4 How Not to be a Jellyfish Human Exceptionalism and the Ontology of Reflection Ted TOADVINE In his popular environmentalist novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn calls attention to the “creation myth” of our culture, according to which human beings are the telos of the evolutionary process. To illustrate this point, the character Ishmael, a telepathic gorilla, imagines an “anthropological” interview with a jellyfish undertaken a half billion years ago, prior to the evolution of land animals. In this imaginary dialogue, the jellyfish insists that it proceeds strictly on the basis of “observation, logic, and the scien- tific method,” but comes to the conclusion that jellyfish themselves are the obvious pinnacle of the evolutionary process, the goal toward which this process has tended from its outset. The jellyfish’s conclusions are intended to strike the reader as absurd, since the process of speciation has not stopped in the meantime; in retrospect, the jellyfish is only one species among many. But, according to Ishmael, humans are in no better a position to draw such a conclusion about their own place in the evolutionary process. Certainly, there is no scientific basis for such a claim, since the processes of speciation have continued unabated since our arrival on the scene, and there is consequently no reason to think our species is the last. Ultimately, the interpretation of the meaning or goal of the evolutionary process is not an empirical question but a philosophical one. The ubiquitous aggrandizement of humans as the “climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation” is therefore revealed to be nothing more than a cultural myth. 1 Quinn’s jellyfish story is intended to demonstrate the tenacity of our tendency toward “human exceptionalism,” as well as to illustrate that the rejection of theistic worldviews is no guarantee of avoiding such dogma. But the message of the story is complicated by the fact that the imagined jellyfish is itself a “rational” creature with the capacity for language, as is Ishmael, the fictional gorilla who serves as mentor for the novel’s human protagonist. The characters of the gorilla and jellyfish turn out to be humans in animal drag who can make their case against human exceptionalism only by ventriloquizing; they make use of the distinctively human capacities of language and reflection and thereby reinscribe the very difference they set out to deny. On the one hand, recent research suggests that the cognitive gap between humans and 39 C. Painter and C. Lotz (eds.), Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal, 39–55. © 2007 Springer.