The Thinking Animal

Erstes Buch:

Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft

 

My office computer, my email, my messenger service, the way we developed a method of communications over distances, the telecommunications network invented through electricity, electricity having been discovered almost by accident, not necessarily a required invention but useful nonetheless, sent to me, as I was sitting there upon an early after-noon, a message: that my boss, my immediate superior in our particular corporate hierarchy of human primates, wished to see me as soon as possible. I weighed making him wait for a while, to inconvenience him and thereby assert my individuality and to also put him off his balance of dominance, and I made him wait a while because hostility is a terrific show of counter-dominance. Once I felt I'd made my show, I got up, crossed the floor, past my superiors and my inferiors, and knocked on his glass door to signal my presence. He called: "Come in," and I entered his lair. Behind his head, hanging upon the wall, were his two certificates that indicated he had earned a reward, apparently at some cost, from two institutes of higher learning, framed and behind glass, and I thought of the two I had hidden away in my closet at home. The rest of the room contains a grey filing cabinet, a chair meant for the likes of me, a chair meant for the likes of him, and a brown wooden desk with a few knickknacks upon it and a framed photograph of an attractive woman, his bride and spouse, who was ostensibly known to me, for she worked in this same building, and my boss knew we knew one another, but it was hard for me to know at that moment how much he knew about the nature of our relationship‑‑and I believed, at that point in time, that he would never know.

"Lion," he said (for Steve Lion is my name): "a very sensitive matter has arisen in our department, and I wish to discuss it with you, but we can't do that in such an open space."

"We're going to form a temporary bond, are we, which we'll dissolve again when the time is right, is that it?"

The boss smiled. "That is the case, yes. I've booked a motel room for us to talk, down near the highway. Can you make it there tonight?"

"I think it would be good for my survival to attend, yes."

He laughed. "It's all about survival for you, isn't it?"

I spread my hands innocently. "What else is there?"

I went back to my cubicle, having received directions to the Super 8 motel. For a while I wondered what the meeting could concern. I methodically looked around the room in an attempt to spot what was making the boss suspicious, but I couldn't deduce anything. I had to think more deeply about it, and so I did, since I did not want to be caught, by surprise, in some trap, in a motel down near the highway. Using, of my right hand, three fingers and my thumb, with a stylus of sorts between them, I sketched out symbolic representations of all the males in contact with myself and my boss, precisely as our ancestors sketched hunted animals upon walls of caves, along with weak or strong lines between them representing subservience and dominance. I could come to no conclusion. If he wanted to parley with me, was it because he wanted my help dethroning his own superior? That seemed most likely; and perhaps I'd get a reward out of it, too: something flashy and appealing to women.

Hours later, I drove down to and parked at the Super 8 down by the highway. I asked the inferior at the desk (who was also, of course, superior to the night clerk) the way to my boss's room, and, having the number in hand, I went to the room, which was on the second level. I knocked, and was admitted.

I looked the room over. My boss appeared to have moved nothing nor used nothing. A desk sat there, empty, though ready to be used for anything from composing a list of nutrients to determining the order in which cities were to be destroyed by nuclear weapons. Really, the sky's the limit with tools, don't you agree?

I pointed at the desk and said: "An extension of man, is it not?"

My boss looked at it briefly and replied: "Yes, I suppose it is. A tool to be used."

I continued: "And how about this entire motel? A great big tool, useful for survival, but shared by many, and with many, many purposes."

"Yes," he replied. "It could even be used for rather seedy and illicit purposes."

"Frankly, I've never considered it that way." (Had I been invited there for some sexual perversion? I didn't think that likely, but it's safer for the mind to think ahead.)

"You haven't?" He seemed, in his pacing, to be trying to get around behind me, but I subtly moved to prevent that from being brought to fruition.

"No," I lied strategically. "I've often wondered, having seen such deeds in movies. Really, I don't know how people do it. How do you go to a motel for strictly reproductive purposes? Don't you get stopped on the way? Don't motels have, in an instinct of self-preservation, a code they must follow? In any case, I don't know how it's done."

