In Kafka’s short story ‘A Report to an Academy’, a chimpanzee educated to the ‘cultural level of an average European’ finds himself in something of a dilemma:
Honoured members of the Academy! You have done me the honour of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape (äffisches Vorleben). I regret that I cannot comply with your request to the extent you desire.2
Rotpeter, the chimpanzee, explains that although only five years have passed ‘since I was an ape (Affentum)’, and that he can recount something of his capture, his incarceration, and the training and personal exertion that lead to his becoming human, of his time in the forests of the Gold Coast he can say nothing.3 The door through which he passed has now closed, and the strong wind that blew after him from his past is today no more than a gentle puff that plays about his heels. Rotpeter tells the honoured members of the Academy that ‘your life as apes, gentlemen, insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me’ and that ‘what I felt then as an ape I can represent now only in human terms’.4 Rotpeter is now a human before he is an ape.5
Rotpeter, like the members of the Academy he is addressing, classifies himself as a human being. The modes of animal being peculiar to apes are now unreachable, left far behind in the distant past of an inaccessible ancestry. Rotpeter affirms Bataille’s suggestion that ‘nothing, as a matter of fact, is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended’.6 It is the precarious nature of the classification of human beings, along with the question of temporal preeminence on which it so often depends, that I would like to consider in this paper. Clearly demarcated categories have always been a problem for the taxonomist, of course. Plato is by no means alone in having had to revise a definition following an impertinent intervention, and Darwin himself complained of the difficulties he experienced, the ‘undefined & unanswerable’ questions with which he tussled, whilst at systematic work.7 No-one has highlighted the problematic character of the questions that haunted Darwin and his fellow systematists [page 70] quite so concisely, or with such flare, as Borges.
Borges’ well known essay ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’, first published in 1942, describes several attempts to construct a universal language, that is, a language in which each word defines itself.8 Such a language would, as Borges put it, speculate on ‘the words, definitions, etymologies, and synonymies of God’s secret dictionary’. Borges mentions the system proposed in 1850 by one C. L. A. Letellier, in which ‘a means animal; ab, mammalian; abo, carnivorous; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivorous; abiv, equine’, and so on. He recounts a similar example from Wilkins’ own ‘undoubtedly ingenious’ system: although the English word salmon tells us nothing, ‘zana, the corresponding word, defines (for the person versed in the forty categories and the classes of those categories) a scaly river fish with reddish flesh’. Borges is alarmed by some of Wilkins’ categories and divisions, however: the whale becomes, for instance, ‘a viviparous, oblong fish’.9 The ‘ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies’ of Wilkins’ system recall, he suggests, a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia:
In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.10
A distinctive kind of disorder manifests here within the heart of the encyclopaedic system. In his discussion of Borges’ text Foucault distinguishes the confusion of the merely incongruous from the true turmoil of the heteroclite.11 The former is apparent in the unusual juxtaposition of creatures listed by Eusthenes when he declares, ‘I am no longer hungry […] Until the morrow, safe from my saliva all the following shall be: Aspics, Acalephs, Acanthocephalates, Amoebocytes, Ammonites, Axolotls, Amblystomas, Aphislions, Anacondas, Ascarids, Amphisbaenas, Angleworms, Amphipods, Anaerobes, Annelids, Anthozoans…’. Ordinarily these creatures would certainly not be found together, but that they might meet on the site of Eusthenes’ saliva, as they do in his list, is at least a theoretical possibility. The disorder of Borges’ ‘Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’ is another matter. Here the ‘fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite’.12 Each of the categories belongs to a different system. There is not even the possibility of a common locus where the creatures could convene, and yet the continuity of the alphabetical sequence obliterates the distances between the categories. The disorder here is the internal incoherence of the paradox.13
Heteroclite systems are, Borges suspects, inevitable. Universal languages, and indeed all attempts at classification, do not and cannot hold because ‘there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word’.14 In short, ‘there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative’.15 But, Borges asserts, the impossibility of constructing a perfect taxonomy, of reproducing God’s secret dictionary, should by no means discourage us from the attempt. Systems and orders [page 71] will always be provisional, but that, in itself, is no reason to abandon them. Systematics, that branch of biological science concerned with the task of classifying species and other taxa, learned long ago to hypothesise rather than to hypostatise. I will return to this noble endeavour in a moment, but first we must exchange Borges’ heteroclite disordering for a little incongruity.
