Rabbit 'Anthropology'

One can surmise all sorts of ideas about the behavior of rabbits, nothing definitive will come to understanding.

Similarly, the rabbit cannot make sense of our behavior (that is, our 'anthropology'). Anthropology, of course, is a scholarly term for the science that studies the specifics of human behavior, ritual, religion, and language. No doubt the rabbits put us into some sort of meaning 'grid'. I am not suggesting that it is a human sort of 'grasp'---no, it is a rabbit's 'grasp'.

The rabbit inhabits some sort of 'world', that is, it remembers parts of its environment, performs 'routines' of cleaning and territory, this reveals meal rituals, instinct, sexuality, etc...

I suspect our world seems just as strange to a rabbit or any other creature. The fact that the rabbit and the human being are 'mammalian' suggests that there is some common ground for grasping each others behaviors---take for example the act of eating a carrot. This is something that the rabbit shares, and its sleeping. So too does the rabbit recognize these behaviors in the human being.

One can imagine alien folk asking for an interpretation of our everyday behavior. Quite a bit of it is ritualistic and repetitive though it does not seem so at the time. The alien might wonder about our customs. This is a kind of 'transcendence'. The alien transcends our everyday lifeworld.

As does the rabbit!

Even moreso does God transcend the human world. God is the source of Being, let alone all beings... If indeed as Aquinas holds we consider God as the source and root of Being itself---the actus essendi 'esse' we can view our everyday life in a new light. There is an inexhaustibility to God who is the essence of being itself. And a permanent mystery---technology cannot overcome the radical mystery at the heart of life. God so far transcends the mind of man, that we cannot imagine what God's 'world' is like. It is as unlike as the rabbit, and more...

God is even 'stranger' to man than the rabbit or the oak tree because a 'being' is like and unlike another being in a certain sense, but the Being that underlies all beings in fact giving rise to these beings so that they can stand out and stand forth in the present, this difference is of another order still.

It pays to study rabbits or bird, or any other creature, for the reason that it gives us a sense of an objective world. That this world exists for other creatures and that we can expand our sense of life by considering how different God really is from our human customs. This tends to make our customs seem 'relativistic', and rightly so.