Man and animals: lessons from the Ancients

Ancient philo­soph­ers were known to har­bour hard cri­ti­cism towards our rela­tion­ship with anim­als. In my opin­ion, this is per­fectly illus­trated by the fun­da­ment­al philo­soph­ic­al move­ment developed by Aris­totle (384–322 BC). At the begin­ning of Meta­phys­ics, he wrote that our thirst for know­ledge is a part of human nature. There are two ele­ments of that, which we will focus on here. The first, which was a pri­or­ity for our ancest­ors, raises the ques­tion “what is an anim­al?”. The second, which seems more urgent today, involves our inter­ac­tion with anim­als. The second ques­tion stems from the first so we need to begin by clearly defin­ing what anim­als are, to know how we must inter­act with them.

In the con­tem­por­ary world, when people opt not to eat anim­als, this choice is seen as a sac­ri­fice in the name of anim­al well-being. For veget­ari­ans and vegans, what is usu­ally being sac­ri­ficed is the pleas­ure of taste. But also, the health bene­fits sup­posedly asso­ci­ated with eat­ing anim­al products – an assump­tion which I do not share. These reas­ons dif­fer from the motives behind veget­ari­an­ism in antiquity because, in most cases, ancient eth­ic­al val­ues include a util­it­ari­an dimen­sion which is incon­sist­ent with this notion of sacrifice.

When a philo­soph­er in Greco-Roman antiquity declared him­self a veget­ari­an, what he was demon­strat­ing above all was an eth­ic­al choice, par­tic­u­larly tied to per­son­al pur­ity. Indeed, the act of slaughter­ing anim­als was thought to, among oth­er things, pois­on the soul. There­fore, ancient philo­soph­ers who were the most sens­it­ive to anim­al issues, like Plut­arch (approx. 46–125 AD) and Por­phyry (approx. 233–305 AD), con­sidered the per­son­al dimen­sion. By respect­ing anim­als, they con­sidered that they were act­ing in a way that allowed them to uphold mor­al val­ues. They recog­nised the per­son­al bene­fits (espe­cially for human health), but also col­lect­ive implic­a­tions, mean­ing the impacts for human­ity as a whole and its rela­tion­ship with oth­er species.

The ques­tion of our rela­tion­ship with anim­als appeared early on in the works of the very first Greek philo­soph­ers. In the Pythagorean tra­di­tion, which is very ancient, some foods were pro­hib­ited. As for Her­ac­litus (535–475 BC), he left a frag­ment in which he wrote that puri­fic­a­tion rituals using anim­al sac­ri­fice and blood res­ult in pois­on of the souls of those who per­form them (fr. 5 Diels-Kranz). It is surely not a vegan pre­cept in the strict sense; how­ever it already shows a grow­ing aware­ness that was later developed upon by Plato.

In Plato’s Repub­lic (369b-376e, par­tic­u­larly 372b‑d), the first Greek city mod­el ima­gined by Socrates requires that its people only eat plants. This mod­el was later dis­missed and replaced by a more com­plex pro­ject: a city where people can main­tain a sense of lux­ury, even in times of war. Socrates defines this second city as “oper­ated by the inflam­ma­tion of moods” (tr. L. Robin), where­as the first, whose pop­u­la­tion is veget­ari­an, is “true” and “healthy”. This shows the value placed on the per­son­al, social, and gen­er­al philo­soph­ic­al implic­a­tions of a veget­ari­an diet.

Prot­agoras, anoth­er text writ­ten by Pla­to, is also pivotal in the con­text of our dis­cus­sion. The myth of Pro­meth­eus presen­ted in this dia­logue exam­ines the ori­gin of liv­ing beings. Epi­meth­eus, Pro­meth­eus’ broth­er, over­sees the alloc­a­tion abil­it­ies and traits to liv­ing beings so that they might pro­tect them­selves. He gives great size to some anim­als, to oth­ers he offers claws or fur. When it is time to attend to humans, he real­ises that he has noth­ing left to give. That is when his broth­er Pro­meth­eus steals fire and tech­nic­al know­ledge from the gods and bestows them to humans to ensure their sur­viv­al. Therein lies, in my opin­ion, the fun­da­ment­al approach to anim­als in Greek philo­sophy: it is at its core foun­ded on a genu­ine dia­lectic between homo­gen­eity and alter­ity. Homo­gen­eity because we are all mor­tal beings who need abil­it­ies and attrib­utes to sur­vive, and alter­ity in the sense that humans are endowed with skills and tools that, in their opin­ion, dis­tin­guish them from the anim­al world.

At the end of Antiquity, there are two cru­cial moments in the his­tory of this debate stem­ming from the thoughts of the two afore­men­tioned authors, Plut­arch and Por­phyry. They expli­citly addressed the issue of the human-anim­al rela­tion­ship and spoke out against the slaughter of anim­als and meat con­sump­tion. In my view their stance is pro­foundly mod­ern, espe­cially in the work of Plut­arch. For the lat­ter, meat con­sump­tion res­ul­ted from a par­tic­u­lar need which arose at a spe­cif­ic moment in the his­tory of human­ity. Our mis­take was mak­ing this moment­ary need a habit and then believ­ing that it was in our nature to eat meat. In real­ity, argues Plut­arch, this need determ­ined what can be called a second nature against nature. Indeed, Plut­arch unveils a cru­cial mis­take that we make when eat­ing anim­als: regard­ing them as food implies an onto­lo­gic­al dis­tor­tion, in the sense that we con­sider anim­als, which are liv­ing beings, as inan­im­ate objects. 

In oth­er words, we reify anim­als. This view is in line with the con­tem­por­ary think­ing on cog­nit­ive dis­son­ance and the fact that anim­als are unre­cog­nis­able when we eat meat, yet it is the flesh of a liv­ing being. Finally, Plut­arch adds that by eat­ing meat we are not just being viol­ent towards anim­als, but we are also viol­ent towards ourselves. This idea entails anoth­er, even more dan­ger­ous, onto­lo­gic­al dis­tor­tion: by los­ing our abil­ity to feel empathy for oth­er liv­ing beings, we are no longer truly human. Even if this philo­soph­er lived in a time when anim­als were far more vis­ible than today, his thoughts can also speak to our soci­et­ies, in which we do not observe the life, let alone wit­ness the death, of the anim­als we eat. 

We have there­fore much to learn from ancient philo­soph­ers on these sub­jects. Many things are con­cealed in our rela­tion­ship to anim­als, espe­cially in sys­tems involving a meat diet; both on a prac­tic­al (unseen slaughter­houses) and a psy­cho­lo­gic­al (we for­get that meat comes from the flesh of a liv­ing being) level. Ancient philo­soph­ers deliv­er a les­son in trans­par­ency, self-con­scious­ness and account­ab­il­ity which might prove use­ful in our rela­tion­ship with anim­als, and with ourselves.