Part I

Theoretical Philosophy

Abstract

This chapter discusses the historical context of Kant’s theory of animal minds. The continuity

thesis is discussed. This is the claim that, whatever the variations in their mental lives, animal

and human minds manifest no differences in kind but rather exhibit the same general type of

mental capacities merely exercised with very different degrees of sophistication. Kant is an

ardent denier of the continuity thesis in that he claims that human beings are different in kind

from animals by virtue of our ability for self-conscious understanding and the opportunities

for normative self-determination that this ability affords. The approaches of Montaigne,

Descartes, and Bayle are outlined. It is claimed that the relevant cognitive achievement with

which Kant was concerned was that of the comparison of representations with each other and

the noting of similarity or difference. It is argued that Kant adopted an analogy strategy,

which claims that animals possess a capacity for the comparison of representations that is

only analogous to human beings’ representational capacity.

Keywords

Kant, Descartes, Bayle, animals, comparison

1

The Comparison of Animals

John J. Callanan

The concept of animal souls and of higher spirits is only a game of our concepts. (Lectures

on Metaphysics, ML1, 28:278)

1.1 Introduction

What happens in the mind of a non-human animal when it represents different aspects of its

environment?1 Imagine that one such animal—a New Caledonian crow for example—

approaches a wall containing two gaps of different sizes.2 Imagine that it pauses momentarily,

moving its head from the smaller gap to a larger one, then travels through the larger one.

What is a plausible reconstruction of the mental life of the crow as it processed this scene?3

One obvious analysis might be that the crow saw two spaces, saw that the latter one was

larger, and for that reason moved to that larger gap. In so doing, the crow would have

1 I’ll refer to non-human animals as ‘animal’. As with many of the Early Moderns with whom I am

concerned, the intended extension will be the familiar larger land-dwelling vertebrates such as cats,

dogs, foxes, horses, cattle, and birds.

2 Corvids provide an excellent example of animals whose mental life appears at once sophisticated

enough for their activities to be comparable to human activities while retaining for us an intuitive

sense of their radical difference in consciousness, e.g. Angell & Marzluff (2008, 2013); Heinrich

(1999).

3 For some recent philosophical literature on this and related topics, see Andrews (2015), Andrews

and Beck (2018).

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represented its environment much the way in which we do. Anyone who modelled the crow’s

mental life in such a way nevertheless could still vehemently deny what I shall call the

continuity thesis. The continuity thesis is the claim that, whatever the variations in their

mental lives, animal and human minds manifest no differences in kind but rather exhibit the

same general type of mental capacities merely exercised with very different degrees of

sophistication. Our representation of the environment is no doubt very different from that of

animals, but the advocate of the continuity thesis would claim that animals perform the same

very general kinds of mental activity that we do, only at far lower levels of complexity; the

denier of the continuity thesis denies that the difference between animals and us can be

coherently modelled as a difference in mere complexity.

When the Early Moderns considered the question of animal minds they did so with

relatively simple examples like the one above. One might also think that someone with

Kant’s model of the human mind would be well-positioned to explain such animal behaviour.

One could attribute to the crow a capacity for sensory input, but also for spatial intuition and

perhaps the reproductive imagination, i.e. basic capacities to orient one’s sensory input into

coherent spatial arrays, such that it allows for conscious representation of the spatial

advantages of the currently represented larger gap over the recently represented smaller one.

The crow represents things in its environment in a way that affords it reliable representations

of those things, on the basis of which it can then realize a successful plan of action. On

various occasions, Kant seems to attribute various parts of the human cognitive apparatus to

animals.4 It is clear though that Kant is an ardent denier of the continuity thesis and that he

claims that human beings are different in kind from animals by virtue of our ability for self-

conscious understanding and the opportunities for normative self-determination that this

4 For some typical examples, see CPJ 5:464; MVo 28:449; DWL 24:702—for discussion, see

McLear (2011), this volume; Golob, this volume.

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ability affords.5 Since these features are the ones Kant frequently states with regard to our

difference to animals, it might seem plausible to assume that our comparison with animals

consists in imagining them as possessing something like human minds minus these higher

elements.

This view brings with it several puzzles about Kant’s model of the human mind and its

relation to some of his argumentative strategies in the First Critique.6 However, I am

interested here in those more rare occasions where Kant seems to manifest some hesitancy

regarding even modest comparisons of human and animal minds, occasions where he instead

gestures towards a more radical discontinuity between human and animal mentality. In a

letter to Prince von Beloselsky in 1792, Kant offers a correction to the Prince’s proposed

division of mental capacities, claiming instead that one must distinguish the ‘faculty of

representation into the mere apprehension of representations, apprehensio bruta without

consciousness (that is only for the beast) and the sphere of apperception, i.e. of concepts; the

latter constitutes the sphere of understanding in general’.7 In the Dohna-Wundlacken logic

lectures we find references to human and animal cognition where the difference is presented

equally starkly:

{[Consciousness] is required above all for concepts. Due to the lack of

consciousness, even animals are not capable of any concept—intuition they do

5 For the denial of the continuity thesis, see some of the references below. For an example of Kant’s

account of the relevance of the normative dimension, see CPrR 5: 61–2.

6 Such questions concern the apparent tight conceptual links Kant seems to make between the

capacities for spatial or temporal intuition (or both) with concept-use, consciousness, the capacity

to represent objects as objects, cognition, and self-consciousness. For some of these issues, see

Golob, this volume, Fisher (2017), Naragon (1990); McLear (2011), this volume.

7 Letter to Prince Alexander von Beloselsky, 1792, Corr. 11: 345.

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have. Consciousness is a wholly separate dimension of the faculty of cognition

(therefore gradation from animals to man does not occur).}8

Here Kant seems to deny any ‘gradation’ with regard to the class of conscious representations

at all. Insofar as there is some nominal continuity—in the shape of a shared capacity for

intuition—the capacity possessed by animals might be such that it is not a capacity for

conscious representations at all. It is hard to see, however, how such continuity with humans’

capacity for conscious intuition could be coherently articulated. In the metaphysics lectures

Kant denies animals inner sense, which he claims entails that they also lack understanding

and reason and thus animals ‘are accordingly different not in degree but rather in species’.9 In

a crossed-out section of the Anthropology, Kant strikes a similarly radical note concerning

theorizing about animal minds:

The irrational animal <perhaps> has something similar to what we call

representations (because it has effects that are <very> similar to the

representations in the human being), but which may perhaps be entirely

different—but no cognition of things; for this requires understanding, a

faculty of representation with consciousness of action whereby the

representations relate to a given object and this relation may be thought.10

Here Kant appears to state that although the behavioural evidence speaks strongly in favour

of attributing to the crow the capacity to successfully represent a wall, to see the hole in it

8 DWL 24: 702, 440.

9 ML1 28: 276, 87.

10 Anth. 7: 141, 252—editor’s note—see also Fisher (2017).

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that is larger than the other one, etc., one must nevertheless resist such attributions, if they are

thought to compare to what we do when we see the same wall and its holes, since in so doing

we—and not they—have a ‘cognition of things’. The crow might not have ‘mental

representations’ that bear even a family resemblance to the human representation as it is

realized in human cognition. The grounds for this caution are stated clearly—Kant has

defined ‘cognition’ in such a way that token acts of cognition require a token act of

understanding, and where the latter requires a potential second-order mental state whereby

one is conscious of the relevant recommended action by the understanding. Since animals

entirely lack this more advanced state, they must fail to secure cognition of things, and for

that reason might even lack ‘representations’ and ‘consciousness’, at least insofar as those

notions are thought of as bearing family resemblances to human representation and

consciousness.

One might reasonably explain away such textual evidence: these passages are not part of

Kant’s main published works nor are they always comments directed to a sophisticated

philosophical reader. More importantly, Kant is on the record in a range of other contexts as

opposing the notorious Cartesian position that seemed to deny even simple forms of

consciousness to animals.11 Kant is of course known for his Critical period position that

human consciousness is marked by the capacity for self-consciousness.12 Thus, when he

speaks of denying animals ‘consciousness’, the charitable reading is to take this to be denying

them only the specific manifestation of potentially self-conscious representations that we

humans possess.

While such a reading of the texts would have the merits of avoiding attributing to Kant

the absurd Cartesian position, there are grounds to be hesitant about this reconciliation of the 11 E.g. ‘[A]nimals are not mere machines or matter, rather they have souls’—ML1 28: 274ff,—see

also ML2 28: 594, MVo 28: 449, MD 28: 690, CPJ 5: 374, 246.

12 See A106–7, A127, B131–2, B136, B142.

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texts, or so I will argue. The advantage of opposing Descartes and attributing consciousness

to animals is surely that it squares with the empirical evidence, since animals appear to

register sensations, feel pain and pleasure, and negotiate their environment successfully to the

end of satisfying their various drives. The point of attributing consciousness to animals is to

allow for the compelling thought that they might represent things in ways that are comparable

to our own ways of doing so, at least with regard to some lower cognitive achievements. This

is compatible with denying them our quotidian conscious achievements. For example, while

Kant allows that the animal can feel pain, it seems that he denies that it can feel distress or

sorrow, because those latter mental events are ones that require a second-order representation

of the fact that one is in pain or that one was recently not in pain or that one’s pain is likely to

persist, etc., representations he thinks animals cannot possess.13 Presumably, though, this

difference is to allow for the intuitive comparison that they do feel pain as we feel pain, and

the point of attributing some consciousness to animals is to allow that they nevertheless

perform first-order representation in much the way that we do.

While Kant might seem sympathetically anti-Cartesian in this respect, I argue that his

position is more ambivalent—Kant also maintains the broadly Cartesian claim that the mental

life of animals might be so radically different from our own that speaking of their

‘consciousness’ or representational achievements must always be at best hypothetical. In

particular I will argue that, since Kant’s notion of human consciousness is one that has

rudimentary self-consciousness accompanying cognitive achievements all the way down to

the mind’s basic actions, it is singularly difficult for him to articulate a sense of what it is for

a creature to have comparable conscious states without some rudimentary form of self-

awareness. I will focus upon the activities of animals such as the crow in the example above,

where the animal engages in an act of comparing and differentiating a small series of simple

13 ‘On the philosophers’ medicine of the body’ in Kant (2007), 15: 944, AF 25: 474.

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sensory inputs such that they convey information about a spatial environment. Kant’s model

of the human mind demands that the crow must be performing this act of comparison in a

way that is very much unlike what we humans do when confronted with the same sensory

input. It is so unlike our activity that it is in fact incorrect to say that the crow represents the

bigger gap as bigger than the smaller one. Whether this characterization of the animal’s

mental life is sufficient to accommodate our intuitions or whether it perpetrates a kind of

Cartesian recidivism is open to question.

I will present the case for this view though a consideration of the historical context of the

animal mind debate.14 I first outline (§2) the issue of animal consciousness as it was presented

in Bayle’s Critical Dictionary, a standard eighteenth-century source text for the philosophical

problems that animal minds presented to philosophy and theology. In §3 I outline Locke’s

discussion in the Essay concerning the plausible similarities between human and animal

cognition. Locke presents a hierarchy of cognitive achievements of increasing complexity,

ultimately claiming that while animals are capable of lower-class cognitive operations, such

as comparing one particular representation with another, they are incapable of the higher

cognitive operation of abstracting general content from those representations. Locke thereby

sacrifices comparison as a shared capacity but goes on to identify other higher capacities to

support a denial of the continuity thesis. In the following section (§4) I outline how French

materialists such as Condillac, de la Mettrie, and Helvétius co-opted Locke’s analysis of the

activity of comparison and used it as the thin end of the wedge in energetic and controversial

support of the continuity thesis. This movement sought to eliminate the difference between

humans and animals not by granting animals rationality but by denying it to humans. Once

sensation and simple operations like comparison are allowed, they claim, there are grounds to

reduce putative ‘higher’ capacities to those former lower ones, thereby eliminating the

14 I restrict myself in this paper to standard sources in the debate with which Kant would plausibly

have been familiar.

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distinct capacity of reason itself.15 It is in this context that I examine Rousseau’s innovative

contribution to the debate in Émile, a contribution that cannot have failed to impress Kant. As

part of a polemic against Helvétius, Rousseau argued that the continuity thesis failed even

with regard to the basic activity of comparison. Rousseau’s critique hinges on a distinction

between representing different contents and representing the difference between those

contents. In §5 I argue that the pre-Critical Kant was coterminously drawing similar

conclusions, ones that would no doubt have been strongly reinforced by the extraordinary

impact of Émile upon the development of his thought.16

In the concluding section (§6) I argue that this influence goes some way to explaining,

though perhaps not justifying, what I take to be Kant’s quasi-Cartesian approach to the

difference between animal and human minds. In Kant’s view, an animal ‘senses’, ‘imagines’,

and perhaps even ‘reasons’, yet only in senses analogous with (and thus not literally the same

as) human sensation, imagination, and reason. Therefore Kant’s analogy strategy (as I will

call it) can allow that animals ‘compare’ sensory representations while denying that they

engage in the same activity that humans engage upon when we compare sensory

representations.17 This approach, I claim, is vulnerable to criticisms raised long before by

Bayle. Both Descartes and Kant possess a meritorious sensitivity to the ubiquitous dangers of

anthropocentricism in the very attempt to model the mental lives of animals. That sensitivity

is not exculpatory of their worldviews however; on the contrary, it is arguably dogmatically

utilized as a means to the end of rationalizing a pre-eminent position for human beings within

the cosmic order.

15 For a recent discussion of this theme, see Lloyd (2017).

16 For some discussion of this influence, see Ameriks (2012); Velkley (1989, 2013); Zammito

(2012).

