Descartes And The Exercise Of Power Essay

It is, however, hardly surprising that science took this path. It would be rather simplistic to say that all of this comes from Descartes, though his influence on the way in which animals are conceived within Western thought was by no means trivial in its impact. Within this framework exists the claim that humans have the right to dominate and control animals, both conceptually and physically. If the question of governance can be posed as “‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’”, then the answer to this question, or an analogous one, with regard to animals has often been silence; it has rarely been asked.1 Instead, total power was seized through the knowledge that was constructed of “the animal”. In the case of the traditional relationship built between humans and animals, it is quite clear that “power is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and that it only exists in action.”2 The violence done physically through this exercise of power is quite obvious, and it is linked to the conceptual claim to power. One may here consider, for example, the English word “ape”. The word, of course, refers to a certain grouping …show more content…
Physically, apes could be killed, tortured, captured, or otherwise dominated without any ethical concerns, and conceptually they were reduced to a kind of grotesque, at times even monstrous, being. This sort of process is hardly limited to the way humans have viewed and treated the beings called apes; the general term “beast” operates in a similar fashion on a broader scale, and the word “animal” itself is not infrequently used in a similar