The animal as mediator of the human

Abstract

Assuming that the disenchantment of the world is due to the rupture between modern human life and nature, this article aims to reassess the importance of animals, and to show why animal experience is necessary for humans to fulfill our lives as human as well as social beings. Animals have indeed become a major issue for a modern world that has cut itself off from nature and feels the need to reconnect to it. On the one hand, some privileged experiences such as stroking make it possible to establish tangible relations and experience a feeling of perfect happiness. On the other hand, the relation to pets can be seen as an extension of democratic individualism: we are in search of a double that is inferior to us, available whenever we want. The interest we feel for wild animals might mean that we need genuine contact with a nature that has remained untouched, a nature that has an ontological meaning. It might also be a sign that modern humans, freed from the uniformity and alienation of the world around, have gained a wealth of experience. More significantly, animals may be considered as mediators: within a dialectical relation involving both what they have in common with us as well as what makes them different, they enable us to know ourselves better, and to achieve a form of self-knowledge that is all the more valuable as it gives us access to the plurality of animal worlds. A phenomenological approach reveals that, far from being alienating or restrictive, the process of identifying with the animal leads us to reconsider our relation to the world. Animals may contribute to the “re-enchantment” of the world. They may allow us to have access to a new humanism based on an anthropozoological relation rather than on an insuperable divide.

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