Luca Marchetti (University of Genova, Italy): Appreciating Other Minds

This paper addresses the issue of whether other minds, particularly non-human animals’ minds, can be legitimate objects of aesthetic appreciation. As far as I know, this topic has not been explored, neither in philosophical aesthetics – where the two main attempts to understand the aesthetical appreciation of animals, Davies’ (2012, ch. 5) and Parsons’ (2007), do not mention animal minds - nor in the philosophy of mind – where philosophers working on other minds have mainly focused on the epistemological problems they raise. The specific questions this paper aims to raise and answer are the following: 

(a) can we appreciate other minds? In particular, can we appreciate other minds that are different from ours, i.e. non-human animals’ minds? 

(b) If we can, what exactly is the object of appreciation in these cases, and (c) how does such appreciation unfold? 

The answers I give in this paper are: 

(a) that we can appreciate other minds and we often indulge in such an activity - a more detailed response to this emerges by the paper’s end, as I illustrate instances of such appreciation in addressing points (b) and (c). 

(b) that the object of appreciation in these cases is twofold: on the one hand, we appreciate knowing the peculiarities, differences, and subtleties of the workings of other animals and, on the other, we appreciate the imaginative activity of trying to put ourselves in the animal’s perspective. After careful consideration and analysis of both, a related issue will be considered here: whether this appreciation is a type level appreciation (I appreciate the consciousness of a certain species) or a token level appreciation (I appreciate the consciousness of that particular exemplar). I argue that in the sense considered in this paper appreciating other minds is mainly a type level appreciation.[1] 

(c) that, as a consequence of (b), the nature of our appreciation is also twofold: appreciating other minds, I claim, is on the one hand a form of scientific appreciation (with aesthetic connotations) – we delight in our scientific understanding of animals’ minds, e.g., in their functionality, fitness, oddity, etc. – and, on the other, it engenders a proper aesthetic appreciation when we engage in the activity of trying to put ourselves in the animal perspective. I further contend that the latter is a mental activity akin in its appreciative structure to what Suits (1978) called striving play, and whose aesthetic significance has been supported by Nguyen (2020): when we try to put ourselves in the animal perspective, I claim, we find pleasure in the challenging imaginative effort involved, rather than from achieving a definitive result – a result that, in this specific context, is evidently unachievable (Nagel 1974).[2] 

I finally conclude that my analysis has potential ethical, political, and educational implications

Bibliography De Waal, F. (2016). Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?. WW Norton & Company. 

Davies, S. (2012). The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution. OUP Oxford. 

Godfrey-Smith, P. (2016). Other minds: The octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Nagel, T. (1974). ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ The Philosophical Review, 83 (4), 435-450. 

Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Games: Agency as Art. OUP Oxford. 

Parsons, G. (2007). ‘The Aesthetic Value of Animals’. Environmental Ethics, 29(2), 151-169. 

Parsons, G. (2008). Aesthetics and Nature. Bloomsbury. 

Parsons, G., & Carlson, A. (2008). Functional Beauty. OUP Oxford. 

Schmalzried, L. (2013). ‘Inner Beauty–The Friendship-Hypothesis’. Proceedings of the European Society of Aesthetics, 5, 613-635. 

Suits, B. (2014). The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Broadview Press. 

Terrone, E. (Forthcoming). ‘Are Works of Art Affective Artifacts? If Not, What Sort of Artifacts Are They?’. TOPOI. 

Wilkomm, J. & Boersma, A. (2022). ‘Hearing Like an Animal. Exploring Acoustic Experience Beyond Human Ears’. In Schillmeier, M., Stock, R., & Ochsner, B. (Eds.) Techniques of Hearing: History, Theory and Practices. Routledge, 125-138. 

[1] In fact, we appreciate the type of solutions engineered by natural selection and at disposal to each member of a species: e.g. echo-localization of the bat-species in general; electroreception of the sharks in general; ultraviolet vision of bees in general; the nine brains of octopuses in general; the complexity of emotional responses of pigs in general; and so on. This is not to say, though, that we can never appreciate the consciousness of particular exemplars; but, I contend, token level appreciation is a different kind of appreciation, usually undergone when we relate to different kinds of pet or to a specific animal and appreciate them as individuals – this is an appreciation, I claim, more akin to the aesthetic appreciation of persons and, in particular, on the appreciation of ‘inner beauty’ (Schmalzried 2013). 

[2] However, there are methods to facilitate or direct this kind of activity. Indeed, I illustrate that this type of striving imaginative activity is frequently supported by a range of props, i.e. by different kinds of experiential artifacts (Terrone forthcoming) – objects such as books, movies, VR installations, soundscapes, etc… created to ease and guide our imaginative processes - thus providing further support to answer (a) with concrete examples drawn from actual practices. In particular, I concentrate on three kinds of support, with related token examples: books, exemplified by Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds; immersive installations, exemplified by the MUSE/LIFEWolfAlpsEU Project’s exhibition Nella mente del lupo (Inside the mind of a wolf); and tentative perceptual reproductions, exemplified by videos and other tools for understanding/altering visual perception (e.g. using videos or VR for understanding color perception or using mirrors to experience monocular seeing, such as whale-seeing) and on bioacoustics researches and implementations (Wilkomm & Boersma 2022).