by Umberto Eco
This is the opening ploy in a polemic aimed ultimately at Aristotle and in general at all those who hold, as do the Stoics, that the behavior of animals is as if it were rational behavior. That would be like saying, argues Plutarch, that it is as if the swallow were to build its nest, as if the lion felt anger, as if deer were timorous—or, worse still, as if animals could see, as if they emitted sounds, as if they were alive.
Different capacities certainly exist, and they exist among animals just as they exist among humans, admits Plutarch, but to say that some beings have weaker rational faculties than others does not mean that they don’t have them at all: “Let us rather say that they possess an infirm and murky intellect, like an eye afflicted with feeble and blurred vision.” He is no doubt referring to the Academicians when he affirms that animals have a share in reason because their behavior proves that they have intentions, preparation, memory, emotions, care for their offspring, gratitude for benefits received, resentment toward those who have caused them suffering, courage, sociability, temperance, and magnanimity.
There follows a plethora of examples drawn from the observation of animal behavior and finally (969 B) Chrysippus’s argument appears. Indeed, it is preceded by the example of the fox, used by some peoples to test the solidity of the ice: the fox edges slowly forward with its ear cocked listening for the flow of the current beneath the surface of the ice and, if it hears it, concludes that it has reached a layer of thin ice and stops. Chrysippus’s dog behaves in the same way.
True, at this point Plutarch tries to attenuate the force of the proof: it is perception itself, through the scent left by its quarry, that guides the dog, not a syllogism. But the undermining of Chrysippus’s argument does not impugn his final conclusion: we must oppose those who would deny reason and intelligence to animals.
In another dialogue, Bruta animalia ratione uti (“Beasts are Rational”), to those who object that it is an exaggeration to attribute reason to beings without an innate notion of the divinity, Plutarch replies by recalling the atheism of Sisyphus. Hence his rejection of a carnivorous diet, and his concession—though through gritted teeth—that we may put down noxious animals.
In his De natura animalium (On the Nature of Animals) Claudius Aelian (third century A.D.), setting aside the examples of dogs who have fallen in love with human beings (I, 6), speaks in VI, 9, of how dogs are capable of taking care of domestic tasks, so that it is enough for a poor man to have a dog who can take the place of a servant; in VI, 26, we have a series of anecdotes probably taken from Pliny—examples of dogs who laid down and died next to the bodies of their masters, of King Lysimachus’s dog who insisted on sharing the fate of death along with his master even though he could have escaped, a theme that returns in VII, 10, where we hear of dogs who identified with their barking the assassins of their masters, while in VIII, 2, the virtues and feats of hunting dogs are remembered. Aelian picks up on Chrysippus’s argument:
If even animals know how to reason deductively, understand dialectic, and how to choose one thing in preference to another, we shall be justified in asserting that in all subjects Nature is an instructress without a rival. For example, this was told me by one who had some experience in dialectic and was to some degree a devotee of the chase. There was a Hound, he said, trained to hunt; and so it was on the track of a hare. And the hare was not yet to be seen, but the Hound pursuing came upon a ditch and was puzzled as to whether it had better follow to the left or to the right. And when it seemed to have weighed the matter sufficiently, it leapt straight across. So the man who professed himself both dialectician and huntsman essayed to offer the proof of his statements in the following manner: The Hound paused and reflected and said to itself: “The hare turned either in this direction or in that or went ahead. It turned neither in this direction nor in that; therefore it went ahead.” And in my opinion he was not being sophistical, for as no tracks were visible on the near side of the ditch, it remained that the hare must have jumped over the ditch. So the Hound was quite right also to jump over after it, for certainty that this particular Hound was good at tracking and keen-scented.9
The facts that Aelian’s source is clearly Philo (seeing that he speaks of a ditch instead of a crossroads), and that he is well known for upholding the Stoical position, prevent him from drawing a positive conclusion from the example in favor of the canine logos, and lead him to prudently attribute the wisdom of the dog’s choice not to a chain of reasoning but to a natural instinct.
