Eduardo Mendieta’s rich and important new work, The Philosophical Animal, opens with a puzzle. “Humans,” he writes, “are philosophical animals” that “ask questions about their nature, their being … their very animality. We are the animal that is despondent at its animality” (1). From this starting point, this book poses the politics of the relation between the human and the animal as our overwhelming ethical problem today. That is—to turn it around—our ethical relation to the animal is one of our most urgent political problems today. In a time of accelerating climate and extinction crisis, it is now a key issue for the study and the theory of politics.Footnote ¹

Consider the bizarre political and ecological impasse in which we find ourselves. The US administration is dismantling government-funded climate science, monitoring, and emergency response to disasters just as ever-worsening fires, floods, and storms cause hundreds of billions of dollars in destruction annually. Trump’s fossil-fuel-funded attack on ecology in turn is paired with attacks on diversity, equity, social security, and non-white immigration. The Brazilian Congress passed a bill that will weaken environmental safeguards in the Amazon just as it approaches a “tipping point” in which its tropical forest could be lost, with irreversible impacts on the earth’s climatic stability. Meanwhile environmental defenders are murdered in the hundreds every year, and the war in Ukraine has brought charges of both crimes against humanity and ecocide. Outrages against people, non-human animals, and planet seem increasingly coincident and connected.

Mendieta speaks to this moment, and many more. Chapters range across the work of Coetzee, Adorno, Heidegger, Habermas, Haraway, Derrida, Benjamin, and Oliver, and thus are never far from the horrendous human rights abuses of the twenty-first century, the industrial killing of animals, the anxieties of the Anthropocene, and our place in the cosmos.

If there is a core moral question in the book, it is: how should the human and the animal be valued? In Chapter 7, Mendieta quotes Theodor Adorno criticizing Kant’s moral philosophy for imagining human “ethical dignity” as “a demarcation of differences” that is “directed against animals. Implicitly it excludes man from nature, so that his humanity threatens to revert incessantly to the inhuman” (160). A humanist might at this point feel a sense of weightlessness as the ontological foundations of liberal human rights begin to shake. But Mendieta is in good company here. In their Animal Crisis Alice Crary and Lori Gruen show how disdainful of the worlds and capabilities of animals human rights founders like Jacques Maritain—who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—were.Footnote ² Such hierarchies were then embedded structurally in international law: in The Ecology Politic, Stefanie Fishel and I lament the way that an extractivist national right to plunder nature—“permanent sovereignty over natural resources”—is embedded in the major human rights conventions as a common article.Footnote ³

Here Mendieta addresses the problematic of dehumanization, which has too often taken place by animalizing others as if that made them less than human and unworthy of voice, empathy, and rights. From antebellum slavery to Belsen, Sarajevo, Baghdad, Rakhine state, and Gaza, dehumanizing rhetorics and beliefs rely on the denigration of both our own and the other’s animal being. A humanism that relies on such a hierarchy cannot hold, Mendieta explains, but this does not mean humanism cannot be recovered as an ethical project. In what emerges as a major argumentative thread uniting the book, he looks to a project that “establishes properly the correctly lived life, a life or form of living that looks to the other, as other, and sees in it a challenge to our hitherto narrowly conceived humanity” (166).

This thread winds around another through the book: a wide-ranging challenge to philosophical justifications for the exclusion of the animal from politics and the project of being. In Chapter 8 this critique flows into a new vision of an “interspecies cosmopolitanism” that steps off from Anna Tsing’s insight that “human nature is an interspecies relationship.” Rather than “a cosmopolitanism of the being-alone of humans,” he imagines “an ethics of cohabitation”; a life lived among “the messy world of companion species” that “acknowledges the becoming with of human and animal others” (179).

The Philosophical Animal carries out a relentless critique of human exceptionalism and superiority, and it may well be one of the more important philosophical works to do so. However (like most posthumanism) its ethics is weakly anthropocentric, and it foregrounds the human as an unfinished project: “We can’t ascend to our enlightenment without our companion species; their well-being is our well-being … We need animal philosophy that is at the height of this ascent, in which we neither blind nor silence those with whom we have to accomplish our humanity” (21).

Suddenly, we are back in the project of enlightenment, which has long been in decline. The Anthropocene shows that humanity has failed to manage its own powers and control the impacts of capitalism; it has bought its modernity and its “enlightenment” at the expense of the earth and too many people. Nor do the “companion species” that Mendieta and Haraway speak of extend to the planetary scale of the biosphere, which includes myriad plant, animal, and microbe species and forms the most crucial and critically endangered part of the earth system.

In my own version of “interspecies cosmopolitanism”—published in 2022 when I was unaware of Mendieta’s early handbook draft of his vision—I also sought to rethink cosmopolitanism based on our relations with the non-human animal, but argued for an earth-bound ontology that valorizes the more-than-human along with and prior to the human.Footnote ⁴ The human has value by virtue of what it shares with the rest of life, which represents its evolutionary inheritance and its basis for survival. The earth matters simply by existing. The grave imbalance of power between humans and non-humans also “suggests that we need more than an ethics that emphasizes interconnection alone, because we cannot trust that translations across systems and worlds will not carry an enormous burden of damage, violence, and exploitation until those systems undergo radical change.”Footnote ⁵

This matters politically when we connect the dreadful rates of global deforestation to the inability of most states to acknowledge the rights of nature and the biosphere in national and international law. Even the human right to a healthy environment—ethically analogous to Mendieta’s posthumanism—has had limited recognition in a General Assembly resolution and international court opinions, but remains unprotected by statute.Footnote ⁶

My point is not that one of us is right or wrong, but that the difference matters. Philosophically, the book represents a compelling (and novel) intersection between posthumanism and the older phenomenological tradition that puzzled over the meaning of being. Our dominant modes of being surely have to change, and there may be many political situations in which an appeal to a better human nature is the right anchor. But we also need to find vantage points outside the human that center the earth. The political challenges of governing a planet hovering at numerous “tipping points” suggest that the earth itself is the form of being we should be most concerned by.Footnote ⁷ It is a being our species is utterly and ever more dangerously bound up with.