Not Alone on the Third Plateau

It is of course essential to disclose passively accepted beliefs that inhabit and shape the roots and edges of American philosophy if the scope of our tradition is to continue to evolve to meet situations that seldom fit neatly into inherited categories. Our dialogue with Roger Fouts is an occasion for supplementing and correcting uncritical perpetuation of narrowly (vs. broadly) humanistic intellectual habits. His lecture is also an occasion for confronting complex issues of how best to comport ourselves toward other species.

With notable exceptions such as McKenna and Light’s Animal Pragmatism and the work of Paul Thompson, scholars working in the American grain have taken a back seat to utilitarian and Kantian philosophers in responding to the profound impact of human practices on other species and rising concern about animal use and treatment. Due to this relative neglect, the debate has been more anemic than it might have been. Yet despite this neglect by Americanists, it is no longer possible for philosophers simply to pre-suppose that our second-order desires outrank the first-order needs of other animals. Despite the troublesome assumption of utilitarians and Kantians that there is a single right way to reason about morals and a single uppermost factor in moral situations, Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and others have highlighted that our prejudices toward other animals are premised on a metaphysical or ethical caste system, not ethical reflection.

Fouts’s work has found its way into many of my own courses, ranging from environmental ethics to introductory philosophy. At first blush this may appear something of a stretch. To see the philosophical fit, consider the oft-quoted dictum stemming from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work on totemism: animals are good not only to eat (bonnes à manger), but to think with (bonnes à penser). This phrasing obviously lacks universal appeal, but it is true that the study of animals has a broad humanistic bearing on how we understand ourselves and on what policies we will endorse in relation to nonhuman nature. Revealingly, the subtitle of the first edition of Fouts’s book Next of Kin was “What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are.” Attention to other animals can disclose aspects of culture that implicate abiding human interests. But these aspects of culture remain inconspicuous if we confine scholarly attention solely to humans.

We are, for example, mostly unaware of the customs that possess us, and as Dewey observes, this makes it difficult intelligently to evaluate and reconstruct customs in light of circumstances. Instead, the tendency is to champion routine customs in blind conformity or to dismiss them in reactionary defiance. This aptly characterizes several decades of academic discourse about the appropriate relationship between humans and other animals. Fouts’s work on chimpanzee and human communication is in this respect richly humanistic, as it enables us to own and appraise social habits.

The persistent attempt in ethics to exclude nonhumans from moral consideration has lost its intellectual credibility, although prevailing intellectual habits still give a bye to dismissive attitudes. Shining Fouts’s spotlight on the classical pragmatist tradition, one would naturally assume that the Darwinian continuity model elaborated in classical pragmatism via Peirceian synechism would sparkle on the subject of human-animal continuity. It arguably does shine to some degree in Peirce (see Anderson), and Dewey throughout his mature philosophy strives “to connect the higher and ideal things of experience with basic vital roots” (Art as Experience 26). In the first chapter of Art as Experience, for example, Dewey celebrates with verve, our continuity with animals. He writes:

To grasp the sources of esthetic experience it is, therefore, necessary to have recourse to animal life below [sic] the human scale. The activities of the fox, the dog, and the thrush may at least stand as reminders and symbols of that unity of experience which we so fractionize when work is labor, and thought withdraws us from the world. The live animal is fully present, all there, in all of its actions: in its wary glances, its sharp sniffings, its abrupt cocking of ears. All senses are equally on the qui vive.

(24)

The...