Hum Stud (2017) 40:217–232

DOI 10.1007/s10746-017-9421-0

THEORETICAL/PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER

Humanizing the Animal, Animalizing the Human:

Husserl on Pets

Christian Ferencz-Flatz1,2

Published online: 8 March 2017

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017

Abstract In several of his research manuscripts from the 1930s, Edmund Husserl
considers the concrete life-world to be a world essentially determined by both
humans and animals, or a ‘‘humanized’’ and ‘‘animalized’’ world. Husserl bases this
claim on two observations. First, in his view, the surrounding objects of the human
world are as such marked by cultural practices. Second, he considers that there is a
corresponding animal world that similarly bears the existential traces of the animal.
The following paper attempts to lay bare the various forms of interplay between
these two processes, as they come to the fore in several analyses, especially in
Husserl’s reflections on pets. Although Husserl’s treatment of this issue remains
rather unilateral and elliptic, the paper attempts to draw from his reflections several
consequences that might also be relevant for current debates in animal ethics.

Keywords Husserl
Uexküll
Animal-worlds
Humanization
Animalization

Pets

Of course, Husserl did not write extensively about pets. The following is merely an
attempt to sketch out a certain strain of problems in his thinking, which on several
occasions tentatively touches upon the issue of domestic animals in general and
animal companions in particular. To be more precise, I will focus on the interplay
between two categories that Husserl uses in this context, namely humanization and
animalization; categories that also hold some relevant consequences for the
contemporary ethical and philosophical debates concerning animal companions. I
will start out with a general discussion of humanization and animalization. Next, I

& Christian Ferencz-Flatz

christian.ferencz@phenomenology.ro
1
Institute for Research in the Humanities, Bucharest, Romania
2
Husserl Archives, Cologne, Germany

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will collect some of Husserl’s scattered remarks on pets and domestic animals and
identify therein some correspondences with the theories of Jacob von Uexküll.
Finally, I will conclude with a brief attempt to situate all of this in a broader
historical perspective.

Humanization

On several occasions in his later writings, Husserl explicitly designates the concrete
life-world as ‘‘a humanized […] world, in which […] all worldly objects have a
human meaning’’.1 For sure, when reading such a claim, one is most likely led to think
of a conception that has become, at least since the end of the nineteenth century,
something of a philosophical common place, namely the idea that the environment in
which contemporary humans live and dwell is not properly speaking ‘‘nature,’’ but
rather an artificial, fabricated milieu, a man-made creation that has in time come to
replace nature proper and even to shield humans from it. Such reflections can be
frequently encountered precisely around the 1920s and 1930s, when Husserl himself
wrote his reflections, either in the writings of conservative cultural critics warning
about the ethical and existential consequences of abandoning our traditional closeness
to nature for the sake of mere convention and artifice, or similarly in the manifestos of
radical artists and utopians celebrating this as a sign of our final emancipation from
nature. As an interesting variation on such positions, one can also think of Peter
Sloterdijk’s (2001) more recent essay The Human Glasshouse, which attempts to
depict human evolution in its entirety as a process conditioned by the creation of tools
and the arrangement of living spaces, in brief: by an artificial environment in which
alone beings unfit for natural existence like humans could thrive. Emmanuel Levinas’
notion of the ‘‘home,’’ which in his view has the double function of shielding off the
human being from the elemental forces of nature and of allowing it to ‘‘constitute’’ a
world, offers a similar variation from within the phenomenological camp (1991:
152f.). In any case, one would not be inclined to add Husserl’s name to this list as well,
and while it is indeed true that Husserl’s own argument concerning humanization does
not actually follow along the lines of such reflections, they are nevertheless not
entirely unrelated to them either.
To illustrate this, it must be made clear what Husserl actually means by
humanization in the first place. The notion as such is for sure a later formulation of a
distinction Husserl had already established by the time of his Ideas II between the
world considered as a sheer object in the perspective of natural science and the
concrete life-world as it is marked through and through by subjective and
intersubjective sense investments, that is by a human meaning that from the onset
determines how we encounter it at first glance. What does this imply exactly? First
of all, this implies that most of our surrounding objects, which appear to us as
weapons, houses, vehicles and so on, are man-made and thus apprehended from the
onset as purposeful products of purposeful subjective activities; in other words: our

1
Husserl (1973: 317): ‘‘Die humanisierte […] Welt, in der […] alles Weltliche humanen Sinn hat’’.
Unless explicitly noted otherwise, all translations from German presented below are my own.

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environment is predominantly made up of artefacts and not simply objects of nature.

