[Draft of an encyclopedia entry to appear, in German, in Die Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit.]
Justin E. H. Smith
The concept of animal is seldom deployed in the modern period without explicit or implicit reference to the concept with which it is presumed to contrast, namely, that of human. ‘Animal’ first functions to delimit the bounds of philosophical anthropology; only later does it come to denote the range of entities of interest to zoology. Between Aristotle and the modern period, this anthropocentric perspective was reflected in the printed bestiaries of the middle ages, which served as guides to the various kinds of beasts, usually arranged alphabetically, including both real and fantastical kinds, and described according to human concerns; thus recipes are often given along with summaries of morphology. On the traditional understanding, plants share one level of soul activity with humans --the vegetative-- while animals share two-- the vegetative and the sensitive. Modern writers could nevertheless draw on ancient sources such as Porphyry’s On the Abstinence from Animal Food which recognized that animals, unlike plants, must always descend from parents, are generally countable as separate individuals, whereas plants may simply be great vegetating masses; and that individual animals consist of specialized organs with specific functions, such as respiration, nutrition, digestion, self-motion, and generation.
The rediscovery of Aristotle’s view that “we must avoid a childish distaste” for zoological researches, “[f]or in all natural things there is something wonderful” (PA 645a 15-24) signalled the emergence of a distinct zoological program in the modern period. The intrinsic value of coming to know nature independently of human concerns was fueled by the translation and publication of Aristotle’s biological treatises by Theodor Gaza in 1483, and by the Lyon edition of his collected works (1529-39). In Thomas Moffett's Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum of 1634 we find an encouragement to study small and seemingly ugly animals, because "nihil tota hac rerum universitate (praeter hominem) esse divinius" (Praefatio, ii). And several decades later, Edward Tyson explicitly invokes the work of these predecessors in his eloquent plea for the promotion of zoology: "[H]ow great Diligence hath been used of late," he asks, "to ransack both the Indies, to pry into all the Corners of the World, both inhabited, and uninhabited, to find out a new Plant, not before described...? And how little hath been done in the Improvement of the History of Animals?" (Tyson, 22). The school of medicine at the University of Padua was headed by Hieronymus Fabricius d’Acquapendente (1533-1619) who conducted research into comparative anatomy and embryology. It was in Padua that William Harvey developed his own brand of Aristotelian natural philosophy coupled with an empirical approach. Harvey’s work on animal generation demonstrated that the birds and mammals shared a common mode of origination in the “egg,” and opponents of spontaneous generation, beginning with Antony van Leeuwenhoek and Francisco Redi, argued that insects as well were generated from eggs. By the early nineteenth century, Erasmus Darwin could suggest that all animals were descended from a single common ancestor, having sprung as it were from an original egg, and from there gave rise to all the forms of life that followed, connecting them together by a hidden ‘filament’. “[W]ould it be too bold to imagine,” he wonders in the 1794 Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, “that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with animality... [and] with the power of acquiring new parts?” (Darwin, § 39).
Despite the breadth of the category, the paradigm animal has always been the quadruped, and species that deviated from this model gave rise to conceptual problems. Some borderline cases, such as the famous ‘zoophyte’, were of interest to early modern naturalists, such as the 16th-century Aristotelian anatomist Julius Caesar Scaliger, because they seemed to belie the cosmological view of nature as consisting in neat, hierarchically ordered levels of beings. Thus we see attributed to Sclaliger the view that “the Creator of Things concatenated a series from plants to men, so that they cohere together as if without any interval: thus the zoophytes link the brutes with the plants, as the simians [simia] link the quadrupeds with men” (cited in Tyson, 5; this passage would, a century later, serve as the opening epigram for Charles White's straightforwardly racist work, An Account of the Gradation of Man of 1799).
The great apes or, as they were all generically called throughout the 17th century, the ‘orang-outang’, seemed to straddle the animal-human boundary in the same way that humans straddled the animal-angelic boundary. Further, some naturalists attributed a share in animal life to nature as a whole, or to its smaller parts. With the discovery of microscopic life beginning in the 1620s, parts of matter that had previously appeared perfectly lifeless revealed themselves to be full of organisms, and Leibniz maintained that it is only the limitations of human perception that prevents us from noting the presence of animal life in the smallest portions of matter. Thus he writes to Antoine Arnauld in the mid-1670s that “since matter is infinitely divisible, no portion can be designated so small that it does not contain animated bodies, or at least bodies endowed with a primitive Entelechy or (if you permit me to use the concept of life so generally), with a vital principle; in short, corporeal substances, of all of which one can say in general that they are living” (Leibniz II 118). Francis Glisson proposed in his On the Energetic Nature of Substance of 1672 that all of physical nature is characterized by biousia, a vital reflexivity that is best exemplified in the nerve tissue of the larger animals. The recognition that worms and other simple life forms were not undifferentiated masses, but possessed distinct organs and were generated by parents of the same species was another consequence of the invention of the microscope. As Kant explains in his treatise Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen of 1775, Im Thierreiche gründet sich die Natureintheilung in Gattungen und Arten auf das gemeinschaftliche Gesetz der Fortpflanzung, und die Einheit der Gattungen ist nichts anders, als die Einheit der zeugenden Kraft, welche für eine gewisse Mannigfaltigkeit von Thieren durchgängig geltend ist” (Kant II 429).
