Defining Human: The Difference Between Human And Non-human Nature

The aim of this essay is to focus and expansively explore the human and animal nature based on what does it mean to be human or animal and most important what distinguishes the human from the non-human, which in this case are the animals, furthermore, developing a dangerous idea deduced from the question above. Many will question that there is no relationship between man and animal, that nothing differentiates a man from an animal and that there are two totally opposite things, which may be true in some cases. If you try to find a similarity between a human and a platypus you will see that the only difference is that they are both mammals but nothing more. Hence, this essay will develop a dangerous idea that will underpin the difference or even similarities between human and animal.

The idea of ​​human nature is problematic because the notion of nature means etymologically what is at birth, the given, the innate. The natural is opposed to the acquired or the man in his human face (bipedalism, the appropriate use of the hands, the speech, the thought, the sensitivity, the behaviour regulated by norms etc.,) is not a natural datum, it is a cultural production.” One is not born man, one becomes it” (Simone de Beauvoir) within the framework of a social environment and a history. The nature of man seems less to be a given nature than an acquired nature. Thus, the example of wild children shows that ‘it is our acquisitions, our imitations that make us men psychically’ (Jaspers, 1967) Biological inheritance is not enough to make a man. He is what he is by his cultural heritage, by his learning. Contrary to animal nature, an animal that is born an animal cannot become anything more than what it is and what it is created to do, to be born to reproduce and die.

Hence the idea that it is perhaps necessary to renounce the idea of ​​a human nature and to admit that man has no nature, that he is a being of culture. Such, for example, is the position of Lucian Malson in his book The Wild Children. ‘It is an idea now conquered, that man has no nature but that he has or rather that it is a story’.

The starting point of this paper is John Berger’s essay entitled “Why look at animals “(2009) in which he turned to animals and their symbolic representation. In his essay he argues, “human veneration of animals has disappeared with urbanisation and real animals have disappeared.” The way John Berger has seen and thought about life and nature is different from traditional ways in such an inspiring way. He seemed to be constantly in love with Earth and its creatures, even with his own existence, he did not hate the human kind or appreciate animals more than humans. But yet, his writing is often more reflective and quieter than passionate. Berger exhibits a vision of modern life in the long history of evolution and mankind, a life so important after his leaving from Earth. Furthermore, Berger offers insightful descriptive arguments and small snippets of stories to make reading not only attractive but also stimulating. There are chapters that show the similarities and differences between animals and humans, but nowhere does Berger say that one is better than the other. He also criticized the commercialization of animals (zoos, toys, pets, etc.) and hinted at how species are losing their breeds, and zoos have simply become an incarnation of diminishing creatures.

Aristotle once said; ‘Man is an animal, it is said, but it is not a beast’. The first of these two affirmations, which recognizes the animality of the human species, is to be understood on a biological level. The precision according to which the man is not a beast is on the other hand not biological but, according to the case, moral, religious or philosophical. Each of these two points, however, needs to be studied more closely.

To say that man is an animal is for man to remember that he has a body, instincts and more generally a biological ‘functioning’ similar to those of other animals, and more particularly to those of his closer ‘cousins’ in the evolutionary tree, like chimpanzees or bonobos. Moreover, in his essay “Ape theatre” Berger, explains that recently, “molecular biologists have shown that we share with ape’s 99 percent of their DNA. Only one percent of this genetic code separates man from chimpanzee or the gorilla. The orang-utan, which means the language of the people of Borneo “man of the forest” is fractionally further removed. If we take another animal family in order to emphasize how small the one percent is, a dog differs from a raccoon by 12 percent” (p.148). According to BBC, about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution through natural selection, scientists began to accept that humans for all our sophisticated behaviour belong to the same family tree as all other animals. The idea led to two inescapable conclusions. First, our species is not an only child. Somewhere out there in the natural world, there is at least one species of animal that is more closely related to humans than any other – what biologists would come to call humanity’s ‘sister species’. Secondly, and as importantly, our species has a long-lost parent. It stands to reason that if humanity has one or more sisters, then these siblings must have shared the same parent species at some point in prehistory. Evolutionary biologists call this species the ‘last common ancestor’ (LCA). Most people know it by a non-scientific name: the ‘missing link’.

Scientists have been on the trail of the LCA for decades, and they still have not found it. But many are convinced that they have established enough information to make the hunt a lot easier. They think they know roughly when and where the LCA lived. They even have a reasonable idea of what it looked like and how it behaved. (BBC- “We have still not found the missing link between us and apes”). This reminder of our common animality with animals can, depending on the case, make us see men as beasts (through the categories of ‘savagery’ or ‘bestiality’, when a man seems to behave instinctively, for example) or, more subtly, to encourage us to ‘flush out’ behind seemingly complex or refined human behaviours of mere instinctive manifestations;

One of the questions posed by this animality of the human being is that of knowing what consists of what is called, sometimes without sufficient precision, ‘human nature’: is it the ‘animal background’ of being human (his instincts for example), or on the contrary what distinguishes and distances man from other animals, in other words animals. It is often the case that someone ‘behaves like an animal’, so many people have been compared directly or indirectly with the animals. Which means that in the end and after all we are not so different from them. When you say ‘act like an animal’ does not mean that it is an animal, but the behaviour once unreasonable or illogical becomes like an animal, and in some cases the humans are worse than the animals. An animal that does not have the ability to develop reason or logic and cannot do more than what it is designed to do, namely to be born to create and die. But the man who is endowed with reason and logic is capable in some cases to cause more harm than an animal. Both man and animals have the same home the earth but yet an animal has not endangered its habitat, destroyed, caused wars between species, did not endanger the ecosystem in which it lives. Humans has urbanized the planet and at the same time destroyed it, the current problems such as global warming due to carbon dioxide emitted by thermal power plants, carbon dioxide emitted by vehicles, massive deforestation of tropical areas and intensive chemical fertilization agricultural crops have not only destroyed many animal species but also endanger our own existence, and as a result, sea and ocean levels have increased or increased hurricanes and storms, drought and desertification and acidification of the oceans, all these causes and effects are due to mankind.

It is in this second sense that it has been said, for example, that the nature of man is culture, that is to say, precisely what animals do not seem to possess (although it seems that some species of monkey are able to transmit non-instinctive know-how, including without human intervention, which is indeed a form of ‘culture’).

To say that man is not a beast is precisely to insist not only on specificities of the human being with regard to the other animals, but still and more precisely on its superiority. This superiority is supposed to consist in a dignity that would confer on humans’ rights over animals, of which the Bible gives a good example: “God bless [man and woman] and say to them,’ Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and submit it; dominate on the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky and all the animals that crawl on the earth ‘. (Genesis, I, 28). The affirmation of this human dignity also serves as a moral justification for scientific or medical experiments making animals suffer or die, since the life of a man is supposed to be worth more than the life of a beast. But what exactly is this superior dignity of the human being, and what rights does it confer on him? Because it is to state a common place to say that humanity is capable of the best as the worst. Should we then see in the moral or religious justifications of our dominion over the beasts as pretexts seeking to mask a cynical ‘right of the strongest’ or an evolved form of the instinct (human in this case) of survival? At the very least, we must limit our rights to other animals. But there are other examples of this domination that sometimes tragically return man to his responsibilities, such as the extermination, voluntary or not, of an increasing number of species by hunting, fishing or pollution. In addition, the ‘use’ of animals for the pleasure of men, as in the circus or bullfighting, raises the question of the finality of our domination over animals: the distraction probably does not have the same value here as the progress of medicine. The empathy that makes us imagine the suffering that men inflict on other animals, empathy precisely made possible by the fact that man is himself an animal, comes here to oppose our right to dominate and use animals as objects, which they do not suffer from the use we make of them.

Therefore, it can be argued that animals, especially apes and humans are not so different, after all, we share 99 percent of their DNA and vice-versa, that is to say apes, possess more or less human qualities which could entitled them to some human rights, but even if this can be proved, the society will never allow an animal to possess human rights, because no one would ever consider the animals to be legal persons. However, a being endowed with intelligence and with the capacity to have complex social relationships that do not belong to the human species and enjoy the right to life, the right to bodily integrity and not to be subjected to acts of cruelty, the right to freedom from movement in his / her environment and not be captured and kept in captivity for any purpose other than medical treatment or salvage from imminent danger, as well as the right to be protected in the living environment and not to be away from the group or family to which it belongs, should be the most absolute right of animals, but in most cases is never respected.

