Every Breath You Take

Grice was fascinated by plants breathing. Excrete, digest, breath, are the 'mandatory' functions of life. "Cotch and potch", to know and perceive, are human abilities. Only.

breath, Gk. 'psuche', anima --

1864 H. SPENCER Princ. Biol. §73

"A zoological individual is
constituted either by any such single
animal as a mammal or bird,
which may properly claim the title of a

zoon,

or by any such group of animals as the numerous
Medusæ that have been developed from the same egg,
which are to be severally distinguished as zooids."



The first _sense_, Liddell/Scott gives as, uninformatively, for 'zoion'


"animal"

and provide some philosophical cites -- the oldest cite they give is
non-philosophical Hdt. --:

(indeed Liddell/Scott note:


the word is post-Hom., no generic word used for
animal being found till after the middle of the fifth
cent. B.C.


[cfr. 'ought' -- is that post-Hom., too? J. L. S.]

Ar.V.551, Pl. 443, etc.;
pan ho ti per an metaschêi tou zên zôion an legoito
Pl.Ti.77b ; zôia, opp. phuta, Id.Phd.70d, 110e, etc.; z. thalattion,
chersaion, Phld. Rh.1.98S.;


Then there's what Liddell/Scott has as "contemptuously" -- an 'implicatural'
factor if ever there was one, and it's up to the classicist, I guess, to
find out whose voice is it that it's reported (treating a beggar as an animal
does not sound very Socratic to _me_):

hopôs hê chôra tou toioutou zôiou kathara gignêtai may be free from this
kind of animal (i.e. beggars),

Pl.Lg. 936c; z. ponêron, of women, Secund.Sent.8.

The derivations of course, typically, from _verbal_ root, zoein
(elementarily, Liddell/Scott use first person singular, as if I ever would have a
performative context to say, "I live"; surely 'to live' is what we need in a lexical
entry, but that's classicists forya! :)):

'zoein'

"to live" Hom. ...
also of plants, to zên koinon einai phainetai kai tois phutois Arist.Ethica
Nich. 1097b33 ;

The Ciceronian confusion (if Ciceronian it is -- I tend, as D. Frederick
does with Rawls --, to blame Cicero for more than it's his due, possibly) may be
traced to the idea -- Greek at that -- of 'psukhe' as 'breath', hence Latin
'animus', 'anima', 'animal'.

It's odd, but amusingly so, that while R. Scruton criticises 'animal rights'
(and 'wrongs' for that matter), he doesn't seem to have a word to say re:
Prince Charles's attempts to _communicate_ with non-human, non-animal livers,
i.e. plants.

Etc. And thanks to S. R. L. Clark for his "Nature of the Beast".