Forms of life and life itself: Reflections on human relations with ideas, artworks, and other species

Abstract

This essay explores experiences that lie ambiguously between the inchoate, the intuitive, and the impressionistic, on the one hand, and the verbal, conceptual, aesthetic, andideological, ontheother. I am particularly interested in experiences that gobeyondthe nominally human and are felt to be shared by other species and to belong to “life itself.” Empirical examples are adduced from ethnographies on human–animal relations and from the world of art.