"Is man an animal?

There is no definitive answer to the question of the difference between man and animal!

According to the theory of human evolution, the difference between them is rather qualitative, due to
man's higher degree of development, but a number of branches of science and centuries of human
experience believe that there are insurmountable barriers between man and animal.

Aristotle sees rationality as a crucial distinguishing feature of human beings, but nowhere does he
define the essence of what it means to be human in these terms. Using analytical reasoning, Aristotle
recognises that although we humans do not have innate ideas, we do have an innate ability to learn
from experience. The power of our reason is not based on the senses, but is part of human qualities
and nature. Therefore, it is the innate power of reason that distinguishes us from all other living
beings and places us at the top of the hierarchy in Aristotle's classification.

The moral difference between a puppy and a laptop may seem obvious to us, but it was not at all
obvious to the father of modern Western philosophy, René Descartes. Descartes thought that animals
were simply "mechanisms" or "automata" - essentially complex physical machines with no experience
- and that they were therefore the same sort of thing as less complex machines, like cuckoo clocks or
clocks. He believed this because he thought that thoughts and minds were properties of an
immaterial soul; thus humans only have subjective experience because they have immaterial souls
inherent in their physical bodies. But animals, Descartes argued, show no signs of being inhabited by
rational souls: they do not speak or philosophise, and so they lack souls and minds. In the end,
Descartes thought that animals were no different from cars or computers; they were mechanical
objects, not living beings.

Descartes argued that animals were essentially indistinguishable from machines, and that their
behaviour could be fully explained without recourse to concepts such as mind and self-
consciousness. Animals, in his view, were complex automatons, creatures that could respond to
external stimuli but lacked the capacity to know that such responses were occurring.

Descartes claims that animals cannot reason or feel pain. He believes that only humans are sentient,
have minds and souls, can learn, and have language, and therefore only humans deserve
compassion. That animals are unfeeling machines was a convenient belief in the years in which he
lived. According to this view, exploiting animals cannot be morally wrong because you cannot harm
machines.

Rousseau argued that the main difference between animals and humans was free will. Free will is the
decision of whether to listen to our urges. If humans didn't have free will, then we wouldn't be able to
make the progress we have today. There are other things that separate us from animals that include
cultivation, language, and reason. Science will never show the power of free will. As we develop new
intelligence, it increases our superiority over animals.

One of the defining characteristics of our age is the radical collapse of the human/animal distinction.
Both in the popular media and in the scientific literature, we are shown new evidence almost every
week that suggests that the barriers separating humans from animals are not as impenetrable as we
once thought. Behaviours and abilities thought to be unique among human beings are increasingly
found in different forms and to varying degrees among a large number of animal species.
Nevertheless, man remains the supreme being and nature's finest creation.