Thinking Animals Quotes

“Animals embody every quality found in the human personality. In the whole range of human temperament and character there is nothing unique, nothing not found as some aspect of another species. It is the only other place they are found. What men do that may be unique or is at least unusual is to know this. Man is capable, to a limited degree and with great effort, of stepping out of the stream of events for a moment, even of his skin, and looking at the whole fauna and flora as a composite of his own possibilities.

By "possibilities" is not meant another bouquet to humanistic autonomy or another claim that all things are possible and that man can be whatever he chooses. "Possibilities" is a reference to the total context of living phenomena within which the human species has its own forms and limitations. This is why recognition of limitations is the essential step in achieving the freedom implicit in intelligence; it increasingly identifies one's kind of being to one's self. It goes beyond this defining and narrowing of our species sense to a widening within that frame. The same faunal ream within which humanity is but one point among many provides a patterned model for discovering and allocating the positions and quality spaces within society.”
― Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence

“Sliding through professions and geography, minimizing race and class, the yearning for androgyny and psychological environmentalism are all unsatisfying because they neglect or deny the category-making nature of cognition itself. The fashionable ideal that everyone should be free of imposed definition in order to be whatever he wants, to choose and change identity in spite of the accidents of birth, and to define self according to ideology and personal taste is very appealing, though in some grievously frustrating way appallingly inadequate and wrong.

The adolescent, caught between the modern world's chronic shortage of order and the chic psychology of identity by assertion, is on queasy ground. The ideal conflicts with the thrust of his mental development, which is to distinguish, define, and classify. The central task of his first twelve years is to develop his powers of discrimination, linking them to speech, and to master the art of conceptualizing and abstracting by searching out the commonalities and differences among plants and animals—traits given, not chosen.”
― Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence