Brain Advance Access originally published online on October 5, 2008
Brain 2008 131(11):3103-3107; doi:10.1093/brain/awn205
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Review |
A foxed mirror
Martin Kemp starts this wonderfully written, erudite, beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated book by noting how we have a propensity ‘to react to members of the animal kingdom as if they have personalities that can be read from their appearance’ while, at the same time, ‘we tend to see individual people as bearing some kind of resemblance to our fellow vertebrates, or even invertebrates’. We humanize animals and animalize humans and this two-way traffic is ubiquitous. Fables, from Aesop to La Fontaine and Orwell, bestiaries, proverbs, metaphors, insults, terms of praise, our everyday talk about strangers and familiars, household pets and the creatures of the wild, draw on and reinforce habits of anthropomorphization and animalization. In recent years, the pincer movement on the gap between man and animals has gathered pace: humans have been seen as more animal-like; and animals have been claimed to have capacities that were thought to be uniquely human. The Human Animal in Western Art and Science is especially timely for this reason. In a fascinating journey, which starts with Hippocrates and ends with Edgar Rice Burroughs, and effortlessly brings together Lombroso, Montaigne, Oudry, Daumier, Leonardo, Theophrastus, LaMettrie and many other artists, writers and thinkers, he examines how it is that ‘the human animal and the animal human’ have become, and remain, ‘deeply embedded in our automatic reactions to characters in the world around us and to images of our characters’.Though Kemp's main focus is on Western art between the Renaissance and 19th century, he begins with the Hippocratic treatise On the Nature of Man. The Hippocratic school identified the four humours, each corresponding to a season of the year—blood (spring), yellow bile (summer), black bile (autumn) and phlegm (winter)—as the key to health and illness. We enjoy perfect health when these elements ‘are duly proportioned to one another’. This naturalistic, as opposed to supernaturalistic, account of disease reflects the extraordinarily brilliant idea that the human body is a microcosm embodying the fundamental properties of the world at large. The Hippocratic humoral theory was transmitted by the hugely influential Galen and dominated medical thinking up to and including the Renaissance. The balance between different humours was reflected in the different temperaments which, crucially for Kemp's thesis, were also associated with different species of animals. The sanguine temperament was exemplified by the horse, the peacock and the monkey; the choleric by the lion, the eagle and the bear; the phlegmatic by the owl, ass and pig; and the melancholic by the elk and the sheep. By this means, particular animals became ideal representatives of human natures. The mutual mirroring of man and beast was thus established and Kemp examines the way this mirroring is in turn reflected in the visual arts, as represented by Durer, Cranach, Leonardo and many of the greatest figures of subsequent centuries. The science of ‘physiognomics’—ultimately traceable to Aristotle's successor in the Peripatetic School Theophrastus, but revived in Renaissance Italy by Giambattista Della Porta—which provided detailed accounts of facial features for different types of characters in terms of animal analogies, was an important intermediary. The profound reciprocity of the soul and body—in Aristotelian terms, the soul was the form of the body—meant that the soul could be deducible by a suitably qualified individual from a person's or an animal's physical appearance. We can read the lion's character—as generous, liberal, magnanimous with a will to win, and as gentle, just and affectionate towards his associates—from his majestic face. The soul of a person we dislike or distrust is equally legible in his ‘piggy’ eyes and ‘foxy’ face.
The association of feelings and temperament with facial appearances was elaborated, implicitly and explicitly, in the work of many artists. One of the most systematic investigations was that of the 17th century painter and academician Charles le Brun, who aimed to uncover a natural grammar of the signs of emotions, more universal than that of written language. The read-across between human and animal expressions was, however, challenged by the 18th century pastor John Caspar Lavater, who aspired to establish physiognomics as a central science of everyday life. He questioned Della Porta's assumption that the human head could really resemble that of a beast in any meaningful sense: ‘A man, who in the forehead and nose should resemble the profile of a lion, assuredly would not be an ordinary person’. Lavater, Kemp says, ‘was utterly committed to maintaining an impermeable boundary between Man, who stands at the divine summit of creation, and mere beasts’. The ‘large and elevated forehead’ set man apart from all the other beasts, even seemingly near neighbours, such as the Orang-utan, which ‘those who take pleasure in degrading man to the level of beasts ... elevate to the level of man’. This was not the last word, of course. Many subsequent artists delighted in doing what Lavater deplored—Kemp especially relishes Daumier's wonderful lithographs of fish-like, cat-like and other animalomorphic human faces—and in this they were supported by writers, most notably the hugely influential La Fontaine, whose fables attributed human emotions, attitudes and capacities to animals.