It seems to me that posterity took up the argument more in Sextus’s sense that in Philo’s. The third book of the De abstinentia of Porphyry (third–fourth century A.D.) is attuned to the anti-Stoical polemic. The arguments offered in favor of animal intelligence serve to back up a “vegetarian” thesis against their slaughter. Animals express their interior states, and the fact that we do not understand them is no more embarrassing than that we do not understand the language or thought of the Indians or the Scythians (and there are individuals and peoples who claim to comprehend the language of animals, as is proven by Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, for whom the Arabs understand the language of the birds). As a consequence, we cannot define animals as being without reason simply because we do not understand them. Nor is it a convincing argument to say that only certain animals like ravens and magpies can imitate human language, because not only can humans not imitate the languages of the animals, they cannot even understand all five (sic) human languages.
There follow the usual references to the various animal abilities and to how the dog interacts intelligently and communicates with his master; we then proceed to the citation of Chrysippus’s argument (III, 6, 1), recalling that, according to Empedocles, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, the dog participates in discourse (III, 6, 6) and that the difference between internal discourse and external discourse for Aristotle is merely a difference between more and less. This is not all: animals are able to teach their young, the male shares sympathetically the birth pangs of the female, they display an acute sense of justice and sociability, they have sharper senses than ours, and if at times their reasonableness seems inferior to ours this does not mean that it is to be denied:
Let it be agreed, then, that the difference is a matter of more and less, not of complete deprivation, nor or a have and a have-not. But just as in the same species one has a healthier body and another a less healthy, and there is also as great difference with regard to illness and in good or bad constitutions, so it is for souls: one is good, another bad. Among bad souls, some are more so, others less so. Nor is there sameness among good souls: Socrates is not good in the same way as Aristotle or Plato, and in people of similar reputation there is not sameness. So, even if we think more than they do, animals are not to be deprived of thinking, any more than partridges are to be deprived of flying because falcons fly more.10
We might see in this passage from Porphyry, just as we saw in Plutarch, to say nothing of certain passages in Aristotle’s Historia animalium, the nucleus of those proto-evolutionist solutions which, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, will be proposed, in polemic against the mechanism of Descartes, by two authors who, through their references and citations, show themselves to be familiar with these classical discussions. We have in mind the Jesuit Ignace Gaston Pardies (Discours de la connoissance des bestes, Paris, 1672)—who cites Aristotle’s Historia animalium, De anima, and De memoria, Herodotus, the dispute between Stoics and Academics, and the Saint Basil of the Hexaemeron—and the Protestant David Renaud Boullier (Essai philosophique sur l’âme des bêtes, published anonymously in 1728) who cites both Aristotle and Aelian. In Bouillier, more explicitly than in Pardies, the idea of a gradual development of species is set forth. Even among human beings there are various stages of development—the soul of a child is less developed than that of an adult—but this gradual development takes place not only in the span of a single lifetime but also from the lowest to the highest of living species. He concludes (
and perhaps we may allow a man of his day a certain measure of “political incorrectness”) there are fewer differences between a monkey and a native of Africa than between a native of Africa and a European bel esprit. The souls of animals cannot conceive of God, but acknowledging that their souls belong to a less advanced stage of development than ours is not the same as demonstrating that they do not have one.
We will reencounter this proto-evolutionary position in the much better-known discussion between Buffon and Condillac. Buffon, in his Histoire naturelle II and III (1749), and later in his “Discours sur la nature des animaux” (Histoire IV, 1753), while denying thought to animals, admits that “nature descends by degrees and imperceptible nuances” and a freshwater polyp could be seen as the last of the animals and the first of the plants—and in Histoire IV there also appears the idea of the ass as a degenerate horse, which allows us a glimpse, though Buffon distances himself from the idea, of the perspective of a transformation of species. Condillac on the other hand (Traité des animaux, 1755) polemically defends the thesis of animal intelligence, and, since for him all higher abilities evolve out of sensation, he concludes that recognizing that animals are capable of developing their sensations means placing them at an evolutionary stage immediately below humans. Animals do not speak like humans, but the difference lies in a different level of complexity, “du plus au moins”—an expression that sounds almost like a quote from Porphyry.
