CHAPTER 1
Aristotle and ZĆa AisthÄtika
The first characteristic of an animal is sensation; for even those which do not move or change their place, but have sensation, we call living creatures.
ARISTOTLE, De anima1
The judgment is in perception.
ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics2
Since Aristotle. If animal studies has an opening gambit, this phrase may be it.3 It was Aristotle, after all, who established the logos/alogosâthe with- or without-logos (speech or reason)âdistinction that so decisively cleaved humans from other animals. Even those who know that the logos/alogos distinction predates Aristotle acknowledge that he did something more emphatic: âWith Aristotle,â as classicist John Heath puts it, âthe link between logos and humans, and the rejection of logos from the non-human, becomes explicit.â4 Usually the âsince Aristotleâ gambit is accompanied by a gesture to the famous passage in the first book of the Politics where Aristotle declares humans to be the animals that have logos (zĆon logon echon).5
That passage may be worth another look, though, especially in conjunction with Aristotleâs writings on other animals, on the soul, and on rhetoric, the artful use of language. Such a survey, as this chapter will show with more detail, helps to draw out a perceptive core of existence shared by all animals. This perceptive core is too often skipped over by scholars of Aristotleâs rhetoric and politics, trained as they are to follow the path of logos.6
But leaving behind the alogosâthe without-logosâas a category, or even presuming that Aristotle did so, comes at a cost. That cost is a more comprehensive, fully fleshed-out theory of rhetoric. The trick is to approach alogos as something other than an absence of logos, to identify in positive terms what takes the place of logos. In other words, the privative work of the alpha (α, a) in alogos neednât make it a deficiency or, as Jacques Derrida formulates it, a withholding.7 Alogos, after all, names a part of the soul for Aristotle, a part that operates without reference to rationality; it is nonrational (as opposed to irrational).8 Alogos may therefore usefully be approached as a capacity or set of capacities. Resources for approaching the term as a capacity or set of capacities rather than a deficiency may be found in texts composed by Aristotle himself and in the capacities exhibited by the nonhuman animals that appear there.
Richard Sorabji, a philosopher long preoccupied with Aristotleâs writings on nonhuman animals, models such an approach when he offers this observation: âIf animals are to be denied reason (logos), and with it belief (doxa), then their perceptual content must be compensatingly expanded, to enable them to find their way around in the world.â9 This perceptual expansion occurs on more than the content level where Sorabji leaves it. In the context of rhetorical theory, nonhuman animals expand into the role of proxy feelers and are often carriers of sensation. In such a view, the implications of which I develop in this chapter, an insistence on nonhuman animalsâ being aloga is as much an attribution as it is a denial or rejection, and this attribution of expansive, and oftentimes intense feeling to nonhuman animals helps account for their constitutive role in the teaching and shaping of rhetorical theory, as chapter 3 on fables will help show. Such constitutive force is not, or not always, as one might surmise, a simple constitutive outsideâthat which helps identify logos-having by precisely and only not having logos. Instead, this constitutive role works through instruction, illustration, and a persistent presumption of cross-species likeness.
Nonhuman animals therefore do the work of sensation, folding back on the logos they have been denied, lending it energetic life through sounds, shapes, textures, and movements. This does not mean they are only or even mere rhetorical objects or figures, but instead means that they infiltrate rhetorical lifeworlds through encounters imaginative and real. In short, in premodern rhetorical theory, and especially in Aristotleâs key and formative texts, nonhuman animals exert a pull. And that pull is toward feeling.
As I will show, nonhuman animals frequently show up in passages where sensation and feeling matter most; Aristotle thereby exploits their ambiguous relation to categories of judgment and thought, but he consistently uses nonhuman animals to display feelings. Sensing, breathing, moving animals can at times embody pure spirit (thumos). They show feelings ranging from pleasure and pain to anger and friendliness. They can be especially confounding for critics when they show up in discussions of cultural economies of honor and shame so crucial for judgment, but less confounding if approached through the category of aisthÄsis, the ancient term for sense perception. For Aristotle, nonhuman animals also act as sensible objects in that they are observable, but they are also simultaneously sensingâon this Aristotle is completely unambiguous. This means that along with sensation, which is decidedly alogos, nonhuman animals often bring life, energy (energeia), to logoi, to speeches, to writings, or to words themselves. Such is the role they play in treatments of rhetorical style. Sensing, feeling animals help to fill out the parts of rhetoric that are alogos, but this does not mean that nonhuman animals remain far removed from the domain of logos. As this chapterâs last section and the next chapter will show, nonhuman animals as lively, energetic, sensible beings inhabit discussions of rhetorical style, filling logos with life.