The decisive moment in the entire 2500 year debate on the relationship between man and animals, was of course, the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin created a seemingly inescapable framework within which mankind could be seen only as a form of animal kind, by providing a compelling account of how we humans could have been produced by the same processes that had given rise to spiders, codfish and chimpanzees. Our claim to being exceptional, insofar as it was rooted in the notion that we had uniquely been created by a separate process, and in the image of the creator of the universe, had proved vulnerable. We are all children of nature: the blind watchmaker (to use Richard Dawkins’ famous phrase) that made us was simply the laws of physics that had generated animals and humans alike. This was, of course, an important vindication of Hippocrates’ naturalization of humans in health and illness. In his The Descent of Man, Darwin approvingly cited Thomas Huxley's assertion that ‘in every single visible characteristic man differs less from the higher apes than these do from the lower members of the same order of Primates’. Darwin was intensely interested in facial expressions—surely the most distinctively human motor phenomena—and made his own contribution to physiognomy. Inspired by Duchenne's photographs of the activation of facial muscles with electrodes, he published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), arguing that ‘With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition’.
Darwinism prompted a search for ‘the missing link’ and a succession of finds of increasingly ancient fossils seemed to fill in the gap between humans and other higher primates; or at least indicated a path upstream to a common ancestor between man and monkeys. This was perfectly acceptable as science—leaving aside the occasional hoax and a tendency sometimes to speculation rather beyond the data—and ethically unexceptionable. Unfortunately, evolutionary theory seemed in addition to provide a scientific basis for notions antedating Darwin that now strike us as not only wrong but also ethically repulsive: for example, that of grading human beings according to their proximity to animals, the master-idea behind many forms of racism. The idea that there was something of the animal in all of us, was connected with the notion that there was more of the animal in some than others. Charles White, a Manchester physician writing at the end of the 18th century, while denying ‘the degrading notion’ that one species could be transformed over time into another, and being a staunch supporter of the abolition of the slave trade, observed on the basis of certain facial features of negroes, and their way of walking, that they much ‘resembled an ape’. The appalling freak shows that toured the towns and cities until fairly recently appealed to a fascination with the possibility that the unfortunate exhibits combined humanity and animality. One of the most famous was William Henry Johnson, a microcephalic black man under five feet tall, born in the United States around 1840. He was publicized as ‘The Man-Monkey’, ‘a most singular animal, which though it has many of the characteristics of both the human and the brute’ was ‘a mixture of both—the connecting link between humanity and brute creation’.
The theory that badly behaved humans are closer to ‘animals’ formed the basis of Cesare Lombroso's massively influential The Criminal Man, which identified morphological stigmata of those who had criminal tendencies. Degeneration was a regression to those earlier states of existence that were still embedded within humans, and criminals could be identified by means of morphological signs that aligned humans with animals. The criminal—‘an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals’—was distinguished by an enlarged ‘median occipital fossa’ required to house an enlarged vermis ‘that almost formed a small, intermediate cerebellum like that found in the lower types of apes, rodents and birds’. Prostitutes—who were assumed to be sexually voracious—were also studied for signs of their unevolved animality, since surrendering to excessive sexual desire was to give way to animal tendencies. Lombroso was thrilled when he observed that the morphology of prostitutes was even more abnormal than that of criminals: they even had prehensile feet like apes. The ghastly consequences of this kind of thinking hardly need spelling out: degenerate human beings, with the unfiltered appetites of beasts, should be treated like beasts and if they are kept in dreadful conditions this is entirely appropriate, since they do not have the sensibilities of their fellow non-degenerate humans.
Kemp traces another strain of thought linking humans with animals which came to particular prominence in the 18th century. It grew out of the idea, expressed most clearly by Descartes, that animals are insentient machines. Insofar they have a soul, this, unlike the immortal soul of humans, is inseparable from their material body, being distilled from blood and refined animal spirits. Animals are thus capable of moving and reacting, but devoid of consciousness and reason and, of course, incapable of elevated sentiments. While La Fontaine's exquisite fables argued, against Descartes, for the reality and richness of animal consciousness, many thinkers were impressed by the machine-like aspects of living creatures, including human beings. Leonardo had already noted these: it was implicit in his wonderful anatomical drawings, in particular of that ‘instrument of instruments’ (as Aristotle called it) the human hand. Most notoriously, Jules de la Mettrie argued (in L’Homme machine) that humans differed from animals simply in virtue of being better automatons: ‘Man is to apes and the most intelligent animal what Huygens's planetary pendulum is to a watch by [the great horologist] Julien le Roy’. Clever automatons, such as the mechanical flute player and the digesting duck of Jacques Vaucanson seemed compelling worked examples, demonstrating what machines could achieve and, Kemp argues, conferring plausibility on the notion that living creatures are carnal machines.
