Unthinking Animals

A short talk I gave a while back on the relationship between cults and culture:

Although the title of this talk is “Cults and Culture,” I will not so much be talking about cults, or really culture for that matter, at least as the terms are commonly understood, if they are understood at all. That is to say, I won’t be talking about the People’s Temple and Jonestown or the Branch Davidians and Waco, or about Heaven’s Gate and the proverbial Kool-Aid, or about Scientology or any other new religious movements, as they’re often referred to these days. That said, I would like to talk about cults in a wider sense, in a sense that has more to do with our more or less modern concept of religion than it does with cults per se (even if, as the debate as to whether it is appropriate to refer to new religious movements as cults demonstrates, it is often difficult to distinguish between a cult and a religion. Indeed, the move to do away with the term “cult” in favor of the term “new religious movements” or NRM’s, may be be regarded as a tacit admission, on the part of scholars of religion, that the old adage that, “a religion = cult + time, is mostly true). In any case, the cults my title refers to has more to do with the Latin cultus—a noun which means “worship, act of worship, form of worship, religious observance,” but also, in its wider sense, “cultivation, tilling, training or education, personal care and maintenance, style of dress or ornament, adornment, stylistic elegance, mode of standard of living, state of being refined, devotion, loyalty, respect;”⁠1 although, these meanings are most often reserved for the derivative of cultus, cultura, from which the modern concept of culture most proximally derives. Both words, cultus and cultura derive from the Latin verb colere, which means—as Raymond Williams points out—to “inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship,” among other things (Williams, Keywords 49). Looking at the various different and differing meanings of colere and its related terms, it is easy to see how this term could be related to culture. But the question I want to entertain today is, “how much cult or cultus (or religion) still resides in our culture or in our concept of culture”? 

“In the contemporary use of the terms,” writes theorist of religion, Tomoko Masuzawa, “the relation between “culture” and “religion” appears to be multiple, complex and contradictory to some extent” (Masuzawa, “Culture” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, 70). Today, it has become perhaps most common to conceive of the relationship between religion and culture as one of a part to a whole, where religion represents just one of culture’s many possible forms as— for example—Ernst Cassirer suggested. Myth, religion, language, art, science: taken together, these five cultural or symbolic forms—as Cassirer refers to them, since we make sense of the world through them—make up the whole of culture. For Cassirer, these forms are also “modes of expression,” through which we disclose who we are, and who we are is, quite simply, our culture. Our culture is what differentiates us from Nature. In this Cassirer is not far from the eminent anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, who also argued that the essence of humanity is not to be found in any one thing that we do or make, but in the fact that we all have culture (although there are indeed many important differences between Geertz and Cassirer). 

Of course, Cassirer was not the first philosopher to think of culture in this way, that is as, as a composite of various cultural or symbolic forms. This honor probably goes to Giambattista Vico, who, in his major work, the New Science from 1725, sought to determine what kind of “science” might be appropriate to that being which, it would appear, does not belong to Nature, at least not entirely. Vico begins his New Science by attempting to secure “universal and eternal principles,” upon which to construct this science—a “science” which, today, we might rather term a history. He comes up with three things which, he claims, all peoples have in common: religion, marriage, and burial. From these three things, Vico maintains, it should be possible to construct a history of what he variously calls the world of nations or the civil world. Yet, it is important to note that this history does not begin with religion, marriage, and burial, even if it takes these three things as its starting point; rather, this history begins at the moment that human beings begin to think humanly, which, for Vico, means to think abstractly. Although religion first appears in Vico’s philosophy as a form of culture among others, it is religion—in this case natural religion—which founds the civil world insofar as, by its means, we break free of the sensible, natural world and learn to tame our sensible, animal natures. “In their monstrous savagery and unbridled bestial freedom,” writes Vico, “there was no means to tame the former or bridle the latter but the frightful thought of some divinity, the fear of whom [...] is the only powerful means of reducing to duty a liberty gone wild” (Vico, New Science, I.¶338). Vico hypothesizes that human beings first stumbled upon this thought when “they had fallen into despair of all the succors of nature and desire[d] something superior to save them” (Vico, New Science, I.¶338). 

Vico’s account may remind us of another philosopher who, while not normally included in anthologies devoted to the philosophy of culture, nonetheless stands out as one of the great cultural critics in the history of philosophy: namely, Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s Genealogy, religion too has a central role to play in civilizing the human being. At the beginning, the human being is an animal which, like all other animals, suffers without reason. But eventually, she comes up with the question, “Why do I suffer?,” and turns to the ascetic priest for answers. She learns from the ascetic priest how to tame herself, how to reign herself in, but in the process she becomes what Nietzsche calls the sickliest animal. For Nietzsche, civilization is the opposite of culture; culture promotes human flourishing, civilization its decline. 

