© 2000 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Animal Consciousness: Some Historical Perspective1
1 History Faculty, E51-285, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts 02139
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A monodimensional understanding of both the past and the present has often characterized the historical background provided for scientific disciplines. It scans the past for the antecedents of the current cutting edge. But establishing such genealogical connections is difficult, even on the level of terminology. For example, neither "animal" nor "consciousness" has ever been defined without contention. The main current (and past) problem with the term "animal" is taxonomic: does it include people or not? and if so, are people included in only their physical aspect or in some more encompassing sense? An examination of 18th and 19th-century taxonomical treatments of the great apes shows how convictions and uncertainties on these issues were expressed through classification. With regard to "consciousness" the main problem has been whether that term refers to something shared by humans and other species. An examination of 19th-century attempts to claim that non-primates like the dog resembled humans more closely than did apes shows that this issue too reflects scientific as well as lay discomfort at the awkward proximity of other primates. A final problem with establishing scientific genealogies is that they often assume past consensus among experts on issues where there was actually intense disagreement, complicated by the difficulty of deciding who the experts actually were two or three centuries ago. None of these problems has completely disappeared even now.
Historical background is often understood to mean a survey of the past, in order to show how it prepared the way for the present state of the field (whatever field may happen to be under discussion)—in other words, a kind of intellectual genealogy or search for ancestors. And such an overview is a fine thing to have, certainly, for various reasons. It illustrates the deep historical roots and resonances of even the most up-to-the-minute research, an aspect of their work that investigators focused on novelty and originality are apt to overlook. Further, an appreciation of the difficulties posed to able investigators of earlier periods by problems whose solutions retrospectively seem simple or obvious or even beside the point may encourage us to reflect on the way we have formulated and assessed the challenges that we face now. Finally, such straightforward recapitulation allows the apportionment of credit where credit is due. There is no question that we all (even historians, who tend not to be so strongly committed as scientists to a progressive understanding of our discipline) stand on the shoulders of our predecessors.
But, as is the case with most attempts to make sense of large and disparate bodies of information, the illumination that such a retrospective account provides inevitably has its (literally) dark side. That is, by drawing our attention to the activities and accomplishments of some predecessors, it diverts our attention from others. Think, for example, of the metaphor I have just invoked (not my own, I hasten to add)—that is, of current investigators standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before them. This metaphor compares intellectual progress either to a kind of acrobatic performance or to the way that parents sometimes hoist their children to give them a clearer view. It rightly emphasizes the long (often ancient) pedigree of even the newest insights. But at the same time it offers several misleading suggestions–most forcefully, that there is a single line of descent that leads from the past cutting edge to the present cutting edge (apologies for that mixed metaphor), but also, for example, that the work that seems most attractive to us as we look back was most highly esteemed by contemporaries, and that, even where this was the case, it was appreciated for the same qualities or characteristics that make it appeal to us. In sum, it suggests that the past can be understood simply as the forerunner of the present. In this suggestion, it is coherent with most of the other metaphors that condition our understanding of the intellectual history of our current pursuits—for example the metaphor of genealogy or descent that I have already mentioned. But now I would like to further suggest a somewhat crossgrained extension of this metaphor: that is, to put it in a nutshell, it is wise discipline that can recognize its own forebears.
Let me state this point in a different way: the reductiveness of the usual kind of "historical background" has its appeal, and also its utility. "Potted history" (another term for the same thing) tends to be easily consumable, both because it is brief and uncomplicated, and also, often, because it flatters both its intended audience and the preconceptions cherished by that audience. But it also can be significantly misleading—and not just about the past. The monodimensional understanding retroactively imposed on the past tends to characterize our understanding of the present as well. For example, current debates about animal consciousness, among others, are also conditioned by the assumption that the stakes are absolute. Positions are understood to be either right or wrong, and the consequence of their rightness or wrongness is understood to be either intellectual survival or intellectual extinction. If we look back, however, we see that, at least in the past, such clarity has not been the rule. I would like to propose a somewhat expanded notion of historical background—one that points at the variety of past understandings of animal consciousness, the diversity of causes that made people embrace or reject them, and the difficulty of deciding which ones to privilege as our precursors.
Of course, as soon as we begin to look at the past of any modern field of endeavor we encounter a basic problem of historical evidence and interpretation—that of language or definition. Both the terms in the title of this symposium—that is "animal" and "consciousness"—are contentious at present. They cannot be defined without reference to ideology. And they have been equally and analogously contentious in the past. At issue—whether explicitly or implicitly, whether in philosophical or religious terms—is the position of human beings within the order of creation. Can we stand to see ourselves as less than singular, and, if not, why not? Aside from this weighty complication, there are more ordinary difficulties—difficulties that complicate the work of understanding all pre-contemporary texts. A century or two is time enough at least to alter the connotation of most words, even if they retain their form and their ostensible reference. And often enough, they do not retain their ostensible reference. That is, they may shift in denotation—in literal meaning—as well as connotation; or their place may be taken by completely different terms. The words in the symposium title exemplify both these possibilities (subtle shift and replacement).