In a rich, inspiring essay entitled ‘Gaps in the Mind’, Richard Dawkins works hard to knock down the door which Rotpeter believes to have shut fast behind him.16 Dawkins describes what he calls ‘the discontinuous mind’, an outlook characterised by the desire to impose inappropriately rigid distinctions on real world continua. Noticing that speciation allegedly occurs by means of infinitesimal, gradual variation, the sophistic lawyer will attempt to argue that, since a member of one species could never give birth to a member of another, Darwin’s theory of evolution must surely be at fault. A gap is posited that does not exist. Dawkins points out that it is convenient for our naming rituals that intermediate species have usually become extinct, but he invokes the case of ring species to demonstrate that this need not be the case. The example he provides is that of the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-Backed Gull, two quite distinct species which are easy to tell apart and do not interbreed. If you follow the population of Herring Gulls westward from the UK, however, to North America, then Alaska, Siberia, across Russia and back into Europe, the gulls gradually begin to look more and more like Lesser Black-Backed Gulls, until, as you reach Britain once more, they are Lesser Black-Backed Gulls. The gulls comprise a ‘ring species’ in which neighbouring groups can and do interbreed, all the way around the world, but whose ‘ends’ constitute two distinct species.17 ‘Footling debates’ which seek to establish sharp divisions where none exist entirely miss the point, and import, of Darwin’s discovery.
‘The word “apes”’, Dawkins goes on, ‘usually means chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, gibbons and siamangs. We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.’ In fact, humans are African apes and are more closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas than either of those two species are to orangutans. Dawkins proposes a thought experiment to demonstrate that there is no great divide, no impassable doorway, separating human from ape. He suggests that the reader imagine themselves standing on the shore of the Indian Ocean in southern Somalia, facing north. ‘In your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother’s hand, and so on.’18 Following this ‘human chain’, we will have hardly started across the width of our home continent before we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. If this ‘arch-ancestress’ then turns east, and takes in her left hand her other daughter, from whom chimpanzees are descended, a parallel chain can be followed all the way back to the coast. The reader will now stand face to face with their modern chimpanzee cousin, to whom they are joined by an unbroken sequence of linked hands. Like a kind of diachronic ring species, there are no gaps in this chain of beings.
Anyone who walked up and down this chain might pass Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, perhaps also Homo habilis the ‘handy man’, and many other species besides.19 They would also pass individuals who could not comfortably be classified as belonging to any particular species. These individuals can be considered members of ‘intermediate [page 72] species’ only to those gazing down the line with the benefit of taxonomic hindsight. This hindsight is necessarily based on historical contingencies such as the matter of which species flourished, which became extinct, and which left the fossil remains on which modern classification depends. The true importance of Darwin’s work was not that he demonstrated the origin of any species, but that he showed just how specious the notion of species can be.20 But to whatever species these individuals did or did not belong, all were African apes.21
Dawkins’ line-up ends with a single individual, a contemporary cousin standing opposite the reader, but there are in fact two species of chimpanzee. Chimpanzees have been known to the Western world since the seventeenth century. In 1641 Nicolaas Tulp, the same physician who had been depicted dissecting a hand in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, provided the first unambiguous description of an ape, together with a gravure illustration.22 His account is the earliest record of an ape unfortunate enough to have been captured and brought to Europe. Tulp called her an Indian Satyr (Satyrus Indicus), and she was later identified as a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).23 Toward the end of the century the comparative anatomist Edward Tyson, a distant relative of Darwin’s, dissected a juvenile chimpanzee, which he called an Orang-Outang. He published an account, with superb anatomical drawings by William Cowper, as ‘The Anatomy of a Pygmie’.24 Tyson’s stated objective was to demonstrate that ‘the pygmies, the cynocephali, the satyrs, and sphinges of the ancients’ were actually apes or monkeys, not men, and that his own subject comprised the connecting link in the great chain of being between animal and Man. He depicted his pygmie standing upright, supported by a walking stick on account of his failing health.25
It was not until the early twentieth century that a second species of chimpanzee was identified. In 1928 a small skull, previously thought to be that of a young chimpanzee, was recognised as belonging to an adult, albeit one with an especially small head. The following year the subspecies paniscus was announced, which, a few years later, was reclassified as a new species.26 The name was simply a diminutive of the genus name, Pan, and the ‘new’ species is often called the ‘pygmy chimpanzee’. In fact it is only the skull that is smaller, and the rest of the body is of comparable size to Pan troglodytes.27 The origin of the preferred name for this ape, Bonobo, is unknown, and may well have derived from a misspelling on a shipping crate.28 In a curious twist of fate, the primatologist Vernon Reynolds has since argued that Tulp’s Satyrus Indicus may actually have been a pygmy chimpanzee, given her size, home, and the cutaneous connections between fingers on her rear right hand.29 Without a doubt, these two species of chimpanzee are closely related, and the one has in the past often been confused with the other.
