The White Bone and Timbuktu

Philosophers and other conceptual bottom-feeders (or snorkelers) have often debated whether animals have thoughts, with Descartes famously insisting that only the human head is host to real thinking. Language has been taken to be the mark of rationality, and rationality as the precondition of thought. I have never seen the force of this position: The consciousness of animals (at least some of them--take chimps) is as thought-laden as many a human's. What else could be going on in there? A more interesting question is what they think--and want, hope, fear, etc. In both Timbuktu and The White Bone the animals have some rather vaulting thoughts--they think, among other things, of heaven, each after its own fashion. They wonder about the afterlife and direct their mortal lives in its light. But how realistic is this? Similarly, as Vicki Hearne notes, these fictional animals think metaphorically, allegorically, not merely literally. But can animals think metaphorically? Can even a chimp look at a sunset and think it is like a blood red rose?

To think of heaven is to think of something idealized; it is to apply the notion of perfection to the empirical world. Plato pointed out that no triangle in nature is a perfect triangle, so that our concept of a perfect triangle cannot be derived from sense-perception. This concept requires a mental operation of idealization or abstraction, a freedom from the sensory world. The idea of heaven involves something similar: the idea of a good day made perfect, to put it simply. Can animals think like this? Or are their thoughts tied to the world of empirical reality? I don't know, but I doubt it. Neither dogs nor elephants are comforted, or troubled, by thoughts of the perfect life beyond the grave. Reality is just what they see around them, not some shadowy adjacency. I think animals understand death and I think they also know they will die (they just need to make an elementary induction from what they witness all the time). But I don't think that they envisage a life beyond this life. Frankly, I envy them. I can conceive of such a life, and I am attracted to it; but I just don't believe there is any such thing.

Do animals live in a cognitive world of dull literality? Hard question. First we need to remind ourselves that literality is an achievement. Primitive man thought in metaphors, conceiving of the weather as an emanation from the gods. The hard-won scientific view requires much training and discipline of thought. So is the mind of a dog or elephant like the pre-scientific mind of man, but with its own species-specific perspective? Or is it perhaps a stage further back, a stage before even the errors of animism and the like? I suppose to answer this we need a better articulation of metaphor and its role in thought. Is a metaphor like a crutch for thought that has not attained full literal rigor, or is it the product of an intelligence that has transcended the merely literal--or can it be both? I wish some enterprising animal psychologist would devise a test for whether animals think metaphorically. From my armchair, I can only pose the question.

I happened to be speaking to Oliver Sacks the other day about one of his favorite animals, the octopus. These animals are short-lived (two years he told me), can grow to an enormous size, and have a highly developed nervous system. We know little of them because they live so deep, but there is every reason to believe they have a rich mental life. What do they think about? Can they imagine? No doubt they remember and can compare the present with the past: What pangs of emotion are produced in them by this fundamental cognitive capacity? What metaphors, if any, shape their conception of their watery world? I wish someone would come along and tell me an octopus storybut perhaps that is beyond the imaginative capacity or a merely human writer. It might end up sounding like you or me equipped with long tentacles and a live-fast-die-young mentality. Dear octopus, tell us your story--we are all ears ...