That other-than-human Sphinx whom, despite her inhumanity, we nevertheless regard and to whom we must respond, asks us to question what we think we know about the human. And her question reveals something about our answer. Asking what first goes on four, then on two, then on three legs simultaneously invokes the shared legacies of our four-pawed animality and our distinctively bipedal peripatetic humanity, as well the various kinds of canes we fashion and incorporate to feel our ways through our finite lives—lives whose ends, as Kaja Silverman (2009) observes, ultimately connect us to all the other beings with whom we share the fact of finitude.
Footing for the unsteady, a guide for the blind, a cane mediates between a fragile mortal self and the world that spans beyond. In doing so it represents something of that world, in some way or another, to that self. Insofar as they serve to represent something of the world to someone, many entities exist that can function as canes for many kinds of selves. Not all these entities are artifacts. Nor are all these kinds of selves human. In fact, along with finitude, what we share with jaguars and other living selves—whether bacterial, floral, fungal, or animal—is the fact that how we represent the world around us is in some way or another constitutive of our being.
A cane also prompts us to ask with Gregory Bateson, “where” exactly, along its sturdy length, “do I start?” (Bateson 2000a: 465). And in thus highlighting representation’s contradictory nature—Self or world? Thing or thought? Human or not?—it indicates how pondering the Sphinx’s question might help us arrive at a more capacious understanding of Oedipus’s answer.
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human
