Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism—defined

The word "anthropomorphism" derives from the Greek for "having human form." It is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities, and considered an innate tendency of human psychology. Merriam Webster also defines it as "humanization." Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions, and natural forces, such as seasons and weather.
Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices, and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters. People have also routinely attributed human emotions and behavioral traits to wild as well as domesticated animals.
"A literary device that attributes human characteristics to non-human entities, like animals and plants, or inanimate objects, like stars or machines, writers commonly use anthropomorphism in fairy tales, fables, and other types of stories." The books Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Winnie the Pooh are classic examples of anthropomorphism.
Zoomorphism (the opposite) is figurative language that characterizes people, objects, places, and ideas with animal attributes.

Anthropomorphism—defined

Psychology Today notes that "some people are more inclined to anthropomorphize than others, but it is a common way of perceiving and interacting with the world."
Anthropomorphism, in which someone “sees” human-like attributes in a non-human, is often associated with the bonds between humans and their beloved pets or possessions or the ways they interpret animal behavior. People can also anthropomorphize in imagining that unseen beings (such as gods) possess human features.
Perceiving the presence of human qualities in other entities can be misleading when such qualities are absent. But anthropomorphism may not always be totally off-base. While a pet rock is never happy to see its owner, some animals may actually experience something like the emotional states that people perceive in them.
Attributing human intent to non-human animals, spirits, robots, or other entities, real or imagined, is one way that people make sense of behaviors and events they encounter. Humans are a social species with a brain that evolved to quickly process social information. The tendency to view non-humans in terms of human-like characteristics has been theorized to be a product of that evolution.

Anthropomorphism—defined

Examples in prehistory
- From the beginnings of human behavioral modernity in the Upper Paleolithic, about 40,000 years ago, examples of zoomorphic (animal-shaped) works of art occur that may represent the earliest known evidence of anthropomorphism. It is not possible to say what these prehistoric artworks represent. A recent example is The Sorcerer, an enigmatic cave painting in France: the figure's significance is unknown, but it is usually interpreted as some kind of great spirit or master of the animals. In either case there is an element of anthropomorphism.
- This anthropomorphic art has been linked with the emergence of more systematic hunting practices in the Upper Paleolithic and are the product of a change in the architecture of the human mind, There's an increasing fluidity between the natural history and social intelligences, where anthropomorphism allowed hunters to identify empathetically with hunted animals and better predict their movements.

Anthropomorphism—defined

In religion and mythology
- In religion and mythology, anthropomorphism is the perception of a divine being in human form, or the recognition of human qualities in these beings.
- Ancient mythologies frequently represented the divine as deities with human forms and qualities. They resemble human beings not only in appearance and personality, but exhibit many human behaviors used to explain natural phenomena, creation, and historical events. The deities fell in love, married, had children, fought battles, wielded weapons, and rode horses and chariots. They feasted on special foods, and sometimes required sacrifices of food, beverage, and sacred objects to be made by human beings.
- Some anthropomorphic deities represented specific human concepts, such as love, war, fertility, beauty, or the seasons. Others exhibited human qualities such as beauty, wisdom, and power, and sometimes human weaknesses such as greed, hatred, jealousy, and uncontrollable anger. Greek deities such as Zeus and Apollo often were depicted in human form exhibiting both commendable and despicable human traits. Anthropomorphism in this case is anthropotheism.

Anthropomorphism—defined

In religion and mythology
- Anthropomorphism has cropped up as a Christian heresy, often based on a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:27: "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."
Criticism
- Some religions, scholars, and philosophers objected to anthropomorphic deities. Both Judaism and Islam reject an anthropomorphic deity, believing that God is beyond human comprehension. Judaism's rejection of an anthropomorphic deity began with the prophets, who explicitly rejected any likeness of God to humans. Judaism's rejection grew further after the Islamic Golden Age in the tenth century, which Maimonides codified in the twelfth century, in his thirteen principles of Jewish faith.
- Hindus do not reject the concept of a deity in the abstract unmanifested, but note practical problems. Lord Krishna said in the Bhagavad Gita that it is much more difficult for people to focus on a deity as the unmanifested than one with form, using anthropomorphic icons, because people need to perceive with their senses.

