The Animal Inside: Essays at the Intersection of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies - Couverture rigide

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1783488212 ISBN 13 : 9781783488216

Editeur : Rowman & Littlefield, 2016

Synopsis

Much has been written about animals in applied ethics, environmental ethics, and animal rights. This book takes a new turn, offering an examination of the 'animal question' from a more fundamental, philosophical-anthropological perspective. The contributors in this important volume focus on how the animal has appeared and can be used in philosophical argumentation as a metaphor or reference point that helps us understand what is distinctively human and what is not. A recurring theme in the essays is the existence of a zone of ambiguity between animals and humans, which puts into question comfortable assumptions about the uniqueness and superiority of human nature.

While the chapters straddle the boundaries of historical-philosophical and systematic, continental and analytic approaches, their thematic unity knits them together, presenting a rich, broad, and yet cohesive perspective. The first part of the book offers general explorations of the relation between animal and human nature, and of the concomitant existential and ethical dimensions of this relationship. The chapters in the second part address the same theme, but, in so doing, focus on specific aspects of animal and human nature: imagination, politics, history, sense, finitude, and science.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Geoffrey Dierckxsens obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Antwerp.

Rudmer Bijlsma is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa.

Michael Begun is a graduate student in philosophy at Fordham University.

Thomas Kiefer is a graduate student in philosophy at Fordham University.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

The Animal Inside

Essays at the Intersection of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies

By Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun, Thomas Kiefer

Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun and Thomas Kiefer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-821-6

Contents

Introduction: Exploring the Fluid Boundaries between Animals and Humans Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun, and Thomas Kiefer, 
Part I: General Explorations of Human and Animal Nature, 
1 Promethean Tricks and Thyestean Feasts: Bloody Sacrifice and Vegetarianism in Ancient Cultures Giulia Sissa, 
2 Kata Phusin: Ancient and Contemporary Perspectives on the Hermeneutic of Animality Thomas Kiefer, 
3 The Animal in Early Modern Philosophical Anthropology Rudmer Bijlsma, 
4 "An Insect Fallen on Its Back": Animal Imagery in the Work of Jean-Paul Sartre Jo Bogaerts, 
5 What Is Distinctively Human? Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre on the Relation between Humans and Animals Michiel Meijer and Rob Compaijen, 
6 Better a Human Than a Lion (!?) Age-old Human Superiority Fights Reason Lantz Fleming Miller, 
Part II: Aspects of Human and Animal Nature, 
7 The Imagination of Animals: Rilke, Kafka, and the Philosophy and Literature of Embodied Cognition Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, 
8 Werewolves: A Reconsideration of Hobbes's State of Nature from the Perspective of Biopolitics Herbert De Vriese, 
9 "The Genuine Problem of the Human Being": Nietzsche, Animality, and History Michael Begun, 
10 The Hermeneutical Animal: Making Sense of Animal Otherness "in the Flesh" Geoffrey Dierckxsens, 
11 Being-toward-Meat: An Analytic of Human-Animal Finitude Matthew Calarco, 
12 On Laboratory Life for a Wired Object: Mirror Neurons and the New Red Peter Babette Babich, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Promethean Tricks and Thyestean Feasts

Bloody Sacrifice and Vegetarianism in Ancient Cultures

Giulia Sissa

In the cultures of the Greco-Roman world, human and nonhuman beings live in symbiosis. Cohabitation also means exploitation and violence. Domestic animals are partners in the household and on the battlefield. They are victims of ritualized immolation. They are treated as food. Wild animals are hunted. The same cultures, however, generate a meditation on the taxonomic contiguity of all living beings, in particular on the kinship of nonhuman and human animals. Theories of metempsychosis and fictions of metamorphosis make us believe in a unified nature, where humans share life and sentiency with many other creatures. This is also an uncertain universe. One can never know how a transformed human self may look like. Meat-eating might result inadvertently in cannibalism.

Sacrifice and vegetarianism are two extreme aspects of this culturally significant, and philosophically disquieting, togetherness. Habits of nutrition are always based on general premises about divinity, humanity and non-humanity, similarity and difference, purity and pollution, body and soul, pleasure and sociability. This is why food is a privileged object of anthropology. To understand food is to understand, on the one hand, the guiding ideas incorporated in rituals and social practices and, on the other, the critical questioning of killing and ingesting living beings that are comparable, analogous, and yet unequal vis-à-vis us. This chapter will discuss the anthropological meaning of animal sacrifice, in the narrative thinking of archaic Greek poetry, namely the epics of Hesiod and Homer, and the radical challenge to the rationale of sacrifice, to be found in Pythagoras's philosophy of daily life. Vegetarianism offers an explicit normative response to the euphoric and reassuring validation of a bloody diet.

RED MEAT AND WHITE BONES

In Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis, myths tell of transformations. Their intricate plots narrate alterations, metamorphoses, and the origin of things. They do so through a colorful casting of typical characters. Across cultures, mythologies recount preposterous vicissitudes that involve divinities, craftsmen, tricksters, women, witches, plants, stars, and, above all, animals. Because of their disparate anatomies and distinctive behaviors, animals are especially "good to think with." But this is just the surface. Adventurous twists and turns, Lévi-Strauss argues, convey an interplay of logical oppositions. These polarities take shape in peculiar, embodied, and very concrete figures, and manifest themselves sequentially – in narrative form. To make sense of a narrative, therefore, we have to grasp the diametrically opposed ideas that underpin the storyline. One recurrent dichotomy pits chaos against taxonomy; states of excessive "conjunction," in which things are mixed up and confused, against states of extreme "disjunction," in which confusion yields to discordance. This basic contrast generates multiple stories in which one state changes into the other, more precisely in which the earliest condition of the universe undergoes a process of differentiation, through separations, generations, foundations, and inventions. These stories usually end with the discovery of what Lévi-Strauss calls "bonne distance," a "good distance," which lies between abusive propinquity and excessive remoteness.

Jean-Pierre Vernant applied structural analysis to the Prometheus episode in Hesiod's Theogony. Prometheus cuts up an ox and offers its ostea leuka, its "white bones," wrapped in fat, to Zeus. This provocative trick inaugurates a separation between Mortals and Immortals, which will be complete with the fabrication of Woman. After Prometheus's prank, the poem adds, the tribes of men now burn ostea leuka to the gods. If this etiological explanation is true, then any sacrifice consists in carving up the body of an animal and separating the edible, meaty parts from the unpalatable bones, in order to burn the latter to the gods and to roast and distribute the former among the humans in attendance at the ceremony. The rite allegedly reenacts the fatal divorce of the human world from the divine. The Olympians inhale the smoke of burning bones; the Mortals chew/swallow/digest red meat – hence the differential butchering of a sacrificial victim, the distribution and specific handling of its parts. Hesiod's narrative of Prometheus's mischief in the Theogony, accompanied by its final etiological gloss, provides the textual foundation for a clear-cut dichotomy.

To start, let us read the Theogony, 535–558.

There is a krisis:

For when the gods and mortal men had a dispute at Mecone, even then Prometheus was forward to cut up a great ox and set portions before them, trying to deceive the mind of Zeus. Before the rest he set flesh and inner parts thick with fat upon the hide, hiding them with an ox paunch; but for Zeus he set the white bones dressed up with cunning art and hidden under shining fat.

Zeus responds:

Then the father of men and of gods said to him: "Son of Iapetus, most glorious of all lords, good sir, how unfairly you have divided the portions!"

Prometheus, in turn, replies:

But wily Prometheus answered him, smiling softly and not forgetting his cunning trick: "Zeus, most glorious and greatest of the eternal gods, take which ever of these portions your heart within you bids." So he said, thinking trickery.

Zeus is game. But

Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw and failed not to perceive the trick, and in his heart he thought mischief against mortal men which also was to be fulfilled. With both hands he took up the white fat and was angry at heart, and wrath came to his spirit when he saw the white bones craftily tricked out: and because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars.

In Vernant's reading of the Theogony, once upon a time, gods and humans used to live together and eat the same food. This temporal presupposition is essential: the poet casts his story against the background of a past of commensality and closeness. Then something happened. They started to diverge in their diet and their entire life. They began to make their own way in one instant, when one of the gods, Zeus's own cousin, Prometheus, took the initiative of distributing among Mortals and Immortals different parts of the same ox. Prometheus carves up the animal, then builds two heaps of food: on one side he places the meat and the inner parts, "thick of fat" (but buried under the skin and the stomach), whereas on the other side, he piles up the bare bones under a coat of fat. This division challenges Zeus. The two mounds of food create a false impression. On the one hand, what seems inedible, the hide and the gaster, covers up edible flesh. On the other, a layer of lard, instead of coating meat, is used to conceal naked bones. Prometheus invites Zeus to choose. The god is not duped. But although he can see that the wrapping is deceptive, he nevertheless lifts the greasy covering to reveal the white bones beneath. Seized with wrath, he deprives human kind of fire. When, in response, Prometheus steals fire on behalf of the miserable mortals, Zeus orders the fabrication of a "beautiful evil," kalon kakon, Woman. It is Woman who, in the end, brings about the separation of the anthropoi. Now a gendered, male humanity has to work to nourish the idle female "drones" living in the house. The manufacture of the first woman acts as an anthropogony.

