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Therianthropes in a Cartesian and an Animistic Cosmology: Beyond-the-Pale Monsters versus Being-in-the World Others

100%

Guenther M.

Literatura Ludowa

2022

vol. 66

issue 3

7-35

The nature of human-animal hybrid beings (or therianthropes) is examined in an Animistic (traditional San Bushman) and a Cartesian (Early Modern Western) cosmology. In each ontological ambiguity is imagined and conceptualized in different terms. One of them is through monstrosity, which, in the Western schema, is equated with human-animal hybridity. This equivalence threatens the boundaries and categories that buttress western cosmology, through a being – the human-animal hybrid – deemed a conceptual and epistemological abomination. It elicits a category crisis that is as much cerebral as it is visceral as the were-beings it conceives are feared and demonized. No such valences attach to therianthropes in the cosmology described in this paper. It is an “entangled” cosmology shot through with ambiguity and fluidity in which human-animal hybridity is neither abominable nor feared. Instead, as a pervasive and salient theme of San world view and lifeways, especially its expressive and ritual spheres, along with hunting, ontological mutability becomes an integral component of people’s thoughts and lives and thereby normalized and naturalized. Beings partaking of this state are deemed another species of being with whom humans engage as other-than-humans, on shared social terms. Monsters are beings who negate or transgress the moral foundation of the social order. San monstrosity, conceptually and phenomenologically, becomes thereby a matter of deviation from social (moral) pre/proscriptions rather than from classificatory (ontological) ones. This basic conceptual difference notwithstanding, we also find a fundamental commonality: the inversion, through monsters and monstrosity, of each cosmology’s underlying epistemic matrices, of structure and ambiguity, respectively.

Towards a Non-human Speciophilosophy

84%

Giannetto E.

Ethics in Progress

2020

vol. 11

issue 2

9-30

After the publication of Jaques Derrida’s book, L’animal que donc je suis, anti-speciesism has been looking for a theoretical foundation for its ethical content. In my opinion, the defect of all these philosophical perspectives is that they still reduce animals to objects of human philosophy. Here, I develop a new framework in which animals are considered as subjects of their own philosophy. In analogy to the concept of ethnophilosophy, the concept of speciophilosophy is here introduced (§ 1, §3). The different ways of thinking between humans and other animals are outlined, by explaining the difference between verbal reasoning and thinking through images (§ 2). Human philosophies are shown to be anthropocentric ideologies, related to carnivorism (§4, § 8). Subsequently, animal speciophilosophies are discussed (§6) and a dialogical symphilosophein (§ 5) among all living beings is proposed to be the extension of the so-called philosophy of dialogue. Finally, it is shown how this perspective was present in the original Christian ethics (§7, §9, § 10).

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Therianthropes in a Cartesian and an Animistic Cosmology: Beyond-the-Pale Monsters versus Being-in-the World Others

Towards a Non-human Speciophilosophy