First the writer to The Times, in April 1872, who called herself An Earnest Englishwoman. Lips are for speaking, and isn't speech our supreme distinguishing ability? The great philologist Max Müller was eloquent here, arguing against 'even so great a general' as Darwin: speech rendered evolution from apes 'impossible, or, at all events, unscientific'.īourke uses two brilliant indices. Eyes are 'mirrors of the soul', which most orthodox religious deny animals possess.

but nothing which truly approaches to human expression.' More than nomenclature is at stake. 'Dogs, in their expression of fondness', a feeling he did concede them, 'have a slight eversion of the lips. Look into a dog's eyes, said Swiss pastor Lavater, and you see the vast difference from yourself besides, the ears are floppy, sign of slavishness. Pre-eminent physiognomists, Johann Kaspar Lavater and Sir Charles Bell, would have denied Bobby a face. This last query was hardly without precedents. But how to place his and Bobby's? Surely the dog couldn't 'universalise from basic principles', and did he actually have a face? Recognition of the Other was for him the key to ethics, to which nothing was more important than the face-to-face encounter. 'Wasn't it remarkable that, at a time when millions of Homo sapiens were being classified as sub-human or even non-human,' Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, 'Bobby 'had no doubt that we were men'.' But as Joanna Bourke relates, Levinas, when writing up this experiences 30 years later, found himself in difficulties. But every morning and evening Bobby bounded forward to greet him delightedly.

Here the philosopher, a Lithuanian-born Jew, was one of 70 cruelly overworked slaves. Take Emmanuel Levinas's encounters with a dog called Bobby in the 1940s, in a camp near Hanover.

What it means to be human joanna bourke