Sexual difference and marriage make humans properly human, that is, distinct from the gods, and living by themselves. A separation is now accomplished. Thanks to the offering of a special food to the gods (white bones), whereas men enjoy what they like (red meat), sacrifice would seem to have brought about a peaceful conciliation of the two groups. Prometheus, the trickster, performs a successful transition from indistinct commensality to open hostility and, ultimately, to compromise. Sacrifice creates "good distance." Animals are protagonists, therefore, in a ritual that constantly reenacts the ordering of the world. Beasts, humans, and gods inhabit a common universe, but within it they play different roles.

While this interpretation seems to provide a reasonable commentary on the Theogony, it proves misleading, both in its application of structural analysis and as an interpretation of Greek sacrifice.

HESIODIC DISJUNCTION

In Hesiod's narrative, the ritualized repetition of Prometheus's gesture endlessly reactivates the offense and the hoax. Sacrifice then is supposed to celebrate the disjunction of humans and gods. The anatomy of the victim allows for the establishment of differences: certain tissues, namely bones and fat, will go to the gods; meat will be allotted exclusively to humans. Sacrifice defines the anthropos, in opposition to the divine and, also, in contrast with the animal. An apparently banal religious routine has a fundamental anthropological meaning.

This exemplifies neatly the logic of what Lévi-Strauss calls "pensée mythique," narrative thinking. Storytelling explores possibilities and puts them in a temporal sequence oriented toward the present, in order to make sense of an actual practice. Between too much conjunction and too much disjunction, it is better to find a "mediation." In this case it is sacrifice that mediates the relation of Mortals and Immortals. There is, however, a problem. Through sacrifice, the tribes of men keep luring the gods to accept an unfair division of the victim. To smuggle bare bones disguised in lard, in lieu of juicy steak, is to awake the memory of Prometheus's first move: the trick itself. Burning bones is the equivalent of cheating Zeus. This is not a final "good distance," therefore, but the opening of hostilities. This initiated the turn of events that led to the invention of Woman. In addition to feeding their wives, men have now to perform Prometheus's butchery over and over again. The tribes of men upon earth burn "white bones," ostea leuka, on fragrant altars.

According to Vernant, these two lines of the Theogony provide the key to Greek sacrifice. For him, Hesiod was the theologian of ancient culture. Hesiod describes the passage from a state of conjunction to a state of disjunction between Mortals and Immortals, a transition that, as I mentioned, Claude Lévi-Strauss finds in a great number of myths. In his reading of Hesiod, Vernant relies precisely on this one idea of structural analysis: mythology tells the progressive differentiation of the world. The contrast between wretched Mortals and blessed Olympians is the final outcome of a process, the inversion of a prior symbiosis into a hyper-differentiated taxonomy.

Properly understood, however, structural analysis does not deal with a single version of a story, nor even with a single story. Lévi-Strauss's method is all about transformations – the transformations of what happens within a myth, but above all the constant transformations of the myths themselves into multiple versions, through new variants. For Lévi-Strauss the process of transformation links myths that at face value do not involve either the same characters or even the same events. Iteration/variation is actually the link. The work of pensée mythique is to reelaborate a story by replacing its elements with new components, often the opposite of what is being replaced. The result is then a reversal that disfigures the antecedent narrative, but must be understood as a variant of that narrative. The last pages of L'Homme nu (The Naked Man) are extremely illuminating of this activity of permutation and recomposition. And nothing prevents us from applying this method to ancient literature, be it archaic poetry or tragedy.

