Why Look At Animals?

"The animal scrutinises him across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension. This is why the man can surprise the animal. Yet the animal—even if domesticated—can also surprise the man. Berger is an unlikely candidate for inclusion in this list. He’s an art historian and a cultural critic—and a Marxist. He became famous in the 1970s for his BBC documentary series called Ways of Seeing , where he taught viewers how to think about images: photographs, paintings, television, et cetera. So he’s not a scientist or an expert on animals. But in 1980 he wrote ‘Why look at animals?’, in which he traced the evolution of the way in which we see animals as a culture. This is where animal studies and art interpretation meet. Although I don’t agree 100% with his account of the evolution of our relationship with animals, it’s a fascinating account that I think is worth looking at. And it’s powerfully written. According to Berger, there was a shift in the late 19th century in the way in which humans saw and interpreted non-human animals. Before the 19th century, our relationship to animals was a combination of proximity and sacrifice . We were closer to other animals in nature, but we also killed them for food—and the killing was direct. We killed them with our hands and with somewhat rudimentary tools. We were close to them—and their deaths. This mix of proximity and sacrifice produced an interesting kind of existential relationship : we loved animals, we respected their differences, and we respected the gravity of the act of killing them. For Berger, people before the 19th century understood the “abyss of non-comprehension” that separates us, but also understood that humans and animals look at one another across this abyss . We see them, and they see us. Everything changes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Industrial Revolution brings about “the reduction of the animal.” Slowly, over a period of a few decades, animals start to be removed from our lives. Horses and donkeys are replaced by automobiles. The slaughter of animals gets outsourced to factories and is carried out in secret, away from us. Disney comes on the scene, pushing caricatures animals, which are really human characters dressed up as animals. Zoos become more common and turn animals into objects of the human gaze. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Berger’s point is that we see animals, but we no longer feel seen by them . It’s a one-way street. In fact, we don’t even really see animals—not really. We look at them but don’t see them . We see teddy bears made of flesh, integrated slices of meat, cartoons that have momentarily escaped the screen. We stopped seeing animals as creatures who look back. For me, this capacity to ‘look back’ is tied to being sentient, being conscious, being social, and being interested. That’s why this essay—though it is partly about art and visual culture—is fundamentally about the problem of other minds. That’s how I read it. Let me begin by saying that I think that Nagel has been misunderstood to an extent. He does say that we will never know what it’s like to be a bat from a first-person standpoint, and that sounds right to me. It would be violent to assume that I can capture the world of another animal just by imagining that I am that animal. There’s an element of conceit there, a presumptuousness rooted in a kind of cosmic vanity whereby we convince ourselves that we are the animal who can contain all other animals within the bounds of its own mind. So in terms of knowing what it’s like to ‘be another animal’, there is a real limit. I discuss this in more detail in an episode of my podcast Overthink . But in that famous essay, towards the end, Nagel talks about the possibility of an objective rather than subjective phenomenology, and he leaves that door open for that. He says, look, we will never know what it’s like to be a bat, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot learn things about the structure of bat experience. After all, we have discovered that bats have sonar, which we do not have. So there’s an indirect access we can have that allows us to think about the properties of the Umwelten of other animals. I, for one, choose to focus not on the door that Nagel closes, which was never open to begin with, but on the door that he leaves open. That’s the door I want to cross in my own work."