In myths and fables animals never quit talking, and these anthropomorphic fantasies reveal how we human beings have always been fascinated by our inscrutable fellow travelers, always at the ready with promises of troubling and illuminating revelations.
As for the philosophers and encyclopedists, a comprehensive survey would take up too much space, and the relevant bibliography is extremely vast. We will therefore confine ourselves to a particular consideration of those arguments that, among the various animals, are concerned with the dog. The comparison between the philosopher and the dog recorded (albeit tongue in cheek) by Plato (Republic II, 375a–376b) is well known. Well-bred dogs are gentle toward their familiars and aggressive toward strangers, and this demonstrates a happy trait in their nature: “your dog is a true philosopher, I venture to say.” The dog can tell a friendly figure from a hostile one purely on the grounds that he is familiar with the one and not the other: How can we deny a certain learning ability to a creature who is able to distinguish friends and strangers simply on the basis of knowledge or ignorance?
The Latin Aristotle makes a distinction between mere sound (sonus) and voice (vox) or utterance, and in De anima (II, 429b) he says that a sound can be defined as a “voice” when it is emitted by an animated being and is significant (semantikos). In any case, animal sounds are not emitted according to convention (they are not symbols, but manifestations of something at a symptomatic level) and they are agrammatoi, that is, not articulate (see, for instance, De interpretatione [On Interpretation] 16a and Poetics 1456b).
We will return to these distinctions later, because they will become central in the medieval debate. Aristotle asserts in his Politics that man is the only animal to possess the faculty of language, but this tells us nothing yet about the animals, because, as we will see, ever since antiquity there have been three recurring problems that crop up in this regard: (i) whether animals have a soul, or at least some form of intelligence; (ii) whether they communicate in some way among themselves and with us; and (iii) whether we should respect their dignity by abstaining from killing them and eating their flesh.
The Aristotelian texts that discuss point (i) are the subject of widespread debate, because, though Aristotle, in defining the soul as “the first actuality of a natural body possessed of organs” (De anima [On the Soul] II, i, 412b), could not deny a soul to animals, it is often unclear what kind of intelligence he means to attribute to them, given that not only was he clear about the distinction between the sensitive and the rational souls, but he drew distinctions among the intellective qualities of different animal species, without reaching any definitive conclusions (De anima II, 413b–414a).
What is certain is that the Historia animalium (History of Animals) (VIII and IX), for example, claims that many animals exhibit traces of psychic qualities (though these may be merely analogous to those of humans), inasmuch as certain beasts display kindness and courage, timidity, fear, and cunning, and quite often something approaching sagacity—so that at times these virtues appear to differ from those possessed by human beings only in degree. Aristotle even seems to suggest an evolutionary progress (from plant to animal and from animal to man), in which it is not easy to draw lines of demarcation. Some animals do not confine themselves to procreating in a specific season, and, while many devote themselves to providing food for their offspring only to abandon them later, others are endowed with memory and live longer in the company of their young, establishing forms of social collaboration. Still others are capable of giving or receiving instructions, both in their intraspecies relationships as well as with humans, whose commands they appear to understand. The Metaphysics (A, 1) states that animals are naturally endowed with sensation, but the more intelligent ones are those in which sensation gives rise to memory, and it is they who are more apt to learn than those without the ability to remember (and this is where the dog comes in). All animals unable to hear sounds (the bee, for instance) may be intelligent, but they lack the ability to learn, while those that possess, in addition to memory, the sense of hearing (see also the Posterior Analytics II, 19) are able to learn. Finally, in the Nicomachean Ethics (VI, 7, 1141a), Aristotle declares that, since it can remember the past, the superior animal is capable of foreseeing its future needs.
In the Dictionary of the History of Ideas entry on “Theriophily” by George Boas (1973–1974), the citations range from Anaxagoras to Diogenes, from Democritus to Xenophon, from Philemon to Menander and Aristophanes, not to mention Theophrastus. But it is the notion of love or admiration for the animal world that is too sweeping.
Among Stoics, Academicians, and Epicureans, a debate had arisen about the possibility of an animal logos, for which the Stoic fragments offer plenty of evidence, though it is often contradictory (for a synthesis, see Pohlenz 1948–1955: I and II). The Stoics distinguish between a logos endiathetos, internally configured, that is, and a logos prophorikos, capable of manifesting itself externally. Now, whereas for Epicurus the difference between an animal voice (vox) and a human voice was simply one of degree, for the Stoics names are imposed by an explicit decision on the part of a rational mind, and therefore the various abilities attributable to animals are merely the consequence of an innate instinct of self-preservation. Along the same lines, Seneca (Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, III, cxxi) will remind us that animals are conscious of their own makeup, which explains their various abilities, and they have innate knowledge, but they are not endowed with reason.3 The adherents of the New Academy on the other hand professed more indulgent opinions with regard to the intellectual capacities of animals.
But it is precisely in the context of the Stoic debate that an argument comes to the fore, unanimously attributed to Chrysippus, and destined for great popularity. We will cite two versions of it.4 The one that is more famous today and more frequently quoted is that in Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism (I, 69):
And according to Chrysippus, who shows special interest in irrational animals, the dog even shares in the far-famed “Dialectic.” This person, at any rate, declares that the dog makes use of the fifth complex indemonstrable syllogism when, on arriving at a spot where three ways meet, after smelling at the two roads by which the quarry did not pass, he rushes off at once by the third without stopping to smell. For, says the old writer, the dog implicitly reasons thus: “The creature went either by this road, or by that, or by the other: but it did not go by this road or by that: therefore it went by the other.”5
Sextus assumes, with respect to Chrysippus’s argument, a position closer to that of the Academicians (as will Porphyry in his De Abstinentia [On Abstinence from Killing Animals], in open polemic with the Stoics). Sextus reminds us in fact (again in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 65–77) that, through its behavior, the dog displays further aptitude for reflection and comprehension: it is able to choose between foods that are good for it and foods that are harmful; it is able to procure its food by hunting; it recognizes people’s merits by wagging its tail when it sees those with whom it is familiar and darting at strangers (it can therefore distinguish between right and wrong); it often shows prudence; and, finally, since it is capable of understanding its own passions and of mitigating them, it is able to remove its own splinters and clean its wounds, it knows it must keep the wounded limb immobile, and it can identify the herbs that will alleviate its pain. Thus, it shows that it possesses a logos. It is true that we do not understand the words of the animals, but then, we don’t understand the words of the barbarians either, who can assuredly speak; and therefore it is not absurd to believe that animals speak. And dogs certainly make different sounds in different circumstances.
But the information provided by Sextus does not appear till the second and third century A.D., while the discussion goes back somewhat earlier. It appears, for example, in the first century A.D. in the dialogue De animalibus (On Animals) of Philo of Alexandria. Philo’s brother Alexander speaks in favor of animal intelligence, citing in fact the classical example:
A hound was in pursuit of a beast. When it came to a deep [ditch] which had two trails beside it—one to the right and the other to the left, and having but a short distance yet to go, it deliberated which way would be worth taking. Going to the right and finding no trace, it returned and took the other. Since there was no clearly perceptible mark there either, with no further scenting it jumped into the [ditch] to track down hastily. This was not achieved by chance but rather by deliberation of the mind. The logicians call this thoughtful reckoning “the fifth complex indemonstrable syllogism”: for the beast might have escaped either to the right or to the left or else may have leaped. (De animalibus 45)6
In point of fact, for Chrysippus all the argument proved was that the instinctive behavior of animals prefigured a logical behavior, and in the dialogue Philo follows the Stoic line, polemically responding to Alexander:
Even the assertion of those who think that hounds track by
