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