Anthropomorphism—defined

Criticism
- One of the most notable criticisms began in 1600 with Francis Bacon, who argued against Aristotle's teleology, which declared that everything behaves as it does in order to achieve some end, in order to fulfill itself. Bacon pointed out that achieving ends is a human activity and to attribute it to nature misconstrues it as humanlike.
- Modern criticisms followed Bacon's ideas such as critiques of Spinoza and Hume. The latter, for instance, embedded his arguments in his wider criticism of human religions and specifically demonstrated in what he cited as their "inconsistence" where, on one hand, the Deity is painted in the most sublime colors but, on the other, is degraded to nearly human levels by giving him human infirmities, passions, and prejudices.
- One anthropologist proposes that all religions are anthropomorphisms that originate in the brain's tendency to detect the presence or vestiges of other humans in natural phenomena.

Anthropomorphism—in literature

Fables
- Anthropomorphism is a well established literary device from ancient times. The story of "The Hawk and the Nightingale" in Hesiod's Works and Days preceded Aesop's fables by centuries. Collections of linked fables from India also employ anthropomorphized animals to illustrate principles of life.
- Many of the stereotypes of animals recognized today, such as the wily fox and the proud lion, can be found in these collections. Aesop's anthropomorphisms were so familiar by the first century that they colored the thinking of at least one philosopher:
- And there is another charm about him, namely, that he puts animals in a pleasing light and makes them interesting to mankind. For after being brought up from childhood with these stories, and after being as it were nursed by them from babyhood, we acquire certain opinions of the several animals and think of some of them as royal animals, of others as silly, of others as witty, and others as innocent.

Anthropomorphism—in literature

Fairy tales
- Anthropomorphic motifs have been common in fairy tales from the earliest ancient examples set in a mythological context to the great collections of the Brothers Grimm.
Modern literature
- Building on the popularity of fables and fairy tales, children's literature began to emerge in the 19th century with works such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) by Carlo Collodi and The Jungle Book (1894) by Rudyard Kipling, all employing anthropomorphic elements.
- This continued in the 20th century with many of the most popular titles having anthropomorphic characters, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) and later books by Beatrix Potter; The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908); Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928) by A. A. Milne; and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) and subsequent books in The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis.

Anthropomorphism—in literature

Modern literature
- In many of these stories the animals represent facets of human personality and character. In The Jungle Book, for example, the boy Mowgli must rely on his new friends the bear Baloo and the black panther Bagheera. "The world of the jungle is in fact both itself and our world as well."
- A notable work aimed at adults is George Orwell's Animal Farm, in which all the main characters are anthropomorphic animals.
- Non-animal examples include Rev. W Awdry's children's stories of Thomas the Tank Engine and other anthropomorphic locomotives.
- The fantasy genre developed from mythological, fairy tale, and Romance motifs sometimes have anthropomorphic animals as characters.
- The best-selling examples are The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), both by J. R. R. Tolkien, books peopled with talking creatures such as ravens, spiders, and a multitude of anthropomorphic goblins and elves. Tolkien saw this anthropomorphism as closely linked to human language and myth: " . . . The first men to talk of 'trees and stars' saw things differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. . . .

Anthropomorphism—defined

Richard Adams developed a distinctive take on anthropomorphic writing in the 1970s: his debut novel, Watership Down (1972), featured rabbits that could talk—with their own distinctive language (Lapine) and mythology—and included a police-state warren, Efrafa. Despite this, Adams attempted to ensure his characters' behavior mirrored that of wild rabbits, engaging in fighting, copulating and defecating, drawing on Ronald Lockley's study The Private Life of the Rabbit as research. Adams returned to anthropomorphic storytelling in his later novels The Plague Dogs (1977) and Traveller (1988).
By the 21st century, the children's picture book market had expanded massively. Perhaps a majority of picture books have some kind of anthropomorphism, with popular examples being The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) by Eric Carle and The Gruffalo (1999) by Julia Donaldson.