It does not matter, for the purposes of Dawkins’ demonstration, whether the Pan we face is a troglodytes or a paniscus. There is an alternative conclusion we might draw from his observations, however, regarding the nomenclature of the African ape family. As has often been noted, humans are genetically extremely close to chimpanzees, sharing 98.4% of their DNA.30 The physiologist Jared Diamond has pointed out that willow warblers and chiffchaffs share less than this, at 97.4%, and yet are placed together in the same genus, Phylloscopus. And the red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, two North American birds, both belong to the genus Vireo whilst sharing only 97.1% DNA.31 In [page 73] short, were we to apply the same criteria to the great apes as we do to these other species, humans and chimpanzees would be acknowledged as conspecifics, that is, as members of the same genus. Diamond’s argument is based on cladistics, the school of taxonomy which depends on the objective criteria of genetic distance between species, rather than traditional or phenetic classification systems which rely on subjective evaluations of the relative importance of anatomical or behavioural traits.32 Since the genus name Homo was proposed first, then according to the rules of taxonomic nomenclature, it must take priority. Diamond thus argues that ‘there are not one but three species of genus Homo on Earth today: the common chimpanzee, Homo troglodytes; the pygmy chimpanzee, Homo paniscus; and the third chimpanzee or human chimpanzee, Homo sapiens’.33 The African ape facing us on the coast of the Indian Ocean is a chimpanzee, though she is not a Pan at all but a fellow Homo.
It was the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnæus who devised both the taxonomic ranking method and the binomial system of nomenclature still used today. Linnæus styled himself a second Adam, giving true names to the Earth’s creatures and thereby accurately representing the order of nature.34 His work constituted an attempt to peek at God’s secret dictionary. In the Linnaean system, which quickly replaced a bewildering, heteroclitic assortment of competing classificatory methods, each species is designated by two Latinate names, the first generic, the second specific.35 Linnæus’ masterwork, his Systema Naturæ, began with the primates, and indeed with humans (genus Homo) whom he divided from the apes (genus Simia).36 More than a century before Darwin, however, Linnæus already considered this distinction questionable:
I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character – one that is according to generally accepted principles of classification - by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so.37
In fact, Linnæus had already blurred this distinction. He divided the genus Homo into two species, Homo sapiens and Homo troglodytes. The former, described as Homo diurnus, comprised various species or races, including Homo americanus, Homo europæus, and even Homo monstrosus, a miscellany of oddities including the Patagonian giant, the dwarf of the Alps, the monorchid Hottentot, and many others. Homo troglodytes, identified as nocturnus, comprised those anthropoids reported by travellers to exist in Africa and Asia. Regarding this species, Linnaeus recorded that:
It lives within the boundaries of Ethiopia (Pliny), in the caves of Java, Ambiona, Ternate. Body white, walks erect, less than half our size. Hair white frizzled. Eyes orbicular: iris and pupils golden. Vision lateral, nocturnal. Life-span twenty-five years. By day hides; by night it sees, goes out, forages. Speaks in a hiss. Thinks, believes that the earth was made for it, and that sometime it will be master again, if we may believe the travellers.38
[page 74] According to Groves this golden-eyed anthropoid actually included ‘some undoubted orangutans and possibly chimpanzees’.39 For Linnæus, then, some of the great apes, at least, counted as Homo.
