Sohaila Javed.pdf

Sohaila Javed
humanness of human beings” (Madison, 1988, p. 154) as a response to the
metaphysical questions, “What is „man‟?” and “What is man‟s place in
nature?” And then, we see ourselves embedded in the numinous dynamics
(Swimme, 1999) of a compassionate ethology, the ethics of living in
Education 1 and a willful desire that every human be
pure
transparent
humanness.
Of hum/animal relations
Leading preponderant lives for many incredible centuries makes us speak
of „humans and animals‟ as distinctive beings in the pedigree of creation
(Kohak, 1999). Obligated by self-glorification, and the element of nonhumanness
that we associate with animals, we assumed that animals are
random objects, lower in demeanour, felled as they are on four legs. So
alien in comportment, these poor, bare creatures seem God‟s cynical tryst
or diabolical miscue on the world stage. Casting them away as aliens, we
had our own world and life as animate beings, processed by our social
order and possession of human potentialities that we could never associate
ourselves with animals, as partners of one life-world. Disconnection from
the animal kingdom has diminished us tremendously. We are less, not
more, by this missing connection. Whatever we speak ill of, diminishes
us, since all forms of living beings without exclusion are connected to us,
and are integral to our being. The egotistical sublime (John Keats, 1818)
in us grows and gives us an attitude of anti-biocentrism--an attitude based
on disrespect of all life, and the pledge to destroy life rather than care for
it, far from celebrating it.
This is the underpinning thought of human consciousness, arising as it did
from taking a literal understanding of the conception of a hierarchical
ordering of „higher‟ and „lower‟ beings, and consequently its meaning and
value to humans, being the centrist ethos of God‟s creation. Their
pertinacious coming from above in the sequence of God-angels-humans,
while all other life rises from below, in the sequence of matter-plantsanimals
insists on the idea of total separation. It still impinges upon our
consciousness and modes of existence, and defines human-animal and
human-human relations in a way that makes the concept of humans as the
crown of creation, endowed with an immortal soul, active intellect at the
time of birth as problematic.
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