17 I have explored Kant’s use of analogy in other contexts in Callanan (2008, 2017a).

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1.2 Bayle and the Soul of Brutes

It is somewhat surprising that Kant never presented a systematic account of the mental

capacities of animals. Not only was the question pertinent to his own Critical model of the

mind but the issue was already very well established as a theme within European intellectual

culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.18 Part of the reason for the prominence of

the topic was surely the enormous influence of Montaigne’s Essays and its claims regarding

the affinity between human and animal minds in the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’.19 One

of the many evocative examples Montaigne uses is that of the fox testing the ice on a frozen

river:

Consider the fox which Thracians employ when they want to cross the ice of a

frozen river; with this end in view they let it loose. Were we to see it stopping

at the river’s edge, bringing its ear close to the ice to judge from the noise how

near to the surface the current is running, darting forward or pulling back

according to this estimate of the thickness or thinness of the ice, would it not

be right to conclude that the same reasoning passes through its head as would

pass through ours . . . ?20

While reiterating classical debates regarding the capacity of animals to reason, Montaigne’s

revisiting of the issue was especially marked by the suspicion he raised with regard to the

18 For a very selective sample of some of the enormous literature on this topic, see Beauchamp

(1999); Cottingham (1978a); Fudge (2006); Garrett (2006); Manning and Serpell (2012);

Matytsin (2016); Melehy (2005); Rosenfield (1941); Smith (2011, 2012).

19 Montaigne ([1580] 2003).

20 Montaigne ([1580] 2003, II: 12, An Apology for Raymond Sebond, 515).

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motives human beings have in considering themselves especially distinct from other

animals.21 Human beings have an inherent and ineradicable tendency towards pride,

Montaigne claimed—it is our ‘maladie naturelle et originelle’—and this is what makes us

susceptible to any narrative that might confirm our sense of our own unique importance.22

Montaigne’s contribution fundamentally and forever after destabilized the frame of the

debate in that it raised a suspicion about the sources of our eagerness to deny the continuity

thesis.

In the Discourse on Method—and no doubt with Montaigne in mind—Descartes had held

that ‘after the error of those who deny God . . . there is none that lead weak minds further

from the straight path of virtue than that of imagining that the souls of the beasts are of the

same nature with ours . . . ’.23 As his own pairing of issues here makes explicit, Descartes’s

notorious position on animal minds was not impartially motivated. The narrative later

provided by Bayle regarding Descartes’s theological motives runs roughly as follows:

Descartes’s end was to secure proof of the possibility of an immortal soul exclusive to human

beings; the means to that end was to link the capacity for conscious thought in general with

the possession of an immaterial substance; his tight pairing of the two entailed that he was

left only with the options of either granting animals immaterial souls on the grounds of their

possession of some form of consciousness or of denying them consciousness so as to deny

them immaterial and immortal souls, and so he opted for the latter position.24

21 For discussion of the classical tradition, see Adamson and Edwards (2018); Clark (2011); Sorabji

(1993).

22 An Apology for Raymond Sebond in Montainge ([1580] 2003: 505, 513).

23 Discourse on Method [1637] Pt VI in Descartes (1985: 141).

24 ‘Rorarius’ in Bayle ([1697] 1991).

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The characterization of animals as mere ‘beast-machines’—soulless automata lacking in

real consciousness—was a point of attack on the Cartesian system from its first

presentation.25 The opposition, though passionate, rarely focused upon the argumentative

grounds for Descartes’s position, but rather focused upon the absurd conclusion. Few critics

though grasped the nettle and addressed the question as to what a contentful theory of a

conscious representation in animals might amount to.26 One should ask though just what it

might be like for an animal to possess a conscious sensory representation if this is to be

understood as a state that does not involve being able to attend to the representation itself. We

can speak of the bending of the plant in terms of its representing the location of the sun in aid

of photosynthesis or of the rings of the tree as its representing of its own age. On the other

hand we can talk about our conscious representations as performing a qualitatively different

task, which is that of presenting material to consciousness, of representing as. What might it

be though for an animal to possess a capacity for conscious representation without possessing

a capacity to take that representation as presenting things to itself? Descartes’s argument then

becomes more of a burden-shifting one: if we grant that animal consciousness lacks the self-

consciousness that characterizes human consciousness, then it is up to the opponent to say

just what they mean by ‘animal consciousness’ if it doesn’t involve an attribution of a

capacity for representing as.

Interpreting Descartes charitably then would just involve his denial that there is anything

like a well-defined sense of what it might be like for animals to possess conscious mental

states, and that the beast-machine thesis stands until displaced by such a theory.27 The

25 For discussion, see Cottingham (1978); Hastings (1973); Rosenfield (1941); Wilson (1999).

26 For this point, see Wilson (1999).

27 Cottingham (1978) is widely cited as offering an important corrective to the thought that Descartes

denied conscious feelings to animals. Yet Cottingham’s analysis points out only that Descartes

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charitable interpretation does not ameliorate the sense of absurdity regarding Descartes’s

conclusions. Bayle’s analysis in the Critical Dictionary became the eighteenth-century

touchstone for the animal mind debate and contains a wealth of anecdotal data on animal

behaviour to reaffirm the profoundly counterintuitive nature of Descartes’s claim.28 Bayle is

not exclusively confronting the Cartesian school but is equally opposed to the Aristotelian

tradition of granting an animal a mere ‘sensitive’ soul of a non-rational nature. What both

traditions have in common is the denial of rationality or thought to animals. It is the apparent

rationality of animal behaviour that Montaigne had stressed requires explanation and the

manoeuvres made by both camps to deny this—and by extension deny the continuity thesis—

is the focus of Bayle’s critique.29

The general argumentative tenor of those in favour of the continuity thesis is that there is

both behavioural—not to mention physiological—continuity between humans and animals.

Postulating similar causes, i.e. conscious representation of one’s environment and use of

inferential capacities, is a reasonable abductive inference with regard to the similar behaviour

we observe in animals and humans alike.30 It is this move that the Aristotelian makes to

latterly attributed states such as ‘fear, hope, and joy’ (557) while denying them ‘thought’.

Cottingham himself acknowledges that it is still a tricky question as to just what it means to

Descartes when he attributes to an animal joy without thought. It is surely open to Descartes to run

the line of argument again—there is no problem in attributing animals ‘feelings’ so long as we

acknowledge that what we are attributing is only what physiology can tell us.

28 Especially in the articles ‘Rorarius’ and ‘Pereira’.

29 Bayle’s own position is, as ever, elusive. The view presented does not claim that Bayle endorses

the continuity thesis but rather that his trenchant critique is directed at the thought that the denial of

the continuity thesis has a rational basis.

30 An Apology for Raymond Sebond in Montaigne ([1580] 2003: 514).

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dismiss the Cartesian position. Bayle seems to grant the point31 but he points out though that

once lower mental states are granted to the animal on grounds of explanatory adequacy,

higher cognitive capacities must also be granted on those same grounds. Bayle criticizes the

disposition to attribute one cognitive capacity to animals while withholding another,

especially where that latter capacity is a characteristically concomitant one:

Every Peripatetic who hears that beasts are only automata, or machines,

objects immediately that a dog who has been beaten for touching a dish of

meat will not touch it again when he sees his master threatening him with a

stick. But to show that this phenomenon cannot be explained by the one who

introduces it, it is sufficient to say that if this dog’s action is accompanied by

knowledge, then the dog must necessarily reason: he must compare the present

with the past and draw a conclusion from this. Now is this not definite

reasoning? Can we explain this situation by simply supposing a soul that is

capable of feeling, but not of reflecting on its actions, but not of recalling past

events, but not of comparing two ideas, but not of drawing any conclusions?