The main current problem with the term "animal" is taxonomic: does it include people, and if so, are people included in only their physical aspect or in some more encompassing sense. This problem is embedded in deep etymology, since "animal" descends from the Latin word "anima," the varied meanings of which include "breath" "life" "soul" and "mind." In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the line between people and other animals was both more and less starkly drawn than it is at present. Both convictions and uncertainties were expressed through classification. Enlightenment naturalists often recognized not only the general correspondence between people and what were then known as quadrupeds, but also the more striking similarities that human beings shared with apes and monkeys. For example, in his 1699 treatise on the chimpanzee (which he called the orang-utan or pygmy) the anatomist Edward Tyson implicitly included humanity in the animal series. (Tyson, n. pag.) His choice of terminology further implied that the categories of "human" and "orangutan" might not be completely distinct. His Latin term for the creature was "Homo Sylvestris" or "wild man of the woods," and, conversely, the humanity of the quasi-mythical pygmies had long been the subject of European speculation. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, naturalists could claim that pygmies were "nothing more than a species of apes ...that resemble us but very imperfectly." (Historical Miscellany, ca. 1800,
III, pp. 288–289) (When thinking about the boundaries of humanity in earlier periods it is also well to remember that until relatively recently opinion was sharply divided about whether everyone now included in Homo sapiens was fully human.)
The celebrated eighteenth-century systematizer Carolus Linnaeus also located people firmly within the animal kingdom, constructing the primate order to accommodate humans, apes, monkeys, prosimians, and bats. And this taxonomic connection was not necessarily confined to the realm of abstraction; through passion or sentiment it might be embodied in living flesh. Thus at the end of the eighteenth-century the naturalist Charles White reported that orangutans "have been known to carry off negro-boys, girls and even women ...as objects of brutal passion" and that it was rumored "that women have had offspring from such connection." (White, 1799, p. 34) In the realm where the interest of specialists overlapped with that of a broader public, claims might be less guarded. Half a century later, a Victorian impresario advertised the merely hairy Julia Pastrana as "a hybrid, wherein the nature of woman predominates over the ourang-outangs." (Bondeson and Miles, 1993, p. 199) A Laotian girl was exhibited in 1883 as "Darwin's missing link," not only because she was unusually hairy, but because she allegedly possessed prehensile feet and could pout like a chimpanzee. (Howard, 1997, pp. 56–57)
The portrayal of apes as particularly human in appearance and behavior extended this implicit assault on the human-animal boundary. Illustrations in works of natural history frequently showed apes assuming erect posture, using human tools, and approximating human proportions in the trunk and limbs. The chimpanzees and orangutans who were predictable features of nineteenth-century zoos and menageries ate with table utensils, sipped tea from cups, and slept under blankets. An orangutan who lived in London's Exeter Change Menagerie amused herself by carefully turning the pages of an illustrated book. At the Regent's Park Zoo a chimpanzee named Jenny regularly appeared in a flannel nightgown and robe. Consul, a young chimpanzee who lived in Manchester's Belle Vue Zoological Gardens at the end of the nineteenth century dressed in a jacket and straw hat, smoked cigarettes, and drank his liquor from a glass. (Peel, 1903, pp. 205–206; "Consul," n. pag.]
