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Animalistic metaphors have been an important tool of philosophical discourse since ancient times. Recently, thinkers have written less about majestic and vigilant birds and more often resort to images from the kingdom of insects or microbiology: the philosophical subject has turned into a parasite, infection, mucus. At the same time, despite all their materialism and rationalism, modern philosophers do not neglect fantastic and otherworldly creatures, such as ghosts and zombies. At the request of The Knife, Nestor Pilyavsky gives our readers a tour of the philosophical bestiary.
Different animals have their own life worlds, different from each other and from the human life world. Many thinkers were intrigued by the border between Homo sapiens and other living matter. Usually it is carried out along the line of consciousness, the ability to comprehend the world and one's own existence. If before the modern era the exceptional position of a person was justified by the presence of an immortal soul, then later arguments about the ability of a person to think and articulate speech were used, which, as it is believed, animals are deprived of.
Martin Heidegger's demarcation line is existential: if animals that do not reflect on their mortality and do not have the opportunity to make a "sketch of the future" live in the "implicit pressure of existence", then a person, on the contrary, can and should conduct a dialogue with being, which is to him through language, mortality and time. However, representatives of speculative realism, object-oriented ontologies, dark vitalism and other trends that fight against philosophical anthropocentrism do not agree that a person has “privileged access” to being. Thus, Ben Woodard reduces a person to mucus, and Graham Harman and Levi Bryant reject not only the hierarchy within living matter, but also, radically eliminating the subject from philosophy, dispose of everything in general, living and non-living,
The worlds of people and the worlds of animals: the problem of dialogue
The concept of the surrounding world (Umwelt), the behavioral space of life or some meaningful environment, was proposed by Jacob von Uckskühl, a zoopsychologist and philosopher who is considered the founder of biosemiotics. In his book "Walks in the Life World of Animals and People", he demonstrated how different the picture of the world can be for certain living organisms. In the same room, a person distinguishes many colors and shades,dog sees only a few of them, but flyand at all recognizes only light and darkness. In the world of flies, we will find “objects important to flies, and in the world of sea urchins, objects important to sea urchins,” explained Ixskühl. The space of the room, with the exception of dishes with leftover food and a lamp, is nothing more than a "running background" for a fly; the heat of the light attracts them, and food and drink hold the legs, equipped with taste organs. Flies and other animals help Uxskyl to conclude that there is no time or space independent of the subject.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, concerned not with distinguishing between species and worlds, but with criticism of language, used the image talking lionin order to illustrate linguistic subjectivity. In Philosophical Investigations, he writes that if the lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him: since the structure of language reflects the ontology of the world, and the lion and man live in different worlds (or see the global world differently), they do not would understand each other even if they could have a conversation.
This statement of Wittgenstein is by no means indisputable - neither in the zoological sense, nor in the philosophical one. Didn't people decipher the "language of bees" when Karl Frisch showed that the dancing of these insects convey information about weather conditions, direction and distance to the source of food? Interesting thatbeeswere the favorite animals of Aristotle, who, among other things, was engaged in beekeeping and honey research. Several vague phrases from his writings suggest that he was the first to discover the ability of scout bees to explain to fellow hives in which direction and how long to fly for flower nectar.
Wittgenstein's talking, but not understood lion is also unconvincing in the light of the discoveries of the anthropologist Eduardo Cohn, who used Charles Peirce's semiotics to explain the ethnometaphysics of the Amazonian Runa Indians. In the book "How Forests Think", Cohn, insisting that all living things produce meanings and meanings (and, therefore, thinks), describes the interaction of people and forests, Indians, plants and animals, includingjaguars... The Runa Indians know how to talk to jaguars. This is not only about shamanic practices, but also about the simplest everyday things:
For some philosophers, animals serve as the subject of research attention, for others - the heroes of thought experiments, and for others they provide an opportunity to study the nature of living things, and sometimes philosophers do not breed, but, on the contrary, unite animals with people.
Thus, Henri Bergson refers to waspsto develop intuitive ideas about "solidarity, but not coincidence" of intellect and instinct. Claiming that a living creature is driven by instinct other than automatic behavior, Bergson cites the example of wasps that know how to paralyze a caterpillar. The instinct presupposes a certain spiritual openness to the world, while the knowledge of the unity of life, which is inherent in instinct, is not thought out, but "discoverable", experienced. Wasps lead Bergson to the idea that when the mind is directed to distinguish objects relative to each other, instinct grasps the object in its mutability. Wasps, who inject their victims with the exact number of injections in order to keep them alive, but to be paralyzed, become for Bergson proof that instinct is not a simple mechanical phenomenon, but a kind of knowledge.
Nietzsche's Philosophical Bestiary: Hunt and Play
Nietzsche's Zarathustra uses animal images to symbolically explain his personality development program:
For Nietzsche, play is the main mode of existence of a truly free mind, for which all being is always innocent.
The animals accompanying Zarathustra are no less metaphorical: snake and Eagle - seemingly textbook images, in the dynamics of which, however, Nietzsche encodes the most important philosophical dilemma - low and high, Dionysian and Apollonian - which will sound in a new way in the philosophy of postmodernism, defining, as we will see later, its specific bestiary.
The eagle has always been associated with the heavenly principle, he is the bird of Zeus, the companion of light and Apollo, proudly ascending above the world. The snake is magic, the power of becoming, the wisdom of the earth, Dionysus.
