At the heart of the home: An animal reading of mikhail bulgakov's the heart of a dog

When we try and contemplate who it is that we think we are in the world history has an important role to play. It can alert us to what we have lost; can point up how we have come to think what we think; and can remind us that what we think now will, inevitably, change — will be succeeded by other models, also temporary, also trying to make meaning out of who it is that we think we are. In these terms, the history of the human is not simply a history of progress from a “bad” model of who we are (Aristotle’s sense of the human as special and separate from all animals; Aquinas’s sense of the human as the only center of the moral universe, for example) to a “good” one in which our relationship with and location in the natural world is more fully acknowledged. Rather, we should perhaps also view the place of our species as a shifting one in which processes of what could be termed humanning, unhumanning, and rehumanning are constantly taking place.