Nonhuman animals have capacities to be uniquely instructive for political life and for rhetorical theory. Aristotle does not underestimate those capacities, nor should we. To show how this constitutive force plays out, I will begin by reexamining the passage in the Politics that inspires all those âsince Aristotles,â putting it next to passages that draw out a more dynamic and lively version of alogos. I will then follow aloga zĆa into the Rhetoric, showing how a zoocentric approach to rhetoric and to rhetorical theory stresses with specificity the components of rhetoric that are themselves alogos, outside the bounds of both verbal language and rationality, but nevertheless crucial for a comprehensive account of the art.
Aristotleâs Politics of AisthÄsis
Here, then, is the passage where Aristotle famously denies logos to all animals except human ones:
That man is much more a political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal is clear. For, as we assert, nature does nothing in vain; and man alone of the animals has speech. The voice indeed indicates the painful or pleasant, and hence is present in other animals as well; for their nature has come this far, that they have a perception [aisthÄsin] of the painful and pleasant and signal these things to each other. But speech [ho de logos] serves to make visible [dÄloun] the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared with the other animals that he alone has a perception [aisthÄsin] of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this sort; and community [koinĆnia] in these things is what makes a household and a city.10
In placing logos at the polisâs center, Aristotle twice asserts a distinction between human and nonhuman animals. The first and more famous of these two assertions has to do with exclusivity: logos is that which man alone of the animals possesses.11 This assertion is too often where scholars stop. But the rest of the passage, the part that contains the second assertion, deserves attention as well. In elaborating the zĆon logon echon doctrine, the passage moves from logos to sense perception (aisthÄsis) andâcuriouslyânot back again. In remaining with aisthÄsis, the passage introduces the capacity that binds together all animals (human and nonhuman) in Aristotleâs writings on the soul, on zoology, on ethics, and evenâas I will showâon rhetoric.
In the Politics, the zĆon logon echon distinction supports Aristotleâs assertion that it is clear (dÄlon) why âman is a much more political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal.â12 The comparative word rendered as âmuch moreâ is mallon, and the implication is that other animals are also political, just not as intensely so as anthrĆpos.13 Supporting this reading is Aristotleâs characterization of politika in History of Animals as âthose which have some one common activity,â a characterization he supports with a list of examples: âhumans, bees, wasps, ants, cranes.â14 Without the connection to the History of Animals it might be easy to overlook the centrality of aisthÄsis in the Politics passage. Indeed, even those scholars who insist on the connection between the two treatises stress the indicative work of logos over the perceptive work of aisthÄsis.15
But the link across the two treatisesâand the nonhuman animals prompting the linkâought to alert readers to the cross-species comparison happening here as much as to the differentiation.16 When the Politics passage unravels the claim about logos to a core of perception, that unraveling is enabled and shared by the nonhuman animals considered alogos in this scheme. Reading this passage as a gloss on the phĆnÄ/logos (sound/speech) distinction rather than the logos/alogos distinction returns more forcefully to a base of aisthÄsis or sensation. PhĆnÄ, in this passage, names the way animals signal âa perception of the painful and pleasant,â while logos âserves to make visible (dÄloun) the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust.â17 That difference repeats in the second distinction, where Aristotle ascribes to anthrĆpos alone âa perception of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this sort.â Read in this way, the Politics passage places logos at a perceptual remove from the polis, for logos âserves to make visibleâ (epi tĆ dÄloun) a perception of a just world, to, in a way, hand it over to or share it with other perceiving humans, thereby creating (or in some cases maintaining) an associative bond. That handing over of a perception, at least in this passage, constitutes a polis. This emphasis on sharing perceptions matters because it places all animals on the same plane in the way they participate in their world. On such a reading, the differences between sound and words seem smaller inasmuch as both are deemed the means by which animals exchange perceptions. But what humans are deemed to perceive and to make visible to others bears more of the cross-species difference than logos itself.
A similar emphasis on sharing perceptions or aisthÄsis constitutes friendship for Aristotle, and the relevant passage in the Nicomachean Ethics also distinguishes such perception sharing from the associative activity of nonhuman animals:
Existing is, as we saw, a choiceworthy thing because of a personâs perception [aisthanesthai] that he is good, and this sort of perception [aisthÄsis] is pleasant on its own account. Accord...