The Great (Nameless) Debate

March 31, 2009 2:42 PM

I am currently writing a paper on where to place humankind on the spectrum between God and animals. Is there a commonly-used name for this philosophical topic? Googling around has failed me.

Assuming God exists, place him/her/it on one end of a spectrum (with perfect free will, any and all mental faculties, etc.) and animals on the other (no free will, no capabilities for logic, imagination, etc.). Humans are ostensibly somewhere in between.

Is there a name for this question/topic that is commonly used in the realm of philosophy? I'm looking to do some research into previous thinking on this subject.

posted by aheckler to religion & philosophy (25 comments total)

So, I think this topic has been rendered obsolete by growth in scientific knowledge and general good sense. I mean, I don't think it's a good topic.

However, it was once a popular subject of scholastic bull sessions. I believe a key concept is The Great Chain of Being.
posted by grobstein at 2:47 PM on March 31 [3 favorites]

Cosmology?

Angelic Hierarchy?

Great Chain of Being?
posted by Roach at 2:48 PM on March 31 [1 favorite]

Ya, great chain of being is what you're looking for.
posted by Midnight Rambler at 2:49 PM on March 31

You might also like Aquinas's argument that humans have free will and animals don't: prepare two equally good bowls of food. Set them down in front of a human, and the human will choose one and take it. But set them in front of an animal -- say a dog -- AND THE ANIMAL WILL BE PARALYZED BY INDECISION, HAVING NO BASIS TO TAKE ONE BOWL OVER THE OTHER! Quod erat demonstrandum; I think I'll tackle the nature of law next; God, I'm on a roll.

(You might call this the dawn of experimental philosophy.)
posted by grobstein at 2:50 PM on March 31

I don't think it's a good topic.

I agree, but unfortunately I have no choice in the matter.

Maybe a better way of putting my problem is: the topic is essentially "Between animals and God, which are humans more similar to?" I was hoping to find some previous philosophic discussion about this...
posted by aheckler at 2:53 PM on March 31

n-thing the Great Chain of Being, with reference to its origins in Neoplatonism, particularly Plotinus.
posted by valkyryn at 2:54 PM on March 31

Ugh, sorry my friend. Don't ignore the post-Darwinian evidence that humans are just another kind of animal, whose supposedly special faculties really just extend the capacities of chimpanzees.
posted by grobstein at 2:59 PM on March 31 [1 favorite]

If you are looking for a quote, Terry Pratchett defined humanity as occupying the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
posted by jenkinsEar at 3:04 PM on March 31 [3 favorites]

Well, there's "angelology" (which, although it sounds like a contemporary made-up word, is not), the study of angels, which got pretty complicated.

See also:

Beast, bird, fish, insect, — what our eye can see,
No glass can reach ; from Infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing. On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leaves a void,
Where one step broken, the great scales, destroyed
From nature's chain, whatever link you strike,
Tenth, or tenth thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

                                                   — Essay on Man, Alexander Pope
posted by XMLicious at 3:09 PM on March 31

Here's a twist... religions/cultures where animals are God. Hmmmm.
posted by ecorrocio at 3:21 PM on March 31

You will not find a philosophy topic on this, as philosophy rarely touches god. There are odd thought experiments relating to the divine, and the obvious question of "Does a god exist?", but in standard philosophy, bringing up some divine power is akin to shutting down the debate - "Why is it wrong to kill?", "Because god said so"... ugh
posted by phrakture at 3:25 PM on March 31

I don't know the answer to your question. But for the heck of it, I would point you to Rilke's Duino Elegies. In a way, he is attempting to address your paper topic in his poem. Interestingly, he suggests that animals are closer in kind to angels than humans are.
posted by kitcat at 3:31 PM on March 31

David Hume: "The reason of animals" (Section 16iii, p.83 - Treatise on Human Nature)

Also Leibniz' Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason:
5. The perceptions of ·non-human· animals are interconnected in a way that has some resemblance to reason. But ·it differs from reason because· it is grounded only in the memory of facts or effects, and not at all in the knowledge of causes. That is what happens when a dog shrinks from the stick with which it has been beaten because memory represents to it the pain the stick has caused. In fact human beings, to the extent that they are empirics - which is to say in three quarters of what they do - act just like non-human animals. [An ‘empiric’ is someone who goes by obvious superficial regularities and similarities without asking ‘Why?’ about any of them.] For example, we expect there to be daylight tomorrow because we have always experienced it that way; only an astronomer foresees it in a reasoned way (and even his prediction will prove wrong some day, when the cause of daylight goes out of existence). But genuine reasoning depends on necessary or eternal truths like those of logic, arithmetic and geometry, which make indubitable connections between ideas and reach conclusions that can’t fail to be true. Animals that never think of such propositions are called ‘brutes’; but ones that recognise such necessary truths are rightly called rational animals, and their souls are called minds. These souls are capable of reflective acts - ·acts of attention to their own inner states· - so that they can think about what we call ‘myself’, substance, soul, or mind: in a word, things and truths that are immaterial. This is what renders us capable of science, or of demonstrable knowledge.
posted by ageispolis at 3:34 PM on March 31 [1 favorite]

The closest I can think of is teleology but, yeah, do you want to approach this from a Western/modern science perspective or a theological perspective?
posted by porpoise at 3:41 PM on March 31

Note that ageispolis' comment was really THE answer, but it did help, thus the best answer marking.
posted by aheckler at 3:45 PM on March 31

Also, if it matters, contemporary philosophy is challenging the "R"eason of humans in the field of ethics, specifically the rights of animals. Peter Singer would be a good alternative perspective from the Early Moderns.
posted by ageispolis at 3:51 PM on March 31

Check out this link. It might give you some leads on thinkers to investigate.
posted by kitcat at 3:53 PM on March 31

I think you've overlooked Roach's and Midnight Rambler's answers, because it's as correct as anything that I know of (which I'm not saying means much, but, hey...). The great chain of being.

You could've found that link yourself, of course, but I really wanted to put up a link to the image they have on that site. As well as this one, which is the one that I was always given on a handout whenever the concept was discussed in college classes. You can see countless images like that, where you see God up at the top, Man somewhere in the middle, and the material world (including animals) down at the bottom.
posted by Ms. Saint at 4:11 PM on March 31

humans are just another kind of animal, whose supposedly special faculties really just extend the capacities of chimpanzees.

This is a controversial assertion, especially as regards human language. Some thinkers like Chomsky assert that no non-human animals have anything like discursive grammar or recursive syntax, and therefore have nothing even remotely like human language. Others argue that non-human animals do have language. Why this matters to the topic at hand is that language may (may) be seen as that which gives humans access--through science, mathematics, and logic--to a transcendental realm of a priori truth. I would suggest to the poster to think of language as one area where the debate about the human place in the grand scheme is still very much alive.
posted by ornate insect at 4:15 PM on March 31

I haven't marked "the great chain of being" because it's not quite what I'm getting at, which is probably my fault; it seems I can't explain my problem well enough. Somewhat clearly stated:

Humans are like animals in some ways. We fall prey to our impulses, we have the tendency to fight each other, and so forth. But humans are also like God (or at least what we imagine God is like) because we can use logic, we can imagine future scenarios, we can do things like science, and so on. So the dilemma is whether humans have a larger number of animal-like qualities or a larger number of God-like qualities.

My ideal situation would be to find some philosophers who thought that animals and humans are hardly different at all. Then, I might be able to find some philosophers who think that what separates humans from animals is enough to put us closer to God on this scale.

TGCOB seems to just rank things arbitrarily (even including metals, angels, and so on, way beyond what I'm looking for), which is not quite what I'm looking for, although I'm having a hard time explaining why. Ageispolis' answer was helpful because it showed me how Hume and Leibniz thought of the relationship between humans and animals, which is very much related to my topic.
posted by aheckler at 4:29 PM on March 31

some philosophers who thought that animals and humans are hardly different at all. Then, I might be able to find some philosophers who think that what separates humans from animals is enough to put us closer to God on this scale.

Well there's the question of free will as it applies to ethics: whether humans have an ethical responsibility that does not apply to other animals, because other animals just do as nature compels them to.

One idea is that humans have a potentially greater degree of volitional control, or behavioral choice, than either (to some degree) our simian brethren do, or (to a greater degree) simple life-forms like amoebas do.

Some books to stimulate such a discussion include:
Freedom Evolves by Dennett
The Volitional Brain : Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will , ed. by Freeman, Libet
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary by Ricoeur
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Desire by Midgley
posted by ornate insect at 4:50 PM on March 31

Well,granted, the great chain of being involves entities other than humans, animals, and God... But if you want to understand the historical views relating to man's relationship to animal and God, you will probably be looking into why man is placed where he is, relative to animals and God, on the great chain of being.