Nietzsche uses traditional symbols, including an eagle and a bird in general - an image closely related to the mythological metaphor of a spirit rising above being and a soaring soul (bird, butterfly, angel). In the same row stands the Platonists and Neoplatonists who were so interested inPhoenix - a bird whose genealogy goes back to the Egyptian bird Ben - the "shining" soul of the god Ra, which personifies the resurrection from the dead, the solar center and the seasonal floods of the Nile. Benu, in turn, is closely associated with Ba - an immortal human particle, which is often depicted as a falcon with a human head.
It is important that Nietzsche's Apollonian eagle and Dionysian snake always appear together: the union of the animals of Zarathustra is designed to demonstrate the continuity and interaction of height and surface, perspective and proximity, reason and vital energy. Nietzsche returns the winged images of Platonism to the fleshly reality - the snake entwines the eagle, the eagle raises it into the sky, but not as a prey, but as an ally and a precious burden: “These are my animals ... The most proud animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun - they set off let's hit the road…". Serpentine wisdom is not an abstraction inclined to rise above the world, but a living knowledge of changeable and perishable materiality, which the Platonic philosophers, unlike Nietzsche's Zarathustra, separated from the "perfect form", eidos - they separated the snake from the eagle, speaking metaphorically.
Favorite parasites of Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze was very interested in the subject of height, depth and surface. He can be called a critic of the height with which ideas and ideals are connected, and an adherent of the surface, the conceptual expression of which is the famous Deleuze rhizome - one of the main concepts of schizoanalysis (and postmodernism in general). To some extent, starting from Nietzsche, but creating his own direction of thought, Deleuze criticizes idealism and Platonism, which appeal to height and its winged images. Modernity, in which "a person - it sounds proudly", full of postural images of exaltation (a person standing up, a person developing, a person striving upward), is subjected to merciless criticism by Deleuze. It turns out that a person looks at the world too haughtily - it is this position that is blamed for the person's tendency to violence, exploitation and repression. Rational control, pretending to total subordination of life and matter, turns into a loss of control, environmental and social catastrophes. It is not surprising that Deleuze rarely mentions birds, but his texts are full of references to animals whose life occurs on the surface, namelybedbugs, ticks and fleas...
When Claire Parnet in her famous interview asked Deleuze about his love for ticks, he replied that he prefers them, because they react to only three factors from all natural diversity and are able to create their own amazing and incredible world. This answer clarifies little, especially since Deleuze repeated in it his passage from the book “The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque". In order to understand Deleuze's cravings for insect-parasites, you need to open two of his other books: "The Logic of Sense" and "Anti-Oedipus."
Deleuze describes himself as a continuation of the philosophical tradition opposed to the thought of Platonism and post-Platonism, but he does not trace his ancestry from the pre-Socratics (Heidegger claimed to be associated with them), but rather from the Stoics and Cynics, ancient Greek thinkers, devoted not to height or depth, but to “a special surface art ". Deleuze calls the wrenching cloak of Antisthenes and Diogenes, as well as the lion's skin worn by Hercules, as a "philosophical symbol" of this tradition, in spite of Plato's wings and Empedocles' sandals. These cloaks and skins are folded surfaces infested with parasites:
From now on, a person should not be amused by comparisons of his spirit, his sense-forming principle, either with proud eagles soaring in flight, or with light butterflies that embody landscape aesthetic idylls - it's time to pay attention to the multiplicity, interpenetration, flocking, swarming and crawling, to the forms of existence, actualized in the images of lice and fleas.
What used to seem dirty, low and despicable is becoming relevant, attracting the eyes of thinkers and artists. Swarming, biting and infectious animals that have vegetated in zones of nondiscrimination fill a new intellectual space. Hence, the attention of the modern philosopher Nick Land to rats... In one of his essays, he blames Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, who "did not have time for rats" from the philosophically analyzed poems of Georg Trakl. Rats fascinate Land because of their "ubiquitous sourness" and "lycanthropic penetration".
Is philosophy a spider science?
Having proclaimed schizoidness a relevant form of human freedom, a way to play with the radiance of ideocratic heights and the darkness of material depth, while remaining on the shimmering surface of life, Gilles Deleuze could say: born to walk, be able to crawl!
This line in a frankly chthonic direction is continued by philosophers who develop Deleuisian intentions in line with new ontologies. In the famous "Cyclonopedia" by Reza Negarestani, the ball is ruledworms, snakes, demonic hydras other dracolatric beasts, provoking epidemic invasions, ruling the global capitalist market from the planet's oil gut and leading the world to a black vulvo-cosmic singularity. For his impressive inhumanist manifesto, Negarestani even mobilized Pazuzu, an evil Assyrian deity who commands the desert winds and combines in his hybrid corporeality parts of man, lion, bird of prey, scorpion and snake.
Much less aggressive, but no less chthonic, is the philosophy and sociology of the radical cyberfeminist Donna Haraway, who preaches the beginning of a new era - htulucene, when all sorts of tentacles and tentacles acquire incredible relevance. Haraway advises people to look at "rope figures" and "network replays" that can help deal with environmental issues, gender oppression and social inequality. Her favorite "tentacular arachnid", a kind of teacher animal, is the spider Pimoa cthulhu, which she renames Pimoa chtulu - Pimoa chthonic. Haraway reports that he "takes the liberty of taking his spider away from Lovecraft for the sake of other stories and labeling this liberation with the more common spelling of chthonic creatures." Everything singular, detached, defined by Haraway receives a negative assessment.
And in order to overcome the catastrophes of the Anthropocene, you need to collect things and entities into tangles, networks, compost heaps - to destroy existing hierarchies and classifications, become related to the inhuman, intertwine with a multidirectional, multi-level and confused world.