Within the Aristotelian tradition, it would have made no sense to ask whether an animal has a soul: an animal was nothing other than the sort of entity that has an anima. Descartes controversially denied that vital functions including not just digestion and generation, but also perception and intentional movement needed to be accounted for in terms of the inherence of a soul; they could be explained “mechanically” giving rise to the doctrine of the “beast-machine.” Language, he maintained, as well as behavioural flexibility, both of which the brutes lacked, indicated the presence of a soul in humans alone. Thus he wrote to Henry More in a letter of 1649: “[W]hen I investigate what is most probable in this matter, I see no argument for animals having thoughts except this one: since they have eyes, ears, tongues, and other sense-organs like ours, it seems likely that they have sensation like us; and since thought is included in our mode of sensation, similar thought seems to be attributable to them.” Yet, he goes on to observe, there are “other arguments, stronger and more numerous but not so ovbvious to everyone, which strongly urge the opposite... In the first place, it is certain that in the bodies of animals, as in ours, there are bones, nerves, muscles, animal spirits and other organs so arranged that they can by themselves, without any thought, give rise to all the movements we observe in animal” (AT V 277). And in another letter later in the same year, Descartes specifies that “[t]he wagging of a dog’s tail is only a movement accompanying a passion, and so is to be sharply distinguished, in my view, from speech, which alone shows the thought hidden in the body” (AT V 344f.).
Some philosophers associated with the 16th-century skeptical movement, and its later echoes in the 17th and 18th centuries, argued that, even with respect to the faculty of reason, animals are no different than, and possibly superior to, human beings. In his treatise That Animals Make Better Use of Reason than Humans, published posthumously in 1648, and known primarily through the celebrated discussion of it in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique of 1697, Hieronymus Rorarius argued that animals are capable of perceiving God’s intention in nature directly, as for example when they predict a coming storm and change their behavior in preparation. Humans, in contrast, must learn to read the significance in the animals’ behavior, rather than grasping what is to come directly. Language, then, is a compensatory bridge between human beings and a world known by animals much more spontaneously and immediately.
In any event, Descartes’s position on the “beast-machine” already vigorously contested in its own day by the Cambridge Platonists, especially Henry More, rapidly ceded, in the course of the 18th century to vitalism, as the full complexity of animal anatomy and physiology revealed themselves to observers and experimentalists (for a general account of this shift, see Roger 1991 [1963]). Kant’s conception of an organism as an entity whose parts were reciprocally cause and effect of the whole and whose functioning could never be explained by reference to the laws of mechanics alone stimulated a school of “romantic” biology, with mechanism re-emerging as the dominant philosophy of the animal only with Claude Bernard’s Experimental Medicine of 1865.
Animals increasingly entered the experimental realm as subjects from the early days of the establishment of scientific academies, and the Cartesian insistence that animals did not feel pain doubtless assuaged some consciences. The Royal Society experimented on mice and on dogs,to study respiration and blood transfusion; and in 1671 Leibniz noted that the advantage of working with animals, in contrast with humans, is that “wir können sie aufschneiden und examiniren wenn und wie wir wolen” (LH III 1, 3; Smith 2010, Appendix I, § 28). Bernard would argue that to deny the relevance of animal vivisection to science would be “to introduce confusion and obscurity into biology... since in the science of life the character that should be placed at the first order of importance is the vital character,” and this is something humans and animals share, and machines do not.
While the beauty and efficiency of animal bodies, and the apparent fixity of the species, was cited from the mid-17th century onwards by Boyle, Newton, Ray, and others as conclusive evidence for the existence of a wise, omnipotent, and benevolent creator, a natural origin, not only for vermin and insects through spontaneous generation, but for quadrupeds and humans was discreetly mooted by some 18th century philosophers. Evolutionary thought, the acceptance of the theoretical possibility of emergence of new forms, or extinction of old ones, as a result of natural forces took its cue from ancient non-Aristotelian sources, especially the Epicurean natural philosophy of Lucretius (see Wilson 2008).
The alternative view --species fixism-- depended on a combination of Christian piety with the exigencies of taxconomy. Already in 1680, Edward Tyson had suggested that the flipper bones of a porpoise are the modified hoof bones of a formerly terrestrial animal, though he was reluctant, in his anatomical study of a chimpanzee 18 years later, to posit similar kinship relations between the higher primates and human beings. That some related species had descended from a common ancestor was proposed by the Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle (1749-88); some naturalists, including Buffon, posited degeneration from an ideal type as the cause of the proliferation of species. Others, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in his Philosophie zoologique of 1809, argued for a thoroughgoing transformism involving real species change over time through the transmission of acquired traits.
*
Atran, Scott, The Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge, 1991).
Darwin, Erasmus, Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (London, 1794).
Descartes, René, Oeuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. 2nd Edition. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1969-74).
Des Chene, Dennis, “‘Animal’ as Category in Bayle’s ‘Rorarius’,” in Justin E. H. Smith (Ed.), The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2006), 216-31.
Duchesneau, François, Les modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz (Paris: J. Vrin, 1998).
Kant, Immanuel, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1902).
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt. 7 volumes. (Berlin, 1849-1860).