In some cases, we tend to equate religion and culture, especially when we speak of societies, whose cultures were, or are, so completely religious that it is impossible to tell where religion ends and culture begins. Early anthropologists and sociologists, such as Durkheim and Mauss, argued that, as societies become more civilized, religion plays less and less a role in those societies. In so-called “primitive” societies, religion determines almost every aspect of culture. In so-called “modern” societies, religion continues to play a decisive role in culture, but the role that it plays becomes more difficult to determine, which is to say, that it becomes less determinate, more fluid—paradoxically, like all fluids, it gets into almost everything. “In the quintessentially “modern” societies of Western Europe and North America,” Masuzawa writes, “culture is envisaged as a vehicle, at its best, for the most profound and essential thoughts and attitudes underlying religion” (Masuzawa, 71). When Max Weber claims that “we” owe “our” work ethic to John Calvin, or Hegel claims that “we” owe “our” very notion of who we, as moderns, to Luther, or when a certain, German, politician claims that crosses are not religious symbols, but cultural ones, culture becomes a vehicle for religion. The assumption, underlying positions such as these, is that, again as Masuzawa writes, “in a society such as “ours,” something like the general essence of religion, which is perforce less tangible and more universal than any particular religion (and is nowadays referred to as spirituality), used to be embodied in religious institutions but now has been partially liberated from those traditional institutional confinements and can find more personal, “freer” expressions through a variety of cultural venues. This deinstitutionalization takes place, supposedly, as society becomes “modernized” and “secular” (Masuzawa, 71). In a paradoxical fashion, as we have become more secular, we have become more religious or, at least, spiritual. Or at least, this is the thought that I’d like to leave you with today. 

BY KOBAYASHI ISSA

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT HASS

A talk I gave in the context of the American Academy of Religion, north-eastern edition:

I would like to frame this talk within the context of what various scholars have, beginning perhaps in the late 1980’s,  termed the ‘animal turn.’[1] Of course, as MIT historian Harriet Ritvo notes at the beginning of her article, “On the Animal Turn,” “learned attention to animals is far from new.”[2] Aristotle, of course, devoted  entire works to the History and the Parts of Animals, as well as Philo and Plutarch. And even if they did not devote entire works to animals, philosophers and theologians from Augustine to Heidegger have often had something to say about other animals. Indeed, I intend, at least in part, to demonstrate, over the course of the next 25 minutes or so, that the question of the animal, and, furthermore, the question of the animal and religion has been posed before—albeit, admittedly, implicitly.

That said, the critical turn toward the animal that has taken place in recent years, often under the rubric of ‘animal-studies,’ constitutes, particularly within the context of the humanities and the social sciences, a radical break with academic tradition—that is with the way in which diverse disciplines, from anthropology to geography, have gone about marking their respective territories. To account for this recent turn would be the subject of another paper, but it is clear that, within both the humanities and the social sciences, the figure of the animal has come to serve, as Kari Weil asserts, as a “limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power.”[3] And, if the recent work of scholars such as Aaron Gross and Donovan Schaeffer are any indication, we might add, of ‘religion’ as well.

While Gross’ The Question of the Animal and Religion, represents the first  “monograph” to take up “the task of theorizing the study of animals and religion as such,”[4] the animal has long appeared at religious sites. In hindsight, an animal turn within religious studies could be seen, as Bataille might have it, as a return to ‘origin’ of religion—an origin, whose source must forever remain “closed to us,” while—simultaneously—unfathomably close, constantly bubbling up, as it were, from the depths of what Rudolph Otto, following Schleiermacher, would call ‘creaturely feeling.’

However, it is Nietzsche who, by tracing the origin of religion back to the birth of civilization—that is, to the point where ‘humanity’ broke with its animal past—offers us the first opportunity to consider, or reconsider, the genealogical relationship between the figure of the animal and the concept of religion.

Today, I plan to demonstrate, at minimum, that Nietzsche is, as Derrida claims in his Animal that therefore I am, “more attuned to animals than anyone else.” And, furthermore, to tell the story of how, according to Nietzsche, humanity came to distinguish itself from other animals. As we will discover, the way in which we think about our relation to other animals depends, in Nietzsche’s view, on the way in which we deal with the problem of suffering.

I.

Nietzsche is one of the first philosophers to take seriously the “Darwinian discovery” that the human being, as Venessa Lemm puts it in her recent study of Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, “stands in direct continuity with other forms of biological life.”[5] As early as 1870, two years before publication of his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes, in one of his early notebooks that “the sciences teach [human beings] to think of themselves as animals.”

