ABSTRACT
Modern science seems to have had little influence upon the felt sense that 'human' designates a different order of being from that of other species. One by one, the barriers separating humans from animals have collapsed. Other animals besides ourselves demonstrate rationality, language use, self-consciousness, deceptive behavior, peacemaking, aesthetic interest, and altruism. This chapter argues that metaphysics is simply a projection of our sense of difference from other animals. Since the time at which human beings imagined themselves sandwiched somewhere between animals and angels on the Great Chain of Being, metaphysics and animality have been in conflict. Metaphysics no longer supplies humanity with an inflated identity; to continue to attach human ontology to the metaphysical means sinking humanity below animal vitality. Gustave Flaubert and Franz Kafka are write out of a consciousness that animality has not been defeated by the metaphysical, neither outside nor inside the human being.