Anthropomorphism—defined

Psychology--Foundational research
- Modern psychologists generally characterize anthropomorphism as a cognitive bias. That is, anthropomorphism is a cognitive process by which people use schemas about other humans to infer the properties of non-human entities and to make judgments about the environment, even if those inferences are not always accurate. Anthropomorphism can also be a strategy to cope with loneliness.
Developmental perspective
- Children appear to anthropomorphize and use egocentric reasoning from an early age and use it more frequently than adults. Examples of this are describing a storm cloud as "angry" or drawing flowers with faces.
- This penchant for anthropomorphism is likely because children have acquired vast amounts of socialization, but not as much experience with specific non-human entities, so they have less developed alternative schemas for their environment.
- In contrast, autistic children tend to describe anthropomorphized objects in purely mechanical terms (that is, in terms of what they do).

Anthropomorphism—defined

Effect on learning
- Anthropomorphism can be used to assist learning. Specifically, anthropomorphized words and describing scientific concepts with intentionality can improve later recall of these concepts.

In mental health
- In people with depression, social anxiety, or other mental illnesses, anthropomorphism can satisfy the patients' need for social connection.

In marketing
- Anthropomorphism of inanimate objects can affect product buying behavior. When products seem to resemble a human schema, such as the front of a car resembling a face, potential buyers evaluate that product more positively.
- People also tend to trust robots with more complex tasks such as driving a car or childcare if the robot resembles humans, such as having a face, voice, and name; mimicking human motions; expressing emotion; and displaying some variability in behavior.

Cambridge Editors' Blog

Animals are commonly found in the backdrop of works of literature, serving as props or setting or, on the rare occasion, as plot point. Even rarer still are the occasions when an animal is the focus of a piece of literature, the main character and the crux more than the catalyst of a novel or short story’s plot. In modern times, an animal main character seems silly, childish; animals are only allowed to be main characters without question in picture books.
But in the beginning of everything—in the beginning of storytelling—animals were almost always the main characters. Many folk tales use animals as the heroes and villains, the most famous including Anansi, the trickster-god spider of West African lore, and the various animals of Aesop’s Fables. Perhaps in a time when people’s lives were more closely connected to wild animals, by chance or design, it was easier and more acceptable to give human characteristics to the animal, to cast the animal as the hero or villain and ignore humans entirely for the sake of a good story.

Cambridge Editors' Blog

The virtue of using an animal as a character is that animals can be simplified in ways that human characters cannot. Make a villain unequivocally evil and readers are unlikely to be convinced.

When reading Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth series, I found myself unable to believe the villains because their actions and motivations were always so shallowly evil. They did bad things not because they were motivated in believably human ways, but because bad things needed to happen for the heroes to overcome and therefore the villains were made weak and cruel and greedy to an almost comical extent.

NOTE: Ken Follett novels fall into the action/thriller/historical category and therefore focus more on plot development rather than character definition. At the core are characters facing difficult times, struggling to survive, and taking action to resolve the threats they encounter. What they do overtakes what they think or how they feel.

Cambridge Editors' Blog

One of the best writing suggestions I’ve come across is to remember that a villain sees him or herself as the hero of the story. Few real people will commit an evil action with the sole intention to cause suffering for the sake of suffering; everyone has a justification. This is the reality which readers demand from human characters. We as readers expect the human characters in a work of prose or poetry to behave realistically.
But we do not demand this reality from animal characters. Readers know that animals are unknowable. Whether a reader believes that animals have emotional lives just as complex as humans or whether a reader believes that animals are little more than organic machines with sensitive reactions to stimuli, the reader knows that the real nature of an animal is unlike that of a human, and therefore it is impossible for a human to imagine.

Cambridge Editors' Blog

In Richard Adams’ Watership Down, all the main characters are rabbits. Although they are intelligent and emotional, the personalities of the rabbits are limited by their species. One rabbit is belligerent and quick to confront and physically subdue other rabbits. Neither the reader nor the other rabbits fault him very much for these shortcomings: because he is a rabbit, he is understood as being a simpler creature, as being bound by his nature.
The very concepts of introspection and insight are seen as strange by the rabbits, and Adams paints higher thinking as antithesis to the animals: at one point in the story they encounter a group of rabbits who have invented and indulge in art and poetry not as a pleasure but as a desperate way of coping with a chosen but untenable reality. In short, when the rabbits decided to act in a more human manner, they became distinctly un-rabbit. Yet as they cannot become human they occupy an unsettling space of quasi-existence, neither one thing nor the other.

Cambridge Editors' Blog

We as readers are perhaps attracted to the perceived simplicity of animals and the comfort of that simplicity. Interacting with other people is complicated and anxious. Words and actions can be misunderstood, feelings can be hurt, and one is often self-conscious about money, or success, or appearances.
It’s satisfying then to sink into the alternate reality of a book where not only are the characters new and exciting but are confident and decisive in a way that humans tend not to be.
Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories, although traditionally seen as children’s fare, are excellent examples of this animal reactivity. Little time is spent on introspection or wondering why someone else has done something: the reasons are usually obvious and understandable, even if they’re morally wrong, such as when Mowgli is betrayed by his wolf pack not because they are cruel but because they are hungry and Shere Khan has been feeding them. Mowgli is adopted by the wolf pack in the first place not because it is the right thing to do, but because the wolf pack is essentially bribed by Bagheera with the promise of food.

Cambridge Editors' Blog

A human character who can be bribed by food is unbelievable, or at best would be perceived as weak and foolish—certainly not as someone who may have a weakness but is largely good and productive.
But an animal who is bribed by food is still sympathetic and its weakness is not held against it so long as its other actions remain sympathetic. In the same vein, an animal who kills out of impulse, even of its brother or without adequate provocation, can be sympathetic, while a human murderer must be developed much more in order to remain in the reader’s good graces.
While animals can be used as shortcuts—and have much use as shortcuts—to tap into certain emotions or atmosphere, I believe they are not just prop characters, lazily written to the same reception as a more intensively developed human character. They are an idealization, a way to sidestep the whole mess of human society and still explore compelling narratives and struggles, a way for a reader to become submerged into a world which is totally unlike the one they live in.

Anthropomorphism—from The Guardian (1-15-2016)

"Anthropomorphism: how much humans and animals share is still contested"
Cute internet videos and animals in children’s entertainment with human-like intentions can be useful, harmful or both—depending on whom you ask.

Anthropomorphism—from The Guardian (1-15-2016)

The widely shared image of a male kangaroo cradling the head of a dying female, in front of her joey, was immediately cast as a touching display of marsupial grief, before several scientists pointed out that the kangaroo’s interests were probably a little more carnal than first thought.
This kind of anthropomorphism isn’t new of course – some of the oldest known deities combine human and beast – but it has only been since Charles Darwin’s description of joy and love among animals that the debate has evolved on whether humans hold exclusivity over certain traits.
Animals such as apes and crows have been seen using tools, previously thought a human preserve. A 44-year-old gorilla called Koko has the of a three-year-old child after learning 1,000 words of American sign language. She has called herself “Queen” – evidence, her head caretaker claims, that she understands her celebrity status.
But many scientists still draw stark lines of difference between humans and other animals. Some warn that anthropomorphism, now regularly demonstrated in online videos of pandas having tantrums or orangutans having a laugh, can be harmful.

Anthropomorphism—from The Guardian (1-15-2016)

“It’s almost like the internet was built for anthropomorphizing animals,” said Holly Dunsworth, an anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island. “Humans aren’t the only animals capable of forming strong bonds, but to say that the kangaroo even knew the other kangaroo was dying is beyond anything we know. No one has shown that animals understand dying or where babies come from. We can’t say they think that abstractly.”
While Koko’s grasp of language is astonishing, it lacks the nuance and complexity of the way humans communicate with each other. There’s a key difference between “signals” and understanding and expanding upon ideas and abstract concepts, Dunsworth said.
“Other animals are more complex than purely being driven by instinct, but I’m very comfortable with the explanation that they don’t need abstract reasoning to do these complex behaviors,” she said. “We can explain behavior separate from the way humans think.”

Anthropomorphism—from The Guardian (1-15-2016)

An unconscious belief that bears, horses and dolphins possess human desires and thoughts wrapped up in odd costumes can be detrimental for children, some psychologists have argued.
Last year, Patricia Ganea, a psychologist at Toronto University, ran a series of experiments on three- to five-year-olds in which they were given information about animals in straight factual form and then in a more fantastical anthropomorphized way.
She found that the children were likely to attribute human characteristics to other animals and were less likely to retain factual information about them when told they lived their lives as furry humans.
Ganea said attributing human-like intentions and beliefs is a “very natural way to explain certain animal behaviors” and can be useful in generating empathy for mistreated animals. But she adds there is a downside.

Anthropomorphism—from The Guardian (1-15-2016)

“Anthropomorphism can lead to an inaccurate understanding of biological processes in the natural world,” she said. “It can also lead to inappropriate behaviors towards wild animals, such as trying to adopt a wild animal as a ‘pet’ or misinterpreting the actions of a wild animal.”
Common depictions of animals in children’s entertainment are likely to amplify this message, Ganea said.
“Jiminy Cricket is the voice of conscience and not an accurate description of what insects behave like,” she said. “But, yes, the human-like animal representations in the media are likely to increase the tendency to anthropomorphize the natural world.”
But it’s clear from multiple experiments that some animals are closer to being “human” than others. In tests, monkeys have given up the chance of food so that older or weaker members of the clan can eat. A chimpanzee named Santino has shown a remarkable ability to plan ahead – and hold grudges – by calmly gathering and hiding piles of stones ready to hurl at visitors who gawp at him in his zoo enclosure in Sweden.

Anthropomorphism—from The Guardian (1-15-2016)

It’s not just primates. Scientists have gathered evidence that elephants sacrifice their wellbeing for the good of the group and grieve for their dead. Young elephants that have lost parents to poachers have suffered a type of post-traumatic stress disorder, trumpeting loudly and unusually at night and showing other signs of agitation. Mapping of the brains of several different species shows that they share similar neurons to humans that process social information and empathy.
“It’s categorically wrong to say that animals don’t have thoughts and emotions, just like it’s wrong to say they are completely the same as us,” said Carl Safina, a biologist and author of a book called Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, which argues that sneering at anthropomorphism risks eroding our empathy with species we are helping wipe out at a rate unseen since the time of the dinosaurs.
“Great apes have large brains and complex social lives, wolves live in structured families. But herrings don’t have social structures. So we can’t say all animals are the same.

Anthropomorphism—from The Guardian (1-15-2016)

“But humans are an extreme example of everything. We are simultaneously the most compassionate and the cruelest animal, the friendliest and most destructive, we experience the most grief and cause the most grief. We are a complicated case.”
The idea that a kangaroo would hold another’s head to say farewell as they die is “overdone,” Safina said, but it’s inaccurate to dismiss any notion of understanding or even loss.
“It’s fair to say many animals have richer social lives and a richer palette of strategic abilities than we give them credit for,” he said. “We should get better acquainted with the animals we share the world with. If only because they are so beautiful and so interesting.”

And so . . .

Smiley sees horses not only as a deep inspiration for her writing, but also a conduit for sharpening people’s empathy. “Riding horses, especially thoroughbreds, you have to try to sense the energy in their body, what they like or don’t like,” she says. “You have to understand the world as they are seeing it.”
So, to paraphrase Jane Smiley, it's a question of perception.
Since at least the 18th century, philosophers have been grappling with the question of what it means to be human.
Does humankind have an innate sense of morality, or "goodness"? Or are humans born with a "tabula rasa," a mind that is basically blank and etched as they learn social behaviors.
Literature's more introspective writers, or those who focus on character development and personal insight rather than action, have also been grappling with this question, and a related one: if living is a question of perception, which differs from person to person, then what is "reality." How can I definitively know the answer to this question if your perception of the world is different from mine?

