Locke, Descartes, animals

I started to read your two new posts, but decided I should first write what I opened this up to write. Not that I have anything particularly well planned out in mind, but I'm reading Locke's "essay concerning human understanding", and I've been thinking vaguely about the fact that you recently mentioned a philosophical interest in animals (thus the pork trilogy... by the way, I'm currently writing 'Notes from the underground' - not like the Borges character who writes Don Quixote, but maybe I'll explain elsewhere at some point) - I will react to your most recent posts next time - probably tomorrow.
Anyway, animals is an incredibly popular theme at the moment (and kind of always has been I guess - which is not to accuse you of trendiness, but rather to say over the past few years I've encountered the theme often, so there is a lot of reading and writing that will necessarily get mixed into anything I say (complicating and confusing the issue rather than making it clearer or more carefully thought out I fear). At any rate, who Locke is arguing against much of the time (and this won't be my only Locke entry... I'm not going to make this a one book = one post thing), who he is arguing against in certain cases isn't entirely clear to me, though I know that his stress on there being no such thing as innate ideas and the issue he takes with an image of animals as machines is targeted at the 'cartesians'... and of course, having only read the two things everybody reads by Descartes, I have no idea where a lot of what is attributed to 'cartesians' comes from, and whether it accurately presents what Desartes thought and wrote. And then, was it the Cartesians or someone else who insisted, for example, that the soul always thinks? I should have an edition with decent annotations and footnotes, but that's neither here nor there. I kind of love John Locke, both in terms of the content of his reflections and his dry way of ridiculing the ideas he disagrees with... I feel like Victorian nonsense is already present in the nonsense he makes to refute (pages and pages on the pointlessness of imagining the soul can think separately from the mind, that thought is possible without memory or consciousness, etc, or similar pages on innate ideas - God and Worship, the fact that something cannot simultaneously be and not be [once again, I have a vague interest in who initially argued this]). Of course, while reading, you periodically think that certain examples are poorly chosen, and you look ahead to Kant and psychoanalysis for complications and counters, but I sat down to write about those passages where he mentions animals... and combine them with more interesting thoughts on animals, because what I object to in Locke probably won't be particularly revelatory.
At any rate, Locke objects to the supposition that animals don't have ideas, and wants to insist that they do have ideas gained by perception and that the difference lies in their inability to further reason beyond the gathering and remembering of ideas. I think I'm sort of nitpicking when I read and, though it isn't his main argument, though he doesn't really develop it, I keep adamantly objecting to wayward comments of his (especially knowing that others have actually studied animal behavior and neurology and have a competence I don't), but Locke seems to try to attribute to animals only simple ideas, which following his own descriptions would be absolutely useless. Perhaps it is nitpicking and perhaps it is a serious internal contradiction in what he writes, but simple ideas are basically nothing but sensory impressions, not yet subject to any reworking or processing into complex or abstract ideas - it is precisely abstraction that Locke says animals lack, and yet, I'm sure he wouldn't deny that my cat knows what packages contain her treats, even when the packages are slightly different in size and color, and sealed so that no smell comes out of them. How would this be possible if she hadn't formed some abstract notion of 'package', which is something more than the vague association of door with outside and dish with food? How could animals get by if they couldn't identify a 'type' despite variations, or combine sensory impressions and recognize a certain visual impression as matching olfactory and auditory impressions and thus comprising a single complex unity? An 'Idea', basically meaning a sensory impression that is added to memory, has no value whatsoever if it is not abstracted, if it is not removed from its context and made to fit a 'more or less' pattern so that different trees, for instance, can be seen as having something in common, so that various cans of food in spite of their differences can be grouped into a single category of 'cans of food'. Without abstraction, it is impossible to imagine what possible purpose sensory impressions could serve. If every impression were self-contained and without relation to other impressions, if shades of green couldn't be seen as having a certain similarity, which suggests a process of comparison.
And to go off subject a bit, speaking of innate ideas, I remember when I was a kid being told that the yellow and black on bees was a natural warning sign and meant danger, and I had trouble believing that, thinking, how would animals know that those colors meant that, especially if I don't? As a kid I already had a notion of symbols being conventionally determined, and so I wondered how symbols could possibly arise in nature and what their point would be if they weren't universally recognized (man being a possible threat who coexisted in the same environment, if black and yellow meant 'back off', shouldn't he be born with that knowledge, rather than having to learn from his experience with bees that they could, in fact cause pain).

Locke brings up the subject of anthropomorphizing only in his discussion with God (where he assumes that only idiots could imagine God as being person-like), though if anyone were to object that attributing ideas to animals is anthropomorphizing, beyond his dismissal of innate ideas which sort of cuts off the only other possible explanation for animal behavior (given the admitted vagueness of what is meant by saying animals have ideas). Nevertheless, Locke does talk about experience as being the only reliable guide for establishing principles, and of course, a process very similar to anthropomorphism is necessary in dealing with other people. I have to 'Kevinize' everyone I deal with to some extent, project my own way of thinking and feeling as a sort of template on which to construct my image of the person I'm dealing with, alterations are made accordingly, some are generally assumed based on past experience of other people, and yes, purely formal rules can be applied that don't require any sympathy or empathy, but for the most part an assumption of similarity is vital for social interaction. That this should be a starting point in dealing with other animals is logical. 'Infants, foreigners and animals' would be a nice title for something or other, grouping together those whose opacity is assured for lack of a common language and whose behavior isn't necessarily subject to all the same cultural conditioning and codes as ours. I'm trying to think back to a discussion I had a year ago - about a book on animals and humans (I don't remember the author or even the title), I remember talking about the way we experience lunatics on a subway platform, the danger inherent in not understanding how or what he is thinking or being able to predict their actions. It is generally unlikely they are going to do anything violent, even the ones screaming and gesticulating violently, though with those, suspicion of violence is actually connected to codes being used which normally signify intended violence. But there's fear even with the harmless ones that just mutter and talk at people or to themselves, merely because we no longer have any way of predicting what they will say or do. I'm getting a bit incoherent myself, off the subject of animals in thinking about the mixture between formal rules and projection of self as how we deal with others and animals. On seeing an animal in the woods, one may think to oneself according to rules learned from others "X does not attack humans", or "X only attacks humans under such and such conditions", but it is testing the limits of our ability to project and imagine some sort of subjective experience of the world that makes animals interesting.
I remember being in a class on 'primate behavior' more than a decade ago. For some reason we one day saw a bit of a documentary... A snake bit a lioness and her cubs, I think, and the cubs died. The narrator talked about how after the lioness recovered, you could see her being particularly fierce in attacking the jackals or whatever, jackals having eaten her cubs after they had been poisoned, when she was still too weak to intervene. A kid in the back of the class objected saying, "how do you know she was really remembering the murder of her cubs - maybe she was just particularly hungry because she had been lain up and hadn't eaten much during her illness". I remember the kid was a swaggering jock who I particularly disliked, but when he asked that, I do remember thinking "we don't" and he was right for asking.
Why am I reminiscing about all this? I don't know. Have you read Derrida's "The animal that therefore I am"? (The title in French is "l'animal que donc je suis", and the 'suis' can be read as "I am" or "I follow" - typical French word play). Me being a kind of worshipper of cats, it is kind of nice to read Derrida's philosophical confrontation with his cat.