On the Unsuitability of Human Dogs: Medieval Reason, Falling Sheep, and The Limits of Clever Animals

Giving a talk at LSU on Friday October 4. The text has material (improved) from the first chapter on my (knock on wood) next book. Here’s the abstract:

Medieval scholastic philosophy was fascinated with clever animals: cats that unplugged basins to get at their fish, wolves that practiced their pig-snatching techniques on logs, humanoid quasi-animals that seemed to be able to speak, and dogs that seemed to have a universal conception of “stick.” For these philosophers, a cognizing animal was not a rational one: that category they repeatedly reserved exclusively to humans. My talk will explore the late medieval fascination with these animal limit cases, and explain their techniques, and perhaps surprising reasons for how philosophers reserved actual reason only to the human animal.

And here’s the talk itself, for people who want to follow along as I read. The version for the book has all the citations.

By way of introduction: my first two books, How To Make a Human and How Not To Make a Human, each explore the relationship between the categories of human and animal in medieval thought and social practice: the first concentrates on dominant ideas and customs, the latter, on widespread but unsystematic material. My next, titled, for now, The Rational Animal: On Human Limits in the Middle Ages, extends my posthumanist project by exploring tensions internal to the definition of the human itself. I will have a lot to say about animals in this project, as in my previous ones, but as with those, I’m concerned primarily with the delusions and misapprehensions through which what we call human produces itself at the expense of what we call animal. I do critical animal theory, and I’m often misidentified as an ecocritic, but I think of what I’m doing more as posthumanism.

So: the Greek definition of humans as the “rational, mortal animal” would be repeated throughout the Middle Ages, and is often still operative today in various disguised and generally unacknowledged forms. We are animals because we are living things; mortal, because we are not gods. But determining what “rational” means is no easy matter: hence the need for the book. My project may well have begun, though, with my realization that the common demand “why can’t you just be reasonable” isn’t asking someone to start thinking: what’s demanded instead is only agreement or accommodation. If to be “reasonable” can sometimes mean nothing more than getting with the program, what does the claim to have reason necessarily have to do with thinking, individual responsibility, or free thought?

We tend to think of reason as a particular kind of thinking. But what enables it? Medieval thinkers had an answer that is likely still not uncommon: the human soul. If they wanted to be more precise, they would term this soul the “intellective” or “rational” soul. The terms ultimately come from Aristotle’s De Anima, On the Soul, which divides souls into three sorts, the vegetative, the sensitive, and the rational. As Aristotle observed, living things clearly lost something when they died; that thing he identified as the soul; but living things were evidently alive in different ways. Everything living could at least grow, feed, and reproduce: these all had the vegetative soul. Some could evidently sense, and even respond to stimuli and move: these had, in addition to the vegetative soul, the sensitive one. Finally, some kinds of life seemed to be able to think in a special way not bound by the senses. Sensory stimulation can overwhelm sensory apparatus: see something too intensely, and you’re at least temporarily blinded; loud noises deafen; too much touch injures. But thinking too hard just leads, however circuitously, to more and perhaps better thinking. There must be a third kind of soul then, at least partially independent of the body and its senses: this is the rational soul. For now, I want you just to note this: that “reason” here is linked not to mental propositions or moral judgments but rather to a kind of receptivity and perhaps a kind of action that is independent of the body. That feels distinct from contemporary notions of reason: though perhaps not if we push at it a bit.

Back to the topic at hand: Medieval Christians, like the other regional monotheists, largely held that humans were better than the other animals, and better on the basis of how they thought. We have reason; they don’t. They have souls, but only we have the rational soul. They are tethered to their bodies and die with them; some essential part of ourselves was fundamentally independent of our bodies. The Aristotelian schema can be variously discerned in Latin Christian writing prior to the later twelfth century, but only then, when Latin translations of Aristotle’s works from Arabic first circulated, along with translations of Arabic commentary, do we see in Latin scholarship any sustained attempt to develop a philosophically coherent distinction of rational from irrational animality.