Perspective in literature

Throughout the history of this course, I've asked what women writers did with the mystery novel, and then the historical novel, when they took over the popular genres, a fact noted in a 2016 article in Vanity Fair.
With the mystery novel, they introduced female detectives to replace the tough, hard-boiled, tight-fisted action hero of the traditional detective novel. Oh, there was still violence; these women got beaten up at least once in most every novel. But they got justice, often not legally because the police and judicial system weren't able to enforce it. So, the women arranged a kind of de facto justice, some kind of reparation for the victim of the crime committed. Justice became recognition of the crime perpetrated rather than a legal penalty. These female detectives operated outside the purview of the recognized, traditional, and patriarchal social structure.
With the historical novel, they maintained this "outsider" perspective and wrote, not about the epic heroes and winning victories, but about the cost of such struggles on the people maintaining everyday life.

Perspective in literature

Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale is a notable example. Women operating undercover as spies for the French Resistance in World War II saved numerous fallen soldiers from capture and death, but paid an extraordinarily high price for their service, a debt largely forgotten in traditional histories, until the debt was acknowledged by these women authors.
Kate Quinn is another such author; in fact, the role of women in war has become the theme of her most recent novels. The Alice Network, for example, is the story of the fleurs du mal spies, again in France during WWII. She moved on to The Rose Code, the novel about women code breakers of Bletchley Park who, until recently, couldn't tell even their families that they broke the Enigma code. And she continued with The Huntress and Diamond Eye (coming up shortly) about women serving in the Russian military.
It all depends on your perspective, and women writers provide just that, an alternative perspective.

Perspective in literature

Kate Grenville is the Australian equivalent in examining her own country's history. The Secret River, now a classic novel and required reading for all school students, told the unpopular side of the story of Australia's settlement, when British colonists stole the land and slaughtered the native population to impose their own social structure, farming methods, agricultural practices, religious and educational systems—a hierarchical, patriarchal, intolerant assumption that didn't recognize or acknowledge the native cultures that had settled the country millennia before.
With Salt Creek, Lucy Treloar did much the same, telling the story through the experiences of the Finch family, indominable father Stanton, his frail wife, and several children, including his son by a native woman. Because of his intransigence, the family fails; children die, are bartered away, rebel and desert the family and the country.
These forgotten and overlooked stories are the focus of several authors we've recently read, including Geraldine Brooks' novel Horse about the Black jockeys, trainers, and groomsmen who maintained the horse racing stables of rich plantation owners.
Or Maggie O'Farrell, who gave life once again, through fiction, to both Anne and Hamnet Shakespeare, and then Lucrezia de Medici

Perspective in literature

But the change in perspective also means that reality does not come from a single perspective but is a rather ragged composite of several.
With The Other Typist, Suzanne Rindell gives us the characters of Rose and Odalie, both typists for the police, but quite different personalities. As the book ends, readers don't know if they've got one character or two. Is Odalie a facet of Rose's personality, or her own person.
With Elizabeth Strout, a more literary than genre writer, we find the short story cycle, a series of short stories each told from the perspective of one character who also figures in the stories of other characters. As readers, we must put them all together and decide for ourselves who each character is—the one represented by his or her title story, or a composite with pieces garnered from other stories.
This is just a short summary of the novels we've read, and there are many we have not as yet touched upon. But now we take a look at the animal perspective.

Summary

Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (collection of essays) edited by Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, Columbia University Press, 2006
"As this innovative new collection demonstrates, humans use animals to transcend the confines of self and species;
they also enlist them to symbolize, dramatize, and illuminate aspects of humans' experience and fantasy.
Humans merge with animals in stories, films, philosophical speculations, and scientific treatises. In their performance on many stages and in different ways, animals move us to think."

Summary

Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (collection of essays) edited by Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, Columbia University Press, 2006
- "Essays in the book investigate the changing patterns of anthropomorphism across different time periods and settings, as well as their transformative effects, both figuratively and literally, upon animals, humans, and their interactions.
- Examining how anthropomorphic thinking "works" in a range of different contexts, contributors reveal the ways in which anthropomorphism turns out to be remarkably useful:
  - it can promote good health and spirits,
  - enlist support in political causes,
  - sell products across boundaries of culture and nationality,
  - crystallize and strengthen social values,
  - and hold up a philosophical mirror to the human predicament."