Wondering Animals: Reflections on Human Exceptionality
Wondering Animals: Reflections on Human Exceptionality

Summary/Abstract: Both historically and in common human practices, attitudes, and be-liefs, a sense of human exceptionality in comparison with other animals undergirds normative anthropocentrism, i.e. prioritization of human interests. The question I wish to address in this article is whether we can use a particular element of the cognitive apparatus or toolkit that supposedly makes us special, namely our s e n s e o f w o n d e r, to d e c e n t e r u s. Several authors have argued that when we viewother beings or the natural world with wonder, we are inclined to care for and wishto protect them. But here I am interested in what happens when we turn our senseof wonder onto o u r s e l v e s as the peculiar animal, the strange evolutionary ex-periment that we are. Not, as has historically been done, in an admiring way, butin an evaluatively more neutral way, characterized by puzzlement, an attunementto mystery, and a sense of unlikeliness and contingency. In particular, how mightour thinking about ourselves change when we think from a wonder that revolvesaround our embodiment, around that which roots us most fi rmly in the world, in“nature,” and reminds us most clearly of our membership of a community of earth-ly life? Wondering at and about ourselves as an animal species may remind us ofour material embeddedness in the world, but what could its e t h i c a l i m p o r t be?More specifi cally, the paper explores whether there is an escape from the ethicalquandaries of human exceptionality, which relate to the impossibility of doing withor without that exceptionality. I argue that there is not, but that in wonder we canhold together incompatible possibilities.

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