My boss tilted his head like a curious dog might. Then he laughed. "There must have been some kind of mistake, then!"

"Mistake in what? I believe mistakes happen, but only as a last resort do I believe they happened."

"You see," and here he uplifted and dropped onto the aforementioned functional desk-tool his briefcase. He snapped it open and pulled out some sheets of paper: "Here I have three transaction records from the Biltmore Hotel downtown, three 'short-stay' occupancies, dated in the last half-year, and do you see the name that's on them all?"

I was being trapped, and I saw no easy way out. My survival was at stake. Nonetheless, I flatly read: "Steve Lion."

"I believe that's your name, correct?"

"Yes, it belongs to me, and to others, I suppose."

He pulled out a few more sheets, thicker sheets this time, and showed me the top. It was a photograph of myself. "This is a photograph of the Steve Lion who was at the Biltmore Hotel on those three occasions."

I had no excuses or explanations. A meek demeanour was the only strategic position I could put myself in. No clever quips could get me out of this one. I could only be aggressive. "Your point being, dammit?"

He raised a finger and looked over at a digital clock on the bedside table. It read 7:29. Motels as tools also offer morning wake-up calls, and always telephones. They are very well-designed tools. He offered another picture: this one was of myself, on the same date, on a date I recalled, some two weeks earlier, but this time I had my arm around a woman. I felt then that I had to make a declaration to end the suspense, but before I could say a word, there came a knock on the door, and my boss called out: "Come in," and in came the woman who was in both the photograph in my hand, and in the photograph that lay upon my boss's desk. She looked at her husband, and then she looked at me.

Her name happened to be Emily. I never enquired as to the origin of that name. Linguistically, I knew it to have a French origin, though perhaps it had been adopted to the French from some other language. People have had names forever. Sometimes the names are given to them long after birth, as a sort of nickname or pet name or from some such other source. It's quite obvious that names arose some time after the mastery of the tool called speech, when primitive peoples naturally found it was useful to treat other people as specialized tools with some dignity. So there stood Emily, looking first at her husband, and then at her illicit lover.

 

 

Zweites Buch:

Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift

 

The question that lay heavily on the room was a simple one, and I felt I could answer it best, in the most plain and reasonable way. There was no need for violence; the explanation was not complex.

I said: "Sit down, boss. I can explain everything."

He sat down on the bed. His face was flush with curiosity and excitement. I knew he would be able to understand. So, I began.

"This affair hasn't been going on for terribly long. Only about a year. Has it been a year? Yes, it's been a year. You were instrumental in getting it going, you know. You decided to allow a fire drill to be held on such-and-such a date, and we all had to leave the building, because you're the boss there and what you say goes."

"Yes, I am the boss," he said, following along nicely.

I looked over at her. "That's how we got thrown together, out there on the sidewalk during that fire drill. I doubt I would have noticed her otherwise. You were off managing the drill, of course, and so with little else to do, we got to talking; and that's when I noticed her, as if for the first time. I'd seen her around, of course, and I'd taken my measurement of her, but I didn't think she was worthwhile at the time. However, my opinion changed when we were out on the sidewalk. I saw at that moment that attempting to impregnate this woman, your wife, would be a worthwhile project. I didn't think of it in precisely those terms, of course: it was only after giving our relationship some thought did I understood what I was doing."

She interrupted, saying: This is all rather insulting, are you serious?"

I waved away the objection. "It's not insulting; it's realistic. Is it my fault that the human female is perpetually in heat? I didn't make the world, and I can't re-shape it at will. It is what it is, and women's bodies are made to bear children, as many as possible. I'm not making anything up. So, I made some clever suggestions, suggestive suggestions, and ... I could go into physical detail, about the ballooning of the uterus and so on, and the engorgement of the penis and so on, and about the various glandular secretions that ensue, and about‑‑"

My boss said: "I don't think you have to go on."

"Very well! In the end, it was natural and normal for me to take her, despite you being my boss and all. Notice, certainly, that we are in a competition for females. It has ever been thus between males. Civilization is the sublimation of these hostilities. Whole cities depend on male competition for access to ova."

She interrupted again. "Why is this the first time I've heard this garbage come out of your mouth?"

"That's quite simple." I looked out the window. There were no police cars in view. "It would have ruined my chances to give the game away. Anyway, you don't have to be coy about any of it; you know all of it already."

"I didn't know any of it."

I laughed. "Oh yes you did. You're playing charmingly innocent."

"Okay, I suppose I knew some of it, but no very much of it. Not all of it."

"You knew enough. You've been around; I know it, I've seen it, I've felt it. You got your charms, and you sure know how to use 'em! You wanted me to impregnate you, deep down it's obvious. You must have thought I'd be a better father than this guy here."

My boss said: "Why am I on the defensive here? I got you, in the act of adultery."

I made a noise through my teeth. "Those morals aren't of any use any more. We've gotten rid of that ghost-ridden priest-ridden country, and there's no way we're going back to those superstitions, not on your life."

My lover said: "I think this is all a bit much. You leave now, and I'm going to make up with my husband."

I laughed. Loudly. "You think that will work? After all we've been through? That's not going to happen. Something entirely else is going to happen here." I strolled over to the bathroom to see what was in it. I saw a few useful tools in there, ready-for-use. "This is going to be a battle to the death; and the winner gets the woman's eggs."

My boss said: "I never knew you were so insane. A little insane, but not like this."

"There's no insanity to me at all. I'm clear-headed all right. What are we going to do, flip a coin instead? Rock-paper-scissors? None of that would do. We're perfectly alone here. This room will work well as a cage of death."

My boss looked to be trying to come up with a way out of it, the cowardly loser. I was absolutely dominant; I could have let him get away if he promised to give me his position at work and his position in bed, but I don't like unfinished matters at all, and I knew he'd come back to haunt me. (Not as a ghost, of course; ghosts don't exist, and they never did; it was all a pre-enlightenment fantasy.) I had to follow through on the logic of what I had started. I could have compromised with him. I could have threatened him, and set him free, with a warning. However, none of those solutions seemed satisfying.

I started pulling apart the bed and tearing the sheets to make ropes. My boss said: "What are you going to do? You going to tie me up and leave me to die?"

"Someone will find you by tomorrow, stop being such a wuss. Come on, let's get this over with."

My lover simply watched as I took her husband and tied tightly him to the bed. I noticed this, and asked: "Are you wondering why he's not resisting?"

She said: "The thought's been going through my head."

"It's because I'm the dominant male right now, and he's hoping for a break."

"I see. Where'd you get all this stuff from?"

"Science. Biology. History. Philosophy. The usual suspects." By this time, I had my boss tied securely to the bed. "Okay, he's tied up now," I said. "Are you comfy?"

He said: "Not too bad. I don't feel humiliated at all."

"That's good. There's nothing to be humiliated about. You're merely dominated. Plenty of people are dominated, but they maintain dignity. I'm very glad you still have your dignity, yes, sir. Never give up your dignity. Be dignified."

Reader, the events I have told you about startled me. I hadn't planned on things going quite the way the happened, but all the events seemed perfectly natural and normal to me. I said to him: "You'll be okay. All this is going to over quite soon, don't you worry."

The woman said: "I think I should be going now. I don't want to see any more."

I turned to her as I stood up from my efforts. "This book is almost over, don't worry. Soon we'll be going to a place a distance away. You know, it's almost perfect. No-one knows the two of us were ever here, after all. We're going to be free as birds. You didn't drive here, did you?"

"Actually, no. It was just a bus."

It was a perfect situation. My car was outside, and all was well. "Time to tie up some loose ends." I went into the bathroom, unwrapped one of the glasses, quietly smashed it in the sink, and wrapped a towel around the sh arpest shard I could find.

Some five minutes later, we were out the door. Everything had happened quite quietly. Off we drove, to my mountain castle ... which was actually a cottage beside a nice lake.

 

 

Drittes Buch:

Götzen-Dämmerung, oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert

 

 

A few hours before the police arrived, when we got word they were in their way, I fled into the forest as quickly as I could. I didn't have time to pack anything, but I had been studying up on all aspects of survivalism. I knew how to hunt, and kill, and skin, and cook; carpentry had taken some of my time, but it wasn't really that difficult; electricity, now, electricity: that was the most complicated. I remember building my first solar cell: it was little more than a tube with a tiny turbine attached. Every once in a while, I'd take it down off its shelf simply to admire in ingenuity. In any case, I didn't have time to take anything with me except for the clothes on my back and a knapsack with two blankets inside it. I bade my bride farewell and told her we're probably meet again some day.

Before I turn to explain what had happened in the intervening weeks, I want to pose this question: what did I know at that precise moment? Knowledge is a relative thing, of course, so I consoled myself with: I know more than the snakes and the bears and the wolves I'm likely to come into contact with. Surely I could keep them off, keep them away, perhaps even kill them and eat them. I was the only tool-maker and tool-user in those woods. I was the only human, and I had cleverness, and the ability to plan far in advance. My ancestors had passed down to me their wisdom, sometimes in writing, sometimes through culture. The animals I would face, I believed, didn't even come close to narrowing this knowledge-gap. A porpoise might have been a match for me, but I didn't expect to run into any porpoises.

After a while I realized that I didn't have to actually run. I slowed down, keeping my directions by the leanings of the sun. I didn't know who was going to win the battle to be the top dog, but I sure as hell wasn't going to give up or surrender.

Until I gave up and surrendered.

The woman and I fled the city, as you read in the second book, to go to a cottage by a lake. The cottage had belonged to my parents, but they only in the habit of going there twice a year, so I figured I could stay for some amount of time before they showed up out of the blue. The woman and I made ourselves at home, and we started making plans for the future. I didn't think I would ever get in trouble for the murder; I thought they'd never figure out everything there was to figure out. They were just cops, after all, and how clever are cops?

We'd sit out on the porch and watch the lake change its form and its colour. She forgave me for the murder after a while, which was probably the wisest thing she'd ever done. Not that I would have harmed her‑‑she had all the eggs, after all‑‑but I may not have been as pleasant as I was determined to be. We'd sit, and we'd talk like everything was normal (which it was).

"You see, nature," I would say, "requires masters. Time requires masters too, and so does space."

"So, you're master of nature, and time, and space."

"Yes, you're starting to get the picture. Everyone knows these basic fundamentals of existence, but they're too nervous to admit it's the case."

After she spent some time looking out upon the waters, she said: "I don't recall who made you king."

I laughed at her exquisite wit. "It's not something bestowed upon you, honeybun. It's something you fee, and defend, and believe in. Back in my systems analysis days‑‑"

"Ah yes, those days."

"‑‑Back when I was analysing systems, it seemed to me that I could see a problem and a solution to that problem much more quickly that anyone else. It was uncanny. For instance, I had a problem involving the standardization of disparate customer service requests. I had to order them in terms of four factors. However, when you have four factors, how do you decide the order of the factors? What I mean to say is: let's take the number one hundred and twenty-five. Now, that's two times three times four times five. But this is the problem: what's the proper order? Does five come first? Does it come last? That was the kind of problem I had to solve on a day-to-day basis."

"That's a hundred and twenty, actually."

"Hmm?"

"Two times three times four times five is one hundred and twenty."

"Very well, very well, but you get my point, don't you? Those are the kinds of solutions I have to come up with, and I come up with them better than anyone else."

"What about Michaels?"

"Who?"

"Michaels. My husband said once that Michaels was twice the problem-solver you are."

"Ah, but I have killed your husband, and therefore I am superior to him!"

"I guess so."

I looked over our territory. "This is pretty good, isn't it? I mean, I didn't earn it or anything."