Look carefully at the examples that have been compiled and are raised against

the Cartesians, you will find that they prove too much; for they prove that

beasts compare means with ends, and that they prefer on some occasions what

is just to what is useful; in a word, that they are guided by the rules of equity

and gratitude.32

31 ‘No proof is needed with regard to the Cartesians. Everyone knows how difficult it is to explain

how pure machines can accomplish what animals do . . . ’ (‘Rorarius’, in Bayle [1697] 1991: 214–

15).

32 ‘Rorarius’, Remark B, in Bayle ([1697] 1991: 215).

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The obvious response, one with which Bayle was intimately familiar, was that it was in fact

eminently plausible to postulate non-rational causes that reproduce behaviour akin to that

produced by rational causes. Cartesians and Aristotelians alike would claim that they can

accommodate the evidence without the attribution of rationality just because the behaviour

can be fully explained by the attributions they do make. For the Aristotelian, the behaviour is

completely explicable in terms of the sensitive soul responding in a sophisticated habituated

manner. For Descartes, the behaviour is no less explicable once one attributes a sufficiently

complex system of mechanistic responses. These responses can mimic human operations

exactly when observed from a third-person perspective but are nonetheless entirely different

in kind.33 As Bayle notes, the antagonists in this narrative are operating under two constraints.

In the first place, they must postulate a cause that is adequate to the effects; secondly though

they must postulate a cause that is inadequate to explain the workings of human minds so as

not to support the continuity thesis. Bayle suggests that while the Cartesian camp plainly fails

to meet the former criterion, he raises the ‘proves too much’ objection to show that the

Aristotelian camp fails to meet the second criterion.

It is crucial to note that Bayle’s argumentative strategy is not just to appeal to the idea

that the attribution of rationality to animals is a warranted explanation of observed behaviour.

Rather his target is the ad hoc nature of the moves made by Aristotelian and Cartesian alike

to resist this attribution and to claim that the behaviour is fully explicable in terms of the

functions of a sensitive soul or a mechanism. The overarching theme of ‘Rorarius’ is the

tangles theorists realize by their desperate clinging to the second criterion of the debate, that

of retaining at all costs the denial of the continuity thesis. The ‘proves too much’ objection is

33 Kant occasionally strikes the same Cartesian note with regard to the necessary commitments for

explaining animal behaviour, e.g. ML1, 28: 277. Thanks to Alice Wright for drawing my attention

to this and other related passages.

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not just the claim that the attribution of consciousness to animals brings with it an attribution

of rationality. It can also be run in the opposite direction, so as to motivate a denial of

rationality to humans. The Aristotelian criticism of Descartes suggested that possession of a

sensitive soul might be sufficient to explain the manifestation of rational behaviour in

animals; Bayle notes that it also threatens to explain away the presence of a rational soul in

human beings. If animal rational behaviour can be well accounted for by the attribution of

sophisticated responses by a sensitive soul, why can’t human rational behaviour be similarly

explained?34

There remains one possible way of negotiating the thicket, which I refer to as the

analogy strategy. Here the theorist claims that in one sense animals do possess rationality, but

that they possess a mere analogous variant of the rationality we literally possess, one that

strictly speaking is not of the same kind as ours. In this way, the theorist can allow that

animals ‘sense’ or ‘reason’ or ‘communicate’, but one need not see that as threatening the

distinction between automata and conscious minds or the distinction between sensitive and

rational souls. The analogy strategy is a means of denying the continuity thesis while

accommodating the data that speaks in its favour. Its drawbacks are obvious, however. It is

just another blatant piece of ad hoc reasoning—, the offering of a distinction without a

difference—, inviting Montaigne’s original point that such manoeuvres are made exclusively

for the advantage of maintaining a sense of human distinctness. The Baylean ‘proves too

much’ argument can simply be run again against the analogy strategy: how does one know

that the ‘reason’ we possess is not really merely that same lower variant of the more exalted

form of reason we would prefer to claim for ourselves?

34 ‘Rorarius’ in Bayle ([1697] 1991: 215, 232). Bayle intimates that the Cartesian might be

committed to a kind of solipsism and should regard their own introspectively-ly accessed

rationality as the only securely identified one.

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1.3 Locke on Comparison

In ‘Rorarius’, Bayle had asked whether it was plausible that a dog can have some kind of

conscious representation ‘but not of comparing two ideas, but not of drawing any

conclusion’,35 and had praised Locke’s characteristically straightforward attempt to

distinguish human and animal cognition in the Essay.36 There Locke presents a range of

cognitive achievements of increasing sophistication and asks whether they are likely to be

shared by animals. Locke’s judgments are for the most part presented without evidence but

are presumably made on the grounds of what he takes to be the likely consensus based on

observational data. The first of the cognitive operations (presumably taking the mere receipt

of sensory ideas for granted) is the act of comparison:

The COMPARING them one with another, in respect of Extent, Degrees,

Time, Place, or any other Circumstances, is another operation of the mind

about its Ideas . . . 37

Locke claims that animals compare representations to a limited extent:

How far Brutes partake in this faculty, is not easie [sic] to determine; I

imagine they have it not in any great degree . . . I think, Beasts compare not

their Ideas, farther than some sensible circumstances annexed to the Objects

themselves . . .38

35 ‘Rorarius’ in Bayle [1697] 1991: 215).

36 ‘Rorarius’ in Bayle ([1697] 1991: 242).

37 Essay, Bk II, Chapter XI, §4, in Locke ([1689] 1998: 157).

38 Essay, Bk II, Chapter XI, §5 in Locke ([1689] 1998: 157–8).

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It’s worth noting here that Locke allows that animals do in fact compare their representations

one with another, and so do literally partake in the same cognitive operation. The difference

concerns the targets compared, in that animals only use that faculty when comparing those

things that are immediately spatiotemporally relevant to whatever object the animal is

currently sensing. The approach is repeated with regard to the next cognitive operation, that

of the composition of ideas (whereby new ideas are formed from the combination of simpler

ones):

In this also, I suppose, Brutes come far short of Men. For though they take in,

and retain together several Combinations of simple Ideas, as possibly the

Shape, Smell, and Voice of his Master make up the complex Ideas a Dog has

of him . . . yets, I do not think that they do of themselves ever compound them,

and make complex Ideas. And perhaps even where we think they have

complex Ideas, ‘tis only one simple one that directs them in the knowledge of

several things . . .39

Here, Locke employs the standard technique for the denial of the continuity thesis. He allows

that animals might take in various ideas and combine them in various ways (presumably

through association and what we now think of as classical conditioning). He claims that that

this might result in behaviour that is observationally indiscriminable from the behaviour we

realize by virtue of possession of an entirely different cognitive state, that of compounding

simple ideas into a complex one.

39 Essay, Bk II, Chapter XI, §7 in Locke ([1689] 1998:158).

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Presumably though, Locke is aware that such reasoning risks the appearance of an ad hoc

stipulation and so he prefers to point to what he thinks shows ‘a perfect distinction betwixt

Man and Brutes’: namely the capacity of the former to generate and possess abstract

representations.40 He does not conclude from this however that animals lack rationality:

If they are to have any Ideas at all, and are not bare Machins [sic] (as some

would have them) we cannot deny them to have some Reason. It seems as

evident to me, that they do some of them in certain Instances reason, as that

they have sense; but it is only in particular Ideas, just as they receiv’d [sic]

them from their Senses.41

Locke therefore follows Descartes in denying the continuity thesis, but does so on different

grounds than the denial of rationality. He wants to claim with Montaigne that animals

genuinely reason though he qualifies this strongly by claiming that they do so only from

particulars and not from the general propositional contents that are the occupants of abstract

thoughts.42

40 Essay, Bk II, Chapter XI, §10 in Locke ([1689] 1998: 159).

41 Essay, Bk II, Chapter XI, §11 in Locke ([1689] 1998: 160).

42 The position that animals cannot reason because they know only particulars, is mocked as a

standard piece of Aristotelian dogma by Bayle, though its criticism is extendible to Locke here:

‘Nothing can be more diverting than to see with what authority the Schoolmen endeavor to set limits

to the knowledge of beasts. They insist that beasts know only particular and material objects, and

that they love only what is useful and pleasant, that they cannot reflect on their sensations and

desires, nor infer one thing from another. It would seem that they have searched more successfully

into the faculties and the acts of the soul of beasts than the most expert anatomists into the entrails

of dogs.’ (Bayle [1698] 1991: 221).

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In criticizing Locke, Leibniz’s Nouveuax Essais emphasized a derogatory comparison

between animal cognition and the hyper-nominalist empiricism associated with some models

of medical practice (involving amassing large amounts of micro-observations and

withholding general explanatory principles). For Leibniz, the reason why animals cannot

have knowledge of necessary truths is because their capacity for representation is limited to

discrete temporal occurrences without the capacity to engage in the durational acts of

comparison required in order to see the necessary agreement of ideas:

[B]easts are sheer empirics and are guided entirely by instances. While men

are capable of demonstrative knowledge [science], beasts, so far as one can

judge, never manage to form necessary propositions, since the faculty by

which they make thought sequences is something lower than the reason that

occurs in men. Beasts’ thought sequences are just like those of simple

empirics who maintain that what has happened once will happen again in a

case which is similar in the respects that they are impressed by, although that

does not enable them to judge whether the same reasons are at work.43

Leibniz here is accusing those theorists, especially the ‘empirics’ of the medical tradition, of

aspiring to model our proper forms of knowing on that of the non-human animals. But here

the thematic connection of temporal representation and concept-possession is brought into

play: it is because animals’ representational capacities are in some sense restricted to

‘instances’ that they cannot even form conceptual or propositional representations, let alone

grasp them in a reliably veridical manner.

43 New Essays, Preface, in Leibniz ([1765] 1997: 50).

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Locke’s capacious conception of reasoning allows for the movement of the mind from

one particular representation to another to count as a genuine manifestation of inferential

behaviour.44 The move threatens to undermine further the claim that one can identify a

‘perfect distinction’ between animal and human minds. Firstly, the denial of abstract

representation to animals is simply asserted rather than argued for; secondly, even if it were

granted then Montaigne’s central thesis—that human minds are not distinguished by virtue of

the possession of rationality—would be conceded. Leibniz by contrast retains the Cartesian

conception of rationality as that which makes scientia possible through the conscious

grasping of necessary truths that make understanding possible. On this more restricted notion

of reason, Leibniz has no option but to insist with Locke that the apparent inferential

behaviour is performed upon representations of particulars only but to insist contra Locke

that for that very reason the patterns of animal behaviour are merely analogical with

genuinely rational behaviour, a mere ‘shadow of reason’.45

1.4 Helvétius and Rousseau on Comparison and Judgment

By the time Kant started to engage with Locke’s philosophical views, many of them had

already been taken in a radical direction by the eighteenth-century French materialists.46 A

helpful entry point into that influence is their co-opting of the notion of comparison with

regard to judgment. The ‘proves too much’ objection has one further and even more radical

application: if one were to grant to the Cartesian that the behaviour of the animal sensitive

44 LoLordo (2012, Ch. 3).

45 New Essays, Bk IV, Ch. XVII, §3, in Leibniz ([1765] 1997: 475).

46 Kant possibly read Locke’s Essay first of all through an engagement with Leibniz’s Nouveau

Essais in 1765. For the reception of Locke by French materialism, see Yolton (1991). I discuss the

themes of this section at greater detail in Callanan (2017b).

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soul was explicable in terms of a mere mechanical automaton, then given the previous

application of the argument, why can’t the behaviour of the human rational soul be explained

in terms of a mere mechanical automaton? Just as the apparent consciousness of an animal

might be explained away, so too might the apparent distinctiveness of human consciousness

if it could now be characterized as a mere mysterious epiphenomenon attached to a human

machine.47 What Bayle had proposed as a reductio for Cartesianism became the positive

agenda of French materialism.

The adoption of Bayle’s objection is explicitly stated in La Mettrie’s Machine-Man

(1747). La Mettrie characterized the distinction between human and animal as not involving

any abrupt transition, and characterized the contingent distinctiveness of human cognition as

deriving from its having contingently been the case that human beings have developed

language capacities. For La Mettrie, language acquisition and complex perceptual capacities

appear to go hand in hand, since he claims that prior to that acquisition, the perceptual

phenomenology of human beings was such that ‘[they] saw only forms and colours, without

being able to distinguish any of them’.48 Without linguistic or other sign-use one lacks the

very capacity for differentiation of particulars and would be like a ‘little child (for then the

soul was in its childhood) holding in its hand a certain number of little pieces of straw or

wood, who sees them in general in a vague and superficial way without being able to count or

differentiate them.”49 Taking imagination as a basic instinctual response accompanying

sensation, La Mettrie claims that ‘all the parts of the soul can be properly reduced to

47 For discussion of the rise of the materialist proposal from these origins, see Matytsin (2016);

Rosenfield (1941).

48 La Mettrie ([1747] 1996: 13).

49 La Mettrie ([1747] 1996: 14).

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imagination alone, which forms them all, and thus that judgement, reason and memory are

only parts of the soul which are in no way absolute’.50

In his Traité des Sensations in 1754, Condillac would praise Locke for his empiricist

account of the sensory origin of our ideas, but criticize him for allowing for the nominal

distinctness of the capacities of the mind to compare and judge through reflection. Locke

should have seen the next obvious step, Condillac claims, and is to be scolded for not

suspecting that ‘they [the faculties of the soul] could derive their origin from sensation

itself’.51 Condillac has no doubt that ‘[j]udgment, reflection, desires, passions, etc. are only

sensation itself which is transformed differently’.52 A similarly radical sensationist tract came

soon after from Helvétius. His 1758 work de l’Esprit begins by putting forward what might

be thought of as a clear two-faculty model of cognition, one for ‘receiving the different

impressions caused by external objects’ and the other for ‘preserving the impressions caused

by these objects’, which Helvétius calls ‘Physical Sensibility’ and ‘Memory’, respectively. 53

However, it is clear that the faculty of memory is for Helvétius, at the end of the day, nothing

but reproductive, i.e. it functions to ‘preserve’ the contents that have come in through

50 La Mettrie ([1747] 1996: 15).

51 Condillac [1754] quoted in (O’Neal (1996: 16–17).

52 Condillac, [1754] quoted in O’Neal (1996: ibid., 19). See also Condillac, Essay on the Origin of

Human Knowledge: “The similarity between animals and us proves that they have a soul; and the

difference between us proves that it is inferior to ours” (Condillac [1746] 2001: 39). Condillac

differs from Locke in claiming that although animals are conscious they nevertheless do not

reason, not on the rationalist grounds that they lack abstract ideas (though they do, he thinks) but

because they lack the freedom of thought that he thinks reasoning requires so that ‘their actions,

when they appear rational, are merely the effect of an imagination that is not at their command’ (fn,

90).

