The lineage of humans is inseparable from that of the rest of the animal kingdom. The relationship with our fellow animals has been, for most of our species’ lifespan, intimate and fruitful. Animal or human-animal mythologies are a common theme to most cultures and there are plenty of reasons to think that, compared to ours, the primitive human had a completely different relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom. An exclusively human world is a relatively recent development and, according to Morris Berman, being exposed to all kinds of animals must have been a common experience among pre-agricultural societies. Sharing the world with other animals breaks the homogeneity of the relationships between the members of our species, it introduces and makes us participants of a natural world that is much larger than ourselves.

There is something tedious and narcissistic about a strictly human world, and hunter-gatherer societies managed to avoid this. It is thus no surprise that the first symbols were animal ones; that the use of animal imagery for charting the experience of the world is universal.¹

But while it integrates us with the rest of the animal kingdom, living with and observing other animals makes us start to recognize ourselves as humans. According to Berman, this happens because “the look of an animal is so unlike the look of another human being. The eyes of an animal considering man … are wary, and man ‘becomes aware of himself returning the look’.”² In this regard Berman quotes some verses of the poem “A Doe at Evening” by D.H. Lawrence:

… I looked at her

and felt her watching

I became a strange being…

These lines remind me of my father’s gaze during the most acute phase of his pneumonia (0.15): “his eyes had lost the shine that set him apart as a person, his face had been stripped of any trace of sociability, the mask of bios had collapsed. His fear and suffering were more like those of a wounded animal than a man’s, his gaze, completely unintelligible, revealed no trace of personality.” My father’s gaze was completely different from what I had hitherto seen in another human, let alone in one so physically similar to me. Thus, it is only through a look lacking in sociability, in bios, that us humans can become aware of our condition as animals. Similarly, in contemplating ourselves as zoē we also become aware of ourselves as bios.

Seen thus, it is not strange that our coexistence with other animals allowed our ancestors to recognize themselves as a self and an other.

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1. Morris Berman, Coming to our Senses, 66-68. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 65. ↩︎