Svoboda a neklid zvířecího života – Burgatová Florence (2019)

The phenomenology of animality, whose foundations are presented in the book by Florence Burgat, does not seek ethical solutions regarding the status of animals in Western society. The aim of the book 'Freedom and the Restlessness of Animal Life' is to analyze the ways in which the heirs of Cartesian thought approached animal life, to free themselves from perceiving the animal as the opposite of humanity, and to lay the groundwork for a true ontology of animality. Therefore, Florence Burgat returns to authors such as Hegel, Uexküll, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Jonas, and Merleau-Ponty, for whom the animal is one who ascribes its own meaning to its environment and behavior independently of humans. Neither vital force nor the conception of the organism as a machine endowed with consciousness can capture the true significance of behavior, which is the highest manifestation of life and its freedom. The effort to maintain the current position of humans as living beings that have transcended the stage of animality, conditioned by the need to preserve a special moral status for humans, also represents an unintended return to metaphysics. What happens when we stop understanding life according to physical laws and evaluating it based on anthropological and cognitive criteria, and instead notice the dynamics inherent to it?