In Republics of Letters. To Read the entire article, go here.
There is today broad scientific consensus, and general if contested acceptance among nonexperts, that human beings are related to nonhuman animals by paths of shared evolutionary descent. This view was consolidated at the end of the nineteenth century with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but evolutionary models of natural diversity had by then already been gaining in interest over the course of at least the prior two centuries. This gain had to do, not just with empirical observation and abductive inference from what was observed, but also with a number of other developments in European intellectual history that might at first glance seem rather distant. A first such is a general rise in philosophical and aesthetic appreciation of diversity, which issued in the cataloging, charting, and assessing of the multitudinousness of natural kinds, as central to the project of natural science. This shift is articulated and anticipated at a philosophical level in the Leibnizian vision of nature as an infinite ensemble of diverse substances reflecting the same underlying metaphysical unity. The shift is further taken up and developed in later natural science, particularly in the work of French natural historians such as Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and associated figures. A second important element in the history of modern reflection on human-animal kinship may be the increased exposure, from the seventeenth century on, to non-European cultural representations of the intersection of humanity and animality, in which are missing the classical elements of the Christian and European representation, grounded in the myth of Adam’s fixing the essences of animals once and for all by a sort of naming ceremony and in the taxonomical picture offered by the story of Noah’s Ark of neatly and permanently bounded-off species existing across an ontological divide from humans.
These various elements come together with remarkable clarity in French natural science in the wake of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Here, we see the impact of Egypt—its flora, fauna, and human history—in the emergence of a new understanding of the project of philosophy and its relationship to natural science and of the nature of humanity and its relationship to animality. These transformations can perhaps best be illuminated by attention to a pair of animal kinds, the ibis and the crocodile, in both their zoological and their cultural roles, as they moved from Egypt to France.
The past two centuries or so since the Napoleonic expedition have been characterized by an inculcation, at least among the educated classes, of a new vision of humanity’s place in the world, in which we are said to inhabit the earth alongside numerous other “nonhuman animals,” and in which we are, ourselves, animals, not just contingently or by some sort of accident but essentially: we are just as much part of the order of nature as are frogs or fish, nor can we claim to have some deeper source of our essence, an immortal immaterial soul, that removes us altogether from that order. This most recent period was preceded by a much longer stage of human history, which synthesized the philosophical anthropology of both Near Eastern monotheism and Greek philosophy, both of which took for granted that the human being is in some way or other the center of the cosmos or is the focus of divine solicitude: that the human being, but not the frog or the fish, is created in the image of god.
Earlier than this synthesis, in turn, we find the great expanse of most of human history, which includes the worldviews of most non-Western, nonurban human communities, and of which the urban religion of pharaonic Egypt may be seen as a late expression. Here, human beings might not be animals, but animals, for their part, most certainly are persons: not human persons but intention-driven, somewhat rational actors who share in the same sociocosmic reality as human beings. Crocodiles and ibises were part of human social reality, not mere brutes existing outside that reality, and so when it came to conceptualizing divinity, the representations took a hybrid form, showed human bodies with ibis heads, for example: not as monstrous hybrids but as reminders of our shared community, of our kinship.
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