Nietzsche also has a spider. Deleuze in his book "Nietzsche" even referred him to the main characters of the German philosopher. However, the spider Nietzsche is not at all good, he is a poisonous spirit of revenge or rancor, which is driven by the will to punishment and condemnation. It looks like, like the Haraway spider, Nietzsche's spider is associated with the destruction of hierarchies and the triumph of leftist ideas, but Nietzsche receives this negatively. “His weapon is the thread, the web is the web of morality. The spider preaches equality (let everyone be like him!), ”Gilles Deleuze describes the Nietzsche spider. Nietzsche calls Parmenides and Emmanuel Kant spiders, whom he blames for entangling the spirit with the fetters of moral philosophy, which, according to Nietzsche, comes down to a painful memory that cannot get rid of the experience of suffering and rebel against life. But, being an image of keen memory, the spider Nietzsche is also a witness to his cosmology, an agent of the Eternal Return:
However, the official symbol (so to speak) of the European philosophical tradition should be considered not a spider, but owl - the companion of the goddess of wisdom Minerva. The owl sees in the darkness just as the philosophical mind sees its way in a twilight and obscure being, in a blurred and darkened everyday existence, in dullness or indistinguishability of life. In this capacity, the owl is mentioned by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in the preface to Philosophy of Law: "Minerva's owl begins its flight only at dusk."
Ghosts, Germs and Slime: Bizarre Entities in the Service of Knowledge
The bestiary of philosophers is by no means limited to animals. It is inhabited and demonic creatures... Sometimes these, however, have a zoological disguise. An example is the flies from the famous play "The Flies" by existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. On the symbolic surface of the plot, flies swarming in the air of the earth cursed by Jupiter representerinius - antique avengers. However, Jupiter had nothing to do with flies in Roman mythology, and its Greek counterpart Zeus did have the status of Apomius - "protecting from flies." This circumstance and other "oddities" in "The Flies" even forced some researchers to suggest that Sartre "inverts" the image of the heavenly god Jupiter, the lord of order and justice, relegating him to the "lord of the flies" Beelzebub, in order to emphasize the main postulate of his existentialist atheism: the essence not that there is no God, but that if he was, it would not change anything.
As you know, the Christian term "demon" goes back to the Greek "daimon": in ancient Greece, this was the name for special creatures standing in the ontological hierarchy between gods and people. Even in Antiquity, mythological daimons acquired a philosophical status: Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and other sages thought about them, describing daimons as essences of insight or agents of an internal, directing dialogue with being. In the XX century, taking apart Parmenides and Heraclitus, Martin Heidegger reminded philosophers about daimons, and they found in his seminars the place of a special being that supports the ontological hierarchy. Daimons are located between immortal gods and mortal people, and mortality in Heidegger, in his reconstructions of ancient philosophers, as well as in his own fundamental ontology, is of key importance. This view of daimons echoes somewhat the way he described them researcher of desire, French philosopher, psychoanalyst, writer and artist Pierre Klossowski, from whom Daimons seem to borrow immortality from immortal and passionless gods, and passion from mortal and passionate people, they connect ontological poles, show them to each other through their mixed and mediating nature - the nature of a fluid that does not have a specific sex and surpasses the limitation of life-mortality.
It is not too surprising to find Daimons in continental philosophy. But spirits and monsters also figure in the tradition of analytical philosophy - at least as "hypothetical creatures" suitable for thought experiment. Such is, for example,philosophical zombie - an imaginary creature that is completely identical to a person, but does not have consciousness. He reacts humanly to all stimuli and signals, but is devoid of sensory subjectivity, the so-calledqualia... The philosophical zombie is a figure of thought experiments and discussions designed to figure out the connections between consciousness and behavior. It is used to criticize theories that reduce the human being to behavior (behaviorism, physicalism, functionalism), to describe the relationship between the material and the phenomenal, and to clarify issues related to the interaction of the subjective aspects of consciousness with the objectivity of reductionist science. The philosophical zombie is an important part of the methodology of David Chalmers, who in The Conscious Mind imagines a whole world of zombies that physically coincide with humans, but have no conscious experience. The philosopher needs this in order to develop a classification of the types of thinkability and ontological modalities.
The philosopher and researcher of horror Eugene Tucker, who is close to speculative realism, addresses the topic of zombies in a completely different way. For him, zombies, vampires and ghosts, elements of mass culture and new media, first of all, are carriers of eerie materiality, allowing him to look from the “world-for-us” into the “world-without-us”: the understanding of horror allows one to overcome anthropocentrism and see the world as inhuman, to bring thought closer to the unthinkable, matter beyond consciousness. Peering into monsters, Tucker develops his concept of horror, opposing it to Heidegger's horror of death and groundlessness: horror no longer communicates any terrible truths, it only communicates the absence of truth, and from this black insight begins "inhuman thought."
Consonant with Tucker, the phenomenologist of horror and theorist of the inhuman Dylan Trigg also writes, among other things, about monsters, vampires,ghosts and ghosts... Deconstructing the concept of the ghost in Emmanuel Levinas, he explores and displaces the border between living and non-living, experience and non-experience. Having experienced a bodily dying, something no longer coincides with itself, differs from itself, showing a “structural gap” through which the human and the non-human are mixed - such is the essence of the ghost.
For Meillassoux, the phantom becomes a tool that shows the impasse - of both theology and atheism.
