal negotiations that prove him wrong (e.g., from primates to vampire bats).
Before Smith, political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in the seventeenth
century, finds in human language the power of reason, as if no wild animals effectively
communicate. A prophet of liberation, philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing in
the Victorian era, attributes to humans, not animals, superior intelligence.
Where are passions in this picture? Common sense requires sensation, and the
ability of judgment is not exclusively human to any animal observer. Current neuroscientists
like Antonio Damasio say we are emotional creatures ruled very often not by
reason but by feelings working on our intelligence. Human institutions (e.g.,
laws) don’t seem to control or check irrational actions.
From these brief notes, it seems that in our humanity we are
not the absolute measure of nature.
Rather than household pets, wild animals are often characterized
as brutes to justify killing them or taking away their habitats. Even domestic
animals we’ve artificially selected from wild strains are deemed useful only as
human food. Some humans, nonetheless, fight for their personhood status and the
conservation of their natural domains. Everyday language indicates that animals
are species unlike ours; but there are many species with common ancestors, like
ours. Are humans in our pride the paragon of animals? Is there sympathy, as
among Indigenous cultures, between humans and animals? French Renaissance
essayist Michel de Montaigne ponders the nobility of animals. Indeed, outside
of the human perspective of might-as-right in a jungle there are symbiotic
balances across ecological niches inhabited by beings from microbes to large
ungulates. Regarding living beings, Aristotle sees nutrition, growth, and
reproduction. There are also sensations (plants and animals), locomotion
(plants and animals). Sentience is more controversial. Are we the only feeling
animals if we evolved from and share similarities to other vertebrate mammals? In
The Edge of Sentience (2024), Jonathan Birch argues for caution since
evidence suggests degrees of sentience in creatures from insects to lobsters.
The natural world is not divided among groups like plants, animals, microbes,
etc. – there’s unity with no easy classification.
In the seventeenth century Francis Bacon, an early proponent
of the scientific method, talks of “bordering instances” where species seem to
overlap in rudiments. Bacon’s observation foreshadows Charles Darwin’s and A.R.
Wallace’s revelation of species loose continuity, separations arising from
modified descent. Medieval religious scholar Thomas Aquinas, following
Aristotle, talks about perfect and imperfect animals where humanity has reached
perfection via reason and intellect. The word perfect derives from Latin per-factus,
thoroughly done. Is there perfection in nature, of which we are a part? That query
rubs abrasively against biological and cultural evolution. Relatedly, with
developments in machine AI, have we returned to the seventeenth-century
methodological skeptic René Descartes and his idea of a soulless machine? He
said that about animals, calling them automatons. If intellect, reason, and
feeling are the functions of plastic, neural, genetic matter, what then for
computers or animals? If sensation and thought can be reduced to particles in
the human brain, so too in machines and animals. Yet what of sentience and
instinct in a machine or an animal? Does the machine, unlike an animal, know to
avoid dripping water or fire? In terms of feeding and reproduction, could a
machine adapt to sub-freezing cold or extraordinary humidity? How free is a
machine compared with an animal or even a plant? Darwin studied plants and was
well aware of their sensitivity and mobility; in fact, over time tree lines can
move forward if not abated.
We again consider the most slippery of concepts, nature. The
word is so slack it probably means nothing specific to biologists; on the other
hand, we romanticize nature in art and literature. Indigenous people like the
Yanomami of South America don’t really have a word for nature but rather see
spiritual images among the trees of the forest. Nature helps us, and we emerged
from nature. Do our material and manufacturing “arts” help nature? One could
say nature is… minerals and chemicals. We use those resources to make products
and then create polluting byproducts. It’s fair to say there’s no pollution in
nature since everything is recycled and reused in mutualistic, evolved
processes. The question is, what have we rendered in the state of nature? In
contrast to Hobbes, political philosopher John Locke does not see war in
nature; but what he deems civil society is not ours alone. In the early
twentieth century Russian scientist Peter Kropotkin observed mutualistic
behaviors among species. Human laws change over regions and time and can be
quite cruel. In a broad sense, laws of nature offer stability, even
accommodating metamorphoses over great time. Nature is that which has not been
reduced or modified by humans. Nature need not be artificially nurtured under
normal circumstances; but now, because of human-engineered climate
catastrophes, we might have to intervene and apply salve to some of nature’s
wounds we’ve inflicted. Has human culture and civilization improved nature? For
Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we’ve diminished ourselves by
tampering with our nature. Is the existence of plants and animals in the wild
determined, or are they free; and why do humans believe they are free to
determine the fate of wildlife, oceans, and old growth forests? Uniformity is
in nature, or as Aristotle says, fire burns similarly in different places
though state laws and customs vary. Clearly, this line of thinking doesn’t
privilege human cities as superior to a bee hive, ant mound, spider web, or
beaver dam. Is human moral order superior to the rhythms of an ocean or forest?
Whereas nature is an end unto itself, humans use nature as a means to their
ends.
We see plainly now the consequences of our modern, industrial
actions.
In the end, our questions center around what Kirkpatrick Sale
reminds us is the human scale. Is there an answer? We’ve gone out of bounds in
so many ways that we now jeopardize all life on earth. Our virus is randomly
discharged. In some respects, industrialized language promoting progress and
materialism is responsible. Where there was order among plants, microbes, and
animals in nature we’ve created disorder. Where vast expanses of oceans and
forests were teeming with abundant, continuous life, we’ve created
discontinuity. Our linguistic methods of differentiation impose death and
destruction on the living whole of nature’s ecology. We say mine for resources or
drill for oil when we should speak about helping complex ecosystems thrive as
carbon sinks, freshwater reservoirs, and lungs of the world. Our languages, not
counting those of Indigenous people who cooperate with nature in cycles of
renewal, have worked mostly for humanity but not for nature.
Language gives us the power of discrimination;
unfortunately, we employ linguistic powers not just in song or the literary arts
but also to harm the natural world (e.g., “drill, baby, drill!” or “wildlife
management”); also, we are complicit in our silence. Use this meditation to interrogate
how you think and speak about nature; turn your words to helping and not injuring
wild plants and animals, and convince others to act likewise.
-
Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D. and Fredericka A. Jacks
Words and Image Copyright©2025 by Gregory F. Tague. All
Rights Reserved. This post was generated by human brains with the help of the Great Books and not by machine AI
algorithms.