Consider, for instance, information available here. For instance, it explains how neoplatonists developed their conception of man's place, relative to God and animals: The Great Chain of Being, then, is seen as a chain of emanation. The One is at the top and so all being flows downward from the One. Below the One, then, are the spiritual beings of Ideas, rational human beings, sensible animals, living plants, and finally inanimate things (which merely exist). Human beings hold a particularly interesting place in this perspective since they exist at once in both the immaterial and material realms. The more humans turn downward and absorb themselves in material things, the more they turn away from the good and become evil. In contrast, the more humans turn upward to the intelligible realm and the Good, the more being or goodness they possess.

Or, about how the Scholastics developed the idea of man's placement: Since humans participate in both the earthly and spiritual realms, their movement through life is considered to be a journey toward God. The temptations of the earthly or mortal flesh lead to evil, whereas the contemplation of things divine lead to transcendence of the spirit. Thus, the struggle between flesh and spirit becomes a specifically moral one. The way of the spirit lifts one up toward God, while the desires of the flesh sink one into the privations of evil.

...And so on and so forth.

The great chain of being is an old idea, and the placement of each type of being on the chain has a lot to do with Christian ideology (very little philosophy done in Europe at the time didn't). But, all the same, you can see reasons being given for how and why man is more or less like God and the higher entities in the chain.

I don't really know that much about the great chain of being, even considering the extent to which I'm cheerleading for it in this thread. However, I do know enough to know that you won't be able to understand the philosophic history of the debate about humanity's placement in the world unless you look up the theorizing done by Augustine, Aquinas, and so forth, about where men were along the chain.

This is a very, very old subject, like I've said. I think a lot of people in this thread have given you some good advice about how to get contemporary opinions about how humans relate to animals.. But you're going to have to go back in time quite a ways, to when the great chain of being was being considered and debated, to understand what the question about man's relationship to God and animal is.

....And, uh, in conclusion, that's why I'm still supporting the claim that what you're talking about is the great chain of being. Thank you, sorry for rambling.
posted by Ms. Saint at 6:52 PM on March 31

You will not find a philosophy topic on this, as philosophy rarely touches god.

well, except that whole 2500 year old history part of it. But that stuff's old, I guess...

Martin Buber? He discusses different modes of consciousness and interaction, famously the "I-Thou" and "I-It" relationships. Dialogue with another person is on an equal footing, with an animal is essentially just a monologue, while with God is seen as foundational for other relationship but never a direct relationship itself...

But in general, a lot of philosophers followed the basic Greek lead that Plato introduced of the hierarchy of the soul - that there are the appetitive, passionate, and rational elements of the human psyche. Animals were usually considered only to have the appetitive level, though some may argue for basic emotions; God was considered to be purely rational.

The struggle of the human being, dealing with having appetites, emotions and reason, is the fundamental focus of a pretty enormous portion of western ethical philosophy - Augustine and Kant leap to mind, but it is the standard way of approaching the question even for those rejecting it (ie, Hume says emotions are what move us, and reason has no causal power, but he still thinks in terms of these categories).
posted by mdn at 9:44 PM on March 31

I took more than a couple philosophy classes during undergrad, and I have to say that when confronted with a question such as this, the most effective tack for me to take was to argue against the premises of the question.

Man is an animal by any reasonable definition. God need not exist for man to be sui generis; any philosophical conception of God is post-Platonic, and thus is best dealt with as a series of attributes. Given that, is man closer to a series of abstract attributes or the definitively real classification as animal (not vegetable, not mineral).

It's a little bit like asking whether a dolphin is closer to a mammal or a fish, e.g. the type of stupid Aristotelian logic that relies on semantic confusion. The only way that this question deserves a legitimate response is if what your prof was really asking was for you to compare and contrast different ancient philosophers' takes on man's relative bestiality (or if you're at a religious school, where God has to be assumed and you bear the horrible weight of millennia of dodgy theology passed off as legitimate philosophy).

I don't guarantee you that attacking the question will get you a good grade—you're the best judge of your prof here—but this certainly seems like a decent candidate for refusing to be done under by blinkered assumptions written into an exam, and most of my philosophy classes were graded on how well you knew the texts you were taught and how well you supported your thesis.
posted by klangklangston at 10:22 PM on March 31

Though you'll want to be less sloppy than I was there—The "Given that…" should end with a "?" and I meant i.e. rather than e.g.
posted by klangklangston at 10:25 PM on March 31