Comments on: The Concepts of “Human” and “Animal”

By: Tony Porcaro

Tony Porcaro — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 04:59:29 +0000

I meant to say..”negative feeling” towards animals…

By: Tony Porcaro

Tony Porcaro — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 04:56:14 +0000

Humans are human because they are not governed by instinctual determinism…the patterns of completion that animals possess; so we have freedom, the ability to choose, as part of our human nature; and humans are unique in that they possess that universal human trait called “blushing” which Darwin referred to as “the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions.” The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov placed “shame”, the mother of the blush, at the heart of his philosophical anthropology and ethics…”the true spiritual root of all human good and the distinctive characteristic of man as a moral being.” Shame leads to guilt and guilt safeguards human conscience…natural shame being the root of moral intelligence; I would strongly argue(although this may seem quite a leap for some of us) that the source of much negative feeling and “blindness” towards animal cruelty in our present society is precisely rooted in the absence of a sense of healthy shame and moral intelligence…even though shame is, in fact, an innate, hardwired, genetically determined mechanism; so as humans we, as a result, become less than human if we fail to develop this affect system; and of course other “humans” will be potential victims as well as innocent animals of all kinds and in every situation. As Mark Twain once observed:”Man is the only animal who blushes or needs to…”

By: Tony Porcaro

Tony Porcaro — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 19:56:19 +0000

Man(kind) may not be the “measure of all things”as D.H. Lawrence once suggested and psychologist Erik Erikson points out that we are, in fact, rather “unfinished” human beings: “The drives man is born with are not instincts…unlike animals they do not carry in themselves the patterns of completion…as an animal, man is nothing…man’s inborn instincts are drive fragments to be assembled…during a prolonged childhood.” (And both Nietzsche and D.H.Lawrence would have agreed!) Speaking of the importance of the “animal psyche”in our lives,psychologist James Hillman long argued for the need to evoke the animal as psychic presence:” I have been trying to foster self-recognition of human being as animal being.” Human constructs will always tend to point out differences that lead to reasons for “separation” in human-animal relationships rather than acknowledging a mutual dependence or “sympathy of all things.”

By: Weekly Round up, January 31, 2010 « The Inhumanities

Weekly Round up, January 31, 2010 « The Inhumanities — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:28:04 +0000

[...] Craig has a post up on the concepts of ‘human’ and [...]