When Animals Speak. Eva Meijer
birds taught their children not to be afraid of Howard, so perhaps this can be seen as the beginning of a new interspecies culture. Language played an important role in this process, and in the next section I further explore the relation between language and building a world with others in interspecies relations.
Learning to Read the Darkness: On the Relation between Language and World
Teaching a dog to retrieve may seem like a simple process, guided by human superiority and dog treats. Dog trainer and philosopher Vicki Hearne ([1986] 2007) shows that there is more to it than that. Hearne describes how she taught pointer Salty to fetch a dumbbell, which she conceptualizes as teaching her the language game “to fetch.” Teaching a dog the meaning of a word clarifies the interaction between dog and human, both on the side of the dog and on the side of the human, and lays the foundation for further interaction. The precise meaning of retrieval is not given beforehand, but comes into being when both individuals interact, and the outcome will differ between individuals depending on their characters and personalities. The learning process asks something of both sides: the dog has to be willing to learn, but so does the human. In order to teach a dog something, one needs to be open to that particular dog, and this means that there is also a chance of being changed by this individual. There is not one formula that works for all dogs, and Hearne argues that dog trainers, in contrast to behaviorists, recognize and respond to the fact that dogs are complex and layered beings.
Hearne uses Wittgenstein’s concept of language games to demonstrate how dogs and humans, who are phenomenologically very different—a dog’s perception of the world is mostly olfactory, whereas humans have a primarily ocular experience of the world—can come to an understanding. Retrieving is a language game that describes a dog-human activity: the human tells the dog to fetch an object, and the dog brings it. The exact meaning of the word “fetch” is also formed by Salty. When Salty learns what it means to retrieve something, this enables her to express herself more fully. For example, it gives her the opportunity to make jokes. Salty jokes by fetching the garbage bin or a car tire instead of the dumbbell, or she does fetch the dumbbell, but takes it to someone else. When she does this, her body movements and facial expression are playful and joyful. Because Salty has more options to express herself and to understand Hearne, and vice versa, their relationship deepens, and their understanding, as well as their common world, grows.3 Hearne expresses this as follows: “When we learn a language game, we learn to read the darkness” ([1986] 2007, 72).
Teaching a dog to retrieve, sit, or stay creates common language games, which lead to a larger common world in which both the dog and the human have more options to express themselves to the other. In order for this interaction to work, dog and human need to follow and respect certain rules; the capacity for rule following is also increased in establishing a greater understanding. In other words: a dog can only learn a new language game in a world in which the concepts “right” and “wrong” make sense, and through learning new language games, this moral understanding also grows. Hearne sees a clear hierarchy between the species in this process: humans set the moral framework in which dogs take part and obey. This does not do justice to dog agency. Bekoff and Pierce (2009) draw on empirical research, especially on dog play and theory of mind in dogs to argue that dogs do act morally, and they emphasize that dog morality is not the same as human morality, but tailored to interaction in dog, and interspecies, communities. Dogs can think about, respond to, and anticipate the mental states of others (Hare and Woods 2013; see also chapter 2), and Hearne is right in arguing that creating dog-human language games serves as a starting point for interspecies moral understanding. Differences between the species are not an obstacle to understanding, but rather enable a different kind of being together, which allows for animals of both species to express themselves more fully and which can also be—for the human at least—a source of beauty.
In thinking about the relation between establishing common language games and a common world, it is important to recognize that we are always already with others. For companion dogs, these others are usually dogs and humans, and sometimes other companion animals. For some humans, this means mostly humans, while others also live with other animals. As we have seen, according to Heidegger, “Being-attuned” to others (1927, 172) is a fundamental characteristic of our structure of being in the world. We are not solitary beings who sometimes meet or engage with others; we are always already with them and Mitsein is constitutive for our way of being in the world. This “being with others” is made explicit in discourse, of which hearing and keeping silent—relevant in the interspecies context—are an important part. Discourse—which is expressed in language and is language—is equiprimordial with Mitsein, and constitutive for Dasein’s existence. In other words: through language we not only express and understand ourselves as beings in the world, we also express and create our relations with others. As we saw in the first chapter, Heidegger regarded other animals as poor-in-world (chapter 1): as beings without language and consequently without the opportunity to experience the world as such. This results not only in the assumption that non-human animals cannot experience the world as world, it also restricts Mitsein to humans (ibid.). However, like humans, other animals are “thrown into” a world that consists of meaning-giving structures from the moment they are born. These structures are formed by language, and other animals influence them by language, in interaction with others (Iveson 2010, 2012).
Being with others does not only involve being with members of the same species. Humans are already constantly with other animals and vice versa. We share a world with them, and some of us share our lives with them: this is part of what constitutes our sense of world and our perception of ourselves. Relationships and language games will, of course, vary between groups and individuals. Some non-human animals are very similar to humans in the way in which they express and understand the world, whereas others are very different. The examples of Howard and the birds and Hearne and her dogs show how individuals of different species can add new layers of meaning to their repertoires through interaction, and can together create new forms of language and understanding. The form of this language and the manner of creating meaning are not predetermined; they follow from the situated interaction and are shaped by the agency of the various animals involved.
Speaking Bodies
In creating common interspecies language games and common understanding we need to take the different ways in which animals express themselves into account. Hearne uses words, gestures, and body movements to teach Salty to retrieve; Salty runs and moves, and uses gestures, sounds, and eye contact to reply. Howard and the birds communicate with song, human words, gestures, movements, and other expressions. The body also plays a major role in human language games (Wittgenstein 1978), but so-called “body language” is often thought of as a weaker or less precise form of communication. Locating language in the mind refers back to Descartes’s mind-body dualism, and to an idealized view of language. As we saw in chapters 1 and 2, the image of language as located in the mind can be challenged in different ways, and various philosophers (Derrida 2008; Heidegger 1927; Wittgenstein 1958, 1978) argued for a more situated idea of language, interconnected with relations and social practices. Wittgenstein (1958) also emphasizes that in language games, gestures, movements, ways of using one’s voice, and other expressions can be as important, or more important, than words.
In the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) we can find some helpful motives for further exploring the embodied aspects of language in an interspecies context. In developing his view of language, Merleau-Ponty focuses strongly on the role of the body, on the basis of which he also sees an ontological connection to other animals. According to Merleau-Ponty (1962), we are not thinking, but speaking subjects. Expression completes thought; speech does not translate thought into words, but rather accomplishes it. A thought is not a representation: speech and thought are interconnected. Thoughts are not internal, and do not exist separately from the words we use and the world in which they are used. Bodies play an important role in language because they form the shape of speech, and thus meaning. Expression brings meaning into existence, and words are so many ways of “singing of the world” (1962, 217). By locating meaning in the words themselves, Merleau-Ponty aims to refute both empiricism—according to which speech is a mechanistic response—and intellectualism