To be sure, proving that humans differed from animals worried the bulk of medieval animal writing very little. Occasional assertions, rarely backed by any argument, generally sufficed to keep humans inviolate. Medievalists who teach literature surveys well know that the decades preceding the turn of the twelfth century was also the era in Latin Christendom of a real explosion of secular narrative writing in the vernacular. You might be aware of the Lais of Marie de France, or Chrétien de Troyes’ romance of the Knight with the Lion: this material certainly played with human / animal difference, but its real worries were with other matters – honor, gender, the rule of law, and so on. Not even medieval natural history worried much about the issue, despite being the period’s most sustained body of writing about animals. Animal facts abound here, in the long commentaries on the Bible’s six days of creation, the genre known as Hexamera, produced by Basil of Caesarea, Ambrose of Milan, and many others; in early collections of animal lore like the Physiologus and its descendants, the bestiaries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; in encyclopedias like Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century Etymologies and Bartholomew the Englishman’s mid thirteenth century De proprietatibus rerum; and in fables, sacred and secular art, sermons, and proverbs.

Such compendia, current through the whole middle ages and well into the early modern era, teach that bears lick their new-born cubs into ursine shape, that eagles renew their sight by flying directly towards the sun and staring at it, that dogs are the most loyal animals, that humans seen first by a wolf lose their voice until they reset the encounter by stripping naked, that pigs are especially dangerous to people who dress in white, that lions become tractable if they lose just a bit of their tail, and so on to the near infinite. The facts all fascinate. Many are remediated as moral and divine allegories, as with the pelican’s piercing of its breast to feed its young, reread as an emblem of Christ’s self-injuring love for us, or the equally legendary stratagem of beavers (castores in Latin): knowing that hunters wanted nothing from them but their testes, they would bite them off and fling them at their pursuers. Bestiaries tended to explain that the hunter represents the devil, the testicles the vices, and the beaver the holy man, who, to become fully himself, needed only to lose the organ that drew the devil on. Was the beaver behaving rationally or not? That hardly mattered here. What mattered was how the Book of Nature might teach us how to live and how to believe.

Even medieval philosophy was not necessarily committed to upholding the difference of the rational animal from all the rest, although for this flexibility we have to look not to Latin scholastics but rather to Muslim philosophers of various schools. Among their favored topics when they considered nonhuman cognition was the shrewdness of mice, notorious, at least since classical Greek natural history, for emptying olive oil from unlit lamps by dipping their tails into their narrow mouths, licking them clean, and repeating the process until they were satiated, frightened away, or the lamp was spent. What could be behind such cleverness? While the Book of Animals of Al-Jahiz allowed mice “foresight” without explicitly denying them reason, and Abu Bakr al-Razi – known to Latin Christendom as Rhazes – lauds the mice for their cleverness while denying them discursive thought, because they cannot resist immediate pleasure for future benefits, Faḫr al-Din al-Razi allows mice reason, and even offers them the possibility of immortality, but only by expanding the range of activities recognizable as rational. Here, at least, there was actual debate, a possibility for even mice to be worthy of being done justice by God. By contrast, whatever storytelling and even natural history in Latin Christendom offered to animals, Scholastic Latin philosophy, indebted as it was to a narrow band of Classical antecedents, reacted to animal behavior with scarcely any debate but chiefly only further explanations and the occasional additional example.

Although no single scholastic work is devoted to enumerating the capacities of the rational soul, a list can be compiled readily by ferreting through natural history, law, the many medieval treatises on the soul, and the equally numerous doctrinal studies of the balance between divine grace and free will for human salvation. The resulting collection of uniquely rational capacities would include doing syllogisms, controlling our emotions and refusing our desires, communicating with language, especially spoken and written language, solving practical problems in novel ways, and deciding and disputing without recourse to divine revelation, or, just as well, not “irrationally” going against the received wisdom of divine revelation preserved and maintained by the official church. That is, “reason” and “reasonableness” might themselves be at odds – recall my point about “why can’t you just be reasonable.”