Jared Diamond does not discuss Linnaeus’ early primate classification. In suggesting, however, that even today’s cladistically inclined taxonomists are anthropocentric, and that ‘the lumping of humans and chimps into the same genus will undoubtedly be a bitter pill for them to swallow’, he is surely correct. The impetus to isolate humans within their own genus betrays a heteroclitic humanism that goes beyond mere incongruity. Nevertheless, Diamond continues, ‘there is no doubt […] that whenever chimpanzees learn cladistics […] they will unhesitatingly adopt the new classification’.40 That is, we might add, whenever we learn to accept the new system of classification. Despite the speciousness of species, despite the lack of clear gaps in the continuum, despite the fact that we cannot read God’s dictionary, we need not cease the attempt to keep compiling and revising systems of classification. The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe should not, Borges asserts, dissuade us from devising our own schemes, even if it is clear that they are provisional.41 The very nature of classifications, like dictionaries, is that they must be supplemented and amended.
Changing the names of species is nothing new. As we saw, Pan paniscus has changed name once already, and Groves lists forty-seven different names by which the several subspecies of ape now called Pan troglodytes have been known since the time of Linnæus.42 The operative principles of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature require that a published genus name must take priority over any subsequently proposed names. Diamond abides by these rules when he proposes that, although humans are ‘the third chimpanzee’, the genus name Homo should be adopted for the three species: Homo dates back to the official starting-point for zoological nomenclature, the tenth edition of the Systema Naturæ, published in 1758, whereas Pan was not employed as a genus name until 1816.43 There is a danger here, however, of reduplicating the same anthropocentrism which Linnæus decried in himself when he imprudently separated Man and Ape. His very description of the genus Homo was in fact the phrase nosce te ipsum (know yourself).44 Reclassifying chimpanzees as humans suggests once more that humans are in some sense prior to, or preeminent among, the great apes. This is the temporal priority of Rotpeter and Bataille, whereby humanity comes first. Our objective should not be to welcome a few new, privileged members into the charmed circle of human affairs.45 If we wish to avoid this first-and-foremost anthropocentrism it is vital that we find a different way to amend our primate nomenclature.46
The genus name of the chimpanzee comes from the Greek god of shepherds and their flocks, Pan (Παν).47 Depicted with a human torso but the hindquarters, beard and horns of a goat, the god was a lustful deity, pursuing nymphs and maenads around Arcadia, whilst accompanied by his lascivious satyrs. Legends have long persisted of the prurient ape, and, following Tulp, Linnæus used the name Satyrus for one of the species of his genus Simia.48 The name Pan is usually taken to have derived from the Indo-European root pa (to pasture), but an ancient Homeric Hymn to Pan, chanted at religious festivals, suggests an alternative etymology. It tells that the gods gave him the [page 75] name that they did because, as a noisy, merry child, he ‘delighted all their hearts’ (from pantes, meaning ‘all’).49 It is most appropriate, then, that this name should apply to every one of the species within our chimpanzee genus. But if humans should take the genus name Pan, what of their specific name?