But Husserl’s concept of the humanized world reaches further than that as it also
implies, secondly, that the objects in our life-world more generally bear
sedimentations of subject-related predicates or ‘‘predicates of meaningfulness,’’ as
he also terms them, while this latter aspect applies not only to man-made artefacts,
as was the case with the previous determination, but also to so-called natural
objects, which are in their turn grasped as edible, useful, valuable, pretty or rare
when encountered in various human activities. Moreover, thirdly, Husserl argues
that humanization affects human beings as well in addition to the non-human
surrounding world, consisting of both artefacts and natural objects. Thus, he even
coins the baffling notion of ‘‘self-humanization’’ (Selbsthumanisierung) (1973: 391
et al.), to which I will return in short. In brief, Husserl sees all worldly objects—
humans and unmitigated nature included—and not only artefacts and man-made
fabrications impregnated with human meaning and thus humanized.
In the following I will sketch an application of this concept to an analysis of the
human-animal relationship as explicitly suggested in some of Husserl’s later research
manuscripts. However, since such a reading of the term would obviously go against at
least two significant points in Husserl’s conception, I will first like to address these
issues so as to show why they can be disregarded in this context. First of all, one could
point here to the fact that Husserl himself most often interprets humanization in a
teleologically biased perspective, such that, when speaking of the ‘‘incessant
process’’ (1973: 391f.) of self-humanization and humanization of the world he tends
to see this as an (albeit infinite) historical progress leading to the full accomplishment
of authentic humanity and its universal worldly correlate (see for instance 2013: 478).
Although this is indeed a predominant perspective especially among the reflections
one finds in volume XLII of Husserliana, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, it is
nevertheless by no means determinant throughout Husserl’s considerations on
humanization, which on occasion allow for a less prescriptive reading. Thus, it is not
only unnecessary to understand humanization in this teleological vein, since we can
very well and legitimately use it simply to designate the process by which life-worldly
phenomena acquire subject-related characters as does occasionally Husserl himself,
but it would even be more fruitful not to interpret it this way, since we could thus
broaden the scope of this concept to include processes wherein traces of human
investment are inversed, effaced, overwritten, etc. Such processes are, as will be
shown below, particularly relevant for our current subject. Incidentally, the notion of
self-humanization would also benefit from a more flexible reading of the concept
along these lines. For, if this concept is indeed often used by Husserl to designate the
process by which human individuals and societies teleologically fulfil their own true
rational being, the concept can nevertheless also be interpreted in a more applied
phenomenological fashion when fastened down to two complementary issues, which
are implicit in Husserl’s treatment of the issue: (1) the various acts of self-
determination like self-discipline, self-cultivation, self-government and self-control,
which are extensively described by Husserl in the first of his Kaizo-essays (see 1989:
20–29), to which one might feel tempted to add some more contemporary versions
like: self-improvement, self-enhancement or self-care; and (2) the various ‘‘meaning
predicates’’ (like ‘‘police officer,’’ ‘‘professor,’’ ‘‘beautiful,’’ ‘‘poor’’ and the like)

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which qualify individual subjects, just like worldly objects, in view of their situation
within the social world (see 2008: 517)—Husserl himself explicitly addresses such
aspects, which he calls ‘‘meaning predicates,’’ on several occasions in his reflections
on intersubjectivity, while Heidegger in some of his early lectures goes so far as to
claim that one primarily grasps even oneself in such characters of meaningfulness
(Bedeutsamkeit). Thus, self-humanization in this narrow sense would itself refer
simply to the manner in which human beings acquire—in virtue of their own
intentional activity or that of others—a human meaning in the life-world; one that
impregnates them through and through.
A second possible objection could originate from the fact that Husserl himself
elaborates his reflections on humanization from the onset in the systematic
perspective of a transcendental account of world-constitution by conceiving these
subject-related predicates of meaningfulness or ‘‘human predicates’’ in contrast to the
grounding constitutive stratum of the ‘‘natural object,’’ understood as a sheer spatial
and material thing. This is a perspective one can already find at work in Husserl’s
Ideas II or in his lecture series Natur und Geist (see 2002: 127) , and it still determines
his account of humanization in the later research manuscripts from the 1930s. Thus,
for instance, in a manuscript from 1931, Husserl describes two stages of world-
constitution: the experiential constitution of the nature-world (Welt-Natur), under-
stood as a world of sheer things, on the one hand, and on the other the constitution of
the ‘‘humanized practical world’’ (1973: 317), while Husserl considers that we can at
any time reach the former layer of sheer nature by simply abstracting from the latter
predicates of human meaningfulness. Now, this contrast between sheer and
humanized nature regarded as mere abstract constitutive layers of course doesn’t
overlap immediately with the concrete human-animal relationship implied in
phenomena like say domestication and its ethical implications. Nevertheless, the
concept can offer a substantial tool for understanding this relationship once it is
properly mundanized, and one can indeed find several instances in which Husserl
himself seems to use the term in a more straightforward mundane context (some of the
passages I will quote further on will be a clear proof of this). Moreover, it is important
to note that the very two aspects that Husserl usually points out in his treatment of
humanized predicates—namely: meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit) and functional
purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit)—are themselves charged with mundane implica-
tions when regarded in this perspective. Thus, it is certain, for instance, that a world
humanized through and through as Husserl conceives it—in the sense that it is
comprehensible and familiar (that is: meaningful) through and through and adjusted
to man’s needs and requirements (that is: invested with human purposiveness)
through and through—would tend both to thrust aside all that is humanly meaningless
and unresponsive to human intentions and to inevitably delude us with regard to its
subject-relativity; thus, it would become what is called ‘‘second nature’’. While this is
of course a point that one often encounters in the theoretical discussions surrounding
the artificiality of the human environment in the 1920s and 1930s—say in Georg
Lukàcs, who emphatically coined the notion of ‘‘second nature’’ in the early 1920s,2