Turning to the main question, yes or no, is there a radical, absolute difference between man and animal? Or is the man only an animal a little more evolved than the others? Through these questions, we seek if, in the man, is ‘something’ that would be truly non-animal. To go beyond the stage of preconceived ideas and deceptive ‘evidence’, this research will have to try to specify what is meant by ‘animality’. For how do we know if a man is an animal or not, if we do not know exactly what animality consists of? On this point, the classic and formidable obstacle is anthropomorphism (an attitude which consists in conceiving all beings on the model of man): if we begin by attributing human characters to the animal, it is not surprising that one concludes then to the animality of the man. Michel de Montaigne, French philosopher (1933-1992), compares in the essay Cannibalism the situation in France with the one in Brazil and he ask the question “who are we to judge” “are we savages, are they savages, we are all savages” an indirect comparation with animals. On reason in animals and humans, he states “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not making me her pastime more than I make her mine?” who is playing with who and who is the pet? suggests a perspective on relationships between animals and humans and one of the things he is constantly talking about is the fact that we look at nature and think that is somehow less sophisticated or less complex than what humans do, but in reality is not, humans are not the only ones doing complex or sophisticated things, for example: “Why does the spider thicken his web at one point and spin it finer at another? Why does it use now this sort of knot, now that one, if it does not deliberate, ponder and draw conclusions?” the way human think when they work is the same with an animal, they both think.

On another level regarding the behavior between man and animal, Hazlitt began in 1805 his writing career with a small philosophical pamphlet, An Essay on the Principles of Human Actions. While that publication was not a success, it shows Hazlitt’s writing from the outset to be concerned with the nature of human behaviour in which he creates a parallel between man an animal “in conformity to which our sentiments and action with respect to others should be voluntarily regulated, according to the same rule by which gross animal appetite is subject to rational self-interest, may be made the subject of a future quiry” ( Hazlitt, 1805; 45). Another echo is the sexual appetite, which exists in both man and animal “and that here the selfish habit produced by this constant state of animal sensibility seems to have a direct counterpoise given to it by nature in the mutual sympathy of sexes.” (Hazlitt, 1805; 132).

Oscar Wilde in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” expose some fascinating ideas that shows the relation between human nature and animal nature and how man should not be content with small things in life and should try to evolve in better to overcome his social condition in a better situation to overcome the animal nature “Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.” (Wilde and Dowling, 2001). On the other hand, he gives an example of a human condition that is not far away of an animal condition that of using the man and the animals for the labour work as known as slavery “Upon the other hand, there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilization, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life. From their collective force Humanity gains much in material prosperity.” (Wilde and Dowling, 2001). Human slavery as animal slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing.

More generally, for the comparison (man / animal) to be rigorous, we must try not to confuse the simple analogy (superficial resemblance that hides a profound difference) with true identity (which, for its part, can be masked by superficial differences). For example, the language; the great novelist and essayist George Orwell (1946), has shown the process in which the language can be manipulated to express different views in numerous occasions. He believed that language was the key to creating meaning and that it can give shapes to the thought and change our view of reality. When we want to express ourselves, we use our speech/language. Animals also have their own language and they use it just like humans. They talk to each other in order to exchange information. Virtually every animal species has a certain language (e.g. bees, whales, etc.) can exchange certain information, by means of signs; it is concluded that the animal possesses language, as does man, but is not it going too fast. If we remember the reflections already made on the dialogue, we will not fail to look more closely, raising at least two questions: 1) that of the status of the other: is he really an interlocutor, that is, someone whose thought requires listening? Or is it the transmitter of a signal that we receive? 2) the question of the content of what is expressed or ‘communicated’: to communicate ‘information’ and dialogue, is it the same thing? On the one hand, an organism signals to another organism that it is hungry, or that it wants to reproduce itself: it is the manifestation of a fact; on the other hand, two beings discuss together the goal to be given to their existence: it is a questioning on the meaning; between the two ‘communications’, is there, not an abyss? or that he wants to reproduce: it is the manifestation of a fact.

Lastly, we cannot forget that man has a body. He must eat, sleep, reproduce: in this, his kinship with the animal is obvious. But again, things are probably not so simple, at least for two reasons: 1) If some needs are common to humans and animals, the way to satisfy them is not the same in both cases: the animal, the man must eat and reproduce, but he does not eat and does not reproduce like the animal which is a strong point to argue that man and animal are not the same; the man accepts to satisfy his physical needs only if certain conditions of another order (aesthetic, moral) are fulfilled. 2) In many ways, man, therefore, demands infinitely more than his body claims. For example, the search for beauty, truth, and justice is essential for man, whereas, from the point of view of the organism and its needs, it is completely superfluous (which is why the animal ignores it superbly).

Conclusively, it can be noted that this difference with respect to the physical needs exists, in the man, for better and for the worse: the man is capable of sublime spiritual elevations, but also of violence and atrocities worse than an animal can be and absolutely unknown of the animal world (torture, rape, pleasure to see the other suffer and so on). But paradoxically, such behaviour confirms the infinite distance that separates man from an animal: for only a being not limited to his physical dimension can experience such drifts.