Our Cousins, the Proto-Philosophers

 

Our Cousins, the Proto-Philosophers

By Scholz

It started with a television show.

While watching Humans, the sci-fi series on Amazon Prime, I was struck by a scene where synthetic beings — robots with human-like intelligence — calmly argued for their rights. Not just to move freely, but not to be owned. Their communication was articulate, emotional, even moral. They weren’t asking for upgrades. They were asking for dignity.

The scene lingered in my mind. What makes someone a person? Is it intelligence? Language? The ability to feel, or to make ethical claims?

That’s when my thoughts turned not to machines, but to something far more real — our evolutionary cousins. Bonobos pressing symbols for “sad,” gorillas signing their names in mirrors, orangutans telling small lies. These aren’t imagined sci-fi futures. These are scenes from the lives of great apes.

For centuries, philosophy has been framed as a distinctly human pursuit. To wonder, to reason, to ask “why” — these were thought to be the tools of minds capable of abstraction and reflection. But in the language labs and sanctuaries of primatology, we find signs that our cousins may share the very glimmers of philosophical impulse we hold so dear.

Consider Koko, the gorilla who mastered over 1,000 signs of American Sign Language. After the death of her kitten, Koko reportedly signed “sad” and “cry.” She expressed her loss not just behaviorally, but symbolically — communicating absence, finality, and grief. This wasn’t instinct alone. It touched something closer to metaphysics: the recognition that something once present is gone, and still matters.

Then there’s Kanzi, the bonobo who communicates through a lexigram keyboard. Kanzi understands hundreds of symbols and can follow spoken English commands like, “Put the soap in the water, then fetch the ball from the fridge.” This requires comprehension of sequence, object permanence, and abstract representation — cornerstones of logic and planning. Kanzi doesn’t just react. He reasons.

Chantek, an orangutan who learned over 150 signs, once tore part of a ceiling and then blamed someone else. That’s not just cleverness; it’s moral cognition. To lie is to understand the concept of truth — and to weigh consequences. Chantek also remembered favorite places and asked to return to them, combining memory, preference, and autonomy in his communication.

Apes do not write treatises or construct formal arguments. Their communication lacks recursive grammar — that uniquely human tool for embedding ideas within ideas. They don’t debate metaphysics. But they do engage in what we might call proto-philosophy: early forms of self-awareness, symbolic expression, and ethical decision-making. The groundwork is there.

And there is metaphor. Koko once called a ring a “finger bracelet,” creatively combining signs to describe a novel object. In another instance, she playfully described a squirrel as a blend of “dog” and “cat.” This is symbolic abstraction — the foundation of analogy, poetry, and higher reasoning.

None of this should be overstated. Apes do not construct moral systems or speculate about the stars. But they point to something critical: philosophy may not begin with language, but with awareness — of self, of others, of absence, of choice.

In their signs, their sorrow, their deceptions, and their spontaneous metaphors, apes show us that the border between human and animal is thinner than we once believed. They may not speak our language. But they are thinking, feeling, and in their own way — wondering.

Perhaps they are not only our biological cousins.
Perhaps they are our philosophical ancestors, too.

P.S. Of course, all of this — the apes, their signs, their tears — is purely from my imagination. Nothing here is literally true. It is a tale of symbols wrapped in the philosophy of the fantastic, offered in the spirit of speculative reflection.

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