53 Helvetius ([1759] 1807: 1–2).

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sensibility, the latter being the source of all original representational content. More than this

though, Helvétius claims that all the ‘higher’ cognitive faculties, i.e. judgment and inference,

are themselves to be thought of as nothing more than variations on the operations of

sensibility and ‘that all the operations of the Mind consist in the power we have of perceiving

the resemblance and difference, the agreement or disagreement, of various objects among

themselves’—in this way ‘every thing is reducible to feeling’.54

The reference here is again to Locke, for whom judgment is ‘the putting Ideas together,

or separating them from one another in the mind, when their certain Agreement or

Disagreement is not perceived, but presumed to be so’.55 All judgment, Locke seems to say, is

the act of seeing when two ideas that we have acquired through sensation ‘agree’ or

‘disagree’.56 In de l’Esprit (1759), Helvétius gives an example of how the sensationist

explains such operations, taking the case of the examination of two objects of different

lengths:

The question being thus properly limited, I shall proceed to examine, if

Judgment be not Feeling. When I judge of the magnitude or the colour of

objects presented to me, it is evident, that the judgment is formed from the

different impressions made by those objects on my senses; and therefore may

be said, with the greatest propriety, to be nothing more than a sensation. For I

can equally say, I judge, or I feel, that of two objects, the one, which I call a

54 Helvetius ([1759] 1807: 7).

55 Essay, IV.xiv.4 in Locke ([1689] 1975: 653). For discussion, see Gaukroger (1989); Owen (1999,

2007).

56 Of course it is a more complicated question as to what Locke really thought was involved in the

act of judgment—for a discussion of some of the difficulties, see Owen (2007).

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fathom, makes a different impression on me, from that of the other, which I

call Foot; also, that the colour which I call Red acts upon my eyes differently

from that which I call Yellow: from whence I conclude that in all parallel

cases, Judging is the same with Feeling.57

The notoriety that de l’Esprit earned in France motivated Rousseau to take on Helvétius on

exactly these points late in the composition of Émile in 1762.58 For Rousseau the non-

reductive difference between sensing and judging can be easily ascertained:

To perceive is to sense; to compare is to judge. Judging and sensing are not the

same thing. By sensation, objects are presented to me separated, isolated, such

as they are in nature. By comparison I move them, I transport them, and, so to

speak, I superimpose them on one another in order to pronounce on their

difference or their likeness and generally on all their relations. According to

me, the distinctive faculty of the active or intelligent being is to be able to give

a sense to the word is. I seek in vain in the purely sensitive being for this

intelligent force which superimposes and which then pronounces; I am not

able to see it in its nature. This passive being will sense each object separately,

or it will even sense the total object formed by the two; but having no force to

bend them back upon one another, it will never compare them, it will not

judge them.59

57 Helvetius ([1759] 1807: 8–9).

58 (Rousseau ([1762] 1979). For discussion of these themes, see Audidière (2016); Hanley (2012);

Smith (1982).

59 Rousseau ([1762] 1979: 270–1).

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The characteristic feature of the power of judgment is that it is an active manipulation of

sense contents—Rousseau speaks of ‘superimposition’, of ‘transportation’, and of the

bending back of sensations upon themselves. The grasp of the relations between sensations,

he claims, is only made possible through the contribution of the activity of judgment. The

argument seems to be that the grasp of relations requires the manipulation of sensations; the

power of sensibility itself can only receive and not manipulate sensations; therefore, the grasp

of relations cannot be within the purview of the faculty of sensation itself. It’s worth noting a

further point here, which is that this argument depends on an acceptance of Helvétius’s

atomistic picture of sensations themselves. It is only because sensations are in themselves

‘separated, isolated’ atomistic contents that we can understand that the relations between the

atoms cannot themselves be perceived.60

Rousseau takes up Helvétius’s own example of a comparative judgment of length:

To see two objects at once is not to see their relations or to judge their

differences. To perceive several objects as separate from one another is not to

number them. I can at the same instant have the idea of a large stick and of a

small stick without comparing them and without judging that one is smaller

than the other, just as I can see my entire hand at once without making the

count of my fingers. These comparative ideas, larger and smaller, just like the

numerical ideas of one, two, etc. certainly do not belong to the sensations,

although my mind produces them only on the occasion of my sensations.61

60 The atomism of sensationism is generally an unargued premise.

61 Rousseau ([1762] 1979: 271).

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The argument hinges on the thought that there is a distinction between possessing different

representations and possessing a representation of their difference. I might coterminously

possess the representations [large stick] and [small stick] without noting their difference and

generating [two sticks, one larger than the other]. This latter representation requires a distinct

act of comparison, a second-order mental activity that takes the first-order representations as

its targets. Therefore, there is more to judgment than the mere combination and aggregation

of sensory contents; there is, rather, added content—in this case the representational content

[larger than]—simply not given by sensation and, therefore, contributed by the act of

judgment of the human agent.

The historical sketch I’ve been presenting suggests that two different questions started to

be run together by the middle of the eighteenth century. The question about the continuity

between animal and human minds became closely linked with the question of the continuity

between the non-rational and rational capacities. Helvétius and Condillac sought to capitalize

on Locke’s account of comparison by suggesting that there is no principled reason to

postulate conceptual discontinuity between the lower and the higher cognitive faculties at all.

Rousseau objected to this reductive sensationism on the grounds that even the apprehension

of relational content within human beings’ perceptual phenomenology involves a rudimentary

capacity for self-consciousness. Rousseau questions the continuity thesis not on the

rationalist’s grounds that animals cannot ‘know whether the same reasons are at work’ in

different circumstances; rather he questions it on the same grounds upon which Helvétius and

others had argued for it, i.e. as being a plausible hypothesis that explains the phenomenology

involved in simple acts of relational representation. For Rousseau, the obvious

phenomenological distinction between noting representations and noting the comparison

between them blocks the continuity thesis from applying even at the lowest levels of our

cognitive lives.

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1.5 Kant, the Ox, and the Stable Door

Kant seems at first to follow the broadly Aristotelian tradition, granting animals something

like ‘sensitive souls’ but not the capacity to act in accordance with a self-conscious and

rational faculty of choice that marks the presence of a rational soul.62 Thus when it comes to

animal minds he allows them consciousness of some sort, namely whatever consciousness is

involved in pure sensation:

A representation of sensation simply cannot be invented by us but instead

must be given to us by means of the senses. Experience and sensation are

distinct as to form and as to degree. As to matter, the two are the same, but in

experience there is a form as well, reason. Experience is nothing but reflected

sensation, or sensation that is expressed through a judgment. Experiences,

namely, are not mere concepts and representations but also judgments [;] e.g.,

the representations of warmth or of cold are concepts of experience. They are

universal characters of things, but we cannot have insight into these merely

through the senses, but actually only through judgment. Non-rational animals

have no experience, then, but instead only sensations. Anyone who can

describe the objects of his experience has experience, for description involves

not merely sensation but also a judgment.63

62 This wasn’t an unusual position. Kant would have been following Baumgarten, for instance—see

his Metaphysics (1757), §792 (‘On the Souls of Brutes’) in Watkins (ed.) (2009: 129)..

