Do chimpanzees (or gorillas or dolphins or whales) have minds or selves? Are they people? Is having a mind equivalent to having a self? Can a chimpanzee (or a gorilla or a whale) be considered a person? What are we to make of the title Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Morton 2017)? Concepts such as mind, self, person are those that are difficult to break down into more fundamental ideas without circularity or tautology, yet which represent indispensable points of reference. They are termed here bedrock concepts (Hutton 2017b). Bedrock concepts are both the tool of reasoning and the object of definitional inquiry. They are both for thinking with and thinking about, and as a consequence are in general ‘essentially contested’ (Merrill 1998: 143). Bedrock or primitive categories are not necessarily indivisible or ‘simple’ (Ishiguro 1980: 65–66), but their status in this respect is problematic. It is much simpler – though still challenging – to offer decontextual definitions for mundane objects and functional institutions (table, spectacles, nuclear power station, police station) than for bedrock concepts which are implicated in fundamental ethical or philosophical debates.
Bedrock categories can be conveniently divided into heuristic classes: for example basic ontological categories, thing, being, object, entity, and idea, with their correlates, such as to be or to exist; basic existential categories, such as human being, animal, man, and woman; fundamental biosocial roles, parent, mother, father, and child; socially defined roles, such as husband, wife, citizen, and employee; mixed sociolegal concepts, notably family, property, ownership, authority, and agency; as well as the more straightforwardly legal bedrock concepts, jurisdiction and sovereignty. Many bedrock concepts express ontological, epistemological, moral, or analytical oppositions: concrete and abstract, self and other, body and soul, truth and falsity, fact and fiction, living and dead, good and evil, right and wrong, and same and different. Concepts related to the senses should also be included, such as basic categories of taste: sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami. The concepts of person, personhood, and personality are entangled with self (or selfhood), identity, autonomy, individuality, and many others. Human beings are of course an animal species. Kemmerer (2006: 10–11) suggests a neologism, anymal, to refer to animals excluding Homo sapiens. The Great Chain of Being schema, which underlies many of our ontological categories, envisages these within a comprehensive hierarchy of relative autonomy (Lovejoy [1936] 1964), from the absolute autonomy of God to the relative autonomy or bounded free-will of the human being, down through the animals to the relative passivity of the plant, and the absolute passivity of the rock. One source of this schema was Aristotle’s Historia Animalium ([350 BCE] 1910: 588):
Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie.
Typically, intellectual questions about categories involve slippage between two distinct modes, namely real versus verbal or nominal definition (Mill 1843: 182–204, Harris and Hutton 2007: 37–58, Toolan 2009). Real definition characterizes an entity or a category in its essence, in terms of its primary or most significant characteristics. Verbal definition concerns word meaning or conceptual content. A real definition of chimpanzee might primarily invoke biological and taxonomic criteria but could also consider social organization, physical appearance, habitat, and a host of other details. However, this open-endedness means that the key characteristics for the purpose of comparison cannot emerge inductively. A verbal or nominal approach would focus on the meanings of keywords such as animal, primate, chimpanzee, human being and the resulting definition would depend on the sources chosen or the patterns of usage identified. C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) applied the real/verbal distinction in his entry on life in Studies in Words (1967: 269): ‘It is for biologists and philosophers to discuss “what life is”; we have the less ambitious task of examining what people mean by the word life, or, more strictly, some of the different things they may mean’. From one point of view, it is odd to think that any substantive question could be solved by investigating the meanings of words alone. As Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) wrote in the preface to his dictionary (1766: para. 17):
I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.
To ask whether a chimpanzee is or could be a person is apparently a question about classes of entity, not the meanings of words. For example, a table is not plausibly to be seen as a person, but this is not directly apparent from the standard definitions of the words table and human being. If we turn our attention to the world of things, the disjunction between these two classes of entity, it might be argued, is evident. Yet it is hard to see much essential difference between asking how biologists understand the nature of life and analysing how biologists define and use the word life in specialist discourse. For any bedrock concept, the claim can be made that we are dealing with mere words, rather than any well- defined real entity: ‘consciousness is not a thing, a place, or a cognitive process (whatever that is): it’s only a word that we use in a variety of ways’ (Schlinger 2008: 59).
Harris sees the Western tradition as concerned centrally with ‘the relation between words and what they stand for’ (1980: 33). He distinguishes between reocentric surrogationism, where words are understood to be primarily surrogates for things, and psychocentric surrogationism, where words stand primarily for ideas in the mind (Harris 1980: 44ff.). The tripartite distinction between word, thing, and idea was depicted in Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning as a triangular relation between symbol, thought (or reference), and referent (1923: 11). Surrogationism is rejected by integrationism: the sign ‘integrates, it does not correlate with’ (Wolf 1999: 27). In The Semantics of Science, Harris described Darwin’s theory of evolution as ‘an unprovable and patently metaphysical thesis’, based on careful selection of evidence and linguistic usage (2005: 36). In the same vein, Harris pointed to ‘a deliberate ambivalence between psychocentric and reocentric definition’ in Einstein’s thinking (2005: 139). So-called supercategories (art, science, law, religion, and history) reflect versions of the language myth (2005: xi). Propositions that appear to be about reality are actually embedded in a tangle of linguistic assumptions.
In what follows, key abstract concepts for thinking about animal personhood are analysed: soul, person, self, and nature. Some parts of the discussion are inevitably highly condensed. A full treatment would include a much wider set of interrelated terms, such as body, brain, consciousness, identity, memory, and mind.