2
As is well known, the concept of ‘‘second nature’’ was first introduced by Lukàcs in his Theory of the
Novel (1920) to designate the ‘‘world of convention,’’ that is: a world of estranged human creation and

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or in Heidegger, who regards the ‘‘readiness-at-hand’’ of artefactual ‘‘equipment’’ as a

primary and irreducible character of being (1996: 62–67)—the consideration of such
aspects clearly shows that the concept of humanization can well be used beyond its
limited scope in Husserl’s transcendental theory of world constitution, and it proves
particularly relevant, as I want to show in what follows, when applied to the human-
animal relationship in a mundane sense.

Animalization

Husserl’s notes on humanization touch upon the issue of pets more or less directly in
two significant aspects, and I would like to start with the one that is less obvious. In
several of the passages that address the concept of humanization, Husserl not only
speaks of the humanized world, but he more specifically addresses a ‘‘humanized and
animalized world,’’ thereby introducing the peculiar parallel notion of animalization.
This parallelism is most notably hinted at in paragraph 66 of the Crisis-work:
‘‘Among the lifeless things, humanized things are distinguished, things that have
signification (e.g. cultural meaning) through human beings. Further, as a variation on
this, there are things which refer meaningfully in a similar way to animal existence’’
(1976 [1970]: 230/227). Now there is indeed a certain hesitation or ambiguity in
Husserl’s attempts to tackle the notion of animalization. On the one hand, he tends to
regard it as a process that fully parallels humanization; to be more precise: a process
by which the animal-subject constitutes for itself a world of its own marks and traces.
On the other hand, however, it is conceived merely as a complement to humanization,
that is: a process by which the human world is enriched not only with signs pointing
to the activity of other humans, but also with ones pointing to animals. See, for
instance, a reflection from the early 1930s, in which Husserl actually begins
discussing the ‘‘animal world’’ in the sense of ‘‘the world as it is given to animals,’’
but finally arrives at the following discussion of animalization: ‘‘The world is a
humanized and animalized world […]. It is a world of culture. The objects of this
world present themselves in the concrete experience of the life-world as weapons, as
houses, as purposeful objects of all kinds, as footprints in the grass […]. But it is the
same with animals. By seeing ‘animal traces’ we can ‘intuit’ that animals were
present and what sort of animals they were’’.3

Footnote 2 continued
artifice that has become rigid and almost meaningless to the human subject, just like nature proper, in
virtue of its habitual erosion (1988: 63f.). It was later adopted by Adorno, Benjamin and others to
designate the second degree immediacy of cultural determinations and conventions in general, which are
taken for granted and go unquestioned with regard to their artificial nature. As such, the term of course
has a certain similarity to Husserl’s notion of ‘‘secondary passivity’’ (see 1999 [1973]: 336/279), which
Husserl defines as a modification of an original subjective activity that has now become a mere passive,
habitual acquisition. However, while Husserl insists on the fact that secondary passivity essentially
indicates its activity of origin, the concept of ‘‘second nature’’ hints at precisely the effacement or at least
a certain impairment of this indication.
3
Husserl (2008: 510): ‘‘Die Welt ist humanisierte und animalisierte Welt […]. Sie ist Welt der Kultur.
Die Weltobjekte geben sich in der Lebenswelt selbst, in konkreter Erfahrung, als Waffen, als Häuser, als

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As is well known, the notion of ‘‘animal worlds’’ tentatively discussed by Husserl

in these reflections was a key concept in the research of Jacob von Uexküll, an
author with whose works Husserl was well familiarized.4 In Uexküll‘s view, the
life-worlds of animals are not in themselves directly accessible to human
experience, but they can nevertheless be construed on the basis of their
physiological constitution and their observable behavior. According to Uexküll,
we can thus draw certain conclusions both with regard to the sensory qualities that
are accessible to different species of animals and to their corresponding possibilities
of action and movement. Following these reflections, he establishes his well-known
distinction between the perceptual-marks (Merkmale) of the animal, that is: the
sensory traits which are generally observable for it, and its action-marks
(Wirkmale), that is: the marks that it impresses on its surrounding world by
following its specific possibilities of response. Together, these two aspects build up
what Uexküll calls the ‘‘animal world’’ or the ‘‘lived environment’’ of the animal,
and Uexküll insists upon the fact that since ‘‘every action-mark erases the
perceptual-mark prior to it’’ (1956: 27),5 action-marks create new perceptual-marks,
which in turn offer new stimulation for action and so on.
Of course, Uexküll’s descriptions of how animals actively mark their surrounding
world with recognizable traces can be easily put into relation with Husserl’s concept
of animalization. Interestingly, however, Uexküll goes a step further than this in his
analysis of the perceptual world of animals. In his view, the sensory qualities of
objects are themselves already endowed with a certain ‘‘tone of action,’’ which
Uexküll illustrates through the example of a crab displaying three different patterns
of behavior in relation to a water lily: the object receives a protective tone when the
animal is in danger, a home-tone when it serves as dwelling, or a food-tone when
the animal feels hungry. Thus, the perceptual-image grasped by the animal is from
the onset impregnated through and through with a certain quality of action.
Moreover, in Uexküll’s view, this observation also sheds light upon the manner in
which humans themselves apprehend their surrounding objects as specific objects of
use: ‘‘How is it possible that we actually see the act of sitting when regarding a
stool, or the act of drinking when regarding a cup, or the act of climbing when
seeing a stair […]?’’ This is due to the fact that ‘‘we have worked out, for all the
activities that we exercise upon our surrounding objects, an action-image (Wirkbild)
that we melt into their perceptual image (Merkbild) […] with such necessity […]
that they receive a new quality, which reveals their meaning for us and which we

