Our ideas and words may be what define us human but ideas do not make us alive.
Other animals, plants and even individual cells are alive. Many of these living
things could be described as more successful, individually, than we are. Some trees
are longer-lived, much larger and command more of the earth’s resources than we do.
All living things experience life; they may not be able to put this into thoughts or
to have complex ideas but to survive they must be able to respond to their environment
and have at least some sort of memory. At the simplest level this memory might be
just that those individuals that respond appropriately survive and so this
survival strategy is stronger in their group.
We might argue that a tree or bacterium can experience events without comparing
the experience with an earlier one or without trying to work out what it means;
but even they seem to learn from experience and to respond to their environment.
The more complex the plant or animal the more need it has for learning and to be
able to respond to its environment
(or vice versa).
Quite a few animals seem to experience life very much like we do. They seem to
have feelings and emotions. When we watch a cat lying in the sun or when we
play with a dog, we feel that we understand their experience; it’s like our own.
We know or feel that animals have some kinds of thoughts; they tell us that
they want food or to go for a walk; they have friendships and enemies; they find
ways of doing things without being taught. Some animals seem to have more complex
thoughts than others. Many animals respond appropriately to circumstances they have
never encountered before. Cats are very good hunters; dogs can round-up sheep;
chimps, other apes and some monkeys have self-awareness similar to ours
and appear to empathise with others.
Counselling and psychoanalysis and many ‘New Age’ and religious
‘formulae for living’ stress ‘feelings’ over ‘analysis’. Some of the
adherents believe that experience is only real when it is about feelings,
emotions, reactions, which are thought to be different to ideas,
thinking or ‘intellectualising’.
When we watch children growing we can see that they feel things in a ‘purer’
way than do adults; they have the feelings they were born with, with little or
no thought involved. These feelings might be pleasure in snuggling or suckling;
or a pain in the tummy.
All our feelings are like this: we can only experience them in relation to other feelings.
There is no doubt that we can just enjoy those things that animals do; relaxing
, physical exertion, sleep and so on, but as soon as we start relating to others or to our
own past we are dealing with ideas.
Friendship, love, hate, laughter, excitement, sorrow, fear, pain, pleasure, birth,
death and revelation are just some of the feelings that signify human experience; but
can we feel any of these without recalling a past experience or something we have
been told; without it depending on ideas and leading to knowledge?
Everything we know comes to us via our senses but, unlike we humans
can never have any experience that is not is felt in the context of our
previous experiences or subject to our existing ideas.
Indeed far from seeking 'pure' experience it is human to seek understanding;
and it is the quest for knowledge and understanding that distinguishes us from animals.
