Parity Between Human and Animal — Michael de Montaigne
Michael de Montaigne (French, 1533–1592), a humanist, is best known for his philosophical, and intensely personal ‘Essais’. He opposed all types of brutality whether aimed at people or animals. Michael de Montaigne stated that animals interact efficiently within their own species, and that humans referring to their poor communication precisely because humans can’t comprehend their specific mode of communication is indeed a form of ignorance to the extreme. How can humans objectively mark animals as silly and heartless merely because their own inter-species contact differed from ours?
Humans and animals are capable of perfection, evidently, Montaigne thus seems to put human beings and animals on a single rank: the distinction between them, from the point of view of their potential for perfection, is one degree rather than kind, as well as the differences that occur between humans put them in the vast variety of animal species that nature has given.
Since the 17th century, It has been most discussed regarding the statements of Montaigne’s on the speech, reason, and wisdom of animals in the ‘apology’. The vast majority of Montaigne’s illustrations include the suffering of animals which are blended by as if carrying a certain force as the accounts of human beings in pain. As stated by ‘Apology’, humans can interact in a shared language, while the issue is very different among humans and animals; It drastically reduces when the signs of suffering along with the difference between communicative effectiveness between humans and animals. For Montaigne, Empathy is more or less the same between a human being and an animal as that between a person and another person. Montaigne illustrates how a complete sentence and collection of results on the aspect of an animal could allegorically follow from an individual indication that involves empathy.
“There is an important distinction, however, between ‘human’ and ‘person’. In the philosophical literature, the term ‘human’ is synonymous with ‘member of Homo sapiens’ while ‘person’ refers to any entity be they human, chimpanzee, robot, or alien who possesses, to some degree, capacities such as ‘rationality, command of language, self consciousness, control or agency, and moral worth” Animal and Society, Web, “Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy 2016”
Since the beginning, Montaigne has developed a mutual relation amongst human beings and beasts which is quite disturbed by the practice of hunting: the animal has alas no “defence” and human beings have not taken any “offence” from it. These two comparisons, or rather the lack thereof, are in harmony with one another in such a way that there is no antagonism among the two kinds of species and besides that imposed by the practice of hunting that originally belonged to one of them.
Nature makes a man inhuman, or anything other than himself. moreover, it is part of the nature of a human being to be inhuman as stated by the Montaignian paradox: so in this way, a human may realize his own inhuman brutality, and being other than himself a human being becomes an animal capable of making an appropriate reaction to the indications of an animal. To put it simply, it is the same ability that makes human beings inhuman to animals that allows them to practice empathy for the latter. Inhumanity in itself includes what makes human beings the most human, a certain species of animal: the capacity of language and apprehension enables human beings to understand symbols which, in all probability, belong to an entirely alien order of meaning. According to Montaigne, self-apprehension, which he clearly suppo(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)rts, that the reaction to both human and animal suffering is a response to a particular collection of signs. if animal signs of suffering look like their human peers, each response resembles the other. So it’s simply a matter of reacting, therefore the ethics to animals in any case requires responsibility.
When viewed through an essentialist prism, the question of what it means to be human could be answered by identifying what significant attributes or abilities differentiate humans from nonhuman animals, hereafter animals. By meaning man is no better than the animals is an extract from Michel de Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond (1580–92), he claims that all such dichotomizing is irrational. He discusses a multitude of potential distinguishing characteristics of humanity in the text, and for the sake of consistency, the article will concentrate on only two: attributes of language and critical thinking.
By an humoristic rhetorical question, Montaigne challenges the common anthropocentrism of the early modern era: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” . This allows the readers to set their pre-existing speciesism aside and view the resulting claims from a less biased viewpoint than they would otherwise.
Cited Works
Animal and Society, Web, “Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy 2016”
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, “Michel De Montaigne” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (1580–92)