Footnote 3 continued
Zweckobjekte jeder Art, als Fußspuren im Gras […]. Ebenso aber auch schon für die Tiere. An ‘Tier-
spuren’ und ihrem Typus ‘ersehen’ wir, dass Tiere und welche Art Tiere da waren’’.
4
In Husserl’s private library one can find two of Uexküll’s works: (a) ‘‘Der Organismus und die
Umwelt,’’ in: Das Lebensproblem im Lichte der modernen Forschung, Leipzig 1931: pp. 189–224
(signature in the Husserl Archives, Leuven: BQ 248). The work is heavily underlined, which proves that
Husserl studied the essay. On the cover of the book, Husserl has added as a possible intention for further
reading: ‘‘J. v. Uexküll Streifzüge durch die Umwelten der Thiere u. M. (J. Springer Verständliche
Wissenschaft Bd. 21) 1934’’. (b) Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, Springer, Berlin, 1921 (Signature in
the Husserl Archives, Leuven: BA 1751–1752). The author wishes to thank Thomas Vongehr at the
Husserl Archives in Leuven for pointing him to these references.
5
The booklet was first published in 1933.

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would like to designate […] as their tone of action’’ (1956: 67) . Put in Husserl’s
terms, humanization as the constitution of ‘‘a world in which all worldly objects
have a human meaning’’ could itself be seen as a particular form of animalization
among others and even in competition with others. I will return later to the
consequences that arise out of this perspective in Uexküll’s reflections on the
interrelations between the human world and that of pets, more specifically: dogs.

Mutual Attunement

Humanized Animals

I return now to the second, more obvious point in which Husserl’s theory of
humanization intersects the question of pets. Animals in general and pets in
particular are, in Husserl’s view, certainly not simply subjects of a process running
parallel to humanization—namely animalization, the constitution of animal worlds;
they are also objects of humanization themselves, insofar as they are in one way or
another part of the environment of humans. This obviously holds true in multiple
senses, since animals are today raised, bred, mutated, kept, sold and eaten in various
human institutions like zoos, industrial farms, slaughter houses, research labs, pet
shops or restaurants, while our everyday experience of them is marked by
representations of the toy industry, cartoons, cinema, video games, magazines or TV
shows, which essentially adapt them to our human world by conferring upon them
predicates of human meaning and interest.
Husserl himself explicitly addresses this issue in two of his later research
manuscripts. The first one refers to the distinction between animals of the home-
world (Tiere der Heimwelt) and animals of the alien-world (Tiere der Fremdwelt),
or exotic animals as we might also call them:
Animals of the home-world, that is: animals that are widespread in Europe,
etc. In our own home-area in a narrow or in a wider sense we do not
experience animals as alien creatures; rather, we apperceive them from the
onset according to familiar types: oxen, horses, swallows, etc. In contrast to
these animals of the home-world, we then find animals that are alien to us.6
In this context, Husserl explicitly notes that exotic animals are themselves regularly
apperceived on the experiential background of familiar home-animals, while the
underlying idea here is that animals are always, one way or another, experienced in
the perspective of a specific human world.
The second quote relates to the distinction between domestic and wild animals,
both categories being explicitly considered here as mere supervening human
predicates that can be abstracted away from our concrete experience of such
animals:
6
Husserl (1973: 622f.): ‘‘Haustiere, Tiere der Heimwelt, in Europa verbreitete Tiere etc. In unserer
engeren,und weiteren und weitesten Heimat erfahren wir Tiere nicht als fremde Lebewesen, sondern als
solche in bekannter Typik, Ochsen, Pferde, Schwalben etc. Gegenüber den heimatlichen Tieren dann
wieder Tiere, die uns Fremd sind’’.

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[I]f, in the case of animals, I abstract from the fact that they are domestic
animals and the property of humans, or in the case of other animals, from the
fact that they live freely, I remain with the pure experience of their being as an
animal, just like in the experience of humans, when I abstract from the fact
that they are clerks, officers, tourists and the like, and I thus finally obtain their
pure experience as humans, as they are before all predicates of meaning as
ultimate substrates of such predicates.7
Therefore, it is certain that pets are from the onset humanized in this very broad
sense that reflects upon all animals in general. What is more interesting here is that,
in several accounts in his late research manuscripts, Husserl speaks more
distinctively of pets as ‘‘humanized animals’’ (vermenschlichte Tiere) (1993: 304)
or even as ‘‘analogues of humans’’ (Analoga von Menschen) (1973: 185), whereas
in such contexts ‘‘humanization’’ seems to also acquire a different and more specific
meaning.

Pets as ‘‘Analogues of Humans’’

Now, it is true that the German term used by Husserl in these considerations,
Haustiere, actually designates ‘‘domesticated animals’’ in general, and not just pets,
which are nowadays often referred to as Heimtiere (home-animals). In contrast,
Husserl himself most often seems to somewhat reverse these two notions by
understanding Heimtiere in a wider sense as ‘‘animals of the home-world,’’ and
Haustiere in a narrower sense. Thus, when he says of Haustiere that: ‘‘insofar as
they have been raised and educated by humans, they have acquired certain traits of
humanity,’’8 this certainly does not refer to oxen and pigs, but rather to animals that
live in a closer companionship to humans, most poignantly pets. Such terminolog-
ical questions aside, however, Husserl himself is not very explicit as to what exact
traits of humanity are in fact acquired by pets as opposed to other animals to justify
their designation as ‘‘analogues of humans’’ in this specific and eminent sense. In
sifting through his writings, one can only find reference to two such aspects:
1. the fact that, due to their association with humans, pets alone share a certain,
albeit rudimentary consciousness of norms, of what is allowed and what is
forbidden (1973: 421), and
2. the fact that pets alone are capable of a certain, albeit rudimentary form of
prospective planning (Vorhaben) (1993: 304).
In the absence of a more detailed explanation, one could easily dismiss such
claims both by referring to the lack of proper ethological research to support
them—for how does Husserl know that other animals don’t display a similar

7
Husserl (2008: 517): ‘‘[A]bstrahiere ich bei Tieren davon, dass sie Haustiere und Eigentum von
Menschen sind, oder bei anderen davon, dass sie ‘frei’ lebende sind, so verbleibt in reiner Erfahrung ihr
Sein als Tier, ebenso wie ich in der Erfahrung von Menschen unter Abstraktion davon, dass sie Beamte,
Offiziere, Ausfügler und dergleichen sind, schließlich in reiner Erfahrung sie rein als Menschen gewinne,
so wie sie ‘vor’ allen Bedeutungsprädikaten und als deren letzte Substrate sind’’.
8
Husserl (1973: 626): ‘‘[des Haustieres,] das freilich menschlich erzogen wirklich Züge der
Menschlichkeit angenommen hat’’.

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behavior?9—and by ascribing those specific patterns of pet behavior solely to

the conditioned responses of dressage, that is: to human programming. This is
precisely the reason why I think one should, following Husserl’s footsteps a bit
more from afar, also add here at least three other aspects, which incidentally
also come up in contemporary more ‘‘humane’’ approaches to animal training,
that oppose dressage in the traditional sense of conditioned. These aspects are:
3. The fact that, due to their close companionship to humans, pets are most
intimately adjusted to the courses and rhythms of human activity. First, this
means that animal companions adapt to the daily schedule of humans, while
humans in turn include the needs and activities of the animal in their routines,
which can be seen most obviously with feeding, walking the dog, etc. Secondly
and more significantly, this implies that the bodily activities and behaviors of
animal companions are to a large extent responsively attuned to those of
humans, which ranges from the mere possibility of joint attention—of
simultaneously focusing on the same object or event—to actually doing
something ‘‘together,’’ like playing, running (dogs are indeed often used as
jogging mates), or even just resting in an explicit sense of companionship.
Thirdly, of course, all of this leads to the larger problem of common habit
formation, and this is presumably what ultimately also finds its expression in the
well-known cliché of pets, especially dogs, resembling their masters in
character, rhythm, or even physiognomic expression.
4. The fact that this primarily implicit, inter-corporeal form of mutual adjustment
is often completed by a certain degree of explicit communication. This is from
the onset enabled by both the animal’s grasp of specific human gestures and
interpellations, with their particular tone and accent, and by the human’s grasp
of certain expressive gestures of the animal, which are in their turn adapted to
the animal’s relation with humans. Significantly, recent empirical studies have
shown that the level of communication one can attain with dogs highly
resembles our level of communication with infants. This pertains both to the
general capacity for understanding communicative pointing gestures (Lakatos
et al. 2009), which dogs share with 3-year old children, and to the specific form
of language communication they allow, since talking to dogs and infants both
involve ‘‘communicating with a limited and inattentive addressee, controlling
the addressee’s attention and behavior by focusing on an object or activity, and
expressing friendliness and affection’’ (Mitchell 2001: 183). For sure, such
discoveries put Husserl’s constant parallelization of the human-animal
relationship with the intersubjective relation to infants in a meaningful light.
5. The grounding fact that pets share with humans a larger extent of their
significant life-world, thus co-constituting an intersubjective context of sorts for
their common activities. Significantly, Husserl himself hints at this latter point
with regard to dogs in several of his research manuscripts from the 1930s on
world-constitution. For, while Husserl generally only ascribes a marginal role to

9
Indeed, both aspects mentioned by Husserl have been recently addressed in relation to social animals,
while Husserl himself does on occasion mention Wolfgang Köhler’s research on communication among
apes, especially stressing their ‘‘polite’’ salutations; see Husserl (1973: 478).

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animals as co-constitutive subjects of world constitution in comparison to the

sphere of normal inter-human intersubjectivity, he nevertheless considers that
animals, as well as children, the insane or primitives do bring about
complementary horizons of experience that need to be taken into account for
a full understanding of the concrete world (see for instance 2008: 479f.). Thus,
he explicitly writes in the early 1930s: ‘‘Here, among the ‘marginal problems’
we must not forget the constitutive function of animals. As intentional
modifications of humans, involved in the first degree of normal world
constitution, they are themselves still engaged in the further constitution of
the world’’.10 Of course, the degree to which animals can be regarded as at least
partial co-subjects of our concrete world experience, with whom we can share a
common context, depends upon the specific forms of communication and
interaction engendered between humans and those animals, as Husserl shows in
another manuscript from around the same period: ‘‘they [Husserl is here
speaking of the human inhabitants of an alien world, my observation: CFF] can
serve as co-subjects of our world experience only to a little extent, as far as our
successful and reliable communication with them reaches, as this happens
similarly, although to an even lesser extent, in the case of higher animals (for
instance dogs)’’.11 However, insofar as such forms of communication are
generally possible, animals can even have a substantial contribution as co-
subjects of world-constitutions by broadening our normal world experience, as
in the case of hunting dogs who expand the experiential world of the hunter by
following the scent of the game (Husserl 1973: 167) (Husserl’s example),
specialized police-dogs, or guide-dogs who complement the wanting orientation
of the blind (Üexküll’s example).

Mutuality

Now, especially when considering the latter three points discussed above in more
detail, it becomes fairly obvious that they are in fact by no means just a matter of the
animal—for instance: the dog—being assimilated into the human world; rather it is
simultaneously, at least to some extent, also a matter of the human letting him or
herself be assimilated into the animal world. In order to fully grasp the meaning of
this observation, it is helpful to again briefly return to Uexküll’s reflections on the
relation between dogs and men.
For, in Uexküll’s view, the world of dogs is fundamentally different from that of
men, even though the two might indeed partially coincide. Thus, the title of one of
Uexküll’s articles from the mid-1930s explicitly states: Der Hund kennt nur
Hundedinge (the dog is only familiar with dog-things) (1935). This is due to the fact
10
Husserl (2006: 395): ‘‘Hierbei ist unter den ‘Randproblemen’ die konstitutive Bedeutung der Tiere
nicht zu vergessen. Als intentionale Modifikation der in der ersten Normalstufe weltkonstituierenden
Menschen fungieren sie für die weitere Weltkonstitution noch mit’’.
11
Husserl (2008: 172): ‘‘Dagegen nur in einem kleinen Umkreis, dem der schon gelungenen und
bewährten Verständigung mit ihnen, können sie uns als Mitsubjekte für dieWelterfahrung dienen—wie
Ähnliches, obschon in noch engerem Kreis, für höhere Tiere der Fall ist (z.B. Hunde)’’.

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Humanizing the Animal, Animalizing the Human: Husserl on… 227

that dogs develop a world of their own markings, which is intuitively inaccessible to
men and which Uexküll analyses in his article from 1932, Das Duftfeld der Hunde
(the odor field of dogs) (Uexküll and Sarris 1931) . In this context, Uexküll shows
that—most notably due to their use of urine marks—the lived spaces of dogs are
fundamentally structured by fragrances. This entire grounding dimension of odor
spaces runs completely parallel to the world of humans, who can only acknowledge
it through the exterior behavior of their pets. Moreover, even the objects that
humans and animals actually seem to share are invested quite differently in a
humanized or in an animalized world. Thus, Uexküll argues, a dog apprehends the
furnishing of an inhabited house quite differently than a human being: ‘‘We know
from […] experiments that a dog trained to sit on a stool when hearing the
instruction ‘stool’ will, when absent the stool, immediately look for some other
possible seating, that is: for a seating proper for a dog, which may not suit humans at
all [cabinets, tables, boxes etc.]. All these possible seats have, as bearers of
meaning, exactly the same seating-tone for dogs, […] as the dog will make use of
them indistinctively when hearing the word ‘stool’. Thus, we see that a house
viewed by a dog as its inhabitant will contain numerous things that are endowed
with a seating-tone. Similarly, it will contain numerous things that are endowed with
a dog-food-tone or dog-drink-tone. The stairs will certainly still have a sort of
climbing-tone, but most of the furniture will only have an obstacle-tone for the
dog—especially doors and closets, regardless if these contain books or laundry—
while all household effects, like spoons, forks, matches, etc., will be ignored as mere
debris’’ (1956: 107).
One may at this point question Uexküll’s remarks regarding doors and closets.
My own dog was, to give a personal example, extremely attentive each time we
approached one of two drawers: the one where we held his leash and the one where
we kept the treats. Even if the animalized and the humanized life-world do indeed
diverge initially and to some extent—and Husserl himself seems to basically agree
to this when stating in a very Uexküllian tone that ‘‘our world is different from that
of a bug, of a bee or of a dove, and even from that of our pets’’12—what is perhaps
most challenging to note here is the fact that the continuous animalization of the
human world, as described by Uexküll in relation to dogs, and the corresponding
humanization of the animal world, as pointed out by Husserl, do not remain strictly
distinct processes running in parallel as both Uexküll and Husserl seem to suggest at
times. Rather, they permanently and inevitably interfere with each other and affect
one another, even though they may indeed not enter a full blown synthesis as
between different human cultures in Husserl’s analyses. The humanization of pets is
thus from the onset more than just the mere labeling of an animal with human
predicates; it is also a process of the animal ‘‘intersubjectively’’ accommodating to
the commerce with humans. In a similar way humans are animalized in their relation
to pets not just insofar as they are generally invested with a meaning-tone in the
animal world—Uexküll mentions the ‘‘magical’’ role that the owner acquires in the
life-world of the dog (1956: 89)—but also in the sense that they attune themselves