If the term "animal" has been the subject of subtle shifts, the term "consciousness" is the most recent in a series of replacements. In the nineteenth century, for example, most discussion of the mental qualities of animals took place under the rubrics of "intelligence" and "sagacity." Then as now, such discussions were not merely descriptive; after all, intelligence and sagacity are no easier to pin down than is consciousness. The quality or qualities under consideration, however denominated and defined, were the focus of particular interest because they contributed both to a ranking of non-human animals among themselves and to a consideration of how closely they approached the human condition. One way of denying the human-ape connection—as of denying the connection between human groups—was to posit an alternative alliance. If non-primate animals resembled humans more closely than did apes, then they would necessarily displace apes from their awkward proximity. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century naturalists debated the rival claims of dogs and apes to be top animal, and therefore closest to humankind. In 1881, for example, George J. Romanes, a close friend of Darwin's with a special interest in animal behavior, celebrated the "high intelligence" and "gregarious instincts" of the dog, which, he argued, gave it a more "massive as well as more complex" psychology than any member of the monkey family. (G. Romanes, 1896, p. 439) Two years later Romanes revised his ranking slightly, including both dogs and apes on level twenty-eight of his famous fifty-step ladder of intellectual development. Level twenty-eight was characterized by "indefinite morality" along with the capacity to experience shame, remorse, deceit, and the ludicrous. (To give some sense of the scale: steps twenty-nine through fifty were reserved for human beings, while worms and insect larva occupied step eighteen because they possessed primary instincts and could feel the emotions of surprise and fear.) Although this schema gaves apes and dogs equivalent rank, Romanes was far from thinking that they possessed identical mental attributes. Rather the ape had achieved its high status through intellect, the dog on account of highly developed emotions. (G. Romanes, 1883, p. 352, inset)
At issue was how to define animal intelligence—if, indeed, animals could be said to possess intelligence at all. Some nineteenth-century naturalists denied that animals possessed any mental qualities besides instincts. A correspondent of the Zoological Journal asserted that although dogs and other animals exhibited behavior that closely mimicked such qualities as foresight, industry, and justice, in fact they were merely performing reflex actions, like Descartes's animal machines. [French, 1824, pp. 2, 9] Most investigators were more generous, however, allowing the higher animals a grab bag of intellectual and emotional attributes. One representative inventory included imagination, memory, homesickness, self-consciousness, joy, rage, terror, compassion, envy, cruelty, fidelity, and attachment. (See Thompson 1851]
An index of the mix of mental qualities that naturalists valued in animals—and perhaps also of their desire to distinguish clearly between animal and human mental capacities—was the fact that well into the last part of the nineteenth century "sagacity" was the standard term for intelligence demonstrated by animals. An individual animal or species might be described as "intelligent," but the term "intelligence" itself was generally reserved for strictly human capacities. (Conversely, if "sagacity" was attributed to human beings, it often had an ironic or less than flattering connotation.) The phrase "animal sagacity" in the title of a book or article often signaled an abstract discussion of instinct or intellect, the kind of discussion that might conclude by appreciating the intelligence of apes. But in the more common usage of naturalists, sagacity indicated not the ability to manipulate mechanical contraptions or solve logical problems, but a more diffuse kind of mental power: the ability to adapt to human surroundings and to please people. A somewhat circular calculation made the most sagacious animals the best servants. So dogs might not only rival apes in the mental competition, but surpass them—closest to their masters in mind as well as in domicile. And since the alternative closeness thus constructed was clearly figurative, the whole animal creation was thereby implicitly removed to a more comfortable distance.
Even if we leave questions of definition aside, we find another source of confusion in retrieving the history of a discipline. It is customary to speak in chronological generalizations—people thought this way in the Enlightenment, and that way in the Victorian period. But such generalizations beg important questions. They assume consensus—almost always an unwarranted assumption—and therefore require the selection of one among competing voices. It is worth asking on what basis such selection is made—how can we tell in retrospect who best represents a bygone era? Or, to put it in a different way, how do we decide whose opinions are most worth recalling? For example, with regard to the taxonomic story I have been recounting about the physical and behavioral resemblances between people and other animals: not everybody was persuaded by Tyson and Linnaeus, or even, later, by Darwin, Jenny, and Consul. Commitments that were explicitly or essentially theological made many naturalists reluctant to embed their own species within the system of animal connections. And if physical resemblances were undeniable, that made it more important to defend the less tangible ground of mentation or behavior. Despite Linnaeus's sanctified status as a systematizer, his inclusive primate order was frequently rejected. According to the late eighteenth-century naturalist Thomas Pennant, "my vanity will not suffer me to rank mankind with Apes, Monkies, Maucaucos, and Bats"; a contemporary similarly asserted that "we may perhaps be pardoned for the repugnance we feel to place the monkey at the head of the brute creation, and thus to associate him...with man." (Pennant, 1793, p. iv; Wood, 1807, p. xvii)
As evolutionary theory suggested a more concrete and ineluctable connection, it provoked still more forceful resistance. After On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, for example, the geologist Adam Sedgwick, who had been one of Darwin's early scientific mentors at Cambridge, asserted that "we cannot speculate on man's position in the actual world of nature ...while we keep his highest faculties out of our sight. Strip him of these faculties, and he becomes entirely bestial." (Quoted in Hull, 1973, pp. 164–165) As Darwin sadly noted at the end of The Descent of Man, "The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons." (Darwin, 1950, p. 919) Given this diversity of opinion within the community of experts it is difficult to identify any particular view as particularly characteristic of the Enlightenment or of the nineteenth century.
