This is often thought to be a key facet of our humanity, especially because of what else it makes possible:The attribute of self-awareness, which involves man’s capacity to discriminate himself as an object in a world of objects other than himself, is … central to our understanding of the prerequisites of man’s social and cultural mode of adjustment … A human social order implies a mode of existence that has meaning for the individual at the level of self-awareness. A human social order, for example, is always a moral order … It is man’s capacity for and development of self-awareness that makes such unconscious psychological mechanisms as repression, rationalization and so on of adaptive importance for the individual.48
A fish, a cat, a dog, or a bird catching sight of itself in the mirror apparently understands the image only as another member of the same species. If unhabituated to mirror images, male animals may attempt to intimidate the reflection; it must be sensed as a rival male. The image intimidates back and the animal may flee. Eventually, it accommodates to the silent, odorless, and harmless image and learns to ignore it. By mirror reflection criteria, these animals don’t seem very smart. It is said that human children must usually be about two years old before they grasp that their mirror image is not some other child with a talent for imitation. In recognizing what a reflection is, monkeys also are like fish, cats, dogs, birds, and human infants. They don’t get it. But some apes are like us.
In 1977 the psychologist Gordon Gallup published an article entitled “Self-Recognition in Primates.”49 When chimpanzees born in the wild were confronted with a full-length mirror, at first—like other animals—they thought the reflection was someone else. But within a few days they had it figured out. Then, they’d use the mirror to preen, and to examine inaccessible parts of themselves, looking over their shoulders to view their backs, for example. Gallup then anesthetized the chimps and painted them red—in places that they could see only in the mirror. Upon regaining consciousness and resuming the pleasures of self-examination in the mirrors, they quickly discovered the red marks. Did they reach out to the ape in the glass? Instead, they groped their own bodies, touched the painted areas repeatedly, and then smelled their fingers. They trebled the time they spent each day examining their mirror images.*
Among the other great apes, Gallup found mirror self-awareness in orangs, but not in gorillas. Later, he may have found it in dolphins. We are conscious, he proposes, when we know that we exist, and have a mind when we monitor our own mental states. By these criteria, Gallup concludes, chimps and orangs, at least, are conscious and have minds.50
“As to what concerns fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man,” said Montaigne.51 But male fireflies skillfully interpose their own blinks so as to make the courting message of their rivals disagreeable to the females. Some chimp females vampirishly stalk young mothers of their group, waiting for the chance to steal and eat their newborns. Many primates seek surreptitious matings when the alpha’s attention is elsewhere. Few of the male alliances rippling through the dominance hierarchy persist beyond their utility. Deception in the social relations of animals, and even self-deception in animals, is an emerging and productive topic in biology; whole books are written about it.52
Chimps sometimes lie. They also sometimes try to outwit others who are lying. This fact surely affords us a glimpse inside their minds:An especially telling example is the duplicity displayed by chimpanzees trying to keep the locality of cached food to themselves, and the cunning of others at beating the bluff … You cannot—logically cannot—tell lies unintentionally; even the idea of self-deception involves the intentional model, one part of the self trying to put it over on the rest. The dissembling chimpanzee appears to be acting on the understanding of what the signs he gives will mean to others, and hence intentionally.53
And yet it is not so long ago that a modern philosopher, among many others, was saying,It would be senseless to attribute to an animal a memory that distinguished the order of events in the past, and it would be senseless to attribute to it an expectation of an order of events in the future. It does not have the concepts of order, or any concepts at all.54
How could he know that?
The chimpanzee’s interior monologue is doubtless not up to the standard of the average philosopher’s, but that they have some notion of themselves, what they look like, what their needs are, their past experiences, future expectations, and how they relate to others—enough for the purposes of a “social order”—seems beyond doubt.
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“Language is our Rubicon,” declaimed the famous nineteenth-century linguist Max Müller, “and no brute will dare to cross it.” Language permits widely dispersed humans to communicate with one another. It allows us to sample the wisdom of the past and time-binds the generations. It is an essential tool in helping us to sharpen our mental acuity, to think more clearly. It is an unsurpassed aid to memory. With good reason we prize it. Long before the invention of writing, language played a major role in human success. This is the main reason that Huxley could reassuringly conclude, “Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that Man is, in substance and structure, one with the brutes.”55 But does this mean that other animals must lack language, even simple language, even the capability for language? We are struck by Müller’s military, defensive metaphor, and the possibility he seems to raise that language is within the grasp of “brutes” and that only timidity restrains them.
A long tradition of similar confident assertions denying language to the beasts dates from the start of the European Enlightenment, perhaps beginning with a 1649 letter by René Descartes:The principal argument, to my mind, which may convince us that the brutes are devoid of reason, is that … it has never yet been observed that any animal has arrived at such a degree of perfection as to make use of a true language; that is to say, as to be able to indicate to us by the voice, or by other signs, anything which could be referred to thought alone, rather than to a movement of mere nature; for the word is the sole sign and the only certain mark of the presence of thought hidden and wrapped up in the body; now all men, the most stupid and the most foolish, those even who are deprived of the organs of speech, make use of signs, whereas the brutes never do anything of the kind; which may be taken for the true distinction between man and brute.56
That chimps and bonobos can engage in a rich flow of gestural and lexigraphic signs is beyond doubt. We have glimpsed the vigorous scientific debate about their ability to use language. The nervousness of some scientists about claims of chimp language is evident in many ways—including repeatedly changing the rules after the game has begun. For instance, some scientists denied that Ameslan-signing chimps have language because of an apparent absence of negations or interrogatives. As soon as the chimps began objecting and asking questions, the critics discovered some other aspect of language that the chimps presumably did not have while humans did, and that now became the sine qua non of language. To a surprising extent, scientists and philosophers have merely asserted, sometimes with extraordinary vehemence, that apes cannot use language, and then dismissed evidence to the contrary because it contradicted their assumption.58 Darwin’s view, in contrast, was that some animals have the power of language, “at least in a rude and incipient degree,” and that if “certain powers, such as self-consciousness, abstraction, etc., are peculiar to man,” they are “mainly the result of the continued use of a highly developed language.”