Meillassoux finds a way out of “effective grief” that allows him to solve the “ghost dilemma” in the unexpected concept of “divine nonexistence”, according to which “there is no god yet,” but this does not mean that he is impossible. A new science is called upon to develop the approach found with the help of the ghost - materialistic "divinology" - the science of the divine, which can emerge from the all-potential "hyperchaos". Unlike speculative realists, to whom Meillassoux is sometimes mistakenly attributed, this philosopher does not deny or bypass the Kantian correlation (the disposition of the observer and the world), but recognizes it as reality itself, but not necessary, but only factual: the notorious relationship between consciousness and a thing works. but this is only for now - as long as there is no God and as long as the "ghost dilemma" is not resolved. Meillassoux does not seek to deprive a person of "privileged access to reality", what causes the wrath of speculative realists and new materialists, who turn to animals, ghosts and inanimate objects in order to equate them ontologically with humans. On the contrary, this philosopher declares that man “has access to the eternal truth of the world,” but he will give up such his superiority just when the era of divine justice and immortality is coming - that is, when God appears from hyperchaos.
Not all strange creatures in philosophy have a mythological genealogy. For example,lamella Jacques Lacan apparently dates back to hypothetical bubblefrom the book of Sigmund Freud "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" - to an indivisible organism in a simplified form, the essence of an irritable substance, "a piece of living matter that rushes among the outside world, charged with energy of enormous force." Lamella Lacana is a flexible slice, an entity or organ without organs, representing death and sexuality, horror and attraction, united in the organicity of libido. Lamella is completely flat and very thin, and it moves like an amoeba, while penetrating everywhere and being protected from any division or surgical dissection. Through the lamella, Lacan comprehends and explains the mutual transitions of the internal and external.
Microbiological ones can also be attributed to unexpected images of living (and not quite living) creatures that live on the pages of philosophical treatises: archaea, bacteria and viruses penetrating the earth's space capture the imagination of modern philosophers. Viruses, which are more like "pieces of information" than autonomous forms of life, raise questions about the border between the living and the inanimate, and at the same time allow you to redefine the human subject and the networks in which it functions. “There are over one hundred trillion microbes in the human body. Which makes us 90 percent microbes (I'm even disappointed that only 90 percent), ” admits Tucker grimly. And Ben Woodard, whose attention is focused on the "marginalized life" of mold fungi and viruses, on viscous and sticky substances, silt, decay, waste and dirt, opposes anthropocentrism with the "creep of life", "the teeming abyss of biological", in which "the mind - everything only one of the properties in the midst of the clawed and fanged bestiary of nature. "
The animal philosophy of the philosophizing animal (man) is full of a variety of images, sometimes overlapping with each other and even forming whole semantic networks.
So, if we consider the European philosophical tradition in the context of thinking about a human being, one can see the aesthetic evolution (or, if you prefer, involution) of animalistic metaphors of subjectivity: the creature being comprehended moves from a bird or butterfly to a flea, and then to microbes and mucus, moving away more and more. from the original ideal height and approaching the material surface.
Behind the change in the zoological landscape of philosophy is, of course, not only a rethought metaphor of space and perspective, but also scientific, technical and social development, which in different periods of history actualizes different areas and forms of activity. Once humanity knew nothing about bacteria and viruses, now, in the context of environmental and epidemiological problems, these tiny agents are turning into carriers of global connections and various mixtures.
Now, when thinking is captured by environmental issues, when the crisis of values and hierarchies inherited from modernity enters its new (perhaps final) stage, the development of philosophy (as well as anthropology) is largely inspired by the desire to grasp non-human reality, a desire that sometimes reaches to radical attempts to "abolish the human". Animals cease to be just emblems and symbols, becoming interlocutors and accomplices in thinking. Some intellectuals even preach a new animism, prophesying an era of interspecies and biotechnological hybrids. It seems that there are much more animals on the pages of humanitarian treatises than before, and other non-human agents - machines, ghosts, demons - come along with the animals. Addressing them, philosophy still remains philosophy - the desire to find the ultimate and, if it turns out to be possible, take a step further. Step or fly - or perhaps crawl?
Different animals have their own life worlds, different from each other and from the human life world. Many thinkers were intrigued by the border between Homo sapiens and other living matter. Usually it is carried out along the line of consciousness, the ability to comprehend the world and one's own existence. If before the modern era the exceptional position of a person was justified by the presence of an immortal soul, then later arguments about the ability of a person to think and articulate speech were used, which, as it is believed, animals are deprived of.
Martin Heidegger's demarcation line is existential: if animals that do not reflect on their mortality and do not have the opportunity to make a "sketch of the future" live in the "implicit pressure of existence", then a person, on the contrary, can and should conduct a dialogue with being, which is to him through language, mortality and time. However, representatives of speculative realism, object-oriented ontologies, dark vitalism and other trends that fight against philosophical anthropocentrism do not agree that a person has “privileged access” to being. Thus, Ben Woodard reduces a person to mucus, and Graham Harman and Levi Bryant reject not only the hierarchy within living matter, but also, radically eliminating the subject from philosophy, dispose of everything in general, living and non-living,
The worlds of people and the worlds of animals: the problem of dialogue
The concept of the surrounding world (Umwelt), the behavioral space of life or some meaningful environment, was proposed by Jacob von Uckskühl, a zoopsychologist and philosopher who is considered the founder of biosemiotics. In his book "Walks in the Life World of Animals and People", he demonstrated how different the picture of the world can be for certain living organisms. In the same room, a person distinguishes many colors and shades,dog sees only a few of them, but flyand at all recognizes only light and darkness. In the world of flies, we will find “objects important to flies, and in the world of sea urchins, objects important to sea urchins,” explained Ixskühl. The space of the room, with the exception of dishes with leftover food and a lamp, is nothing more than a "running background" for a fly; the heat of the light attracts them, and food and drink hold the legs, equipped with taste organs. Flies and other animals help Uxskyl to conclude that there is no time or space independent of the subject.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, concerned not with distinguishing between species and worlds, but with criticism of language, used the image talking lionin order to illustrate linguistic subjectivity. In Philosophical Investigations, he writes that if the lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him: since the structure of language reflects the ontology of the world, and the lion and man live in different worlds (or see the global world differently), they do not would understand each other even if they could have a conversation.