12
Husserl (1973: 626): ‘‘Unsere Umwelt […] ist nicht die des Käfers, der Biene, der Taube, auch des
Haustiers’’.

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to the behaviors and needs of the animal. This is perhaps most visible in the
‘‘doggish’’ way humans play with their dogs or in the extent to which a home shared
with pets strikes the external observer who enters it to be as much impregnated by
animal life as it is by humans.

Context and Implications

The essential phenomenological problems arising at this point, namely the specific
forms of human-animal interaction, common habit formation, or the constitution
and sedimentation of shared worldly landmarks, certainly all require a much more
thorough research and discussion. However, in the completion of our considerations
following Husserl’s reflections on the human-animal relationship, it is only possible
to suggest some ways in which they might be situated within a broader historical
context. This attempt will eventually also allow us to indicate some ways in which
such an approach can offer relevant implications for current issues in animal ethics.

Origins

First of all, as concerns the difference between Heimtiere and Haustiere, or between
pets and domestic animals, it is worth mentioning that, if domestication is generally
considered an immemorial process with prehistoric origins—some theorists even
claim that men and dogs evolved simultaneously in a process of mutual
domestication (Groves 1999)—pets are on the contrary a more contemporary
phenomenon. I quote from a recent paper on the history of the animal welfare
movement in early twentieth century Germany:
In the course of urbanization, the century-old living and work-communion
between man and animal was destroyed. The need for nature, for living
alongside animals found a rudimentary equivalent in the urban habit of
keeping pets. For modern urbanites, the pet became the symbol of their
missing connection to the countryside and to nature as such. The decisive
difference to the human-animal relationship in the countryside is, however, to
be found in the fact that, in a world of industry and technology, pets were now
being kept purely out of sentimental reasons. The animal companions were,
contrary to farm animals, taboo as food, they received a name and—when they
died—a proper funeral. They were humanized. This was a basic condition for
the empathy that is till nowadays shown towards animals. (Zerbel 1998: 35)
This perhaps somewhat too blunt assessment is nevertheless quite telling not only
because it shows that, within the early animal welfare movements, pets were the first
animals to be treated as subjects of ethical concern, but also because it sets the
precise historic context within which the specific interfusion of humanization and
animalization described above first originated.

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Humanizing the Animal, Animalizing the Human: Husserl on… 229

Present-Day Context

Secondly, it seems clear that the entire question of animalization and humanization
is posed today in a context simultaneously characterized by two contradictory
yet also complementary tendencies that make the entire problem radically more
complicated:
1. We can thus note the increasing tendency to blur the formal boundaries between
the human world (including domesticated nature) and wildlife proper due to what
we may call, with a slightly Heideggerian touch, the general superintendence of
humans over the entire spectrum of their natural environment. Husserl himself
certainly had little reservations in still straightforwardly distinguishing between
the cultural territory of humans and the external realms of nature (see for instance
1973: 206), although this is of course not entirely consistent with his idea of the
humanized world understood as a world ‘‘in which all worldly objects have a
human meaning’’. Instead the point here is not just that the human territory has
today advanced further into the realms of nature than ever before, but that nature
has been in its entirety engulfed by the human world in a completely novel
fashion. One can perhaps already grasp this difference, symptomatically, when
contrasting traditional zoos or circuses, which introduced wild animals into the
human world by forceful imposition of human characters (think of the humanized
décors of early zoos or the human gestures that circus animals like the dancing
bears were required to perform) with contemporary versions of such institutions,
which claim to reproduce the ‘‘animal world’’ proper (in the case of so called
ecological zoos) or offer full access to life situations in the wilderness (in the case
of nature channels on TV). In any case, the crucial difference here concerns the
fact that wilderness and the human world no longer simply persist one outside the
other. The former was as such and without actual domestication integrated into
the latter both legally, in the form of institutionalized ‘‘natural reservations’’ that
practically encompass the whole of our non-human environment, and factually,
insofar as this environment has today become the object of various practices of
caretaking encapsulated by the comprehensive notion of ‘‘wildlife-management’’
(see also Sandøe et al. 2008: 153–164).
2. In this way we can notice today an ever increasing tendency of the human world
to engulf wild nature within its sphere of practical mastery. However, we also
witness today the similarly strong tendency to reverse this process and to
reinstate nature, as it were, just as it presumably was prior to humanization.
This is accomplished through a variety of practices ranging from the mere
diminishing or gradual retreat of human intervention, as in the case of
ecological agriculture, to the various proceedings of what is now termed ‘‘de-
domestication’’—another telling contemporary concept designating the attempt
to restore by means of engineering species of animals and plants, which were at
some point modified through domestication, back to the state of wilderness in
biospheres intentionally detracted from human control.13

