I teach a course called “How to Think About Animals,” in which we read T.H. Huxley’s classic paper “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata and Its History,” published in the journal Nature in 1874. Huxley (1825–1895), nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog for his fierce defense of Natural Selection against the counter-tide of Victorian sentiment, recounts sympathetically how one of the greatest scientists of the seventeenth century, René Descartes (1596–1650), could have come to the unfortunate conclusion that animals are nothing more than unconscious machines.
Against this notion—a logical outcome of an anthropocentric, mechanistic view of Nature—Huxley argues that nonhuman animals are, rather, like us, “conscious automata.” While Huxley’s conclusions on other matters may fall short of satisfactory, he puts his finger on a button that should signal our attention: consciousness is a real wrench in the works, so to speak.
The perhaps irresolvable problem that besets us all, arguably the font and fundament of all our other problems, is that humans are both a part of Nature, yet, with our capacity for recursive thought and symbolic representation, can also stand apart from it. We need somehow to reconcile both conditions, what we might call singly the human condition.
Ancient thinkers seem to have understood this dilemma. Their injunction to follow Nature’s lead in deciding how to live and what courses of action to pursue is an attempt to resolve it.
To the charge that in valorizing this idea from the past I have resorted to cherry-picking the evidence I would reply that, well, cherries are delicious. Of course we should pick the ripe, low-hanging fruit. And we should preserve it.
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