This statement of Wittgenstein is by no means indisputable - neither in the zoological sense, nor in the philosophical one. Didn't people decipher the "language of bees" when Karl Frisch showed that the dancing of these insects convey information about weather conditions, direction and distance to the source of food? Interesting thatbeeswere the favorite animals of Aristotle, who, among other things, was engaged in beekeeping and honey research. Several vague phrases from his writings suggest that he was the first to discover the ability of scout bees to explain to fellow hives in which direction and how long to fly for flower nectar.
Wittgenstein's talking, but not understood lion is also unconvincing in the light of the discoveries of the anthropologist Eduardo Cohn, who used Charles Peirce's semiotics to explain the ethnometaphysics of the Amazonian Runa Indians. In the book "How Forests Think", Cohn, insisting that all living things produce meanings and meanings (and, therefore, thinks), describes the interaction of people and forests, Indians, plants and animals, includingjaguars... The Runa Indians know how to talk to jaguars. This is not only about shamanic practices, but also about the simplest everyday things:
In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein conducts another "animal-philosophical" thought experiment, which later became famous - with the participation of beetle. To show the inability of a person to go beyond the limits of his linguistic privacy, to see the world through the eyes of another person, that is, to fully understand the interlocutor, Wittgenstein imagines that each participant in the experiment has a box, the contents of which are called a "beetle", but one cannot look into other people's boxes. and everyone can judge what a "bug" is only on the basis of what is in his box. Since other boxes may contain something else (or nothing at all), people will represent something called a "bug", each in their own way. This "beetle", which may not be a beetle, not an insect or not an animal at all, is compared by Wittgenstein with mental content: people think that in their conversations they mean the same thing, but having different experiences, they always talk about different things. Here we are talking about individual life-worlds, and from this point of view, cognitive limitation is characteristic not only of interspecific communications (between people and lions, even speaking), but also intraspecific (between man and man).
For some philosophers, animals serve as the subject of research attention, for others - the heroes of thought experiments, and for others they provide an opportunity to study the nature of living things, and sometimes philosophers do not breed, but, on the contrary, unite animals with people.
Thus, Henri Bergson refers to waspsto develop intuitive ideas about "solidarity, but not coincidence" of intellect and instinct. Claiming that a living creature is driven by instinct other than automatic behavior, Bergson cites the example of wasps that know how to paralyze a caterpillar. The instinct presupposes a certain spiritual openness to the world, while the knowledge of the unity of life, which is inherent in instinct, is not thought out, but "discoverable", experienced. Wasps lead Bergson to the idea that when the mind is directed to distinguish objects relative to each other, instinct grasps the object in its mutability. Wasps, who inject their victims with the exact number of injections in order to keep them alive, but to be paralyzed, become for Bergson proof that instinct is not a simple mechanical phenomenon, but a kind of knowledge.
Nietzsche's Philosophical Bestiary: Hunt and Play
Nietzsche's Zarathustra uses animal images to symbolically explain his personality development program:
We are talking about the work of consciousness with the "spirit of gravity": if camel, a beast of burden, uncomplaining and enslaved, guided by the imperative "You must", the predatory and impetuous a lion, "The king of his wilderness," overcomes camel patience and turns the strength gained in training and discipline into a voluntaristic "I want". However, over time, a lion who can create freedom for himself, but cannot create new values for himself, must become a child, since only a child can easily let go of the old and surrender to the new in the game.
For Nietzsche, play is the main mode of existence of a truly free mind, for which all being is always innocent.
The animals accompanying Zarathustra are no less metaphorical: snake and Eagle - seemingly textbook images, in the dynamics of which, however, Nietzsche encodes the most important philosophical dilemma - low and high, Dionysian and Apollonian - which will sound in a new way in the philosophy of postmodernism, defining, as we will see later, its specific bestiary.
The eagle has always been associated with the heavenly principle, he is the bird of Zeus, the companion of light and Apollo, proudly ascending above the world. The snake is magic, the power of becoming, the wisdom of the earth, Dionysus.
Nietzsche uses traditional symbols, including an eagle and a bird in general - an image closely related to the mythological metaphor of a spirit rising above being and a soaring soul (bird, butterfly, angel). In the same row stands the Platonists and Neoplatonists who were so interested inPhoenix - a bird whose genealogy goes back to the Egyptian bird Ben - the "shining" soul of the god Ra, which personifies the resurrection from the dead, the solar center and the seasonal floods of the Nile. Benu, in turn, is closely associated with Ba - an immortal human particle, which is often depicted as a falcon with a human head.