13
On the concept of de-domestication, see also: Gamborg et al. (2010).

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230 C. Ferencz-Flatz

For sure, both aspects—wildlife-management and de-domestication—imply a

certain blurred relation between intervention and retreat, between animal-oriented
humanization and human-led animalization. What is more important to note here is
that this double relativization of the boundaries between wildlife and domesticated
nature has, alongside the now popular view of the ‘‘Anthropocene,’’ led to a
widespread need for overcoming the traditional dichotomies between nature and
culture, or domestication and wilderness in the anthropological discourse concern-
ing man’s relation to his environment, and to a persistent cry for new theoretical
concepts better suited to address this. Husserl’s terminology might well be an
important asset at this point. Further, this relativization also holds some stringent
ethical consequences—and with this I come to the implications arising out of this
strain of considerations for some of the contemporary debates in animal ethics.

Ethical Implications

To be more precise, there are two major ethical consequences derived from these
historical considerations: first of all, the fact that wild animals have now themselves
become subjects of an ethical responsibility being viewed as a human duty to
preserve them; secondly, the fact that domesticated animals have in turn become an
issue for ethical qualms as victims of human interventions that as such demand their
reversal. These two developments of course also charge the contemporary ethical
situation of pets with ambivalence, and one can perhaps best grasp this moral
ambivalence in our current relation to animal companions when sifting through the
websites of some of today’s animal welfare associations championing moral
awareness in our treatment of animals. Thus, for instance, the German website of
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) reads under the heading
‘‘animal companions’’: ‘‘In a perfect world, all animals would live freely, raise their
offspring, follow their inclinations and live in a natural environment’’.14 However,
since we don’t live in such a perfect world, the question of captivity and constraint
inevitably looms over the very notion of animal companionship, regardless of the
fact that keeping animal companions in itself implies a tender and empathic relation
to animals which is not an issue for ethical incrimination.
Now, these assessments are no doubt important in the perspective of Husserl’s
reflections sketched above, not only because, by circumscribing such specific moral
ambiguities, we pinpoint an essential aspect in our actual contemporary relation to
pets, but also and foremost because these complications in our moral stance towards
pets inevitably also reflect in the precise dosage of humanization and animalization
that we not only allow but ethically demand in our relationship with them today.
This aspect is for instance symptomatically illustrated in the following advertise-
ment of a contemporary German training school for dogs: ‘‘Man and dog learn
together how to reach a harmonious co-habitation. But this does not mean solely
that the dog should learn how to adapt to our life-style and how to live up to our
expectations; man should learn in his turn to respect and fulfil the dog’s specific

14
http://www.peta.de/themen/Tierische_Mitbewohner (last accessed on 04.12.2016).

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Humanizing the Animal, Animalizing the Human: Husserl on… 231

needs whenever this is possible’’.15 What this advertisement basically calls for is of
course nothing else than precisely that form of mutual attunement between humans
and animals that I tried to highlight above by speaking of the possible interplay
between ‘‘humanization’’ and ‘‘animalization’’.
Certainly, such historical considerations are not directly in line with Husserl’s
more general philosophical reflections, but they nevertheless allow us to point out a
series of nuances and complications of the subject matter that he himself was still
unaware of by using his phenomenological descriptions as tools. Moreover, if one
recalls the fact that, in many of Husserl’s later research manuscripts, the human-
animal relationship is but one example of a fundamentally asymmetrical intersub-
jective relation—in line with other examples like the relationship to infants, to the
insane or to the ‘‘primitives’’—it is clear that similar forms of mutual attunement, as
described here in relation to animals, can be described and considered ethically with
regard to all of these cases as well. On the other hand, such reflections allow us, at
the same time, to lay bare the precise constellation of ethical constraints and
historical circumstances within the context of which phenomenological analyses
should be generally situated in order to fully clarify their object.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dieter Lohmar, Paul Zipfel and the two anonymous reviewers
for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Funding was provided by CNCS-UEFISCDI
(Grant No. PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-0630).

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