Aristotle and Zoa Aisthetika

The first characteristic of an animal is sensation; for even those which do not move or change their place, but have sensation, we call living creatures.

ARISTOTLE, De anima

The judgment is in perception.

ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics

Since Aristotle. If animal studies has an opening gambit, this phrase may be it. It was Aristotle, after all, who established the logos/alogos — the with- or without-logos (speech or reason) — distinction that so decisively cleaved humans from other animals. Even those who know that the logos/alogos distinction predates Aristotle acknowledge that he did something more emphatic: "With Aristotle," as classicist John Heath puts it, "the link between logos and humans, and the rejection of logos from the non-human, becomes explicit." Usually the "since Aristotle" gambit is accompanied by a gesture to the famous passage in the first book of the Politics where Aristotle declares humans to be the animals that have logos (zoon logon echon).

That passage may be worth another look, though, especially in conjunction with Aristotle's writings on other animals, on the soul, and on rhetoric, the artful use of language. Such a survey, as this chapter will show with more detail, helps to draw out a perceptive core of existence shared by all animals. This perceptive core is too often skipped over by scholars of Aristotle's rhetoric and politics, trained as they are to follow the path of logos.

But leaving behind the alogos — the without-logos — as a category, or even presuming that Aristotle did so, comes at a cost. That cost is a more comprehensive, fully fleshed-out theory of rhetoric. The trick is to approach alogos as something other than an absence of logos, to identify in positive terms what takes the place of logos. In other words, the privative work of the alpha (α, a) in alogos needn't make it a deficiency or, as Jacques Derrida formulates it, a withholding. Alogos, after all, names a part of the soul for Aristotle, a part that operates without reference to rationality; it is nonrational (as opposed to irrational). Alogos may therefore usefully be approached as a capacity or set of capacities. Resources for approaching the term as a capacity or set of capacities rather than a deficiency may be found in texts composed by Aristotle himself and in the capacities exhibited by the nonhuman animals that appear there.

Richard Sorabji, a philosopher long preoccupied with Aristotle's writings on nonhuman animals, models such an approach when he offers this observation: "If animals are to be denied reason (logos), and with it belief (doxa), then their perceptual content must be compensatingly expanded, to enable them to find their way around in the world." This perceptual expansion occurs on more than the content level where Sorabji leaves it. In the context of rhetorical theory, nonhuman animals expand into the role of proxy feelers and are often carriers of sensation. In such a view, the implications of which I develop in this chapter, an insistence on nonhuman animals' being aloga is as much an attribution as it is a denial or rejection, and this attribution of expansive, and oftentimes intense feeling to nonhuman animals helps account for their constitutive role in the teaching and shaping of rhetorical theory, as chapter 3 on fables will help show. Such constitutive force is not, or not always, as one might surmise, a simple constitutive outside — that which helps identify logos- having by precisely and only not having logos. Instead, this constitutive role works through instruction, illustration, and a persistent presumption of cross-species likeness.

Nonhuman animals therefore do the work of sensation, folding back on the logos they have been denied, lending it energetic life through sounds, shapes, textures, and movements. This does not mean they are only or even mere rhetorical objects or figures, but instead means that they infiltrate rhetorical life worlds through encounters imaginative and real. In short, in premodern rhetorical theory, and especially in Aristotle's key and formative texts, nonhuman animals exert a pull. And that pull is toward feeling.

As I will show, nonhuman animals frequently show up in passages where sensation and feeling matter most; Aristotle thereby exploits their ambiguous relation to categories of judgment and thought, but he consistently uses nonhuman animals to display feelings. Sensing, breathing, moving animals can at times embody pure spirit (thumos). They show feelings ranging from pleasure and pain to anger and friendliness. They can be especially confounding for critics when they show up in discussions of cultural economies of honor and shame so crucial for judgment, but less confounding if approached through the category of aisthesis, the ancient term for sense perception. For Aristotle, nonhuman animals also act as sensible objects in that they are observable, but they are also simultaneously sensing — on this Aristotle is completely unambiguous. This means that along with sensation, which is decidedly alogos, nonhuman animals often bring life, energy (energeia), to logoi, to speeches, to writings, or to words themselves. Such is the role they play in treatments of rhetorical style. Sensing, feeling animals help to fill out the parts of rhetoric that are alogos, but this does not mean that nonhuman animals remain far removed from the domain of logos. As this chapter's last section and the next chapter will show, nonhuman animals as lively, energetic, sensible beings inhabit discussions of rhetorical style, filling logos with life.

Nonhuman animals have capacities to be uniquely instructive for political life and for rhetorical theory. Aristotle does not underestimate those capacities, nor should we. To show how this constitutive force plays out, I will begin by reexamining the passage in the Politics that inspires all those "since Aristotles," putting it next to passages that draw out a more dynamic and lively version of alogos. I will then follow aloga zoa into the Rhetoric, showing how a zoocentric approach to rhetoric and to rhetorical theory stresses with specificity the components of rhetoric that are themselves alogos, outside the bounds of both verbal language and rationality, but nevertheless crucial for a comprehensive account of the art.

Aristotle's Politics of Aisthesis

Here, then, is the...