It is important that Nietzsche's Apollonian eagle and Dionysian snake always appear together: the union of the animals of Zarathustra is designed to demonstrate the continuity and interaction of height and surface, perspective and proximity, reason and vital energy. Nietzsche returns the winged images of Platonism to the fleshly reality - the snake entwines the eagle, the eagle raises it into the sky, but not as a prey, but as an ally and a precious burden: “These are my animals ... The most proud animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun - they set off let's hit the road…". Serpentine wisdom is not an abstraction inclined to rise above the world, but a living knowledge of changeable and perishable materiality, which the Platonic philosophers, unlike Nietzsche's Zarathustra, separated from the "perfect form", eidos - they separated the snake from the eagle, speaking metaphorically.
Favorite parasites of Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze was very interested in the subject of height, depth and surface. He can be called a critic of the height with which ideas and ideals are connected, and an adherent of the surface, the conceptual expression of which is the famous Deleuze rhizome - one of the main concepts of schizoanalysis (and postmodernism in general). To some extent, starting from Nietzsche, but creating his own direction of thought, Deleuze criticizes idealism and Platonism, which appeal to height and its winged images. Modernity, in which "a person - it sounds proudly", full of postural images of exaltation (a person standing up, a person developing, a person striving upward), is subjected to merciless criticism by Deleuze. It turns out that a person looks at the world too haughtily - it is this position that is blamed for the person's tendency to violence, exploitation and repression. Rational control, pretending to total subordination of life and matter, turns into a loss of control, environmental and social catastrophes. It is not surprising that Deleuze rarely mentions birds, but his texts are full of references to animals whose life occurs on the surface, namelybedbugs, ticks and fleas...
When Claire Parnet in her famous interview asked Deleuze about his love for ticks, he replied that he prefers them, because they react to only three factors from all natural diversity and are able to create their own amazing and incredible world. This answer clarifies little, especially since Deleuze repeated in it his passage from the book “The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque". In order to understand Deleuze's cravings for insect-parasites, you need to open two of his other books: "The Logic of Sense" and "Anti-Oedipus."
Deleuze describes himself as a continuation of the philosophical tradition opposed to the thought of Platonism and post-Platonism, but he does not trace his ancestry from the pre-Socratics (Heidegger claimed to be associated with them), but rather from the Stoics and Cynics, ancient Greek thinkers, devoted not to height or depth, but to “a special surface art ". Deleuze calls the wrenching cloak of Antisthenes and Diogenes, as well as the lion's skin worn by Hercules, as a "philosophical symbol" of this tradition, in spite of Plato's wings and Empedocles' sandals. These cloaks and skins are folded surfaces infested with parasites:
In other works, Deleuze puts in one row the tick and the monad - an indivisible unit that, according to a number of philosophical teachings, lies at the heart of every phenomenon. An insect, and rather a crawling rather than flying, becomes for him a metaphor of subjectivity, and the gregarious, collective nature of lice and fleas seems to be important in this channel. The shifting multitude, forming concatenations of meanings on the surface of life, replaces the atomic, lonely or heroic soul, the subject-unit inherited by modernity from Christianity. In poststructuralism, the anthropological subject appears as a folded, sliding exterior or restless, changeable colonies of insects crawling over each other.
From now on, a person should not be amused by comparisons of his spirit, his sense-forming principle, either with proud eagles soaring in flight, or with light butterflies that embody landscape aesthetic idylls - it's time to pay attention to the multiplicity, interpenetration, flocking, swarming and crawling, to the forms of existence, actualized in the images of lice and fleas.
What used to seem dirty, low and despicable is becoming relevant, attracting the eyes of thinkers and artists. Swarming, biting and infectious animals that have vegetated in zones of nondiscrimination fill a new intellectual space. Hence, the attention of the modern philosopher Nick Land to rats... In one of his essays, he blames Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, who "did not have time for rats" from the philosophically analyzed poems of Georg Trakl. Rats fascinate Land because of their "ubiquitous sourness" and "lycanthropic penetration".
Is philosophy a spider science?
Having proclaimed schizoidness a relevant form of human freedom, a way to play with the radiance of ideocratic heights and the darkness of material depth, while remaining on the shimmering surface of life, Gilles Deleuze could say: born to walk, be able to crawl!
This line in a frankly chthonic direction is continued by philosophers who develop Deleuisian intentions in line with new ontologies. In the famous "Cyclonopedia" by Reza Negarestani, the ball is ruledworms, snakes, demonic hydras other dracolatric beasts, provoking epidemic invasions, ruling the global capitalist market from the planet's oil gut and leading the world to a black vulvo-cosmic singularity. For his impressive inhumanist manifesto, Negarestani even mobilized Pazuzu, an evil Assyrian deity who commands the desert winds and combines in his hybrid corporeality parts of man, lion, bird of prey, scorpion and snake.
Much less aggressive, but no less chthonic, is the philosophy and sociology of the radical cyberfeminist Donna Haraway, who preaches the beginning of a new era - htulucene, when all sorts of tentacles and tentacles acquire incredible relevance. Haraway advises people to look at "rope figures" and "network replays" that can help deal with environmental issues, gender oppression and social inequality. Her favorite "tentacular arachnid", a kind of teacher animal, is the spider Pimoa cthulhu, which she renames Pimoa chtulu - Pimoa chthonic. Haraway reports that he "takes the liberty of taking his spider away from Lovecraft for the sake of other stories and labeling this liberation with the more common spelling of chthonic creatures." Everything singular, detached, defined by Haraway receives a negative assessment.
And in order to overcome the catastrophes of the Anthropocene, you need to collect things and entities into tangles, networks, compost heaps - to destroy existing hierarchies and classifications, become related to the inhuman, intertwine with a multidirectional, multi-level and confused world.