However, though the sciences teach us to think of ourselves as animals, Nietzsche recognizes that “the natural [human being] experiences a decisive gulf between himself and the animal” (NF-1870, [5] 36). Such that, human beings “will never act accordingly.” Instead, they will always “rely or fall back upon stupid distinctions [dumme Unterscheidungen]”to both make sense of  and justify this ‘decisive gulf.’ (NF-1870, [5] 36)

Although Nietzsche does not tell us what these distinctions are, it is clear that he has at least one in mind. That “human being means ‘thinker,’ writes Nietzsche, “therein lies the insanity” (NF-170, [5] 37). Here, Nietzsche most likely has Hegel in mind (as he often does) and, in particular, Hegel’s claim in the introduction to the Encyclopedia, or perhaps in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, that the human being comes to distinguish herself from other animals through thinking.

In any case, it is clear that Nietzsche rejected, early on, Enlightenment definition of the human being as that animal “endowed,” as Kant asserts, “with the capacity for reason (animal rationabile).” In Nietzsche’s view, even if we could legitimately say that  reason or thought differentiates us from other animals, this would not give us a reason to think of ourselves as superior to other animals; in fact, quite the opposite. We only think, as he puts it in The Anti-Christ, because we are “most unsuccessful animal,” the “sickliest animal” (AC §14). We were forced to think, just as Red Peter in Kafka’s Report to an Academy, was forced to to learn. That is to say, not because we wanted to, but because it was our only way out or Ausgang—the term Kant uses when he defines the Enlightenment as the “emergence [Ausgang]” from “self-imposed immaturity.”[6]

That Nietzsche regards human beings as animals becomes even clearer in the 1872 fragment, Homer’s Contest. There, Nietzsche considers the ‘trait of cruelty’ or, what he otherwise calls, the ‘tigerish lust to annihilate’ and its role in the cultivation of the Hellenic Greek. Admittedly, in Homer’s Contest, Nietzsche not only claims that the human being is wholly animal, but, moreover, wholly natural. Of course, ‘nature’ and ‘natural’—as well as ‘animal’ and ‘animalistic’ for that matter—are notoriously ambiguous terms. However, it is clear that, for Nietzsche, what is ‘natural’ in the human being corresponds to what is ‘animal,’ and what is ‘animal’ corresponds to, for lack of a better word, what is cruel. The passage I am about to quote is a bit long, but it is important for us so I will quote it in full.

When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which distinguishes the [human being] from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: ‘natural’ qualities and those called truly ‘human’ are inseparably grown together. [The human being] in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly natural and embodies its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are terrifying and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work” (HC, in PN, 32).

Nietzsche echoes these comments in Beyond Good and Evil, when he criticizes ‘modern’ humanity for its pursuit of “the universal green-pasture of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort and an easier life for everyone,” where suffering itself has been abolished (BGE §44).

While we might think that humanity has grown best under ‘humane’ conditions, Nietzsche insists that, thus far, the human ‘plant’ has grown most vigorously under the “opposite conditions”—which is to say, under conditions that we might call inhumane.

According to Nietzsche, “every thing in [the human being] that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents serves the enhancement of the species as much as its opposite. Indeed, we do not say enough when we say only that much” (BGE §44). The Greeks, for instance, though they were—in Nietzsche’s view—the “most humane [people] of ancient times,” nonetheless “considered it an earnest necessity to let their hatred flow forth fully,” to “let the tiger [leap] out, voluptuous cruelty in his terrible eyes” (HC, in PC, 33). When we look into the eyes of this Hellenic tiger, armed “with the flabby concept of modern humanity,” we grow terrified, in part because we recognize in its eyes, something, undeniably human, which is to say—at the same time—undeniably animal.

But if such is the case—if, the human being has become human “through [a] long fight with essentially constant unfavorable conditions,” then how and why did we come to regard such conditions as ‘inhumane’? Or, to put it otherwise, how did we come to regard everything that life essentially is: namely, (and again I am quoting Nietzsche), “appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation,” as ‘evil?’ In truth, according to Nietzsche, the answer to this question is rather simple. We have simply come to value such attributes negatively, or, that is, to attribute to them “a slanderous intent” (BGE §259). But, still the question remains, how did we come to value such attributes negatively?

II.

According to Nietzsche, before we became ‘civilized,’ we were, like the Greeks, able to let our “hatred flow forth fully.” But when we entered the ‘state’ of civilization, the “walls of society and peace,” we found that we were no loner able to express our “natural desire to hurt” (GM II, §16). In other words, we found that we could not find an outlet for what Nietzsche calls the most life-affirming drive: namely, the drive for freedom, or, in the language of Nietzsche, “the will to power” (GM II, §18).