"No. It was more-or-less given to you, huh?"

"I suppose I didn't do that much towards its upkeep."

"Probably nothing, wouldn't it be?"

"Yes, almost clearly nothing."

After I'd decided to stop running from the police, out there in the woods, among the plan of creation made for you and me, I remembered that after our conversation she went out for a walk by herself. I almost never let her do that, but I felt that since she had been so receptive and appreciative of our conversation and myself, the rule deserved to be bent. So off she went, and I think something happened when she was away. I couldn't prove anything, and my lawyers wouldn't tell me either. Maybe it happened that way, and maybe it didn't. Oh, who am I kidding. Of course it happened that way.

I started to get hungry after a couple days. I had no idea where I was, out there in the woods, because there was no map for where I was. Why would there be? There was absolutely nothing out there but hills and swamps. However, I still felt I was the cock-of-the-walk, ready for anything, at least on those first few days. After that, I started to get uncharacteristically afraid. I think I ate some bad mushrooms, too, and I didn't manage to catch even the smallest frog. I knew I was still better than nature; and I would have been able to show my stuff if only I'd remembered to bring a tool or two of sorts. That was the mistake I committed: I hadn't brought the right things with me. Since I don't believe in the gods, I don't think they were tying to punish me. It couldn't have been like that. I simply made a mistake, and that was that and nothing else.

I found a road, and I staggered along the road. I was hungry. I came to a gas station. They knew me by name. "Ah, the fugitive!" I sat in the office, waiting for the police to show up. I'd been licked. I was clearly just another dog, and I was showing my throat to the higher dogs. Still, it all made sense to me: I'd gone as far up the chain as I could go. That didn't mean my wheels weren't spinning in an attempt to find a way out or a way up. The game wasn't over by a long shot.

The police arrived to collar me. I submitted, whimpering, to being led away and put in their wagon.

"You survived out there for quite some time," said one of my catchers.

I replied: "I gave it my best. I should have brought more tools with me. Extensions of man, you know."

 

Viertes Buch:

Nietzsche contra Wagner

 

They only had me in their little jail for a night; even so, they gave me clothes that weren't all torn and dirty. The place had but two cells, and I was alone. In the morning, within twenty-four hours, I got formally charged.

I asked the judge: "You seem important around here. But: am I your biggest catch?"

He hesitated to answer. (You don't get anywhere by being entirely honest.) Then he said: "One of the bigger fish, yes, that you are."

I was disappointed by his answer. I wasn't a fish! I was a dog! In any case, I told him: "It's people like me who got you where you are."

He snorted. "Take him away."

So, a couple cops put me in a car and away we went, back to the big city, and a bigger jail. I could foresee my fate: the woman would testify against me, and I would be executed. It interested me. I asked the cops: "How do you people execute people like me around here?"

Slowly the passenger-side cop: "We use a gas chamber."

"Don't I have a choice?"

"You won't have a choice."

"I'd rather be hanged."

"Nope."

"Guillotine would be nice."

"We don't have any of those around here."

"Could you get me one?"

"Nope. Just gas. Sweet, sweet gas."

I knew I had to drop the subject. The miles rolled by, and I was the centre of attention on that highway, or at least the police car was‑‑but the police car wouldn't have been there if not for me. Am I right, or am I right? All eyes were focussed upon me, if only for a brief and shiny black-and-white moment.

A prison is a fascinating tool, don't you agree? The animals at the top of the pyramid can put the animals slightly lower in the pyramid into them, and security of position is established. Though the idea has recently been perverted into the purest sadism, in its origin it was a tool of mercy. I could kill, or imprison. I'll spare you, with prison. Staring at those bars, I knew I was being taken seriously. I may not have come out on top, but I was certainly up there. I was a threat to slightly better beasts.