I must say that spiders began to excite philosophers long before Donna Haraway. It is known that they were kept by Baruch Spinoza, who, according to his ancient biographer Kohlerus, loved, "during his break from scientific work, to observe, throwing a fly into a net to the spider that lived in the corner of his room, the movements of the prey and the predator". At the same time, as they say, Spinoza laughed furiously. This information served as the basis for the story of Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky , who linked Spinoza's entertainment with his political ideas in the field of "natural law".
Nietzsche also has a spider. Deleuze in his book "Nietzsche" even referred him to the main characters of the German philosopher. However, the spider Nietzsche is not at all good, he is a poisonous spirit of revenge or rancor, which is driven by the will to punishment and condemnation. It looks like, like the Haraway spider, Nietzsche's spider is associated with the destruction of hierarchies and the triumph of leftist ideas, but Nietzsche receives this negatively. “His weapon is the thread, the web is the web of morality. The spider preaches equality (let everyone be like him!), ”Gilles Deleuze describes the Nietzsche spider. Nietzsche calls Parmenides and Emmanuel Kant spiders, whom he blames for entangling the spirit with the fetters of moral philosophy, which, according to Nietzsche, comes down to a painful memory that cannot get rid of the experience of suffering and rebel against life. But, being an image of keen memory, the spider Nietzsche is also a witness to his cosmology, an agent of the Eternal Return:
Accusing Kant of "Chineseism" and "spider habits", that is, rationalistic, methodical, casuistic and lifeless thinking, Nietzsche aimed, perhaps, at the whole of classical philosophy, and in this, through the metaphor of the spider, he was partly consonant with Francis Bacon. Bacon in his book "The Great Restoration of Sciences" described three methods of cognition: "the path of the spider", "the path of the ant" and "the path of the bee." And for the "path of the spider" it is characteristic to deduce judgments precisely from "pure reason", in a rationalistic way, sometimes bypassing empiricism and living. Thinkers who follow this path, Bacon notes, risk falling into dogmatism, becoming prisoners of the "web of thoughts from their minds," and it is better to prefer this path not to the other extreme - the "path of the ant" (an absolute empiricist who has no access to theoretical knowledge), but balancing life practice and mental contemplation "the path of the bee."
However, the official symbol (so to speak) of the European philosophical tradition should be considered not a spider, but owl - the companion of the goddess of wisdom Minerva. The owl sees in the darkness just as the philosophical mind sees its way in a twilight and obscure being, in a blurred and darkened everyday existence, in dullness or indistinguishability of life. In this capacity, the owl is mentioned by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in the preface to Philosophy of Law: "Minerva's owl begins its flight only at dusk."
Ghosts, Germs and Slime: Bizarre Entities in the Service of Knowledge
The bestiary of philosophers is by no means limited to animals. It is inhabited and demonic creatures... Sometimes these, however, have a zoological disguise. An example is the flies from the famous play "The Flies" by existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. On the symbolic surface of the plot, flies swarming in the air of the earth cursed by Jupiter representerinius - antique avengers. However, Jupiter had nothing to do with flies in Roman mythology, and its Greek counterpart Zeus did have the status of Apomius - "protecting from flies." This circumstance and other "oddities" in "The Flies" even forced some researchers to suggest that Sartre "inverts" the image of the heavenly god Jupiter, the lord of order and justice, relegating him to the "lord of the flies" Beelzebub, in order to emphasize the main postulate of his existentialist atheism: the essence not that there is no God, but that if he was, it would not change anything.
As you know, the Christian term "demon" goes back to the Greek "daimon": in ancient Greece, this was the name for special creatures standing in the ontological hierarchy between gods and people. Even in Antiquity, mythological daimons acquired a philosophical status: Socrates, Plato, Xenophon and other sages thought about them, describing daimons as essences of insight or agents of an internal, directing dialogue with being. In the XX century, taking apart Parmenides and Heraclitus, Martin Heidegger reminded philosophers about daimons, and they found in his seminars the place of a special being that supports the ontological hierarchy. Daimons are located between immortal gods and mortal people, and mortality in Heidegger, in his reconstructions of ancient philosophers, as well as in his own fundamental ontology, is of key importance. This view of daimons echoes somewhat the way he described them researcher of desire, French philosopher, psychoanalyst, writer and artist Pierre Klossowski, from whom Daimons seem to borrow immortality from immortal and passionless gods, and passion from mortal and passionate people, they connect ontological poles, show them to each other through their mixed and mediating nature - the nature of a fluid that does not have a specific sex and surpasses the limitation of life-mortality.
It is not too surprising to find Daimons in continental philosophy. But spirits and monsters also figure in the tradition of analytical philosophy - at least as "hypothetical creatures" suitable for thought experiment. Such is, for example,philosophical zombie - an imaginary creature that is completely identical to a person, but does not have consciousness. He reacts humanly to all stimuli and signals, but is devoid of sensory subjectivity, the so-calledqualia... The philosophical zombie is a figure of thought experiments and discussions designed to figure out the connections between consciousness and behavior. It is used to criticize theories that reduce the human being to behavior (behaviorism, physicalism, functionalism), to describe the relationship between the material and the phenomenal, and to clarify issues related to the interaction of the subjective aspects of consciousness with the objectivity of reductionist science. The philosophical zombie is an important part of the methodology of David Chalmers, who in The Conscious Mind imagines a whole world of zombies that physically coincide with humans, but have no conscious experience. The philosopher needs this in order to develop a classification of the types of thinkability and ontological modalities.