This state, with its “fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected against the old instincts of freedom…brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling [human beings] turned backward against [the human being itself].” This forced us to create a new place, “an entire inner world”, a “soul”, within which [we] could discharge [our] natural, animal instincts”. (GM II, §16). In short, civilization forced us to develop a ‘bad conscience’—a conscience whose form consists of “(cruelty directed backward)” (GM III, §20).

Once we had become civilized we began, “from lack of external enemies and resistances…” to, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘lacerate ourselves,’ to persecute and ‘gnaw at’ ourselves until we became sick (GM II §16), just as—once again—Red Peter in Kafka’s Report ‘learned to “lacerate [himself] at the least sign of resistance” until his “ape nature, turnings somersaults, raged out of [him] and away” (Kafka, 87).

Under these conditions, we contracted “the gravest and uncanniest illness, from which humanity has not yet recovered:” namely, “man’s suffering of man, of himself—the result of a forcible sundering from [our] animal past…” (GM II §16). It is only with the contraction of this illness, that we began to think of ourselves as ‘human,’ for our illness is an illness which, as Nietzsche makes clear in his Untimely Mediations, that other animals cannot contract and therefore cannot suffer.

According to Nietzsche, to be an animal means “to hang on to life madly and blindly, with no high her aim than to hang on to it”—to suffer cruelties of the worst kind without reason, to suffer without even seeking a reason (UM III, §5). In contrast, we—as human beings—are ale to ask, “why do I suffer.” What’s more, we have found a way “to turn the thorn of suffering against itself and to understand [our] existence metaphysically” (UM III § 5).

However, Nietzsche suggests that, in spite of our ability to turn this thorn against itself, we usually “fail to emerge out of animality” because we usually only desire “more consciously what the animal seeks through blind impulse”: namely, the “universal green-pasture happiness of the herd,” rather than the opposite—rather than those conditions which are necessary for the cultivation of humanity. As long as we desire happiness, we will remain just like the animals whose “suffering seems to be senseless” (UM III § 5).

Yet, Nietzsche does not so much criticize our desire for happiness as our desire to make sense of suffering through metaphysical reasoning—it is this, which, in Nietzsche’s view, makes it nearly impossible for us to ‘emerge out of animality.’ Nature, Nietzsche asserts, “presses toward the human being,” and, in this way, “intimates that [the human being] is necessary for the redemption of nature from the curse of animal life” (UM III §5). However, thus far, we have not responded to our vocation. Rather than attempting to affirm suffering as “a genuine seduction to life,” we have instead “brought forward [suffering] as the principle argument against existence, as the worst question mark” (GM II §7). Indeed, Nietzsche claims that, before the ‘ascetic priest’ invented the ‘ascetic ideal,’ “the human animal had no meaning” (GM II §8). [And another long quote]

His existence on earth contained no goal; “why [the human being] at all?” was a question that was lacking; the will for [the human being] and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny there sounded a refrain a yet greater ‘in vain!’ This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that [the human being] was surrounded by a fearful void – he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning…He was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question “why do I suffer?” (GM III §28).

Because they had no answer, people turned to the ‘ascetic priest,’ who took advantage of their bad conscience, their “sense of guilt,” by renaming it ‘sin.’ The priest told people that that they suffer because of their sin; that suffering is a punishment (GM III §20). Which is to say that, the priest invented what, in the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche refers to as an ‘imaginary cause,” “It never suffices,” Nietzsche writes, “to establish the mere fact that we feel as we do: we acknowledge this fact—become conscious of it—only when we have furnished it with a motivation of some kind” (TI, The Four Great Errors § 4). It is this form of reasoning, Nietzsche asserts, which demonstrates “reason’s intrinsic form of corruption” and which, moreover, counts “among the most ancient and most recent habits of [human] kind: it is even sanctified among us, it bears the names ‘religion’ and ‘morality’ (TI, the Four Great Errors § 4).

While Nietzsche asserts that the ascetic priest’s justification of suffering ‘closed the door’ to “any suicidal nihilism,” it ultimately led us down the road toward a “hatred of the human, and even more of the animal,” and, ultimately, toward “a will to nothingness.” That is, toward an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life” (GM III §28). To counter this will toward nothingness, we would have to return to the pre-Homeric Greeks and confront that ‘abyss of hatred,’ which Nietzsche found in their tigerish eyes. But this, would require—at the same time—that we acknowledge a “lack of any cardinal distinction between [human] and animal”—a doctrine which, as Nietzsche proclaims, belongs to those doctrines which are ‘true but deadly’ (UM II §9).