Porphyry meanwhile (to get back to him) maintains that even the vices of animals (such as jealousy) are signs of intelligence. Be that as it may, there is one vice that animals do not have, unlike humans, and that is treachery toward those who love them. They have no cities, but neither do the Scythians, who live in caravans. They do not have written laws, but laws did not exist among humans so long so they lived in a state of natural felicity. Maybe they do not hold counsel (though that cannot be demonstrated), but not all human groups do. For these and other reasons it is demonstrated that animals possess reason—even though it may be defective in many cases—and hence the need to respect them.
Apart from the argument of Chrysippus, the text that exerted most influence on posterity from the first century A.D., and in particular on the medieval encyclopedists, is Pliny’s Naturalis historia (Natural History). In it he deals with the language of fish (book IX) and birds (book X, including birds that can speak), but what he has to say about canine intelligence in VIII, 61, is worth quoting, considering that all those who will write about the subject subsequently appear basically to be echoing his text (or referring back to the same sources):
Many also of the domestic animals are worth studying, and before all the one most faithful to man, the dog, and the horse. We are told of a dog that fought against brigands in defence of his master and although covered with wounds would not leave his corpse, driving away birds and beasts of prey; and of another dog in Epirus which recognized his master’s murderer in a gathering and by snapping and barking made him confess the crime. The King of the Garamantes was escorted back from exile by 200 dogs who did battle with those that offered resistance. The people of Colophon and also those of Castabulum had troops of dogs for their wars; these fought fiercely in the front rank, never refusing battle, and were their most loyal supporters, never requiring pay. When some Cimbrians were killed their hounds defended their houses placed on waggons. When Jason of Lycia had been murdered his dog refused to take food and starved to death. But a dog the name of which Duris gives as Hyrcanus when King Lysimachus’s pyre was set alight threw itself into the flame, and similarly at the funeral of King Hiero. Philistus also records the tyrant Gelo’s dog Pyrrhus; also the dog of Nicomedes King of Bithynia is recorded to have bitten the King’s wife Consingis because she played a rather loose joke with her husband. Among ourselves the famous Vulcatius, Cascellius’s tutor in civil law, when returning on his cob from his place near Rome after nightfall was defended by his dog from a highwayman; and so was the senator Caelius, an invalid, when set upon by armed men at Piacenza, and he did not receive a wound until the dog had been dispatched. But above all cases, in our own generation it is attested by the National Records that in the consulship of Appius Julius and Publius Silus when as a result of the case of Germanicus’s son Nero punishment was visited on Titius Sabinus and his slaves, a dog belonging to one of them could not be driven away from him in prison and when he had been flung on the Steps of Lamentation would not leave his body, uttering sorrowful howls to the vast concourse of the Roman public around, and when one of them threw it food it carried it to the mouth of its dead master; also when his corpse had been thrown into the Tiber it swam to it and tried to keep it afloat, a great crowd streaming out to view the animal’s loyalty.
Dogs alone know their master, and also recognize a sudden arrival as a stranger; they alone recognize their own names, and the voice of a member of the household; they remember the way to places however distant, and no creature save man has a longer memory.11
4.1.2. The Transmigration of the Problem in the Middle Ages
Did the Middle Ages know of these texts? The Platonic texts no, but Aristotle’s Analytics will become known at least in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in the same period the Metaphysics and the Nicomachean Ethics will also begin to circulate. Knowledge of the Politics and the Historia animalium will come a bit later.
