In this brief note, I wish to highlight Proclus’ unappreciated contribution to a well-documented debate in antiquity that continues to hold great contemporary interest: what psychological characteristics (such as deliberation, purposiveness, practical intelligence, but also emotions, memory and self-awareness), if any, distinguish humans from non-human animals?Footnote 1
In a fragment from his lost commentaryFootnote 2 on Plato's Phaedo, quoted by the Aristotelian commentator Elias (active in the sixth century a.d.), Proclus puts forward the idea that, although animal behaviour displays some signs of rationality, it lacks a feature that is specific to human rationality, namely self-awareness. The immediate context in Elias’ commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge concerns the nature of philosophy: he aims to show that the good of philosophy can be identified with the good for humans, rather than the good for some other creature, such as a dog or a horse.Footnote 3 Elias’ own view is that animals have memory but not recollection (In Isag. 2.6–10 Busse):
μόνος γὰρ τῶν ζῴων ἄνθρωπος ἀναμιμνήσκεται τῶν ἀλόγων μνήμην ἐχόντων μόνον, ὡς δηλοῖ ὁ κύων τοῦ Ὀδυσσέως ὁ Ἄργος φυλάξας τὴν μνήμην εἰς εἴκοσιν ἔτη. οὐ ταὐτὸν δὲ μνήμη καὶ ἀνάμνησις· μνήμη μὲν γάρ ἐστι μονὴ νοῦ, ἀνάμνησις δὲ ἀπολομένης μνήμης ἀνανέωσις. καὶ ἡμεῖς μὲν οὕτως.
Man alone among the animals has the power of recollection, while the irrational animals have only memory, as the example of Odysseus’ dog Argos shows, who kept the memory [of his master] for twenty years.Footnote 4 Memory and recollection are not the same: memory (μνήμη) is the remaining of intellect (μονὴ νοῦ),Footnote 5 and recollection (ἀνάμνησις) the renewal of lost memory (ἀπολομένης μνήμης ἀνανέωσις). This is our view.
The example of Odysseus’ dog serves to illustrate the point that animals can preserve their memories over an extended period of time.Footnote 6 Elias gives us no explanation how this example shows that animals cannot also recollect a memory that has in some way become ‘lost’, presumably in the sense that it cannot be recalled at will or in appropriate circumstances. Having set out his own view, Elias next explains an alternative view (In Isag. 2.10–25):
ὁ δὲ φιλόσοφος Πρόκλος βούλεται ἐν τοῖς εἰς Φαίδωνα ὑπομνήμασιν ἔχειν καὶ τὰ ἄλογα ἀνάμνησιν· ὑπερβαίνει γάρ, φησί, τὴν ἐκείνων ζωὴν τὸ ἀμετάπτωτον τῆς γνώσεως· τὸ γὰρ διὰ παντὸς μεμνῆσθαι [αὐτὰ]Footnote 7 καὶ μὴ ἐπιλανθάνεσθαι ὑπὲρ τὴν ἐκείνων φύσιν ἐστί· τοῖς γὰρ ἀνθρώποις κρείττοσιν οὖσιν οὐχ ὑπάρχει τοῦτο. ἐπιλανθάνεται δὲ καὶ τὰ ἄλογα· δεινοῖς γάρ ποτε περιπεσόντα αὖθις τοῖς αὐτοῖς περιπίπτει καὶ τὰ πρότερον σαίνοντα μετὰ χρόνον ὑλακτεῖ καὶ ἀγριαίνει πρὸς τούς ποτε συνήθεις. ὅθεν δῆλον ὅτι ἐπιλανθάνεται καὶ ἀναμιμνήσκεται.
ὅτι δὲ ἔχει ἀνάμνησιν, δῆλον κἀντεῦθεν ἐκ τοῦ μὴ ὁμοίως εἰς συνήθειαν ἄγεσθαι τῷ προοραθέντι καὶ τῷ πάντῃ ξένῳ· θᾶττον γὰρ ἐν συνηθείᾳ γίνεται τοῦ προοραθέντος, ὡς φυλάξανταFootnote 8 δῆλον ὅτι τύπον τινὰ καὶ δι’ αὐτοῦ λαβόνταFootnote 9 ἀφορμὴν ἀναμνήσεως. πλὴν εἰ καὶ ἐπὶ ἀμφοτέρων ἐστὶν ἀνάμνησις, ἀλλ’ οὖν διαφορά τίς ἐστιν· ἐπὶ μὲν γὰρ ἀνθρώπου σὺν τῇ ἀναμνήσει ἐστὶ καὶ τὸ συναισθάνεσθαι αὐτῆςFootnote 10 τῆς ἀναμνήσεως, ἐπὶ δὲ τῶν ἀλόγων οὐκ ἔστι τοῦτο· οὐδὲ γὰρ συναισθάνεται ἐκεῖνα ὅτι ἀνεμνήσθη· ὥσπερ γὰρ ἡ ὄψις ὁρᾷ μέν, οὐκ οἶδεν δὲ ὅτι ὁρᾷ, οὕτως καὶ ἐπ’ ἐκείνων ἐστίν.
But the philosopher Proclus maintains in his commentary on the Phaedo that the irrational animals also have recollection. For, he says, the unchanging nature of knowledge goes beyond the life of these natures, since remembering throughout and not forgetting is beyond the nature of these irrational animals—this is not possible [even] for men, who are better. But the irrational animals also forget. For despite having previously fallen into some danger, they fall into the same one again; and those that previously fawned after a lapse of time bark and become angry at those whom they were once used to. From which fact it is obvious that they forget and recollect.
That they have recollection is evident also from the fact that they are not brought into familiarity in the same way with someone they have seen before as with a complete stranger; for they are brought more swiftly into familiarity with someone they have seen before, so that it is evident that they have preserved some imprint and that through this imprint they have begun to recollect. Except that, even if recollection occurs with both [men and irrational animals], there is nevertheless a difference of sorts: for in the case of man, with recollection also comes the awareness of recollection itself, but in the case of irrational animals this is not the case, since these are not aware that they have recollected. For just as sight sees, but does not know that it sees, so it is with them too.
How much of this passage preserves Proclus’ ipsissima verba, and how much is Elias’ own explanation of the arguments he found in Proclus’ commentary? On a cautious method of attribution, only the sentence in which φησί immediately occurs has any claim to be a Proclean fragment, which would give us:
Proclus, In Phd. fr. 1: ὑπερβαίνει γὰρ τὴν ἐκείνων ζωὴν τὸ ἀμετάπτωτον τῆς γνώσεως· τὸ γὰρ διὰ παντὸς μεμνῆσθαι [αὐτὰ] καὶ μὴ ἐπιλανθάνεσθαι ὑπὲρ τὴν ἐκείνων φύσιν ἐστί.
The unchanging nature of knowledge transcends the life of the [irrational animals], since remembering throughout and not forgetting transcends their nature.
The γάρ-clause included in this fragment (τὸ γὰρ διὰ παντὸς μεμνῆσθαι καὶ μὴ ἐπιλανθάνεσθαι ὑπὲρ τὴν ἐκείνων φύσιν ἐστί) adduces a general consideration in support of the proposition introduced with ὑπερβαίνει (that knowledge transcends the nature of irrational animals); it may thus be plausibly thought of as part of Proclus’ original argument. Somewhat more dubious is the γάρ–clause immediately following this fragment (τοῖς γὰρ ἀνθρώποις κρείττοσιν οὖσιν οὐχ ὑπάρχει τοῦτο), which, in its naivety, looks more likely to be Elias’ own gloss. But whatever we think of this last clause, it is clear that the bulk of the passage from Elias must be considered as a testimonium, with two or three lines at most constituting a genuine fragment from Proclus. This should not discourage us, however, as there is no good reason to doubt the reliability of Elias’ testimony.Footnote 11
Some comments on the content of this passage are now in order. First of all, it is worth pointing out that Proclus’ claim that ‘the unchanging nature of knowledge’ transcends the life of irrational animals should be understood in the context of his theory of how intellect, as an ideal knower, possesses the forms. Continuous memory—which both Proclus and Elias view as properly attributable only to intellect, adopting the etymological fantasy that ‘memory’ derives from ‘the remaining of intellect’Footnote 12—transcends the nature of animals as well as humans, since it belongs to a reality in which neither of them, as embodied creatures, can fully participate. On this picture, intellect ‘remains’ within itself and possesses ‘memory’ in the sense that it is one with the objects of its thought and always self-thinking, such that nothing can escape its cognitive grasp at any time.
Recollection, on the other hand, implies the possibility of temporarily forgetting and then regaining knowledge of whatever is being recollected. As the above passage from Elias makes clear, Proclus distinguishes two forms of recollection: one (human) form, which involves self-awareness (τὸ συναισθάνεσθαι), and another, specific to animals, which does not.Footnote 13 Two questions are worth asking here: first, what kind of self-awareness is Proclus talking about, and second, how is it possible to recollect anything without having this kind of self-awareness? To begin with the first question, I take it that the relevant kind of self-awareness at stake is what might be termed introspective self-awareness.Footnote 14 This kind of self-awareness involves an awareness of one's own mental states. Plausibly, we might think that all metacognitive states (cognition about other cognitive states, including, for example, the recognition that I am right now recollecting who gave me that birthday present when I was four years old) include some level of introspective self-awareness: in order to have any attitudes towards or beliefs about my mental states, I need to have some awareness that they are my mental states in the first place, i.e. that I am the subject in whom they are occurring.
If this is the relevant sense of self-awareness, we should turn to our second question and ask how animals can recollect at all without being aware that they are recollecting. Without introspective self-awareness, any acts of recollection performed by animals (or anyone whatever) might seem indistinguishable from simply remembering or seeing something for the first time: if I am not aware of retrieving a previously forgotten memory, for example that the man with the curious gait is Smith, the proposition will enter into my mind either as something I already know (without any awareness that there has been an interval of forgetting), or as something that I have just learned. In other words, Proclus’ distinction between two forms of recollection, one self-aware and the other not, involves a serious problem, since only one half of the dichotomy (self-aware recollection) seems to involve genuine recollection at all. It is, for all that, a defensible distinction to make: while recollection without self-awareness may look paradoxical when we imagine it from the perspective of the one recollecting, from a third-person perspective the appearance of paradox dissolves. If we take Proclus’ example of the dog that after some interval of forgetting regains familiarity with a person previously known to it, we, as observers, can describe the episode as one of regaining previous knowledge, even though, from the dog's perspective, no such recollection takes place, only an act of learning something new.
But even if we can defend Proclus’ distinction between human and non-human recollection along the lines suggested here, we are faced with another question: Proclus appears to deny self-awareness to animals more generally; this much is suggested by the analogy between sight that does not know that it sees and animals, in the passage from Elias quoted above. What are his reasons? Clearly, one cannot without further argument use the supposed inability of animals to recollect as evidence for their lack of self-awareness as such: they may not be aware that they are recollecting, but they may still be aware that they are learning something new at a given moment. In other words, the denial of one metacognitive state cannot, without further argument, amount to the denial of all metacognitive states in animals.
I suggest that the reasons for Proclus’ denial of animal self-awareness are entirely metaphysical. In his Elements of Theology, Proclus argues that the capacity for self-knowledge that (rational) souls of human beings possess provides evidence for the stronger conclusion that human souls are able to enter into a special relationship with themselves and should hence be accorded a unique metaphysical status, namely that of entities capable of self-reversion, or of turning back on themselves.Footnote 15 If the denial of self-awareness in animals is set against this background, we can see that it forms part of a larger view of what constitutes distinctive human activities and how these activities can be metaphysically grounded.Footnote 16
Having said this, Proclus may well turn out to be wrong in his conclusion that animals do not have introspective self-awareness; we have here another case where a priori reasoning cannot act as a substitute for the detailed experimental work that is required to decide the issue.Footnote 17 Moreover, Proclus’ denial of self-awareness to animals risks conflating two capacities that should be treated as quite distinct. On the one hand, there is the kind of reflexive self-awareness which Proclus links with self-reversion, namely the ability to reflect on good or bad courses of action and to perfect oneself in the pursuit of knowledge. But this kind of self-awareness is surely to be distinguished from the perceptual self-awareness of an embodied creature, the kind of self-awareness that we may well share with other animals. Even if one accepts Proclus’ claim that the capacity for self-reversion belongs to rational non-animal souls alone, therefore, it does not follow that animals could not possess a lower kind of self-awareness involved in recollecting perceptual content. Animals may, for example, be able to form second-order perceptual judgements (‘I am aware of perceiving x’), without being able to form second-order evaluative judgements (‘I do not want to desire what I am now desiring’); and cases of ordinary recollection (as opposed to recollection of forms) can be thought to fall under the category of second-order perceptual judgements. However, despite these shortcomings, it is to Proclus’ credit to have identified a clear criterion, the presence or absence of which may help in deciding where to draw the boundary between human and non-human animals, if such a boundary is indeed to be drawn. The question what kind of self-awareness can or should be ascribed to animals is still one that occupies scientists and philosophers to this day. As an illustration of the striking modernity of Proclus’ view on the limited rationality of animals, I conclude with a passage from Immanuel Kant's Lectures on Metaphysics (28:276; trans. K. Ameriks, S. Naragon):
Animals are accordingly different from human souls not in degree but rather in species; for however much animal souls increase in their sensible faculties, consciousness of their self, inner sense, still cannot be attained thereby. Even though they have better phenomena in sensibility than we do, they still lack inner sense … The consciousness of one's self, the concept of the I, does not occur with such beings that have no inner sense; accordingly no non-rational animal can think: I am; from this follows the difference that beings that have such a concept of the I possess personality.