The Human Animal would be important and absorbing even if it were only a contribution to intellectual history in the narrow sense of recalling past ways of thinking about our nature. It is this, of course; but it is much more than this, if only because many of the ideas he explores are currently in the ascendant. The justified prestige of neuroscience, of evolutionary theory and of computer science has been exploited increasingly to support a scientistic account of human beings that sees them as animal-machines. A new orthodoxy has emerged according to which the human mind is identical with certain functions of the brain; the brain has been shaped by evolution to optimize its contribution to ensuring the replication of the genome; and the functions of the brain–mind are best understood in computational, that is to say machine-like, terms. Kemp enables us to take a long view on these ideas and, by showing their venerability, to remove from them the false glamour of novelty. His inquiry into our use of animals as mirrors in which we see ourselves and ourselves as mirrors in which we see animals, highlights the frailty of many of the habits of thought that have grown up within the framework of this double identification.
If the identification between man and animals seems compelling, it is to a significant degree because anthropomorphism and animalomorphism support one another, like the two components of an arch, a state of affairs that is itself reinforced by a continuing shuttle of descriptors between the two parties. A word such as ‘courtship’, for example, is transferred from the complex setting of the interactions between self-conscious human beings in a community of minds to the hard-wired behaviour of animals. This act of lexical anthropomorphism is then complemented by a reverse movement in which the notion of ‘courtship’ reduced to hard-wired rituals is reapplied to the human behaviour from which the term was originally derived. It is by such means that we reinforce the habit of locating the idea of the human in the same conceptual space as the idea of the animal. Compared with this first step, the decision as to what our standing is with respect to animals is of relatively minor importance. Kemp notes that some thinkers have seen animals as our inferiors—for example, those in the Cartesian tradition which holds that soulless animals are insentient machines. Others have seen them as our equals, the most striking current contemporary example being Peter Singer, the founder of the Animal Rights Movement, who has argued that the higher primates at least should be granted some kind of citizenship. And there is a third tradition, common among misanthropists, that rates some animals as superior to humans. Swift famously placed the horse-like Houyhnhnms above the repulsive, rapacious humans. And in La Fontaine's ironic recasting of the Circe story from The Odyssey, Ulysses's companions, changed by Circe's spell into a variety of animals, decline the offer to be turned back into men, since their period of non-human existence has awoken them to the essential nastiness of humankind. The mistake, irrespective of whether we rate animals above us, beneath us, or our equals, is to imagine that humans and animals can be located on a single metric. To do so is already to overlook the gap between us and the rest of the animal kingdom.
Does this elision of the gap between man and animals matter? It does. First, it is plainly, and therefore boringly, wrong. It should not seem necessary to point out that there is a fundamental difference between all other animals generated by the processes of evolution and the one animal that wrote The Origin of Species. Darwin himself emphasized this in his discussion of the expression of human emotions. While ‘every true or inherited movement of expression seems to have had some natural and independent origin’, once acquired ‘such movements may be voluntarily and consciously employed as a means of communication’. We take the biological givens and subordinate them to distinctively human ends. We are explicit animals that do things deliberately. Uniquely, we entertain theories about our own nature and about the world; systematically inquire into the order of things and the patterns of causation and physical laws that seem to underpin that order; create cities, laws, institutions; frame our individual lives within a shared history; guide, justify and excuse our behaviour according to general and abstract principles; and so on and so forth. The desire to minimize human uniqueness has prompted exaggerated claims about animal tool use, about their range and mode of communication and their sense of each other, about their putative beliefs and other modes of thought. The monuments of collective endeavour seen in the animal kingdom—for example, the heaps created by termites—are the result not of conscious deliberation but of dovetailing automaticities. Beavers and humans make dams but the beaver's dam is a standardized species-wide imperative; human dams are the product of argument, effort, imagination, domination, evolving technology, ingenuity and so on. The Hoover Dam was legislated into place; Beaver dams require no such instruments to bring them about. What is more, there is compelling evidence now that even our nearest kin, the chimpanzees, have not attained our ‘folk metaphysics’ (to use Daniel Povinelli's phrase): an ontology of material objects independent of experiences; the sense of a causal interaction between the items in the surrounding world, that drives us to find ever more indirect and powerful ways of manipulating those items; the notion that there are hidden laws regulating what happens; and even the notion that other animals have a consciousness like their own. These are all ill-developed, if at all, in non-human animals. At the heart of the difference between ourselves and other sentient creatures is the fact that in man, the one product of evolution that has a theory of its own origins, ‘nature opens her eyes and sees that she exists’, as the great German philosopher Schelling put it.
In a deeply thoughtful ‘Personal Footnote’ Kemp explains what prompted him to write The Human Animal, pointing out that, while we are animals, ‘the conjunction of mental and bodily powers we have developed has crucially granted us a capacity to think and act differently in kind from animals’. While these distinct human capacities are gloriously expressed in the art that he has described—no chimp has yet been reported as celebrating or satirizing his fellow chimps by representing them on canvas as humans, donkeys or chimps—he also finds these capacities manifested in quite ordinary examples of human ingenuity and ability for abstract thought, such as is implicit in the invention and use of the needle, which has no parallel in the so-called tools used by animals.
