Do We Need Continental Philosophy?: Nonhumans, Ethics, and the Complexity of Reality

The Continental Animal

In his 1929–30 Freiburg lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger considers the distinction between humans and animals. In the view of this extremely influential author, the Western philosophical tradition has been mistaken in defining humans as “rational animals,” as this would suggest that between humans and nonhumans there are differences in degree, while these two “determinations of essence” are separated by “an abyss . . . which cannot be bridged by any mediation whatsoever” (2001, 282). For not only are animals in general world-poor since they are “encircled by a disinhibiting ring” to which the access to other things “as beings” is barred (253ff.), but they have “death neither ahead of [themselves] nor behind [them],” because “only man dies” (1971, 176). Indeed, so great is the gulf Heidegger posits that, when forced to confront those disquieting doubles of ours, the nonhuman apes, he cannot but state that they “have organs that can grasp, but . . . do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence” (1968, 16).

Approximately in the same period, in a series of seminars held in 1935 and 1936 in Paris, Alexandre Kojève, the philosopher who contributed most to project G. W. F. Hegel’s long shadow well into the twentieth century, thus describes the human “I”—“an I essentially different from the animal I”—while expanding on the Master/Slave dialectic:

The very being of this I will be becoming, and the universal form of this being will not be space, but time. Therefore, its continuation in existence will signify for this I: ‘not to be what it is (as static and given being, as natural being, as “‘innate character’”) and to be (that is, to become) what it is not.’ . . . And it is this I, and only this I, that reveals itself to itself and to others as Self-Consciousness.

(Kojève 1980, 5)

In simpler words, the human “I” is allegedly different insofar as it is self-conscious in the sense that its continuation in being takes the form of a becoming in time that is free with respect to nature and generates history. And a few pages later, one can find an even clearer appeal to the conventional dichotomy nature/culture: the Slave’s work, Kojève explains, “creates a real objective World, which is a non-natural World, a cultural, historical, human World. And it is only in this World that man lives an essentially different life from that of animals (and ‘primitive’ man) in the bosom of Nature” (26).

What is one to make of these claims, which, each in its own way, well exemplify the prevailing idea in Continental philosophy that nonhuman “nature” is so different that animals should be merely accorded a zero, or radically lower, degree moral status with respect to human beings—an idea that is traditionally shared, more or less explicitly, by authors as distant from each other as Heidegger and Hegel, but also as René Descartes and Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx and Max Scheler?¹

The first thing to notice is that they are usually grounded in idiosyncratic conceptions of being and “essences”—and, as it has aptly been observed, in the face of such approaches one must recall, and stigmatize, “how often unverifiable metaphysical theses have been made in the name of treating some as naturally less deserving than others” (DeGrazia 1996, 250). Secondly, one can stress that the authors in question, and the schools of thought they belong to, happily embrace a derogative view of nonhuman cognition. Even if not all that is presently known about the members of other species was known when they wrote, their judgments clearly tend to be dogmatic and uninformed. Although it is only recently that we have been offered ample and detailed evidence that many animals are self-conscious, have memories and expectations, make and carry out plans, have moral attitudes, and that many animal societies have sophisticated cultures that generate processes such as cultural group selection...