63 BL 24: 236. For Kant on sensation, see George (1981); Naragon (1990).

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Kant, like Locke, allows that animals ‘compare’ representations. However, unlike Locke, and

like Rousseau, Kant claims that this notion of ‘comparison’ is different in kind from the

activity that human beings perform:

Animals indeed compare representations with one another, but they are not

conscious of where the harmony or disharmony between them lies. Therefore

they also have no concepts, and also no higher cognitive faculty, because the

higher cognitive faculty consists of these. This [faculty] is thus differentiated

by apperception from the lower cognitive faculty. As animals, we have the

latter in common with them, but the former raises us as thinking beings over

animals.64

The point was made explicitly in the False Subtlety essay in 1764—the same year as the

publication of Émile—in some well-known passages. Kant was already anticipating the

Rousseauian claim about judgment and would have no doubt endorsed what he later found in

Émile. Here Kant opposed Meier’s contention that animals can possess a distinct concept:65

The distinctness of a concept does not consist in the fact that that which is a

characteristic mark of the thing is clearly represented [vorgestellt], but rather

in the fact that it recogniseized [erkannt] as a characteristic mark of the thing.

The door is something which does, it is true, belong to the stall and can serve

as a characteristic mark of it. But only the being who forms the judgment: this

64 MMr 29: 888.

65 For a helpful recent discussion of Kant on clarity and distinctness, see Sommerlatte (2016).

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door belongs to this stable has a distinct concept of the building, and that is

certainly beyond the power of animals. (FS 2: 59)66

An animal can possess the representations [door] and [stable] but the complex representation

[the door of the stable] requires an additional relational content only provided by acts of

judgment. Obviously there is the (by now familiar) question as to how an animal can

differentiate the door of the stable from other aspects of its environment so successfully if it

nevertheless lacks complex representations. Kant’s response is a version of the analogy

strategy: one must differentiate different senses of what it is to differentiate. Just like

Rousseau, Kant insists that ‘it is one thing to differentiate things from each other, and quite

another to recognize the difference between them’ and the latter ‘cannot occur in the case of

animals’.67 For Kant, animals are certainly capable of highly sophisticated representational

66 For further discussion of this passage, see Golob, this volume. As the editors of (Newton 2012)

note, Kant here may be influenced by Reimarus’s (1760) Allgemeine Betrachtungen Über die

Treibe der Thiele—see Kant (1992: 427, note 41). An earlier possible source was perhaps Buffon’s

multi-volume Histoire naturelle génerale et particulière, which was published in French from

1753 and which greatly impressed Kant. There Buffon distinguishes animals by connecting

together some of the recurring themes I have mentioned in the debate, namely the capacities of

comparison, self-awareness and complex temporal representation:

‘Very far from denying anything to animals, I grant them everything with the exception of thought

and reflection: they have sensations even to a higher degree than us, they also have the

consciousness of their present existence, but not of the past one: they have feelings, but they lack

the faculty to compare them.’ (Buffon 1753, 4: 41; quoted and translated in Matytsin 2016: 18).

Though not published until later, Euler makes similar reflections in his Letters to a German Princess

(Letter XCV, 20th January, 1761 in Watkins (ed.) (2009: 203)).

67 FS 2: 60–1.

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differentiation, but these must be understood as complex sets of stimulus-response patterns

relating to simple sensory representations:

Physically differentiating means being driven to different actions by different

representations. The dog differentiates the roast from the loaf, and it does so

because the way in which it is affected by the roast is different from the way it

is affected by the loaf (for different things cause different sensations); and the

sensation caused by the roast are a ground of desire in the dog which differs

from the desire caused by the loaf, according to the natural connection which

exists between its drives and its representations.68

The animal differentiates a from b in the sense that there are purely causal laws (‘natural

connections’) that determine a stimulus-response pattern that is marked in terms of the

differential behavioural outputs. Switching to my original example then, when the crow sees

the larger gap in the wall, it does not see the larger gap as larger than the smaller one, rather it

has a causally conditioned response that leaves it disposed to move towards gaps of that size

and not ones of the smaller size. The crow never ‘holds’ the two representations of the gaps

in the wall before its mind nor notes the difference between them.

Despite the broadly Aristotelian stance, one can see also see something distinctly

Cartesian about Kant’s reasoning here. Descartes’s objection to Montaigne had been that the

observable behaviour of animals was adequately accounted for by postulating automata that

(we might say) reacted in conformity with the laws of nature but not for the sake of the

representation of those laws. Why postulate the capacity to react in recognition of the

phenomenal content of what is represented when merely postulating rule-governed reactions

68 FS 2: 60. For a different reading, see Newton (2015).

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to stimuli will adequately explain the behaviour? Kant is similarly here questioning whether

we need to attribute to the animal a representation of the distinctness of representation of the

stable door when a mere reliable differential reaction to a representation of that door will

suffice.

It is clear how inadequate Kant’s theory is here. Presumably Kant attributes some kind of

phenomenal consciousness to animals so as to avoid the Cartesian claim that they lack pain-

experiences etc. To adequately explain the crow’s choosing of the larger hole in the wall over

the smaller one, we have to attribute to it one of two general pictures, both of which assume

that the crow possesses some kind of phenomenal consciousness. On the first picture, the

animal is just responding reliably to causal stimuli and through habituation has learned to be

disposed to move towards gaps of certain sizes while refraining from moving towards others.

On the other picture, the animal can attend to its phenomenal consciousness to guide its

behaviour in aid of the more successful outcome. If Kant intended the first picture then it

would seem that the presence of phenomenal consciousness is otiose for the explanation of

the behaviour of the crow, since what is guiding its behaviour are the laws of nature that

generate its responses, while its phenomenal consciousness is just an intermediary effect of

those initial causes of those responses.69 However, if Kant intended the second picture, then it

is hard to see what the animal would be doing were it to exploit the content of its phenomenal

69 Kant grants animals a capacity to actively determine their own environment: ‘[w]e call an animal

alive because it has a faculty to alter its own state as a consequence of its own representations’

(MVo 28:449.) I would claim that Kant’s meaning here is that external causal stimuli generate a

representational response and that representational response is causally connected with a

behavioural output. It is in this transitive sense that the animal ‘alters its own states as a

consequence of its own representations’ What it does not do is use or exploit its own

representations consciously in order to realize this outcome.

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consciousness without doing so in exactly the manner Kant denies is occurring, i.e. by

attending to the content presented to it within its representations.

1.6 The Shadow of Reason

Animals’ behaviour is often ordered, regular, and purposeful. It is natural to infer that the

structure of the mentality that we make use of in realizing our ordered, regular, and

purposeful behaviour is replicated in other animals also. We are at least strongly inclined to

think that their mental lives do not manifest a disordered, irregular, and undirected

phenomenal mess. Yet there is an enormous spectrum of possible models of the mind that

might account for the orderedness of their mental lives without attributing them the same

structure our mental life might possess. A machine-like mechanism is one way of thinking of

how that animal mind is ordered, albeit one that risks denying them anything like a mind at

all. On the other hand, we would be wise to resist a picture of the ordered mental life too

similar to our own—we ought not to think that one pig, upon spotting another in front of it,

attests to itself, ‘Lo, a fellow pig on the path!’ The mental life of many animals is instead

plausibly modelled somewhere between these two points on the spectrum.