In his Anatomy of a Pygmie, Tyson wondered whether it might be more appropriate to describe his chimpanzee as ‘Quadru-manus’ rather than ‘Quadrupes’.50 Buffon, who was well acquainted with Tyson’s text, and critical of Linnæus’ inclusion of troglodytes within the genus Homo, would go on to use the terms ‘quadrumanous’ and ‘bimanous’ of ape and man in his Nomenclature of the Apes.51 It was not until 1795, however, that Johann Friedrich Blumenbach came to employ these two terms in a specifically classificatory sense. In the third edition of his On the Natural Varieties of Mankind Blumenbach suggested that, despite the pioneering work of ‘the immortal Linnæus’, his Systema Naturæ was now more than sixty years old and in need of revision. Accordingly, and despite protesting that ‘I am very far indeed from that itch for innovation which afflicts so many of the moderns’, he proposed a new taxonomy of his own.52
Blumenbach rejected naturalists’ long-established commitment to the continuity or gradation of nature, the chain of being which had still held Tyson captive, and argued instead that there are large gaps between classes and genera of creatures. He proposed ten distinct orders of mammalia, the first of which, the Bimana, included only the genus Homo.53 He argued that Man’s unique, erect stature gives him ‘that highest prerogative of his external conformation, namely, the freest use of two most perfect hands’. The anthropomorphous animals, the apes, monkeys and lemurs, however, have on their hind feet a second thumb, not the great toe which is given to Man alone. As such they ought not to be considered either bipeds or quadrupeds, but belong in a distinct order of their own, the Quadrumana.54 Only humans are fully bipedal,55 a posture made possible precisely by the lack of hands on their hind extremities. It is not, as Heidegger has argued,56 the hand which distinguishes human beings, but the fact that they have only two of them. With his two new orders, the Bimana and the Quadrumana, Blumenbach thus definitively separated humans from all the other great apes, a taxonomic distinction that has persisted to the present day. The distinguishing feature of the human chimpanzee is the fact that members of the species do not have four hands, like the majority of the other primates, but a pair. In choosing a new specific name for the third chimpanzee, we might, on the one hand, appropriate Blumenbach’s term whilst, on the other, we temper the rigidly distinct gaps he described by remembering that chain of beings which Dawkins imagined to be joined by their hands. Humans, then, might best be considered Pan bimanus.
In considering the question of ‘animal beings’ from the perspective of biological classification, my proposed revision breaks the systematic imperative of temporal, taxonomic pre-eminence. Homo came first according, not only to the author of Genesis, but also to that second Adam, Linnæus. What justification could be offered for this wilful itch for innovation? In retaining (and indeed extending) the use of ‘Homo’, I have suggested, the rules of nomenclature manifest, in this instance, as a form of anthropocentrism. Linnæus himself acknowledged that, as a good naturalist, he should have done otherwise. This anthropocentrism is a kind of self-centredness, a species of narcissism, a species-narcissism. The fact that humans not only evolved from, but [page 76] continue to be, apes, need not, of itself, prevent their being self-centred, of course. Indeed, Derrida has suggested that one will always narcissistically reappropriate the other in one’s own image:
I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the other - even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation - must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example. Love is narcissistic.57
What we think of as ‘non-narcissism’ is in general ‘but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism’. ‘Narcissism! There is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended’.58 There is, we might say, more than one self-image in which the other might be cast, and with which one might fall in love.59 Man (Homo) might well be erased as a distinct order or genus, like a crude taxon sketched in the sands of genealogical time, but this does not draw to a close all possible forms of narcissism. It is true that Derrida himself will not, ‘for a single moment’, take it upon himself to contest the thesis of a rupture or abyss ‘between those who say “we men”, “I, a man”, and what this man among men who say “we”, what he calls the animal or animals’.60 There will always be gaps in the mind, and such a disregard for difference would simply be ‘too asinine’. The point, however, is that this is not the only difference, the only abyss or gap or rupture. Derrida has given his attention, he says, not just to difference, but to differences, to heterogeneities and abyssal ruptures. Rotpeter chooses to narrate his history, to recount his particular kind of being, by stressing a single difference, but there are other tales he might have told. To follow Derrida, the autobiographical animal, one final time, we might choose to ask:
Where then are we? Where do we find ourselves? With whom can we still identify in order to affirm our own identity and to tell ourselves our own history? First of all, to whom do we recount it? One would have to construct oneself, one would have to be able to invent oneself without a model and without an assured addressee. This addressee can, of course, only ever be presumed, in all situations of the world. But the schemas of this presumption were in this case so rare, so obscure, and so random that the word ‘invention’ seems hardly exaggerated.61
The seemingly incongruous claim that humans are chimpanzees is made possible not by a listing of names, like Eusthenes’ inventory of edible snakes, but by the presumptuous invention of an inclusive taxonomic hierarchy. The individual organisms comprising any given taxon belong, necessarily, to multiple categories. The bimanus belong to the genus Pan, the family Hominidae, the order Primates, the class Mammalia, the phylum Chordata, and the kingdom Animalia. Derrida suggests that there are ‘little narcissisms’ and ‘big narcissisms’, and here, in the component classes of our nested taxonomic schema, we can identify multiple differences, heterogeneities and ruptures, and therefore assorted scales of self-image. In addition to these incongruously inclusive narcissisms, however, there are many more asymmetrically heteroclite clusters we might move to appropriate. The individual Pan bimanus [page 77] who was Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, was (i) male; (ii) middle-class; (iii) married; (iv) included in the current classification; (v) etcetera.62 Mapping genealogical and evolutionary categories will not exhaust what an individual was, is or might become, and the politics of adjectives and articles requires that the being inclined to see itself as human pay due care and attention to the parts of speech employed in claims to self-identity. Where the substantive tends to define and delimit, the adjective permits a more inclusive multiplicity of relations. One might choose, then, to acknowledge one’s animal being rather than to be an animal, to see oneself as mammalian rather than a mammal, to prefer ein äffisches leben or even ein Affentum to ‘life as an ape’, and perhaps, even, to be human rather than a human being.63 The provisional, presumptuous classifications we choose to invent will be, as Foucault, Borges and Derrida well knew, both incongruous and heteroclite, but no less productive for all that.
I began with Kafka’s tale of an ape, but there is another, more appropriate story with which to end this report to an academy. Pierre Boulle opens his most famous novel with Jinn and Phyllis, ‘a wealthy leisured couple’, who are holidaying in space ‘as far as possible from the inhabited stars’.64 They spend their time sailing their solar-powered spacecraft and taking pleasure in one another’s company. By chance they intercept an old-fashioned message in a bottle which, as they read it, becomes the main body of Boulle’s novel. Jinn and Phyllis shake their heads in disbelief as they complete the manuscript, which reports the trials and tribulations of an astronaut, one Ulysse Mérou, who has been stranded on a world populated by rational chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, a veritable planet of the apes. ‘A likely story’, says Jinn, which shows only that ‘there are poets everywhere, in every corner of the cosmos, and practical jokers too’. And so, in the closing words of the novel,
[Jinn] let out the sail, exposing it to the combined rays of the three suns. Then he began to manipulate the driving levers, using his four nimble hands, while Phyllis, after dismissing a last shred of doubt with an energetic shake of her velvety ears, took out her compact and, in view of their return to port, touched up her dear little chimpanzee muzzle.65
Rotpeter appears at first to be an ape, but it soon becomes clear, if his repeated protestations are to be believed, that he is now human. Jinn and Phyllis, on the other hand, we assume to be human, right up until the point at which their quadrumanous nature and chimpanzee muzzles reveal them to be apes. Rotpeter is still an ape, however, despite his cultured ways. He tells us that, ‘the first thing I learned was to give a handshake; a handshake betokens frankness’,66 but it is clear from his report that he has not been entirely forthright with his captors, trainers and audience. From the moment he realised that there was only one way out of his confinement, his assumption of human ways has been an elaborate and effective performance.67 Is Rotpeter lying about his anthropocentric amnesia? Who can say? But his well-groomed fur and his tail betray the fact that he remains an ape.68 Rotpeter presents his report as a human, but he is in fact a chimpanzee, just as Jinn and Phyllis seem to be human whilst reading the astonishing report upon which they have stumbled, only to turn out to be chimpanzees. And so it is with this report, offered to my presumed addressees, the honoured members of the academy. Our lives as apes are not so far removed, and do not lie behind us.
Tom Tyler is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Culture at Oxford Brookes University. His published research concerns the uses of animals, and the persistent expression of anthropocentric and anthropomorphic assumptions, within philosophy and critical theory.
More essays by Tom Tyler are available at his Research page.