But, in any case, the Middle Ages was familiar with Pliny and, through him, with a whole vast repertory of sources dealing with the animal world.12 It is to Pliny that the entire encyclopedist tradition in general refers: we need only cite Isidore of Seville, who reminds us that there is no creature more intelligent than the dog:
The Latin word “dog” (canis) seems to have a Greek etymology, for the animal is called kuon in Greek. Still, some people think it is named for the sound (canor) of barking because it is loud, whence also the word “sing” (canere). No animal is smarter than the dog, for they have more sense than the others. They alone recognize their own names; they love their masters; they defend their master’s home; they lay down their life for their master; they willingly run after game with their master; they do not leave the body of their master even when he has died. Finally, it is part of their nature not to be able to live apart from humans. There are two qualities found in dogs: strength and speed.13
What the sources are for the Middle Ages’ familiarity with Chrysippus’s dog is uncertain, but we have already seen that the argument of the dog as syllogist appears early on in patristic culture: for Saint Basil (Hexaemeron, Homily IX) this is the example used to demonstrate that the dog has a faculty similar to reason. After this Chrysippus’s dog makes its appearance in the bestiaries; for example in the twelfth-century De Bestiis sometimes attributed to Hugh of Fouilloy (and previously attributed to Hugh of Saint Victor, but more likely anonymous).14 Later it will be mentioned by Gregory of Rimini as evidence of the fact that animals too possess the “notitia complexa de sensibilibus” (Lectura super primum et secundum Sententiarum I, 3, 1, 1).
The Middle Ages did not enjoy direct access to Porphyry’s De abstinentia, first translated into Latin in the fifteenth century by Marsilio Ficino, but information regarding his arguments had been transmitted by Saint Jerome (Adversus Jovinianum) and, apropos of abstaining from animal meats, by Augustine (Civitas Dei I, 20, and Confessions III, 18, where the problem of abstinence is dismissed as a pagan prejudice).
In Scholastic circles too the question of the souls of animals was not explored to any significant extent because, although in the wake of the Aristotelian tradition the notion that animals had a soul had never been called into question, they were merely granted, in addition to the vegetative soul, a sensitive soul. A sensitive soul may have instincts but it clearly lacks rationality or the ability to exercise free choice, as Thomas Aquinas concludes, precisely apropos of Chrysippus’s argument, in Summa Theologiae, I–II, 13, 2.15
Furthermore, a sensitive soul, unlike a rational soul, could not be immortal. Indeed Thomas, who holds tha
t the rational (and immortal) soul is introduced by God into the fetus only when the brain is fully formed several months after conception (Summa Theologiae I, 90), came to the conclusion that even human embryos, which possess only a sensitive soul, could not participate in the resurrection of the flesh (Supplementum 80, 4).
This allowed Thomas to justify the slaughtering of animals for alimentary purposes: the inferior forms of life are ordered toward the survival of the superior forms, and therefore vegetables serve as food for animals and animals for man.16 The themes of Porphyry’s De abstinentia were alien to the medieval mentality, and the problem of the suffering of animals did not occasion much distress, given that human beings were sufficiently prone to suffering themselves.17
The fact that Saint Francis of Assisi could not only profess brotherly love toward animals but was also able (at least according to the powers attributed to him in Franciscan circles) to convince a wolf by reasoning with him, was evidence of a mystically provocative attitude at odds with the opinions officially shared by the philosophical and theological culture of the time.
So the thinkers of the Middle Ages do not appear to have been tempted by what we have termed “proto-evolutionist” tendencies. Even if we read ontogenesis in terms of philogenesis, the development from the vegetative soul to the sensitive soul and eventually to the rational soul was not seen as a continuum, and (given the Thomistic notions cited above) the transition in the fetus from the vegetative soul to the rational soul was, so to speak, a “catastrophe” attributable to direct divine intervention. Still, Rosier-Catach (2006) points out, in a passage from Dante’s Convivio (III, 7, 6), the idea of a more or less continuous gradation from the souls of the angels to the souls of humans to the souls of the animals, a gradation that strikes her as definitely “contrary to the teachings of the Church”: