2.42
In a sense, though, it’s true that animals (and other beings) should be taken as perspectival centres. It seems obvious that animals have a variety of meaningful relations with things around them based on how they sense things.
Yet, it’s also true that animals aren’t reducible to ‘perspectival centres.’ First, ‘perspectival centre’ risks being thought of as a formal, general characteristic that’s abstractly applied to or derived from different cases. Just as consciousness is always intentional, so a perspectival centre is always intentional, relational, embedded, enworlded, and directed: it’s particular in each case, and commonality shouldn’t be reduced to sameness. Second, our work is not done when we find this commonality, for we must sit with the vast differences, the abysses, that exist as well. So, animals are perspectival centres, but we can’t stop there.
The abysses between us and other animals are vast, indescribable, and irreducible. But this is true between all kinds of animals: the abyss from bird to bear, bear to fish, fish to bird. (And, to push the point, are all birds ‘birds’? Just how similar are hummingbird and emu, penguin and woodpecker; in both a bodily and an enworlded sense?)
We must ask ourselves anew, how do phenomena present themselves? Try to imagine transposing yourself into a squirrel. How would you do so? What would that be like? Would it just be ‘you’ in or as a squirrel? There are innumerable difficulties with questions of access, and we find ourselves pushed away. So, how does the phenomenon, which holistically includes being pushed away, reveal itself? As an ambiguous possibility of access; as an epistemological and abyssal limit.
Animals, some more than others, reveal ways that they come close to us, approach us, share some features with us; yet they also, some more than others, reveal ways that they don’t come close, recede, have features we don’t understand in their irrevocable difference. — In other words, as with all beings, they reveal and conceal, approach and recede, share and withhold.
Either difference or similarity can be used oppressively. But if, on the other hand, we let non-human animals be the beings they are, then we see that they show us, through similarity and resonance, something other, something fundamentally other: they show us a fundamentally different way of being.
It’s not hard to see why certain peoples have encountered certain non-human animals as majestic, mythical, and fantastically terrifying beings.