Different Beasts : Humans and Animals in Spinoza and the Zhuangzi

Different Beasts explores conceptions of animality and humanity as they emerge in the writings of Spinoza and in the ancient Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi. The project thus brings together works from distant and different pasts to bear on debates regarding the human-animal binary in its many constructions. It also investigates what is at stake in the formation of responsible comparison--one that is contextually grounded and refined in detail--to understand how the complex machinery behind the human-animal binary operates in different philosophical systems.

Different Beasts studies conceptions of human and animal identity as articulated in the ancient Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi and in the works of the seventeenth-century European philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. By examining how, in these very different philosophies, notions of humanness and animality intersect with ideas about human unity and solidarity, social order, and social difference categories (such as gender, descent, and ability), Different Beasts opens new paths for understanding Spinoza and the Zhuangzi while also developing methodological insights into the practice of cross-cultural comparative philosophy. Different Beasts critically engages with a long tradition of reading Spinoza together with Asian “wisdom literatures” and especially with canonical Chinese texts. Interpretations of these works, which are outside the mainstream philosophical canon (defined from a certain Euro-American perspective), often see them as premised on a harmonious view of the world, free of tensions between humans and the nonhuman world. Different Beasts adds to the literature of animality and to the practice of turning one''s attention toward “non-canonical” philosophical texts to seek new understandings. However, it argues that the transformative potential of studying these texts does not lie in their allegedly harmonious view of the world but in the variety of ways they exhibit humans'' uniqueness, foolishness, or superiority, which can help us further understand our own often contradictory investments in the human-animal binary.