2.38
Because we’re immersed in our world and never leave it behind, even while opening to others, we never exceed the limits of our world. Other experiences can occur only within our world.
Thus, we know there are limits to my perspective (not solely visual, but ‘situational’) insofar as there are other perspectives; limits to my world insofar as there are other worlds; and limits to my being insofar as there are other beings and the possibilities of ‘no-world’ or ‘not-being.’ But these limits and how they’re conceived are disclosed within my world, even if they shift and expand my world. — There is no neutral position from which to observe them.
‘But, then, how can you know about the multitude of divergent views you speak of, if you lack access?’
My enworldedness reveals that other beings are also enworlded: that they have meaningful relations trailing off in various directions. Now, I can’t fully know their worlds. My claim that there are other worlds—as with my claim that there are other perspectives (or, more traditionally, other minds)—comes from within my world (my perspective); it’s a way to make sense of the phenomena, to approach what’s really there. While I can know that my world ‘ends’ at a certain point (not a linear point, but a blended, overlapping, fuzzy ‘point’ that’s not really a point but instead occurs at all ‘points’), I cannot directly experience my world ending. Derrida makes a similar claim regarding death: I cannot directly experience my death. Any imagination of it instantiates a phantasm by which I survive it (i.e., there’s always my perspective there, ‘watching’ myself after death).[1] – So too, here, I survive, persist, and insist through any projection ‘beyond’ my world.
Nonetheless, there are better and worse ways to take up this fact, grounded in part in feedback given from things themselves. We must imagine what it’s like, or rather, what it is or could be for the other. Yes, you can never directly experience nor ever know fully—there’s no such thing, not even for the being in question—but you can learn in part. As with death, you cannot experience your death ‘as such,’[2] but this doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to interrogate it. Nor can you avoid these transgressions any way (i.e., we cannot avoid thinking about and imagining others, our death, and our limits).
Non-human animals, like death, demarcate a limit for us and our worlds. Undoubtedly, something like Morgan’s Canon, the directive against anthropomorphizing non-human animals, exists for good reason. There’s a problem with a facile transference of too many facets between two contexts just because they have some facets in common. Yet, there are several responses here.
First, the same facile transference that Morgan’s Canon is meant to prevent occurs amongst that diversity that we call ‘the animal’: i.e., all non-human animals are presumed to be alike in fundamental ways or, put otherwise, humans are presumed to be utterly unique compared to all other animals (§2.11).
Second, when we notice a commonality, the directive is applied to stop us from assuming that there are further commonalities: e.g., birds chirp and other birds respond, which is similar to what we do with our vocalizations, yet Morgan’s Canon says we shouldn’t assume that chirping is a form of language. In this way, we maintain anthropocentrism. But how many of the things that we attribute to ourselves, under the concept of ‘the human,’ do we actually have in the (exclusive) way we think we do?[3]
Third, the directive blinds us to commonalities. We end up erring on the side of difference at the expense of similarities, and so we miss commonalities-in-difference (§1.2, §2.2).
Fourth, just because the directive says one shouldn’t attribute some facet to non-human animals doesn’t mean a.) they don’t have it (either at all or in part), b.) they have its negation or lack, or c.) they’re inferior to humans. (There are attributes they have that we wouldn’t attribute to ourselves, such as, possibly, magnetoreception.)
This directive is a methodological principle that usefully avoids collapsing difference. But when it’s used (even if implicitly), for instance, to question whether non-human animals can feel pain in a way that matters[4]—when it’s used to deny non-human animals worlds and to view them as outside ethics (§2.11)—we need to ask whether it continues to be the best way to respect difference. Yes, there’s a danger in too hastily attributing, but there’s the opposing danger in too hastily denying.
Another principle, which we may perhaps do well to heed in conjunction with its opposite, might run as follows (though I’m sure others could refine it better):
Do not withhold attributing commonality without good reason; or, positively put:
Assume there is commonality unless you can show more substantial difference.
These principles, taken together (i.e., don’t leap quickly into either emphasizing difference or commonality), may act as a prophylactic against our tendency to block imaginative leaps, blocks which restrict better approaches to thinking and imagining.
[1] Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 117, 130, 157, 160. See also Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press Limited, 1957), p. 289: “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.”
[2] Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 76.
[3] Derrida asks this question about death as such, the other as such, deception, auto-reference (in deictic terms), and so on. Derrida, Aporias, p. 76; Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 94–5, 133–6.
[4] That is, whether they can consciously experience anything, which includes pain, and thus whether their pain has any moral concern for us: Peter Carruthers, “Brute Experience,” The Journal of Philosophy, 86.5 (May 1989): p. 258–69, see p. 268. Carruthers argues that non-human animals only have nonconscious experiences which are of no moral concern.