The Animal Inside

Essays at the Intersection of Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies

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

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783488216
• eBook ISBN: 9781783488223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

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.

Part I

General Explorations of Human and Animal Nature

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 nonhumanity, similarity and difference, purity and pollution, body and soul, pleasure and sociability. This is why food is a privileged object of anthropology.1 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.2

Jean-Pierre Vernant applied structural analysis to the Prometheus episode in Hesiod’s Theogony.3 Prometheus cuts up an ox and offers its ostea leuka, its “white bones,” wrapped in fat, to Zeus.4 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.5

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...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Introduction: Exploring the Fluid Boundaries between Animals and Humans
• Part I: General Explorations of Human and Animal Nature
• Part II: Aspects of Human and Animal Nature
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors