ABSTRACT
Romantic-period writers went to great lengths to find that unique skill or special quality that would, once and for all, position the human species at the hierarchical apex of biological existence. Most of the characteristics they suggested were fairly orthodox. The Scottish philosopher James Beattie referred to speech (“man is the only animal that can speak”), William Hazlitt repeated Aristotle's emphasis on humour (“man is the only animal that laughs and weeps”), and Aikin and Barbauld believed it was tool-making that distinguished Homo sapiens from the animal world (“man is the only animal that makes use of instruments in any of his actions”). 1 Some of their suggestions were rather less conventional and included the ability to survive without teeth (“man is the only animal that can counteract the fatal consequences of the loss of teeth”), an immoderate indulgence in recreational sexual behaviour (“man is the only animal that uses coitus where nature does not require it”) and the use of printed material to attract public interest in commercial activity (“man is the only animal that publishes advertisements”). 2 One of the more sophisticated distinctions appears in Hegel's introduction to his Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel recognises that humans are essentially animals, but he believes that our rational capacity to understand our own animality at once propels us from the stringent conditions of animal existence towards a higher, metaphysical plane: “precisely because [man] knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit.” 3 If our fall into self-consciousness terminated our cosy and blissfully ignorant relationship with nature, Hegel believes it also enabled us to elude nature's bestialising violence and to watch its casual disregard for human life from a safe, alienated distance. To be sure, Hegel's argument that scientific thought serves a humanising function and renders us virtually exempt from biological determinism was not a novel idea at the time. In his Pensées, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal memorably compared humanity to “a thinking reed” and already wrote that “if the universe were to crush the reed, the man would be nobler than his killer, since he knows that he is dying, and that the universe has the advantage over him…. All our dignity consists therefore of thought. It is from there that we must be lifted up and not from space and time, which we could never fill.” 4
