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We are animals but were are not beasts – Jean-Marie Meyer
Interviews with Patrice de Plunkett¹

A disaster! We want to give “rights” to animals, as Human rights! Why? Dealing with this issue, the authors, a philosopher and a journalist, deeply wonder about the difference between humans and animals. What they discovered upsets our ideas and raises the alarm for the future of our species. A corrosive book!

From La Fontaine to New Age
La Fontaine liked beasts, but he considered that the perfectible and admirable being was the human being. In New Age ideology, the admirable being was the animal. The truth is not in the human but in the nature. Today’s human beings are not supposed to share ideas but emotions and the sole field in which we talked about intelligence, is precisely in the studies who looks for detecting it in animals...

Does your dog talk to you, but you do not understand it?
A dialogue of the mute?

You are not deaf, it is the animal which is mute! Do not mix up communication and language. Man wants to let the others know, not only what he “felt” but also what he “understood”. To restrict you to react to an impression crying, it is not language, it is a reflex and it is close to the animal. The latter communicates with a signal, which triggers an action. The word used by the human being is a sign, including a meaning and turning to the transmission of knowledge.

Human intelligence acts by freeing from the affectivity and putting things at a distance. Thus, the word “bread” will carry on interesting the man after he eats. In other words, there are two different principles of representation and communication: the concept and the image. The concept opens the intelligence to the “being of the thing”, it is unique to man; the image comes from sensitive field, which triggers a representation and drive to act, it is the psyche of the animal. In short, human speech expresses the thinking, whereas the animal behaviour is a set of reactions of adaptation between an organism and its environment.

The animal and the beast
The animal is the animated being, endowed with soul. Among them, Aristote distinguished the “animals” endowed with speech from all others the “beasts”.

Animal instincts are not equivalent to human reason:
- reason is a control unit, based on logical processes and a free capacity to thinking. Man is a sensitive animal, capable of thinking, speech and concept,
- the beast is under the influence of its trends and of its response to the environment. It is a sensitive being deprived of reason.
Only man is capable of behaviours wrongly described as “bestial”. The man can use all his intelligence in nastiness. The animal cannot be cruel because it is human. To premeditate an act, to enjoy other’s pain, all the cruelty the man is capable has no equivalent in the beast.

The beast and the man
What raises problem today, it is not the beast but the man. He looses sight of his own originality. We have more and more difficulty to assume the human paradox: to be animals in this world but also other thing than matter.

Animal right?
Giving legal and politically recognised rights to animals questions the notion of Right, which is specific to man. It amounts to bring down the anthropocentrism which places man in the centre of the Creation. Thus, animal rights would kill Human Rights.

Hyper-ecology / biotechnology
The advocates of animal rights are ultra-ecologists sworn enemies of biotechnological industry but they share the same unsaid: they forget the face and the mystery of man. Human dignity is not anymore in the centre. We do not talk anymore about man, we talk about the “living” which is only a material. The hyper-technology assumes the right to manipulate the man; the hyper-ecology reduces the man in the “Whole World” of the Nature. These two trends missed out the originality of the human species; the human dignity is not anymore in the centre. Thus they forget the essential which is to distinguish between the preservation of a species and the respect of a person and this underlines, as if it would require it, the emergency of the philosophical vigilance.

1. Nous sommes des animaux mais on n’est pas des bêtes- Libres propos d’un philosophe sur les animaux et les hommes – Ed. Presses de la Renaissance – Avril 2007

Women’s liberation?
Today what do really women live? After the progress wanted by feminism and ratified by law, do French women experience a better life? Two women writers, described with difficulty as reactionary, present a disenchanted picture of the feminine condition and wonder about it¹. Women do not find their place in today’s society. They have enough to juggle with work and familial life, to suffer from diets, to be terrified by the wrinkles, to struggle against divorce and to be more and more beautiful, slimmer, with better professional results, good mothers and good wives. Why does a woman who succeeds in the professional field remain single? Why a woman, who married being in love, is five year later very close to divorce? Why abortion, claimed as a vested right after a hard fight, is actually experienced as a terrible test, a physical and moral pain indescribable because taboo? Abortion is the very example of the invisible straight-jacket which traps women in their so-called liberation: “A terrible gap exists between the law and the experience of its application”. “In fact, men are free from a child they do not want and the mothers fell guilty.” One of these women recognised that “I did not abort the foetus but I abort my feminine essence”.

Feminism developed Against
Feminism developed against man, against patriarchy, against the established order, but also against the feminine and thus against the deep nature of women. Feminism developed against man, while it took him as a model. And the powerful women took the place of men in several fields; after having claimed the divorce, they showed it was possible to bring up children alone, but what is the cost to do so? At the cost of themselves and at the cost of men who are excluded from the familial cell. This way the pornography on Internet flies to weak man’s assistance; there, he can find back the image of the ultra-powerful man…

For a new French woman
In conclusion, today’s woman passed the mark of the fight against man. Eliette Abecassis and Caroline Bongrand conclude: “even the apparently most powerful women told us: they give the impression to control everything, but they need man. To free woman from the invisible straight-jacket, the whole society has to be freed and thus the man, in other words to give him back his place”.

1. Le corset invisible – Manifeste pour une nouvelle femme française - Eliette Abecassis et Caroline Bongrand - Ed. Albin Michel - Mars 2007

The disrupted reproduction
Before, all seemed to be simple: reproduction was the result of sexuality and the foetus developed in the mysterious maternal womb. Breaking with age-old unknown and fatalism, today, foetal medicine allows knowing all the details about intrauterine period, detecting early development disorders and sometimes to remedy. The changes around reproduction make raise thousand medical, legal, ethical and social questions which require coherent choices. Faced with the new situations the foetus will experience, Doctor Roger Bessis, one of the pioneers of ultrasound and one of the influential figures of foetal medicine, emergently asks for a status to go beyond the opposition between thing and person.

Individualised foetus
The doctor can intervene on the foetus to care it, eliminate it or choose among others an embryo free from a given disease (preimplantation diagnosis). The foetus can also be the instrument of a project which does not concern it (when it does not generate its destruction), when it deals with using its cells or its organs in a therapeutic purpose for the benefit of another. Now it can be detached from its reference to sexuality of the parental couple or even from the maternal uterus. If it is impossible to predict the use our descendants will do with the artificial uterus or whether this one will disrupt effectively the relations between men and women, on the other hand the certainty of its appearance concretely questions the individualisation of the foetus.

A status for the foetus?
Between thing and person, Dr Bessis speaks in favour of a status of the foetus which would incite to search for alternatives to openly utilitarian conception techniques for the future (therapeutic cloning, “doctor” child, embryo bank…). According to Roger Bessis his clear distinction from the human person would allow resolving the non-sense of the penal inexistence of the foetus without questioning abortion.

About this issue, the author’s position is clear: the practice of an efficient foetal medicine is inseparable from the possibility of possibly interrupting pregnancy, until the day before birth for medical reason. Nevertheless, recognising a person status to the foetus would be considered as recognising it specific rights, possibly opposable to those of the mother, which would prohibit any abortion.
”It is time to get away from the double obscurantism of those who deny the evidence of the right to abortion in the name of the foetus and of those who deny the evidence of the foetus in the name of abortion”, concluded Roger Bessis.

1. Qui sommes-nous avant de naître ? - Dr Roger Bessis - Ed. Calmann-Lévy - Avril 2007