Thursday 21st November 2024: 4.00-5.15pm (GMT): An in-person lecture organised jointly by the UCC Eco-Humanities Research Group and the Department of Classics
M.D. Usher (University of Vermont)
Umwelt and the Etymology of ēthos: How Animals Make Us Human
Venue: ORB 203 (O’Rahilly Building Room 2.03), University College Cork main campus. There is no need to register for this lecture – but if you are travelling to Cork from any distance, please contact Crystal Addey (crystal.addey@ucc.ie) so that we can keep you updated with any schedule changes.
At Theognis lines 213-218 the poet recommends adopting the cagey maneuvers of the octopus, who “adapts her colours to match the rock she clings to,” as a model for negotiating human social relations. The poem consists of a mere few lines but involves several revealing double-entendres. Chief among them is the word ēthos, which Theognis uses to mean “cast of mind,” but originally meant the habitual “haunt” or “den” of an animal, only later to be used to describe human behaviour.
In this lecture, I will discuss the ways in which, evolutionarily and historically, human ethics relate to non-human animal behaviour. Taking the Theognis poem as a point of departure, I trace the development of the concept of human ethics from the earliest uses of the Greek word ēthos, linking these findings to biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, which he described as a “bubble” in which both space and time are wholly relative, experienced and navigated uniquely by organisms in Nature depending on their morphology and sensory receptors. Human ethics, I propose, extrapolating from Uexküll’s idea, differ from animal ethics by the degree of recursive intelligence (logos, or “reason”) humans possess relative to other species, a notion, as it happens, that is adumbrated in Porphyry’s treatise on the humane treatment of animals, De Abstinentia. The idea of human ethics deriving from the experience and observation of animal behavior (and yet being distinct from it), I suggest further, finds its fullest expression in antiquity in the Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis, which I translate and characterize (with a nod to the nomenclature of zoologists) as “proprioception.” Ethics, I conclude, borrowing a phrase from Temple Grandin, is one of the many ways that animals make us human.
M. D. Usher is the Lyman-Roberts Professor of Classical Languages and Literature and a member of the Department of Geography and Geosciences at the University of Vermont, USA. With his wife, he also built, owns, and operates Works & Days Farm. His books include Plato’s Pigs and Other Ruminations: Ancient Guides to Living with Nature (Cambridge 2020), How to Be a Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land (Princeton 2021), How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism (Princeton 2022) and How to Care about Animals: An Ancient Guide to Creatures Great and Small (Princeton 2023). A book in press with Princeton, to be published simultaneously in French with Presses universitaires de France, Following Nature’s Lead: Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World, is forthcoming in May 2025.