Man: the dressing animal

Jules van Schaijik | Oct 13, 2009 | 3 cmts

Apparently, the Disney company is going to update its retail stores. One new feature, inspired by Apple’s “Genius Bar,” will be called “WWTD: What Would Tinkerbell Do?” It is a place where you can ask all sorts of Disney related questions. This, for instance, is the question Macworld reporter, Scott McNulty, has been dying to ask:

“Why does Goofy wear pants while Pluto doesn’t? They’re both dogs.”

That’s a question that never occurred to me. But now that it’s been pointed out, I find it rather interesting. It’s true: Goofy wears pants, Pluto doesn’t. Why the difference? Is Pluto a moral libertine? a nudist? Does Goofy have some sort of a hang-up about his own body? Not at all. It turns out, as Luis Alejandro, a Macworld reader, shows, that there is actually a personalist reason for it: “Pluto, as a character, is a dog. Goofy, as a character, is a person. Persons use clothes. Goofy uses pants.”

So, whoever at Disney came up with these two characters had a good intuition into the difference between persons and animals. Draw a dog with pants on, and it’s no longer just a dog. Perhaps we can make a new entry in the long list of lighthearted definitions for man:

• Man is the animal that dresses

The habit of wearing clothes is not as central or illuminating a characteristic of human persons as that of being rational or free. But it is revealing nevertheless, especially in light of the phenomenon of shame (as analyzed by Scheler or Wojtyla, for instance). It can be compared, in that respect, to other definitions such as:

• Man is a talking animal (C.S. Lewis makes much of this feature in the Chronicles of Narnia. Also Disney: i.e. Goofy can, whereas Pluto cannot, talk.)
• Man is a laughing animal
• Man is an animal laughed at (Cf. Bergson’s interesting essay on Laughter.)
• Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called
upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason (Oscar Wilde)

Are there any others that I am leaving out?

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By the bye, during my extensive research into the Pluto - Goofy question I discovered that the question has been asked before. See this page for some other answers.