With reason, furthermore, we can conceive of universals, so we became cognizant of unchanging truths, the closest mental categories we could have to the perpetuity and perfection of divinity. Reason also makes us our own causal agent. Irrational things react because some other thing has acted, but reason mediates between us and stimuli, allowing us to establish new paths of action, so we bear moral responsibility for what we do. These last two capacities – abstraction and true response – are the most important for distinguishing the rational from other animals, and linked as well, as each allows us to step back from the immediate situation, to view it, as it were, from a distance, or to freeze it briefly, so we do not understand it from our own limited perspective but from the general, nonsubjective viewpoint of reason. Reason thus saves us from being fully absorbed by our material circumstances. In however limited a way, we can let ourselves be caused by something more than our own petty individual needs.

Part of the problem, though, was demonstrating that this soul existed, and that it was independent of the body. Aristotle’s proofs on sensory versus cognitive stimuli should have been enough, but clearly more was needed. One classic demonstration was concocted by the eleventh-century Muslim philosopher known to the Latins as Avicenna, who hypothesized a person created amid temperate air, none of its limbs touching each other, and unable to perceive of its body either in whole or part, but still aware of its own ongoing existence. The scholarship interchangeably and indifferently calls this either the “flying,” “floating,” or “falling man” thought experiment, as if formally imitating the very physical indeterminacy of this hypothesized person, who can know nothing of their predicament except that they are knowing things and that they therefore exist. That very limitation of knowledge, combined with the certainty of knowing itself, as well as the certainty that, in this situation, subject and object of knowledge are identical, are all central to Avicenna’s thought experiment. He aimed to concretize through this unforgettably strange image what he wanted to present as the key fact of our existence: that the rational soul is our I, and that it is immaterial and by implication therefore immortal, because it depends in no way on any material body. This, at least, demonstrates that thinking exists, along with life, and that the two can be experienced even incorporeally, and that if these all these capacities exist, then the soul must exist too. In sum, the rational soul’s characteristic activity proves its own existence, or so ran the logic of the hypothesis.

The problem, though, was reserving this soul for humans alone. Some philosophers writing in Arabic acknowledged that self-awareness was not necessarily indisputable evidence of the rational soul, and some of them even imagined the falling man experiment with an animal protagonist: a sheep, for example, without having ever known any other kind of existence, might wonder at that moment as it floated or fell or flew woolily in the temperate air just what it was. If it could do this, then it was not simply cognizing. It was cognizing independent of the body, which meant it, like us, had a disembodied soul, and that therefore they too might have been, in some way, immortal. Some cap had to be put on animal capacity.

We can detour briefly to just before the Middle Ages began for a sense of what logic drove all this. Augustine of Hippo, perhaps the most foundational thinker of Latin Christianity, offers a classic example in his treatise On the Free Choice of the Will. Though he had no more knowledge of Arabic philosophy than he did of airplanes, his method and concerns, to my mind, are kin to what the scholastics would do. Bear with me then as I linger in late fourth century before I finally find myself securely in the thirteenth. Like so many others committed to human uniqueness, Augustine finds himself having to establish that humans possess reason, because without reason, we have no free choice, and without free choice, we have no moral culpability, and without moral culpability, salvation becomes impossible or unnecessary. What sense could the idea of sin have if humans had no control over their actions? To prove we have reason, and thus, ultimately, to save both our existence and the meaningfulness of Christ’s sacrifice, Augustine surprisingly does not point to what we might typically think of as rational actions. He references no philosophical arguments, no treatise-writing, no law-making: rather, he talks about our routine domination of the other animals. Augustine admits that animals do sometimes get the better of us, but in the long term, we overmaster them. He concludes, “something is not present in their souls (and so we tame them) that is present in ours, so that we are better than they are. Since it is apparent to anyone that this is neither insignificant nor trivial, what else shall I call it more rightly than ‘reason’?” Perhaps a decade later, in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, Augustine would make the same point more succinctly: “man,” he writes, “was made to the image of God in that part of his nature wherein he surpasses the brute beasts. This is, of course, his reason or mind or intelligence, or whatever we wish to call it.” Augustine’s list of possible terms for the superior “part of nature”– the Greek nous (mind) or the Latin intellectus or ratio — is itself evidence of a set widely shared set of assumptions about human difference in Mediterranean philosophy of his era: whether the word is  he thinkers all share a commitment to some qualitative cognitive difference freeing humans from the common muck miring every other worldly living thing.

That difference is not, however, evidenced through thinking, at least not directly. This is key. Augustine’s illogic gives the game away: no necessity connects the physical practice of domination and the presence of some insubstantial yet essential quality or substance that turns us from living machines into agents of our own activity. We simply may be machines perfected for dominating others. That perhaps is the extra thing we have that the other animals lack. Nor should routine submission to domination be taken as certain evidence that this same placeholder quality, the rational soul, is lacking. Self-awareness may well be compatible with being domesticated, evident, for example, in animals that at least act as if they are deliberately rebelling. Bizarro Augustine might have put it like so: an ornery horse has something in it that refuses domination, his reason or mind or intelligence, or whatever we wish to call it. So Augustine’s chief goal must be not so much to produce a compelling, certain argument – because he could have, but he didn’t – but to skip ahead to what his argument wants most: proof of human difference through reminding us of human superiority. Self-awareness is one way to get us there, but its arrival at its desired destination cannot be guaranteed. Even so, the ornery horse can generally still be made to obey, or, failing that, it can be done away with. The uniqueness of rational thought to the human animal cannot be known certainly, but domination, at least, can be. And that is enough for our claim to uniqueness.

More elaborate arguments in Latin Christendom for the absence of reason in nonhuman animals would have to await the impact of Latin translations of Aristotle from Arabic on the newly burgeoning scholastic philosophy, some seven centuries later. The scholastics busied themselves with generating, demonstrating, and debating doctrinal truths, testing themselves against sometimes quite bizarre limit cases in university debates about, for example, questions of whether spirit had something analogous to matter (hence the debate, often misunderstood by moderns as about the heads of pins, about whether multiple angels could occupy the same space simultaneously), whether the food we ate would resurrected with our body in the Last Judgment, and whether a person eaten by a wolf, which was eaten in turn by a lion, would be able to resurrect at all. As Anselm Oelze, Juhana Toivanen, and Ian P. Wei have demonstrated in recent years, many of these proofs and debates concerned animal cognition. They joined an intensification of interest in animal behavior throughout the general culture, evident, as Elisabeth Schinagl and Nigel Harris have demonstrated, in how natural history proliferates in the public-facing Christianity of the thirteenth century. Though no scholastic work devoted itself exclusively to animal irrationality, the topic itself was often considered. In sermons, nonhuman animals as a class of beings were the very emblem of damnable attachment to the body and its desires, in short, irrationality, whereas in religious and philosophical work more systematized than sermons and moral commentary – treatises on the soul, commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the theological summae that began accumulating in the thirteenth century, and various collections of university disputations – animal irrationality offered itself as an intellectual challenge, a topic diverting enough to be worth working through again and again.

Working through, however, involved anything but arriving at entirely new conclusions. On the question of animal rationality, only the structure and sources of their arguments differed much from what had come before. Although these professionally trained theologians differed on many things, all shared a bedrock belief that only humans had a rational soul, and that therefore only humans could truly reason. All recognized wide ranges of quasi-rational capacities in nonhuman animals, with an enthusiasm that might impress even modern ethology, but underlying all that recognition is an unwavering commitment to preserving reason as a capacity proper only to humans and rational spiritual beings. Their belief in animal irrationality was therefore not so much proved as it was maintained, as it had been maintained for the whole of Latin Christianity. For however different their methods and philosophical syllabus from Augustine’s, their conclusions ultimately fit on the same common ground, a shared field of play that offered theologians opportunities to hone their logical skills variously, safely, and predictably.

It was content, that is, to work its way through inherited thought experiments, and even to concoct some of its own. Frequently considered problems included the dog that, once beaten with a stick, cringes from all brandished sticks, as if it had developed its own universal concept of “stickiness,” or why all chicken fear foxes, even if they have never encountered any before. Roger Bacon considered a cat that gets at fish in a tank by removing its cork, leaving the fish helpless, gasping, and flopping. Albert the Great had heard of wolves perfecting their pig-snatching technique by practicing with pig-sized logs. Scholastics wondered too about the prudence of ants that store food for the winter. They allowed that cranes, cows, and sheep all elected leaders, that they were, in other words, political animals. They wondered at the complexity of birds’ nests and spiderwebs. None of these ethological observations, however, really threatened to undo human difference. Rather, these observations are better understood as a kind of intellectual game, whose rules required players to account for animal behavior in all its variety without using any forbidden explanations, without, that is, relying on free will, nonsensory cognition, the generation of universal categories, or any other capacity held to be unique to rational beings: the clever cat, the conceptual dog, the anxious chicken, architectural spiders and birds, all of them, it had to be said, thought only with their sensitive soul, only with a soul, that is, whose operations never surmounted the body and its sensations.

Given the evident cleverness of many animals, winning the argumentative game required concocting correspondingly complex solutions: the “estimative faculty” proved especially handy. Its originator, Avicenna, identified it as an analog in the sensitive soul to reason to explain sub-rational forms of cognition difficult to trace to any specific sense. It is through the estimative sense that, for example, some visual stimuli act on our sense of taste, as when we salivate at the very sight of honey, or when some unfortunate sees it and gags, because the honey’s yellow reminds them of bile. The estimative sense also perceives non-sensory properties associated with objects, including those like danger, or harmony: this is the sense, then, that causes all sheep to seek their flock and to flee all wolves. The estimative sense, furthermore, can make past events or future possibilities seem present in the animal’s now: well-trained hunting dogs, for example, even with a mouth stuffed with duck, bring back their prey, because the estimative sense puts in their mind immediately both the reward and the harm that awaits them according to what they do next. In humans, we may blame the estimative sense for our involuntary laughter, or any unwilled, embarrassing flinching, and we might praise it for bridging sensitive and rational apprehensions – of matter and ideas, that is – as this is what allows us to do physics. Though the faculty would be misread and simplified by Avicenna’s scholastic inheritors, all joined Avicenna in barring the estimative sense from any apprehension of abstract, universal concepts. For though a sheep might have through the estimative sense some form of self-awareness, this sense could give it no access to any second-order awareness of its own ovinity; the falling sheep might know that it exists, but that’s as far as its thought can go: as elsewhere, animals remain creatures only of the body.

Animal noise was another problem, like others, eminently responsive to philosophical channeling towards a predetermined end. Albert the Great’s analysis of sounds made by living things is typical in its conclusions and methodology. Vox (voice), he explains, is produced by a living animal using air, lungs, and the larynx, in conjunction with the mental, yet only sensitive, faculty of imagination: it requires both the physical capacity to shape sound and the mental capacity of generating sonically transmittable intentions. This much Albert was perfectly willing to acknowledge, but such rudimentary communicative capacity still fell short of winning animals any place among the rational creatures. Among mortal, living animals, only humans possess that subset of vox that Albert terms sermo (speech), a vocal capacity whose reliance on the intellect rather than on the merely corporeal imagination suits it for generating and conveying universal, abstract concepts. Albert considers border cases, like wild sylvan humanoids, or Indian manticores – legendary creatures with the bodies of lions and human faces that could imitate human speech – and pygmies, equally legendary to Albert, whom he judges “the most perfect animal … after the human”: although pygmies might be able to produce sounds that seem like rational words, they still “have nothing but the shadow of reason,” an opaque metaphor Albert opaquely explains with yet another one: “an obscure echo from sensory things.” He offers no further explanation, except to contrast humans unable to reason abstractly or to follow logical arguments, due to the effects of some accident or melancholy, with pygmies, who are no more able to reason than any other irrational animal. Albert’s key method is his fussy division of actual, true reason from all he asserts are mere imitations. Not even something that sounds like speech or even functions in some way like speech can qualify if it lacks reason’s ineffable support. How Albert arrives at his final judgement, and how he keeps reason’s light clear from its echoing shadow, matters less than his goal of keeping human distinction inviolate.

In short, so long as a sensory cause could be produced, animal deliberation could be understood as irrational. Though sheep flee all wolves, they cannot be allowed any abstract notion of lupinity; instead, as Aquinas explains, what must drive them is a subrational form of “natural judgement.” They will never think of the wolf in the abstract, or even wonder to themselves whether they should have been braver. When ants store grain against the winter, what they did was, according to Albert the Great, only a “sort of prudence.” And while architectural animals like birds and spiders and bees could do good design, they were said to be unable to do anything but carry out predeliberative patterns: aesthetic innovation was unique to the human animal. The clever cat and other syllogistic animals required some further intellectual strain, evident in explanatory phrases scattered throughout scholastic philosophy like “rational distinguishing,” “a sensitive appetite,” a “natural inclination,” a “power of cogitation,” or even “some likeness of free choice.” Animals are allowed to creep perilously close to reason’s border, but only ever asymptotically. All these thinkers held that we can learn all manner of things from animals, including laudable traits of fidelity and marital constancy. But while animals can be trained, they lack free will, so they never be anything but their own, merely sensual, mortal, predictable selves. The content of the debates and their evidence varied, but never the conclusions: many animals could think – that was indisputable – but no animal could reason.

This was an anticipation of Morgan’s Canon, so called from Lloyd Morgan’s chapter on whether “Animals Perceive Relations” in his 1894 Introduction to Comparative Psychology, which observes “in no case is an animal activity to be interpreted as the outcome of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be fairly interpreted as the outcome of one that stands lower in the psychological scale.” Notably, Morgan formulates his ethological Occam’s Razor with an example as apt for a medieval university as for his English imperial context. He recalls playing fetch with his dog using what he calls “a K[—] knob-kerrie,” likely a ceremonial wooden weapon originating in Southern Africa, then occupied by the British Empire. Morgan observes that his dog seems to decide on which end of the object would be easiest to grasp. But has it reasoned? Morgan says that we can assume only that the dog “became aware in a practical way of how best to deal with the stick.” Staying well clear of verbs like “recognized” or “concluded,” Morgan says the least he can with “became aware.” Modern science would call Morgan’s canon a principle of deflation, or parsimony, and would hold it up as a laudable bulwark against superstition. But we can just as well term its almost automatic exclusion of animals from reasoning, and its implicit inclusion of humans within in, an instinctual activity, done in the service not of thought but a regulated pattern, to ensure the dog does not tread too close to Morgan’s human – and perhaps even White Imperial English – confidence.

Why go through all this trouble? I pointed to the why earlier, in my discussion of Augustine: grant animals reason, and the whole architecture of salvation, built as it is on human exceptionalism, collapses. That problem is also what the scholastics sought to uproot. Consider two final thought experiments, the first from Thomas de Bailly, an early fourteenth-century chancellor of the University of Paris. He writes about a dog that tracks a robber to a very remote place and gets the right man. He sought to demonstrate that the dog found the robber by using only his senses. Per usual, he relies chiefly on existing authorities in natural philosophy to do his thinking for him. Aristotle, Thomas explains, holds that only humans can think; even elephants, the most tractable and sagacious of wild animals, lack any intellectual capacity. And while humans and animals may both have memory, the great Muslim Aristotelians Avicenna and Averroes each hold that only humans conjoin memory with intellect, which allows them to recall and analyze things long after they have faded from the senses. And so on, with increasingly subtle, yet still familiar, taxonomies of psychological faculties, until Thomas arrives at his conclusion: yes, a dog might catch a thief far from the scene of the crime, but it does this purely through its sensory capacities. The dog might sense the thief’s fear or some other violent passion, or the dog might discover that the thief shares an odor with the air of the place where the theft happened. But nothing other than sensory knowledge enables the dog’s success. It had drawn and can draw no logical conclusions. For, as Thomas explained almost as soon as he started down this familiar path, if a dog were to have a form of thinking that surpassed sensory powers, it would transcend its own species and “esset homo,” and be a human, and, as he observes with almost studious blandness, “quod est inconveniens,” that would be unsuitable. And the fourteenth-century Oxford philosopher Adam de Wodeham is just as sharp on the question of dogs: they cannot be recognized as having rational judgments, not because they lack any specific kind of behavior or mode of expression, but because otherwise “I do not see why they should not be called rational animals.”

A long snout, four legs, fur and a wet nose—if dogs could universalize or otherwise think without their bodies, none of this dogginess would stand in the way of their being human. We are what we are not because we are featherless bipeds – that’s an old joke at Plato’s expense – but because we alone are the mortal life that conceptualizes. Keeping the dogs at the door, and letting them get no further, required arguments both detailed and flimsy, for the point was just to keep the game of keep-away going. As Derrida observes in his late work on animals, the list of qualities supposed to be proper to human beings and denied animals “n’est jamais close,” can never be finished. Whenever animals seem to be acting human — by getting their man, for example — the game requires that the definition of what counts as rational activity shifts slightly, with jealous defensiveness, to enclose humans on the inside, and to keep animals out.

It may be too much to call the logic of these scholars “anxious”: their confidence about human supremacy never wavers, and difficult cases from natural history are, for them, not to be avoided but rather played with as further opportunities to dazzle their colleagues with their solutions. Not anxious, then, but certainly defensive, always fixed to an answer every bit as settled as the goals that frame either end of a soccer field. For the scholastic players, no animal action – no deliberating over choices, no development of a conceptual understanding of an object, no speech even – could ever win them recognition as a reasonable creature. Any animal able to think its way into having a rational soul would break the rules of human uniqueness. To recognize them as creatures like us would be to recognize them not only as living vulnerable things, possessed of the need to sleep and eat and, as a species, needing to reproduce, but also as things deserving a special dignity, precisely because, were they rational, like us, they would also be immortal, deserving the care, concern, and judgment that can rightly be directed only to creatures destined for eternity. Animals can be allowed to think; they can be allowed to think with surprising cleverness, far more cleverness, in fact, than Morgan was willing to grant his dog; but they could never think their way past the guardians of human dignity.

What my talk’s pointed to is the politics of reason. We tend to think of reason as operating through an impersonal framework of supposedly objective, propositional, logically interlinked statements. But I have described it today as a highly social claim, dependent not on the content of the propositions, but on the more fundamental decision to recognize, or not, a being as either reasonable or mechanistic, or, to put that last term another way, as merely instinctual. Animals could not be rational not because they could not think but because it would not do for them to be rational. Reason has long been understood as an activity bounded by its adherence to objectivity, that is, to the capacity and willingness of an individual subject to step back and think more broadly – to make themselves an impersonal spokesperson for the discovered truth. Animals were held – like animalized people – to be only local, parochial, cut off from disembodied truth. There was nothing they could do, no way they could express themselves, that could convince anyone otherwise who already considered themselves a universal subject. Doing so might have caused them to doubt their own independence from their body and its dependencies, to think of reason not as an escape from this world but merely as a term for problem solving in general, some forms of which might be cognitive and subjective, some forms of which are not. There are ways around this of course – Montaigne comes to mind – and I’m looking forward to how this shakes out further in our discussion.

Thank you.