We should do so, precisely, with the etiological account of sacrifice in the Theogony. We should suspend our belief about its general validity. We should compare it with the scenes of sacrifice that abound in the Iliad and the Odyssey. This intertextual exercise does justice to narrative thinking and shows the specific strategy of Hesiod's variant. What is at stake is, after all, no small matter, but the very nature of the gods themselves – what makes them so real – and the place of nonhuman animals in the world. The basic, oversimplified, ungenerous (Hesiodic in a word) interpretation of sacrifice implies that the gods need a special kind of food: food that is dematerialized, disembodied, noncarnal so to speak, in its very texture. I will argue that the other Greek theologos recognized by Herodotus, Homer, could not possibly agree.

In the Theogony, "sacrifice" (thysia) is the mimesis of Prometheus's insulting challenge to Zeus, from which the disaster of human dereliction unfolds. Sacrifice does not commemorate a moment of conclusive reconciliation, as I mentioned, but the beginning of a quarrel that triggers Zeus's wrath toward human kind. By imitating Prometheus, all that men would do is to arouse the ire of the gods. By burning over and over again only bones in disguise, they would repeatedly insult their pride. Firstly, there can be no reverence, in reserving a pile of garbage for a divinity. Secondly, each sacrifice would attempt to deceive the very deity to whom it is offered. Thirdly, sacrifice would cause offense. Now, this has nothing to do with what actually happens in the Homeric poems. We cannot import into Homer's world the idea that to perform a thysia means to reenact an outrage and a deception, thus to repeat a provocation of divine anger. Homeric sacrifices are always contextualized as attempts to please, to appease, and to pacify the Olympians. The gods judge the value of a hero in function of his generosity. The intention to honor a divinity is expressed in the value of what is being offered. The poem highlights the visible excellence of the victims, especially their magnificent flesh.

HOMERIC SACRIFICE

Is it the case, outside Hesiod, that a thysia entails the offer of bare bones to the gods? In order to test such a claim, the first place to go is of course "Homer," whose poems abound in scenes of sacrifice. In the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Hymns, we find what may seem at first sight to be a confirmation: when the sacrificers prepare the animals for the ritual, they cut out (ektemnein) the meria, in order to burn them on the altars. Meria may mean "thighbones." Fair enough. More surgically fastidious than Hesiod in the Theogony, Homer details the anatomy of the victims. The tribes of men, so it seems, offer to the gods not just a bunch of white bones taken from the entire carcass, but, more precisely, femora. Unfortunately, however, we have a problem: meria can mean not only the bone, but also the upper part of a leg, including the flesh. This lexical uncertainty complicates our understanding of Homeric sacrifice. Whereas two lines in conclusion of Prometheus's story in the Theogony allow for the delineation of a structure, there are dozens of verses, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, which intimate something very different. The gods receive massive pieces of meat, entire rumps actually – and they enjoy them a lot, in proportion to their quantity. Meat versus bone is not the master binary opposition, which organizes the anthropology/theology of archaic ritual. The bone is not naked.

In a sense, this structural theory of sacrifice has been so overtaken by particular studies, and so thoroughly criticized already, that it might seem redundant to return to this particular question. More to the point, I have already discussed elsewhere the problems of divine food and the theology that it presupposes. I argued, firstly, that the narrative logic of the Theogony presupposes that Zeus would have preferred the meaty part in the first place. If not, Prometheus's unfair carving would not be a trick. Zeus goes for that part – the one that looks promising, because fat usually covers meat. When he lifts the "gleaming fat" that conceals the bare bones, he feels disappointed, slighted, and furious. Why would the trick be offensive? Why would Zeus become angry? Zeus's anger at Prometheus, cholos, is the motif that frames the entire episode. Secondly, I pointed out the addition of pieces of raw meat, omothetein, to the portion burned to the gods, in Homeric sacrifices. This textual evidence has now been taken up and further developed by Louise Bruit. Thirdly, I questioned the equivalence, which Jean-Pierre Vernant takes for granted, between the "white bones" of the Theogony and the meria or meroi burned to the gods, in Homer. These can be either thighbones or, on the contrary, thighs – the whole big, fleshy, and fat thing.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Animal Inside by Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun, Thomas Kiefer. Copyright © 2017 Geoffrey Dierckxsens, Rudmer Bijlsma, Michael Begun and Thomas Kiefer. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Rowman & Littlefield
• Date d'édition: 2016
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1783488212
• ISBN 13: 9781783488216
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 250
• Éditeur: Dierckxsens Geoffrey, Bijlsma Rudmer, Begun Michael, Kiefer Thomas
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne