C. Boesch writes that “wild chimpanzees seem to use drumming on buttressed trees to convey information and changes of travel direction.”(*) From this we may infer that at least some animals have symbolic language, i.e. an abstract and agreed-upon type of language. Conversely, iconicity (in terms of the mimicry of visual, sound, and olfactive forms, like in the case of the hummingbird’s curved beak which mimics the flower’s stalk, the brown thornbill’s cries which mimic those of other birds, and the orchid’s fabrication of a smell that resembles that of a female wasp) and indexicality (e.g. inference of the presence of a predator from the sound of its footsteps, or of rain from the increase of humidity in the air) are as widespread among animals, and possibly too plants, as they are extended among us.
Moreover, we know that all organisms on earth – from bacteria to big mammals – have their own “lived worlds” with their corresponding existential landscapes. The tick’s gravitates around what we call thermoception. The dolphin’s, around what we call echolocation, among other things.
Hence it is tempting to concede that all organisms have worlds different from the human worlds (which needless to say are many and different from one another). In a way they do. Still, it is obvious that calling a dolphin’s world and a tick’s world “worlds” amounts to give them an exclusively-human designation. For “world” – as Kant said – is an “idea” of our reason that brings unity to the otherwise unsynthesised plurality of everything we perceive; and there is simply no warrant that dolphins, ticks, leopards or hummingbirds have ever produced the idea of “world,” or any idea similar to or different from it for that matter.
Very likely – to go back to our initial example – neither the tick nor the dolphin would describe their worlds as “worlds.” They would probably describe them as “3w4; iojxwel ;k” and “≦a∌ℸx;p oOP;I.” In fact not even like this, as dolphins and ticks are not known to make use of any symbolic language, and thus do not describe things. So the more we can say, in the end, is that, seen from their own ticklish- and dolphinish perspectives – which are as fascinating as they are, for us, inconceivable – the dolphin’s and tick’s worlds are more sort of a “…” and a “…” than what we properly designate as a “world.”
This, of course, does not make them less than us: it just makes us different from them.
In different forms, Herder and Leroi-Gourhan point to the plausible reasons of that human “difference” – calling it “exceptionalism” would be a mistake, as hummingbirds, leopards, ticks and dolphins are exceptional in their own ways:
1) Bipedalism brought the freeing of what we call our hands and, as a consequence, a high degree of un-specialisation that explains our paradoxical non-adaptiveness (we do not adapt to the environment as quickly and easily as a leopard does to its environment) and ultra-adaptiveness (we can, and often succeed in, adapting ourselves to whatever environmental conditions: tropical forest, desert, high mountains, ice lands, etc.) at the same time.
2) The amount of external sensations we thus suddenly opened ourselves to perceive, especially by means of our sight, demanded from us a way to bring order into an otherwise confusing picture. And language thereby helped us to distinguish this from that in an elsewhere-unmatched sophisticated manner.
This is why what Lévi-Strauss famously called “savage thought” – i.e. human thought in its pure essence, free from any ornaments – consists in classifying, that is to say, in making sense of such and such. Even of what is useless: the waves of the distant sea which distract for a second the attention of the hunter that awaits with his blowgun behind the bush for the spotted leopard to appear, or the dragon-like form of a fallen tree trunk in the forest…
(*) C. Boesch, “Symbolic Communication in Wild Chimpanzees?,” Human Evolution, vol. 6, no. 1 (1991): 81-90.
“The Dragon.” Photograph by Polymorph