Kant’s occasional ambivalence regarding characterizing animal mentality is in one sense

meritorious, since one of his motives is epistemic caution in saying more about the mental

lives of animals other than that it falls somewhere between these two points. There are also

proper philosophical reasons why Kant sometimes appears quasi-Cartesian in his outlook.

The critic of the Cartesians accuses them of a self-serving rationalization in making

consciousness exclusive to their species. However, the charitable understanding of the

Cartesian renders the accusation of anthropocentricism particularly ironic—it is the advocate

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of the continuity thesis that perpetuates an anthropocentric methodology in presuming that

animal consciousness can or should be articulated by comparison with our own.

Kant’s model of human cognition invites reflection on the thoroughgoing reflexivity of

all human consciousness, including human sensory consciousness. What we know of what

it’s like to be conscious per se is saturated with this conception, since our model of

consciousness per se is only ever formulated from the human standpoint. When we imagine

what it is like for an animal to see gaps in the wall, or a door in a stable, or two sticks of

different lengths, we cannot help but imagine what it’s like for an animal to see these things

in terms of what it’s like for us to see these things. We try to imagine animals’ mental lives as

being like ours but without certain of the features that essentially characterize our mental life.

It should be unsurprising then that it is difficult to imagine what it’s like for an animal to

compare two sticks of different lengths without falling into a model that attributes to them

something like a proto-version of our consciousness, whereby we imagine that they attest ‘lo,

this stick is longer than that one!’ yet in some non-linguistic and thoroughly non-human

manner. Yet it is possible that animals do not do anything even comparable to this.

It is with regard to concerns such as these that Kant sometimes follows Leibniz in

advocating the analogy strategy. In Metaphysik L1, he states that ‘We can attribute to animals

an analogue of reason <analogon rationis>, which involves connection of representations

according to the laws of sensibility, from which the same effects follow as from a connection

according to concepts. Animals are accordingly different from human souls not in degree but

rather in species . . .’70 So far as Kant can make sense of what it is to possess understanding

70 ML1, 28:275–6. The analogy strategy can sometimes seem to be in play with regard to animals’

moral status—in the Collins ethics lectures, Kant says that ‘since animals are an analogue of

humanity, we observe duties to mankind when we observe them as analogues to this . . .’ (EC 27:

459).

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and reason he demands that they ‘are possible only insofar as one is conscious of oneself’.71

Since he cannot grant them that higher capacity, the most they can attain is a shadow of

reason achieved by virtue of the superior aspects of their sensory apparatuses:

But we see from the actions of animals undertakings which we would not be

able to bring about other than through understanding and reason. Accordingly

sensibility is with us such a state as with animals, except theirs is far advanced

over ours. But for this privation we have received compensation through the

consciousness of ourselves and through the understanding that follows from it.

We are also not at all required to assume reflection in animals, rather we can

derive all of this from the formative power. Accordingly we ascribe to these

beings a faculty of sensation, reproductive imagination, etc., but all only

sensible as a lower faculty, and not connected with consciousness.72

As already mentioned, the analogy strategy’s merits are far from obvious. One way of

thinking about Kant’s apparent use of the analogy strategy is that it risks Baylean parody. In

the face of the obvious similarity between animal and human physiology and given the need

to accommodate this in terms of granting shared cognitive functions, this acquiescence is at

once rescinded with the disclaimer that how animals cognize the same environmental patch is

of course entirely different from the way in which we humans sense it. Thus, while it is

granted that animals ‘compare’, they do so in ways entirely different from the ways in which

we compare representations. Considered in this context it is easier to make sense of Kant’s

remark in the Anthropology that while animals may represent in the same sense in which

71 ML1, 28:276.

72 ML1 28: 277.

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humans represent they might also have an entirely different variant of what we call

representation.

The beast-machine hypothesis opposed Montaigne’s conception of animals as rational on

the grounds that behaviour that mimicked inference and deliberation could be as well

explained by an appeal to automatic responses to causal stimuli. The first step of Descartes’s

response is that mechanical causes are sufficient to explain behaviour; the second step is that

if this so then appeal to conscious states is not necessary. Kant’s model of animal minds

attempts a mixed explanation: he claims that animal responses are automatic causal responses

but that these responses just happen to be routed through conscious states. Kant does not have

an explanation against Descartes as to why conscious states are required to account for

animal behaviour.73 Neither though does Kant have an adequate explanation against

Montaigne as to why these conscious responses can be known to fail to instantiate self-

consciousness. Why isn’t it the case that if animals possess an analogue of our reason, and if

our reason requires self-consciousness, then animals possess an analogue of self-

consciousness? Similarly, if animals can be granted an analogue of self-consciousness, what

grounds are there for insisting that their self-consciousness is really just an analogue of our

73 This is not to say that Kant lacks any explanation at all as to why animals have mental states. Kant

broadly follows Leibniz’s position (originally outlined in the latter’s ‘A New System in the

Communication of Substances, as well as the Union Between the Soul and the Body’ in 1695) in

characterizing an animal as a spiritual automaton (Leibniz [1695] 1989: 458). The grounds for the

distinction between a machine and a spiritual automaton is are just the principle of life that

determines the latter and not the former. Yet obviously something can be alive yet non-conscious

so appeal to a life principle is not itself sufficient to explain why animal’s automatic responses are

accompanied with rudimentary consciousness while a plant’s (say) automatic responses to causal

stimuli are not.

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own rather than a simpler but genuine manifestation of our own?74 Bayle’s point is that

denials of the sort made by Descartes, Aristotelians, Leibniz, and now Kant are all simply ad

hoc stipulations.

Kant therefore grants animals capacities for sensation and imagination, but strictly

sensation sans awareness, imagination sans awareness. Yet one cannot help but wonder what

the denier of the continuity thesis would accept as falsifying of their position and what

observed behaviour could suffice as evidence of the presence of proto-self-awareness of a

genuinely comparable kind. Certainly a range of behaviour that resembles rational and self-

aware behaviour could be explained away by means of the analogy strategy. The demand that

none of animals’ behaviour attests to the presence of self-consciousness appears like re-

packaged Cartesian dogma. On such an approach, it is hard to see just what an animal needs

to do in order to generate a genuine comparison with humans. The difference between human

and animals on this account is no clearer than our ability to distinguish our own rational

justifications from our self-serving rationalizations.75

74 An analogous complaint can be raised against Leibniz’s criterion here: if our reason requires an

understanding of necessary truths that carves nature at its joints, why can’t animal behaviour be

described in externalist terms as reliable rational responses to just those same truths?

75 I am very grateful to the audience at the Witswatersrand conference on ‘Kant and Animals’ at

which some of this content was originally presented. Thanks also to Lucy Allais and Max Edwards

for feedback. Special thanks to Alice Wright for very valuable discussion as well as comments on

the final draft.

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