Photo by Eija-Liisa Ahtila from the eight part series
of images entitled Dog Bites (1992-97)
Like Lou Carrington, I’ve always believed there must be something else to marvel at in humanity besides a clever mind and a nice, clean face and that we might term this something else animality.
And like Lou, I’ve always hoped that were we to conduct what Nietzsche terms a reverse experiment and resurrect the wild beast within us, then we might produce a type of man who would be “as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath”.
But now I’m not so sure about the desirability of this: for clearly there are dangers involved in the process of man’s becoming-animal and no one really wants to see werewolves prowling the streets.
Nor, for that matter, do I think it an attractive prospect to live like a dog, as Diogenes liked to live and as was central to the ancient philosophical practice of Cynicism. I don’t want to shit in the street or copulate in full view of others; don’t want to drink rainwater, growl at strangers, or eat raw meat. Like incest, these provocative acts might be perfectly natural and constitute secret pleasures, but they should only be indulged in with extreme caution.
In other words, unlike the ancient Cynics - and unlike some of the more militant of the animal rights activists and environmentalists campaigning in our own time - I don’t wish to tie the principle of the true life exclusively to the domain of Nature and thus reject all social convention and civilized restraint.
Our humanity may well be something that needs to be reformulated and eventually overcome, but it remains nevertheless a magnificent accomplishment; one that was achieved only after a huge amount of suffering over an immense period of time.
Thus, to adopt a model of behaviour based upon that of our own animality (or, rather, what we imagine the latter to be) simply so we might lick our own balls in public and thereby scandalise those who pride themselves on all that distinguishes them as human beings, seems to me profoundly mistaken.
Notes
Lou Carrington is a character in D. H. Lawrence’s short novel St. Mawr. See St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The line quoted is on p. 61.
For an interesting interpretation of the bios kunikos and why the Cynics prided themselves on living such see Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 242-43.