This is even true of one of the most frequently cited such views. We are accustomed to see Descartes and his above-mentioned animal machines as icons of the Enlightenment, along with Newton and his gravitational apple. For example Ernst Mayr, who has no love for "Descartes's crass mechanism" and who notes with pleasure the many critics of the biological aspects of his work, credits him with "the spread of the mechanistic world picture," and asserts that his claims "that organisms are merely automata" have "created a millstone around the neck of biology, the effects of which have carried through to the end of the nineteenth century." (Mayr, 1982, p. 97) But it is difficult to know why this position should be regarded as either especially typical of its period or uniquely ancestral to modern attitudes. Although it gave rise to (or served as justification for) many spectacular practices, which have leant themselves to reproduction as part of "the rise of experimental science," there was a great deal of demurral among his contemporaries, both specialists and members of the interested general public. (Even members of the general public willing and even eager to inflict pain on animals—enthusiasts of badger baiting, fox hunting and other blood sports—did not think that their victims could not feel it; on the contrary they often reveled in the fact that they did.) Sometimes this resistance was expressed formally, in the ripostes offered by investigators with greater experience of actual animals. (Boakes, 1984, ch. 4) Sometimes it was expressed informally, as when spectators at public demonstrations quietly put the animal subjects out of their misery. And although this assertion can be seen as at the foundation of subsequent use of animals in experimentation, not all experimenters have been persuaded by it—and it also led to or justified many procedures that modern researchers find both shocking and silly. Indeed, this particular case illustrates yet another recurrent problem of historical retrieval. When we look back, it can be difficult to decide who are the experts. With regard to the formal (taxonomic) relations that I have been discussing, the experts are mostly recognizable in modern terms–they were self styled as naturalists if not as biologists or zoologists. But with regard to the sensibility of animals, a much wider circle of people has always felt able to speak with authority. It is not clear why Descartes rather than Bentham or some other like-minded philosophe should be regarded as ancestral authority on such matters, and it is salutary to consider the somewhat different potted history of ideas about animal sensation offered by people whose major commitment is to the protection of animals, rather than to the increase of zoological knowledge. Perhaps the modern study of animal consciousness should trace itself as much to the protesters as to the experimenters.
That is, at least, if ancestry is determined by shared content as well as by shared form. This brings us to another complicating determinant of how we read our past—which perhaps could be characterized as social rather than political. Descartes may be the preferred progenitor because he was scientific in his methods, at least some of them. This reading recapitulates a protracted effort within the study of animal consciousness—as within most other disciplines that fell within the nineteenth-century rubric of natural history—to cast out the amateurs, the people who were accused of wasting time in journals and at meetings with unsystematically recorded anecdotes about the intellectual and moral capacities of their anthropomorphic dogs, cats, and horses. This effort was characterized in terms of physics envy–such people and practices interfered with the attempt of what ultimately became known as animal psychology to become properly "scientific." This explanation is more persuasive if we look at the sinners than if we look at their judges; from a late twentieth-century perspective they can be hard to distinguish. For example, although Romanes repeatedly warned of the pitfalls of anecdotal observation, he used his favorite terrier to illustrated the "exalted level to which sympathy had attained" and the "intelligent affection from which it springs" in the dog. (G. Romanes, 1896, p. vii; G. Romanes, 1883, pp. 234–235, 240; E. Romanes, 1894, p. 15) Conwy Lloyd Morgan described his observations of his own fox terrier as well as of several dogs belonging to friends (not to speak of a young chicken named Blackie) as experiments. (Lloyd Morgan, 1900, pp. 141–143; Lloyd Morgan, 1893, pp. 227–228) And, in any case, the kind of information that had been excluded as anecdotalism reemerged in a more respectable form within a only few decades as ethology. Research about animal consciousness still comes from a range of disciplinary and subdisciplinary sources. It may be worth asking whether similar questions of sociology still influence relations between exponents of these various approaches.
So if we look back we can see a lot of confusion. The past is as variable as the future, although for different reasons—and we tend to construct or project it to suit our present needs. It is at least interesting that as information has accumulated about the mentation of other animals, there has been no significant reduction in the ways in which that information is interpreted—in the range of opinions about what goes on in our heads and in those of our mammalian and avian kin. It seems unlikely that this diversity can be explained in terms of reductive rightness or wrongness, any more than can analogous diversity in the past. So maybe it would produce additional clarity, as well as additional confusion, to try to recognize the religious, philosophical, political, and sociological commitments that inevitably supplement the scientific ones in current debate.
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1 From the Symposium Animal Consciousness: Historical, Theoretical, and Empirical Perspectives presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 6–10 January 1999, at Denver, Colorado.
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SYNOPSISReferences |
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N. d., "In memory of Consul.". Pamphlet in the Belle Vue Collection, Chetham's Library, Manchester.
Boakes, R. 1984. From Darwin to behaviourism. Psychology and the minds of animals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
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Mayr, E. 1982. The growth of biological thought. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
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Thompson, E. P. 1851. The passions of animals. Chapman and Hall, London.
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