Leibniz and the singing dog
(part 2)
Part Two of a tediously long, research dump of a post follows. Part One here.
So where’s the line between the human and the animal? Or between the human and the non-human, the post-human? TiR has no idea.
[TiR prefers the question: Where is the line between the interesting and the boring? We don’t know, but on the distant side beyond any such boundary boldly stands – all of TiR’s posts.]
However, one way to contemplate the meaningfulness of any such distinction is to watch videos of animals doing human things, and of humans behaving like beasts.
Hence the internet’s venerable tradition of honoring household pets who ride skateboards, cats who can has cheezburgers, and the like.
Each is a small moment of reflection, of acclimating ourselves to the reality, that human beings are probably already obsolete and pointless, or in any case maybe not even very amusing anymore.
Such videos are our collective emotional and psychological rehearsal for the approaching far side of the non-human divide, for our exciting, next bigger step, first into an awesome but short-lived AI-driven hellscape, then into blessed, post-human eco-collapse.
Doomy!
The longer you refuse to get off the internet, the more inescapable these conclusions will seem.
So why are animals who do “human” things so popular on the internet?
Probably for balance, so that we can at least find humaneness on there somewhere.
[Maybe this is a reason why videos that show friendship between members of different animal species are popular on the internet. Maybe some humans feel how allyship is possible and solidarity across difference is needed more than ever, and find the images heart-warming and instructive as postulated models or analogies of what such fraternité could look like. But mainly: The videos are very funny.]
. . . or precisely because of how the on-line medium holds a sobering mirror to all of us sooner or later that reflects how beastly we can behave (not least to animals).
And also like beasts, we do so with a total and tragic lack of self-awareness, or awareness that arrives too late.
Or as Leibniz, with whom TiR started this mess last month, might put it if he were here to see it: Once we log on, we tend automatically to log off our “faculty of reflection, which the beasts do not have.” (New Essays on Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter xxi ).
If "log off" is too binary of a metaphor, another attempt to capture a frequent dynamic would be on-line life's paradoxical ability (when its potential for wonderfulness goes awry) to buffet and hyper-accelerate valiant human efforts at self-awareness, then to fragment them in a hall of mirrors, whereby coherent reflection collapses and attempts at successful engagement and mutual recognition are short-circuited. Who knows?
As for human reflection versus animal non-reflexivity, Leibniz’s Preface to the same New Essays work further clarifies the distinction, as he sees it.
On the one hand: “This is what makes it so easy for men to capture beasts.” Humans have reason and the ability to draw logical consequences. Animals, who “are purely empirical and are guided solely by instances,” do not.
On the other hand, both species have memories, even though memory often operates in a kind of automatic way, “and the contents of our memory are not always consciously perceived . . . as when we need only the beginning of a song to make us remember the rest.”
The singing dog who so charmed Rorarius (see Part I, here), described in the latter's manuscript, immediately returns to mind. Was its knockout showdogship a function of its automatic memory, mere "empirical" guidance by "instances," or of something more deeply soulful?
Maybe one's answer to the question depends on your broader mesh of ideological commitments, or even your attitude; whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, or an idealist rather than a materialist.
Which side would Leibniz have taken? He was a pretty anti-materialist dude. As he puts in the same “Preface”:
“[T]hinking cannot be an intelligible modification of matter, that is . . . a sensing or thinking being is not a mechanical thing like a watch or a windmill. . . Thus it is not natural for matter to sense and to think.”
Not unrelatedly, Leibniz was also the quintessentially optimistic philosopher. He had a lot of faith in the power of explanations. Particularly his own (and the Bible's).
For example, in the immediately previous paragraph of the “Preface,” Leibniz justifies his “distinction between what is natural and explicable and what is inexplicable and miraculous” by contemplating a world with no such distinction, which necessarily:
“would renounce philosophy and reason, and throw open refuges for ignorance and idleness through a hollow system . . . without rhyme or reason . . . this do-nothing philosophy would equally destroy philosophy.”
To which the modern reader might reply, “So? What’s the problem? Sounds good to me.”
Leibniz’s love for explanations links up directly with his optimism. Per the last paragraph of his “Monadology”:
“[I]f we could understand the order of the universe well enough, we would find that it surpasses all the wishes of the wisest, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is.”
Too rose colored a view, particularly for the modern mind? If so we think, then we might chose to retrace our steps, back to Rorarius, to see where a different path might lead.