The philosopher and researcher of horror Eugene Tucker, who is close to speculative realism, addresses the topic of zombies in a completely different way. For him, zombies, vampires and ghosts, elements of mass culture and new media, first of all, are carriers of eerie materiality, allowing him to look from the “world-for-us” into the “world-without-us”: the understanding of horror allows one to overcome anthropocentrism and see the world as inhuman, to bring thought closer to the unthinkable, matter beyond consciousness. Peering into monsters, Tucker develops his concept of horror, opposing it to Heidegger's horror of death and groundlessness: horror no longer communicates any terrible truths, it only communicates the absence of truth, and from this black insight begins "inhuman thought."
Consonant with Tucker, the phenomenologist of horror and theorist of the inhuman Dylan Trigg also writes, among other things, about monsters, vampires,ghosts and ghosts... Deconstructing the concept of the ghost in Emmanuel Levinas, he explores and displaces the border between living and non-living, experience and non-experience. Having experienced a bodily dying, something no longer coincides with itself, differs from itself, showing a “structural gap” through which the human and the non-human are mixed - such is the essence of the ghost.
However, the most impressive study of ghosts was the acclaimed article by contemporary French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux "The Ghost Dilemma", in which the thinker attempts to logically comprehend grief for a "real ghost" - a deceased whose terrible death cannot be mourned after parting with him.
For Meillassoux, the phantom becomes a tool that shows the impasse - of both theology and atheism.
Meillassoux finds a way out of “effective grief” that allows him to solve the “ghost dilemma” in the unexpected concept of “divine nonexistence”, according to which “there is no god yet,” but this does not mean that he is impossible. A new science is called upon to develop the approach found with the help of the ghost - materialistic "divinology" - the science of the divine, which can emerge from the all-potential "hyperchaos". Unlike speculative realists, to whom Meillassoux is sometimes mistakenly attributed, this philosopher does not deny or bypass the Kantian correlation (the disposition of the observer and the world), but recognizes it as reality itself, but not necessary, but only factual: the notorious relationship between consciousness and a thing works. but this is only for now - as long as there is no God and as long as the "ghost dilemma" is not resolved. Meillassoux does not seek to deprive a person of "privileged access to reality", what causes the wrath of speculative realists and new materialists, who turn to animals, ghosts and inanimate objects in order to equate them ontologically with humans. On the contrary, this philosopher declares that man “has access to the eternal truth of the world,” but he will give up such his superiority just when the era of divine justice and immortality is coming - that is, when God appears from hyperchaos.
Not all strange creatures in philosophy have a mythological genealogy. For example,lamella Jacques Lacan apparently dates back to hypothetical bubblefrom the book of Sigmund Freud "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" - to an indivisible organism in a simplified form, the essence of an irritable substance, "a piece of living matter that rushes among the outside world, charged with energy of enormous force." Lamella Lacana is a flexible slice, an entity or organ without organs, representing death and sexuality, horror and attraction, united in the organicity of libido. Lamella is completely flat and very thin, and it moves like an amoeba, while penetrating everywhere and being protected from any division or surgical dissection. Through the lamella, Lacan comprehends and explains the mutual transitions of the internal and external.
Microbiological ones can also be attributed to unexpected images of living (and not quite living) creatures that live on the pages of philosophical treatises: archaea, bacteria and viruses penetrating the earth's space capture the imagination of modern philosophers. Viruses, which are more like "pieces of information" than autonomous forms of life, raise questions about the border between the living and the inanimate, and at the same time allow you to redefine the human subject and the networks in which it functions. “There are over one hundred trillion microbes in the human body. Which makes us 90 percent microbes (I'm even disappointed that only 90 percent), ” admits Tucker grimly. And Ben Woodard, whose attention is focused on the "marginalized life" of mold fungi and viruses, on viscous and sticky substances, silt, decay, waste and dirt, opposes anthropocentrism with the "creep of life", "the teeming abyss of biological", in which "the mind - everything only one of the properties in the midst of the clawed and fanged bestiary of nature. "
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The animal philosophy of the philosophizing animal (man) is full of a variety of images, sometimes overlapping with each other and even forming whole semantic networks.
So, if we consider the European philosophical tradition in the context of thinking about a human being, one can see the aesthetic evolution (or, if you prefer, involution) of animalistic metaphors of subjectivity: the creature being comprehended moves from a bird or butterfly to a flea, and then to microbes and mucus, moving away more and more. from the original ideal height and approaching the material surface.
Behind the change in the zoological landscape of philosophy is, of course, not only a rethought metaphor of space and perspective, but also scientific, technical and social development, which in different periods of history actualizes different areas and forms of activity. Once humanity knew nothing about bacteria and viruses, now, in the context of environmental and epidemiological problems, these tiny agents are turning into carriers of global connections and various mixtures.
Now, when thinking is captured by environmental issues, when the crisis of values and hierarchies inherited from modernity enters its new (perhaps final) stage, the development of philosophy (as well as anthropology) is largely inspired by the desire to grasp non-human reality, a desire that sometimes reaches to radical attempts to "abolish the human". Animals cease to be just emblems and symbols, becoming interlocutors and accomplices in thinking. Some intellectuals even preach a new animism, prophesying an era of interspecies and biotechnological hybrids. It seems that there are much more animals on the pages of humanitarian treatises than before, and other non-human agents - machines, ghosts, demons - come along with the animals. Addressing them, philosophy still remains philosophy - the desire to find the ultimate and, if it turns out to be possible, take a step further. Step or fly - or perhaps crawl?