I told the other inmates what I had done, proudly done and proudly recalled. I could sense their envy of my will to do what I had done. Of course, in the history of the world many had done more than myself on their own particular ladders, but the days of such heroism were mostly well in the past. They'd shake their heads in a clear kind of wonder, and nervously laugh. I became their most noble soul, me among the felons, and I always held my head high. You've surely heard about the rewards of prison? I'm here to tell you: it's no myth.

As the date of my trial grew near, I grew dissatisfied with my paid-for attorneys. They were such blockheads! They couldn't see my reasoning, or they tried to explain it away with dime-store psychology. I kept telling them my mind was clear, and I went to far as to explain to them how their motivations were not at all far from mine. But would they listen? I'm telling you, dealing with intellectual inferiors was really getting my goat! I had no choice but to hire the only person I really trusted, and that was my brother Fizzy.

Fizzy had street smarts to spare; he'd gone to graduate school back in the day, and he'd gotten the degree. He worked tirelessly on my behalf, filing papers when he had time and so on. He was the first person at my trial to shout: "I object!" and it wasn't just to hear the sound of his own voice.

Yes, the trial. Aside from some so-called 'mountain' of physical evidence‑‑you know, fingerprints and DNA and CCTV and so on‑‑my woman testified against me. She was the only 'eyewitness' as they call it in matters like these. That she would wilfully try to ruin me in this way goes pretty far into why ... um ... I've forgotten what I was saying.

Oh, right, it's because it's all about reproduction. (How could I have forgotten?) You want to have women, lots and lots of women, and genetics etc. backs up this argument, in many books and in many languages.

She testified. She answered the prosecution's questions, and they were questions about everything, since the prosecutor was trying to show the jury the nature of our 'love affair,' as he called it, and no matter how often Fizzy objected, he got overruled ever time. None of it seemed especially fair to me, but it was what it was.

Our turn came up, and I went onto the stand, where I proved to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how right I had been to murder my boss; I wanted to hand out annotations in case they wanted to look them up themselves, but that wasn't allowed. I had to hope they simply believed me. (O, I also hope they went home and looked it all up themselves, just to see how wrong they were in the end!)

Then‑‑can you believe it?‑‑the prosecutors got to cross-examine me! How against justice is that, I ask you? In their cheap suits and pantsuits, they kept me up there on the stand so long I had to resort to shouting and screaming and lathering up about the mouth. I kept my wits about me, though: I didn't convince a single one about the natural injustice that was being done to me, but I hope they lost some sleep over it.

The day of my execution came. I considered snarling all the way to the gas chamber; I considered begging and pleading; I considered trying to bribe all and sundry, including the priest; instead, I recognized my position for what it had become: I was the omega dog who'd tried and failed to get to the top of the pack. The herd had to be winnowed of its useless members, and, for that one day at least, I was the useless member. Resources are limited, and the genome must march into the future no matter the phenotypes destroyed, I think I got that right, and 'adieu!' must be said from time to time; and so I was to be put to sleep. All information said it would be entirely painless. I would be put to sleep, that was all. I would not be waking up, that was the only difference. I've always liked sleeping, wherever I could, and so I resigned myself to the facts in my case. I had failed in life, and I had no place to go but to the fireplace rug, and there I could sleep, chasing pussycats all night and day.

Though I told them it wasn't at all necessary, they chained me to a chair. One of them said: "Breathe deeply, and all your troubles will end the sooner."

I told him: "I've had no troubles. This isn't any trouble. I think you're the one who's troubled."

He nodded. "You got me there."

They went through a thick door, and I saw no more of them. Soon, the air filled with a sugary scent. I did as I'd been told, who's a good boy, and my eyes grew heavy and I started to imagine things. I couldn't shake myself awake. It was like I was already dreaming. I waited to become nothing, with no more illusions of consciousness, and no more fancy thinking among the thinking animals. I was soon fast asleep.

Nothing turned out like I thought it would, there in that sleep. I didn't dissolve into a void, no; rather, I became with my friends again. The woman was there too, and my boss, and my brother, and my judge even. It was the happy hunting ground once again, and we played in the fields all day long, and it all went on, forever, and forever.