Animal or human?

There is this thing about coincidences, they are strange, and there are even very strange coincidences. What induces these coincidences is beyond my comprehension. Yet the one on which I am terribly concerned about now could not be accidental (or I hope so)-The accident of finding ourselves inhabiting an animal body.

For we are animals are we not? Some think so. They are called the animalists. They think that we are thinking animals and our animal part and our thinking part function together as one and there is no separation.

Some would not agree. They would call themselves God’s, finding them enmeshed in a thing which is of animal origin. The problem is, to provide the space for such an argument all parties have to bisect themselves into two. A thinking entity and an animal entity.

It was all started by Aristotle.

He germinated (like many other branches of thought) the vague beginnings of Animalism. I firmly believe that his express purpose was to irk me.

Like most of my ilk I too am fond of sitting in a chair. Our grand sires in this land used to sit on low wooden stools in the deep distant past. But that has no relevance to the point under consideration. Whether you sit on a stool or a chair you are supposed to be identical with a human animal sitting in them.

In truth I was otherwise engaged while Animalism was being developed in the later half of the last century and was blissfully unaware of it. It surprises me that it suddenly shed its lethargy just when I am not watching and more than a century after Darwin propounded his theory of evolution. If we have to be animals the theory of Darwin is the best bet for it. (There are some who say that his physiognomy induced him to write it)

Anyway as there are animals who can think (some believe that I am one such, but they are in gross error I must say, for I am not one of the thinking animals. I would qualify as a feeling one if you want. ) the human animal is one such.

What goes into proving this? Well the animalists have a minimalist approach to the problem. They argue that (1) there is an animal located where you are (2) which is thinking your thoughts and that (3) you can never know if you are different from this animal when the both are sharing their thoughts.

The opponents have to deny one of the above arguments to prove animalism false and they would be hard put to do that.
Well some have tried to circumvent this by a curious argument. When a person dies a corpse results. Death can not bring any new material thing into being. So it must have existed even before. Now animalism believes that we cease to exist when we die. If so our body can not be an animal, if it is it has to cease to exist when it dies.

So what is to be believed? Should we subscribe to the view that we are primarily animals that can think or that we are superman? Hell what does it matter? We are biological entities are we not? There has never been a single instance to believe otherwise. What matters if the biological entity sitting in the chair and psychological entity which sees itself as inhabiting this biological entity is the same or not the same?

My wonder is that why should the animalist maintain that an animal cease to exist when it dies? Is it not a lame argument? What makes it certain that we do not cease to exist after death? We may lose ‘life’ at death but that too is little tricky argument to sustain for ‘life’ can be defined severally.

Animalism is good pass time anyway.