The Western tradition moves between the extremes of animism (anthropomorphism) and either ontological idealism (immaterialism) or materialism. Edward Tylor (1832–1917) saw what he termed animism as the basis of all the religions of mankind. It involved belief in the ‘souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after the death or destruction of the body’ and ‘in other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful deities’ (1920: 426). Like many key concepts in the Western tradition, the modern notion of soul has its roots in classical antiquity. In Presocratic philosophy, an anthropomorphic model of the cosmos gave way to investigation into the grounds of being, notions of constancy and change, and the nature of the soul (Torchia 2008: 17–38). Plato’s tripartite division of the soul or psychē into the rational, spirited, and desiring parts was a mirror of social organization (Ferrari 2005, Fukuyama 2018). In Aristotle’s De Anima (c. 350 BCE), a series of fundamental questions are posed (Charlton 1980: 170):
(1) To what logical kind of thing does soul belong? Does ‘soul’ signify a particular individual and a substance, or does it rather express a quality amount or the like? […] (2) Is a soul a thing which exists in dunamis [potentiality] or rather a kind of entelecheia [actuality] (3) Is a soul a thing with parts? […] (4) Is all soul the same in kind or are there different souls, the soul of a horse, the soul of a dog, the soul of a man, and so on? […]
If one substituted mind for soul here, these questions arise in much the same way today. In scholarship on classical ideas of the soul, two basic views are distinguished: an instrumental one, in which ‘the body serves the soul as instrument’ and a hylomorphist one, where ‘soul is form of the body’ (King 2007: 322). Olshewsky sums up the Plato and Aristotle’s views aphoristically as follows (1976: 391): ‘On Plato’s understanding, the soul is in the body; but Aristotle’s account implies that the body is in the soul’.
The first philosophical reflection on the ‘fundamental fact about the human mind that it is present to itself in such a way that it can be an object of its own awareness’ has been attributed to Augustine (354–430) (Dutton 2016: 228). In mainstream Christian thought, the human soul is understood as ‘an immaterial substance, distinct from the body’ (Kagan 2012: 69). Possession of an immortal soul marked human beings out from all other earthly phenomena in the Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy [1936] 1964). The scala naturae itself can be traced back to Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) Historia Animalium (Heijnol 2017: 88). In a long and complex history, a set of contested questions arose in relation to the soul, such as whether and in what sense it was immortal (Duncan 1942, Young 1975), how it interacted with the body in dualist thinkers such as Plato and Descartes (Broadie 2001), whether animals might in some sense have souls (Brown 1998, Thomson 2010), and how non-Western and heretical philosophies should be understood, notably the possibility of reincarnation, or the transmigration of human souls into animals (Smith 1984).
With the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the divide between human beings and non-human animals became a matter of intense contestation. One possibility was that animals were organic machines in contrast to humans who were characterized by mind/body dualism; a second was that humans were like animals in being machines, though of a more sophisticated kind. The materialist philosopher, Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) (La Mettrie [1747] 2003, Stock 2009) argued that neither human beings nor animals had souls in the Christian sense. A third view was that both animals and humans had souls, or at least shared a basic range of feelings (Spencer 2013). The view of animals as biological machines is commonly attributed to René Descartes (1596–1650 and Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) (Harrison 1992, Jolley 2000: 42). Descartes’s view was that animals are soulless automata, that is, they are in essence ‘biological machines without consciousness, who experience neither sensations nor emotions, though appearing to’ (Grayling 2006: 25). The philosopher Mary Midgley ([1979] 1995: xxxii) criticized the persistence of this view: ‘Animals are not machines. […] Actually only machines are machines’. Descartes is the anti-hero of the animal rights movement, a rationalist counterpart to Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), whose hierarchical understanding of creation looked back to Aristotle (see Wade 2004).
While Darwinian evolution left no room for the Christian soul, it also proposed profound affinities between humans and higher animals (Darwin 1872). The term soul remained in scientific use however. The ethologist Eugène Marais (1937) used the terms group psyche or group soul to capture the collective mind of a termite nest. Marais’s Soul of the Ape (1969), published posthumously, was one of the first accounts of primate life based on close observation. Soul in such contexts is an effective synonym for mind. Notions of the soul remain powerfully present in contemporary usage and thinking about human identity. Wittgenstein (1998: 178) evoked the intuitive sense that another human being is not an automaton. This was not a question of belief or opinion: ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’.
Soul is not a term used in mainstream philosophy of mind or naturalistic neuroscience: ‘human capacities or facilities once attributed to the soul are now seen to be functions of the brain’. The brain is now seen as the res cogitans (Murphy 1997: 1) or ‘the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’ (Crick 1995: 3). Yet the complex of issues raised by the mind-body problem, and monadic versus dualistic accounts of how mind relates to body, reflect directly theological anthropology and continuing debates about the body-soul relation (Cooper 2015). Christian anthropology invokes the notion of the soul and personhood to resist the Darwinian naturalistic reduction of humanity to the status of higher animal (White 2013). Contrary to some understandings, Christianity does not necessarily deny embodiment. A notable theological voice on the centrality of human embodiment was Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) (see Dahill 2012).
There is an apparent analogy between dualistic understanding of human beings (mind versus body) and dualistic understandings of language (meaning versus form). Yet Ullmann rejects the idea that the form-meaning relationship is analogous to that between body and soul (1966: 239):
To compare the form of a word to the human body and its meaning to the soul is no more than a metaphor. […] The distinction between form and meaning has nothing to do with metaphysics: it is simply an example of the duality inherent in any kind of sign and symbol. One could argue with just as much cogency that, in traffic lights, the green colour is the ‘body’ of the signal and the meaning: ‘the traffic may proceed’ is its soul.
Yet one need only refer to John 1: 14 to see the mystical analogy at work: ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth’. Pace Ullmann, theoretical approaches that deny the autonomy of mind also reject cognitive or mentalistic models of meaning. Behaviourism and systems theory are obvious examples. Similarly, mentalistic theories of meaning imply a mind/body duality.
