Animals and Philosophy

I have a hunch that animals could be a really interesting and important challenge to any philosophical conception of reality. I mean a kind of "test case" for the validity of a philosophical position. How many philosophers have made room for animals in their philosophical reflections? Not many, or at least very few have given them serious consideration. When they have it has been in relation to questions of ethics. That is important. But what would a serious consideration of animals mean for areas like epistemology and ontology?

In his book on the message of the book of Job, A Battle for Righteousness, Klaas Popma devotes his final section to the animals and claims that it is here where we must find the solution to understanding the book. Here's a quote:

"Both wild and domesticated animals live their own lives in their domains which remain, for people, impenetrable. For those humans who consider themselves the most important of creatures, the instruction to look to the animal world for understanding God, is utterly humiliating. Animals who are, after all, our fellow creatures, by their own incomprehensibility, point to the incomprehensibility of God. Those who believe in the perspicuity of being only need to look at the animals to see how incredibly foolish that belief is. God has made all these animals and for no other reason than that it was His good pleasure to do so; for God always does what pleases Him. God created the animals because He took delight in doing so." (263)

His comment on the foolishness of the belief in the "perspicuity of being" is more than a hint of philosophical significance. Perhaps a worry we might have is that the very incomprehensibility of the animals is enough to set them aside in our attempts to throw light on the nature of reality from out of our philosophical thinking. Or, are we tempted by the thought that animals being part of the natural world - they don't have souls, or reason or whatever - any mystery regarding them is just a gap waiting for scientific elucidation. Hopefully any reformational philosophy would reject the second option. As for the first, even a reflection on the shape of such incomprehensibility, could prove beneficial in filling out our ontology and epistemology. Also, should we not say that incomprehensibility is not the full picture, there is also some knowledge as implied in Proverbs 12:10.

The second quote is from a long footnote in a paper originally given as a lecture and since turned into a book. This actually goes further and considers our response to plants and even human made artefacts. My claim is that if even plants can make some kind of demand on our (moral) consideration, then might it be worth considering what demand on our philosophical reflections the life of animals might make. The point at the end about how we should "treat every kind of thing in accordance with its nature" must also apply to philosophy as well as to more 'practical' pursuits.

Christine Korsgaard "Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals"

“Why shouldn’t the argument of this essay extend even further down the line of the different senses of “natural good” or “good for”? Our moral values spring from reflective endorsement of the natural good we are inclined to pursue as animals, but that natural good in turn depends on the sort of good to which plants are oriented, and that in turn to the general, functional capacity for having a good. Why shouldn’t we think that implicit in our endorsement of our own self-concern is a concern for the good of anything that has a good? At the risk of being thought a complete lunatic, let me admit that I am tempted by this thought. There is no reason to believe that “moral standing” is an on-off notion: perhaps it comes in degrees or kinds. We respond normatively to plants; a drooping plant in need of a drink seems to present us with a reason to water it; a sapling growing from what seems to be almost sheer rock makes us want to cheer it on. Is this because we cannot help animistically imagining that plant experiences its good? Is it because, as I say in the text, the line between plants and animals is unclear? Or is it perhaps because the shared condition of life itself elicits these responses? Or could it even be that we have duties, not only to our fellow creatures, but to our fellow entities? Granted, it sounds absurd to suggest that we might have duties to machines, yet still there is something in the far outer reaches of our normative thought and feeling that corresponds even to this. A general discomfort in the face of wanton destructiveness, a tendency to wince when objects are broken, an objection to the neglect or abuse of precision tools that isn’t rooted completely in the idea of economic waste… Again it might be suggested that such feelings result from a kind of animistic imagination, that we imagine that the tool feels the badness of being broken. But what is it that calls forth that animistic imagination, unless it is a distant form of respect for functional identity itself, a condition we share with all entities? I do not mention these possible consequences of my of argument in order to insist on them, but only to affirm that if someone thinks this follows I wouldn’t regard that as a reduction to absurdity. Perhaps we should treat every kind of thing in accordance with its nature, in accordance with the kinds of good and bads to which it is subject.” (p.33)