On Rorarius’s manuscript, the illustrious Frederick Albert Lange devoted to it an incisive footnote in his 1870s master work on materialism:
“It is distinguished by a grim and serious tone, and the assiduous emphasizing of just such traits of animals as are most generally denied to them as being products of the ‘higher faculties of the soul.’ With their virtues the vices of men are set in sharp contrast. We can therefore understand that the manuscript, although written by a priest who was a friend both of Pope and Emperor, had to wait so long for publication.“
In contrast with Leibniz, what does Lange’s tome on materialism have to say about optimism?
One might say that he wished to be neither its friend nor its enemy.
We see that Lange’s Volume II (Second Book, Chapter 1) condemns Kant for his obliviousness to “poesy,” the “necessary offspring of the soul,” which is “a complete counterbalance to the pessimism which springs from an exclusive acquaintance with reality.”
Lange’s Volume III, in its discussion of David Friedrich Strauss (chapter 3), counterbalances the counterbalance:
“Optimism, moreover, is a pious error, for this, as well as its opposite, Pessimism, is only a product of human ideology. The world of reality is itself neither good nor bad.”
Lange's conclusion:
“Thus the world appears to the optimistic philosopher. He praises the harmony which he himself has introduced into it. As compared with him, the Pessimistic a thousand times is right; and yet there could be no Pessimism at all without the natural ideal of the world which we carry within us. It is only contrast with this that makes reality bad.”
Let us follow this path one step further:
Who was a big and noteworthy fan of both Lange and music? None other than the dude who wrote this, about the animal world:
Consider the herds that are feeding yonder . . . Man cannot see them without regret, for even in the pride of his humanity he looks enviously on the beast's happiness. He wishes simply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all in vain . . .
We saw that the beast, absolutely "unhistorical," with the narrowest of horizons, has yet a certain happiness, and lives at least without hypocrisy or ennui.
Oh, those animals with their non-human relationships with time. In a paradox, they can simultaneously be very musically attuned. As in their instructions to the convalescent Zarathustra:
“Go out unto the roses and bees and flocks of doves! But especially unto the singing birds, that thou mayest learn singing from them!
. . .
"Speak no further," his animals answered once more. "Rather, thou convalescent one, make first a lyre, a new lyre!
“For, behold, O Zarathustra! For thy new songs new lyres are requisite.
“Sing and foam over, O Zarathustra, heal thy soul with new songs, that thou mayest carry thy great fate that hath not yet been any man's fate!
“For thine animals know well, O Zarathustra, who thou art and must become. Behold, thou art the teacher of eternal recurrence. That is now thy fate!”
Note however that Zarathustra here is serenaded by birds, not by any canine animals. Just as well. Zara has a rather low and uncharitable opinion of dogs (emphases supplied):
“Not to the people is Zarathustra to speak, but to companions! Zarathustra shall not be the herd’s herdsman and hound!”
(Part I, Prologue)
“But he who is hated by the people, as the wolf by the dogs -- is the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods.”
(Part II, Section 30)
“Baser still it [i.e. “wholesome, healthy selfishness”] regardeth the obsequious, doggish one, who immediately lieth on his back, the submissive one; and there is also wisdom that is submissive, and doggish, and pious, and obsequious”
(Part III, Section 54)
“Virtue for them is what maketh modest and tame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man’s best domestic animal.”
(Part III, Section 49)
.
Was Zarathustra then a cat person? Meh, not so much either:
"No, I like him not, that tom-cat on the roofs! Hateful to me are all that slink around half-closed windows! . . .". . . the cat however, steals along over the ground. Behold, cat-like does the moon come along, and dishonestly."(Part 2, Section 37, "Immaculate Perception") (emphases supplied)
Was music fan Zarathustra, unlike Rorarius, unaware that dogs can sing?
Here then at long (long!) last is a point on which the Classical Age and Anthropocene Age can agree.
Souls or no souls, the recent years of our wired age have provided abundant videographic evidence, distributedly gathered, that dogs can sing.
However they seem largely but not always to prefer classic rock:
Dylan (with unsurpassed comparative research methods)
Finally for scientific balance and Zarathustra's enjoyment, here's a bird: a parrot singing the Clash.
Pending future gathering of additional (and as always, pointless) web-gathered evidence, TiR will for the moment consider the case closed.
Some dogs can be better singers than are humans. Numerous commentators on the videos linked to below do not fail to observe this.
One might even venture to say that dogs are the best people.
How could Leibniz disagree?
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