Animal nature

There is nothing definable or tangible about the barrier between humanity and the animals. Animal nature is inherent in human nature, however humanity has fundamentally distorted animal nature, for between animal nature in humans and that same nature in animals there is a vast and essential difference. What we percieve in ourselves as animal nature, when brought into the realm of human consciousness, takes on an extra quality, what Uexkull describes as a magical reality. Thus man has always seen his animal side as dangerous, impure, chaotic, even evil, in a way that the natural world itself cannot be. In mixing the brute physicality of nature and mankind’s infinite talent for abstraction, mystification, creation, and destruction, humanity has muddied its own waters. We appear to ourselves as a conflagration of the “higher” of “human” side, self-consciousness, reason, creation, achievement that goes beyond the scope of nature, and the “lower” animal nature, the immutable forces of life, evolution, and the pure physical existence from which we emerged. Thus even as mankind sees itself as superior to animals it nonetheless is able to perceive, by the very same self-reflexive capabilities that define it, its own inescapable impurity. Animal man is worse than an animal, he is nature given the freedom to act, to create and destroy, and to define and execute good and evil, wonder and terror beyond anything nature could produce. In a sense, then, what we see in the non-self-aware physicality of the animal realm is an enviably pure and innocent state of existence. For, not knowing itself as separate from its nature, the animal is able to live without contradicting itself. To us the animal appears conscious of itself as one, complete being, as opposed to the chaotic multiplicity of human consciousness. Thus, when Agamben writes about the miniature from a thirteenth century Hebrew bible, which portrays the righteous after the last judgment as anthropomorphic figures with human bodies and animal heads, he plays upon a fundamental paradox within the way we, as human beings, see ourselves. The idea expressed in this image that at the end of history, when mankind has completed its long and arduous act of self-negation, the pushing out of the animal from the human, there with be a breaking down of the barriers between animals and men, reveals this paradox. Mankind has, since its emergence from animal existence, desired of some level to re-unite with the animal realm. Whether this unity is achieved, as in the Hebrew tradition, by the complete banishing of the animal from the human (an act that, inasmuch as it returns man to a state of unity with himself, complete self-knowledge, and complete innocence, returns him to the animal state) or through some more primal return to animal consciousness by embracing the fluidity and chaos of our own animal nature, it is nonetheless essentially a regression into the purely physical world. We shun animals, domesticate them, laugh at or pity their ignorance and suffering, yet on some level we envy them, and despite everything we have created, the world we have built for and around ourselves, we cannot help but wonder if they are, ultimately, happier.