Animal intelligence and its products and human intelligence and its products are fundamentally the same.

This may be true from the “outside” – i.e., from the perspective of some hypothetical non-human observer – but what it doesn’t consider, I think, is the subject-object distinction so important to historical progress. Humanity experiences itself most purely as subject (intelligible) and the non-human worldmost purely as object (alien and unintelligible). Since humanity begins in bondage to external nature, the original traumatic experience is the collective discovery that subject is in fact, and from a certain view that may be considered more “correct,” also object, and this with regard to the brute, unintelligible forces of external nature. Historical progress is humanity asserting and maximizing its subjectivity by control over the external world. Thus, dialectically, a real distinction between humanity and nature develops. Nature is that which cannot be known (by humanity) as subject, and over which humanity is struggling to assert control; humanity is that which can be known as subject, which itself struggles, and which is experienced as struggling. The precise boundary between the natural and the human is discovered and created within the conflict itself.