If a philosopher has already discussed this in depth, please inform me of the author so I can do some reading before I continue delving into this topic in my mind.
Try to think about a view of the world from outside the perspective of a human. In fact, from any other perspective. A cat. A tree. Matter.
It’s impossible. We’ve been subjected to a human worldview our entire lives. So has the entire society that has been constructed by our species. Even if we do attempt to imagine what it would be like to be cat for just one moment, then one has to attempt to determine how accurate our portrayal of that perspective was? My guess is not very, and it’s more likely just a human portrayal broadcast onto a cat.
This might seem a pointless question, but I feel it is essential, before making an accurate determination about the world around us, to recognize our severe bias just having lived solely as a human being. This severe bias shapes our views of reality, and can be very blinding to the truth of humanity.
Good topic. I recently purchased a book off amazon called The Open: Man and Animal by Giorgio Agamben. I haven’t read it yet but the premise sounds fascinating. The title refers to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, which he used in an anthropocentric sense. According to him man is the only being which experiences the miracle of what is. Agamben challenges this assertion by going through various ancient sources in an attempt to uncover the development in which way man was somehow considered apart from and above the animal kingdom and how the distinction between the two began. Although this will undoubtly be a source of ammunition for animal rights activists I am beside such considertions and am interested by the content and ideas themselves.
It seems along the lines of Foucault’s attempt to re-integrate ancient notions of natural reality into modern science in The Order of Things but Foucault doesn’t seem to overcome his humanism. Anyway, the text is here:
In “The Open”, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the “human” has been thought of as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether. In an argument that ranges from ancient Greek, Christian, and Jewish texts to twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kojève, Agamben examines the ways in which the distinction between man and animal has been manufactured by the logical presuppositions of Western thought, and he investigates the profound implications that the man/animal distinction has had for disciplines as seemingly disparate as philosophy, law, anthropology, medicine, and politics.