Selma Singer wrote:
>
> Of course, any of us who have had pets can give many examples of behavior
> that appears to be rational or thinking behavior; actually, I believe they
> are examples of a very important kind of intelligence( we might make note
> here of a recent post about different kinds of intelligence).
>
> However, there are major differences between the intelligence of animals and
> of humans and they turn on the ability of humans to have language and that
> turns on the ability of humans to see themselves as objects to themselves.
I agree that this is the important issue (or at least *an*
issue, since we also need oxygen, etc.). I had a friend
who said:
Be a witness to your life.
(--Irene Katcher)
According to this criterion, human existence is not coextensive with the
species life of anthropoid bipeds. Only when persons actually are
seeing themselves and "the world" (being-in-general and being-as-such)
as
objects, are they in fact and not just potentially human.
On the other hand, the reason this faculty of "being a witness to the
world"
is important is because of what it is "per se",
not because it differentiates us from anything else.
If our pets (or G-d, etc., et al.) realize this event
of universal self-awareness, then they too are
what is important, which is not belonging to any species, but being
part of universalizing conversation about witnessing and judging the
world (which creates the very idea of a species,
as well as postulating particular empirical taxonomies of them, etc.).
To be human, like being American or being a Muslim or being a neutron,
is just part of the objective world (i.e., part of the domain
of what are objects for us) -- like being a pebble or being green
or being CEO of Enron. To be a witness is
to be a perspective upon objectivity as such,
and this alone is what is not just one more object within
a perspective.
--
This goes by a variety of names -- Heidegger
calls it "the ontologicval difference3", e.g.
It needs to be taught to children, and also to PhD candidates
and even to Endowed Chair University Professors,
many of whom apparently
are apparently obvlious of it even though
they have spent their lives in "study" and research.
The reason they are oblivious of it is that their
training never taught them about it. To borrow
another Heidegger image, they are at best like the
man looking for his eyeglasses when they are right on
his nose -- but they aren't even looking....
The practical expression of
understanding this is the establishment and
nurturing of peer discourse,
in which interlocutors discuss the world with mutual
respect for each other's judgment.
Whenever anthropoid
bipeds are engaged in hierarchical social relations, i.e.,
where one person (or some persons) discusses what is to
be done about another person (or other persons), then
only those anthropoid bipeds who do the discussing
(teachers, bosses, et al.),
and not those anthropoid bipeds whose disposition they
discuss (students, employees, etc.) are part of
a peer discourse, even if both the discussers
and the discussed are all "peeple" (and not,
instead, e.g., sheep or Klingons).
"Yours in discourse...."
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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