Kemp's final paragraph is crucial:
Any evolved form has [the] ancestral entities it evolved from embedded within it, but the ancestors do not retrospectively have the later creature embedded within them. Thus we are human animals but animals are not human.Which is why, of course, while we look to animals as a mirror of ourselves, animals do not seek to mirror their own nature in us. They do not have a sense of, or agonize over, the kind of thing that they are. And this, as with the needle, is a manifestation of the profound difference that sets us apart from animals and which is present throughout every aspect and pretty well every moment of our lives—a difference that is captured in the observation that while all animals live their lives, humans are unique in leading their lives according to explicit goals, ambitions, dreams, principles, that are woven into the unending narrative of a conscious self, itself interwoven with the narratives of other individual selves and the collective self embodied in society and history.
Kemp adds that his assertion of human uniqueness ‘is not a value judgement, just a statement of fact’. And that is true—indeed if it were a mere statement of value, it would be discredited—but it does have consequences that are central to our understanding, and hence our valuation of, ourselves. John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, has spoken for many thinkers when he asserts in his massively popular and widely cited Straw Dogs. Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals that ‘the humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration’ and that ‘The Internet is as natural as a spider's web’. If that is so, and we are not particularly special, then we should not perhaps value ourselves over-much. For Gray, the animal nature of man leads him to the chilling conclusion that ‘human life has no more meaning than the life of slime mould’. Man (whom he renames Homo rapiens) ‘is only one of many species and not obviously worth preserving’. We know where talk like this has led to in the past; how such pseudo-Darwinian nihilism has visited such horrors on the world. Those who despise humanity rarely despise themselves quite as much as their fellow men or those with whom they are identified as much as the out-crowd of strangers with whom we have to share the planet. Once the assumption is in place that we are essentially animals, then it becomes easier to invoke quasi-scientific reasons for treating some of our fellow human beings abominably.
In John Gray's case, we may be confident that he does not take his own views seriously; that he does not, for example, believe that the Chair of European Thought at the LSE is occupied by a creature not significantly different from a chimpanzee, or subscribe to the Slime Mould Liberation Front. And we may also safely assume that few of even of his most enthusiastic readers sincerely share his black vision of humanity as a predator that has no access to any kind of objective truth, has not made any progress since the hominid ancestors forked off from the monkeys, and will inevitably make the world a place uninhabitable for itself, a process accelerated by the misguided attempts of an animal that thinks it can fix things. The foothills of a nihilism based on a naturalistic account of humanity are, however, more densely populated. Numerous thinkers deny the distance between man and animals by identifying human beings with their organic basis, for example, looking for the key to consciousness, the self and personal identity in the activity of the evolved brain. We may scoff at Lombroso's craniometry but the crude way in which functional MRI scanning is currently being used to identify personality types and even to detect criminal tendencies from hypo-activity in the frontal lobes is not as different as it may seem: the technology has got more sophisticated but the conceptual framework has remained as naive. And man-machine metaphors are alive and kicking in computational theories of the mind which see the mind as the supreme machine. Metaphors for the mind tend to be based on the cutting edge technology produced at the time by the mind. Computational theories of mind inspired by the rise of the electronic computer are the descendents of the hydraulic theories of the 17th and 18th century. It is interesting, in this context, that Descartes anticipated the famous Turing test for a thinking machine. Turing argued that a machine that could be designed to deceive human beings into believing it was human was actually thinking in the way humans do. Descartes, as Kemp notes, pointed out that such deception would always and only be over a narrow range. The global explicitness, the 360° solid angle, of human consciousness, could not be mimicked by any machine, a point that seems to have escaped the machine intelligentsia.
Martin Kemp's magisterial investigation of one of the fundamental metaphors pervading man's thought about himself is consequently of immense importance. The metaphors, while often useful, also limit the way in which we can think about who and what we are. The progressive zoologization of anthropology is a cause for the greatest concern. In an interesting reflexive twist, Kemp offers an account of why man has this propensity to see animal faces in the countenances of his conspecifics and to see his own face in the countenances of animals: it relates to the way we store remembered faces—human or animal—for recognition in the form of a ‘caracatured’ mnemonic that brings, say, a pointed nose in an animal closer to that in a human being. At any rate, it is salutary to see the fragile foundations upon which great systems of thought may be erected, if only to be liberated from them. For if man forms his self-image in a foxed mirror, he may start to lose his feeling for what he might achieve and the proper way to achieve it; in short to lose his way.
Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine
Manchester University
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||