Liberating the Animal

Roger Berkowitz has just published Liberating the Animal in Theory & Event (Project Muse, subscription required), a review of Vanessa Lemm's new book Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy.

Lemm's project is part of the now widespread attack on the traditional distinction between humans and animals. While the animality of humans has been a basic axiom of philosophical thinking at least since Aristotle characterized the human being as the animal having logos, the Aristotelian-Kantian elevation of the human as the animal who reasons is under revision. In part, the dissent results from our changing views of animals. But, as Berkowitz writes:

A more important challenge to human distinction originates from the discourse of human rights. One core demand of human rights—that men and women have a right to live and not be killed—brought about a shift in the idea of humanity from logos to life. The rise of biopolitics—the political demand that governments limit freedoms and regulate populations in order to protect and facilitate their citizens’ ability to live in comfort—has pushed the animality, the “life,” of human beings to the center of political and ethical activity. In embracing a politics of life over a politics of the reasoned life, biopolitics rejects the distinctive dignity of human rationality and works to reduce humanity to its animality.

Lemm's book brings Nietzsche to the aid of those who would oppose the traditional elevation of human over animal. She argues that the seat of freedom and creativity is with animals, not with humans. Berkowitz dissents.

Such an optimistic reading of the rise of the animal is, to my mind, one-sided. Affirming otherness and multiplicity risks forgetting that, as Hannah Arendt has argued, “Human distinctness is not the same as otherness.” While animal life can be multiple, “only man can express this distinction and distinguish himself, and only he can communicate himself and not merely something—thirst or hunger, affection or hostility or fear.”3 Far from outdated, Arendt’s version of human distinction is an effort to remind us that it is the human capacities to act and think, not to reason, that makes us uniquely human. Plurality, Arendt reminds us, is only possible because humans can initiate action.

The great tension of our times is that between a humanism that builds a world, a civilization, and an animalism that rebels against the limits that world represents. Nietzsche’s greatness was to see through the inhumanism of enlightenment humanism and to identify the perversion of human civilization into a rational world that plans, calculates, and orders the world dehumanizes humanity. To respond to the degradation of humanist civilization by abandoning humanity to its animality, however, risks pursuing a false path to liberation. The animal freedom and plurality that Lemm’s account of Nietzsche offers is, in Heidegger’s words, the “absence of boundaries and limits, the absence of objects not thought as a lack, but as the originary totality of the actual in which the creature is immediately admitted and thus set free.”4 The freedom of Rilke’s animal, in its rebellion against the rationalism of metaphysics, is the freedom of the “open sea,” a vast, undifferentiated, and yawning freedom of infinite possibility. What such a freedom forgets is that humans live in a world. It is one thing to bring into question the rational foundations of that world. It is another to question the world itself.

Read Liberating the Animal