The Animals We Are:
The Movement From Talking About Animals To Feeling With Animals
May 2015
2. Chapter I: The Lives of Animals
a. Intro …3 – 7
b. Part A: Form and Function
i. Literature or Lecture …7 - 12
ii. Representing the Moral Hydra …12 – 16 c. Part B: The Philosophers and the Animals …16
i. Philosophical Deflection …16 –
22
ii. Animals, Physicality, and Sex …22 – 25 iii. When Feeling and Philosophy Debate …25 – 28
iv. Philosophy and Language …28 – 30
d. Part C: The Poets and the Animals
i. What Cannot be Put In To Words …30 – 32
ii. The limits of Poetry …32 - 35
e. Conclusion …35 – 36
3. Chapter II: The Death of the Animal
a. Intro …36
b. Part A: Form and Function
i. A Dialogue …36 - 37
ii. The Form as Ironic …37 – 32
iii. The Form as Experience …41- 42
c. Part B: Where Are the Animals?
i. Unengaged Philosophy …43 – 45
ii. Animals vs. “The Animal” …45– 49
iii. Animals vs. “The Animals’ in Posthumanism …49- 53 iv. Posthumanism and Modern Physical Realities
…53 – 58
v. Human Appetite and Physicality …58 - 60
d. Conclusion …60 - 61
b. I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur …64 - 65
i. Controversy …65 - 70
c. Conclusion …70 - 71
5. Thesis Conclusion …71 – 75
Animal welfare is an issue of growing concern in our modern society.
Specifically, not just the way we treat animals, but the way we decide how to treat them and attempt to convince others of how to treat them, is reflective of a change that I feel is best described as moving towards an ethos of feeling with rather than talking about animals. I first noticed this shift when reading J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, wherein I read a strong critique of philosophical methods of argument for understanding the plight of animals. I intend to show that Coetzee’s text advocates a switch from a philosophical understanding to what he classifies as a poetic understanding of what animal suffering is, but it also reveals some weaknesses within that poetic approach— namely, that while it enables us to feel like animals it does not lend itself to establishing proscriptions of how we ought to behave in relation to real world issues of animal rights or provide a way of convincing others to change their attitudes towards animals.
I want to argue that Coetzee’s premise is right—philosophy is the wrong tool for comprehending animal suffering, and a poetic approach is preferable—but that this call for a poetic approach has been taken one step further in reality than it was in Coetzee’s text. While Coetzee’s picture is bleak for the plight of the animal welfare movement, I will argue that a stronger form of his poetic approach has actually come to pass in a progression from poetry to images, embodied the campaign style of animal rights juggernaut PETA, specifically through their “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign.
To examine this theory, I will spend my first chapter engaging in a close reading of Coetzee’s text as well as in critical discussion about it to establish that Coetzee does do
what I read him as doing: exposes the distancing nature of philosophy from the reality of animal suffering. To do this I will build on Cora Diamond’s treatment of the text in her essay “The Difficulty of Philosophy, The Difficult of Reality.” I intend to explore the form and function of Coetzee’s piece by offering an alternate reading to that of Peter Singer, to involve Stanley Cavell’s notion of “deflection”, to look at the problematic link between philosophy and language, and to explore the weaknesses of the poetic approach that Coetzee advocates.
In particular, I will use Cora Diamond’s critique of Singer’s reading of the piece to support my argument that Coetzee’s chosen form reflects an admission of the
hypocrisy that characterizes the human/animal relationship, the inability of a person to ever speak candidly and straightforwardly about their relationship to animals because the issue is so multifaceted. For Coetzee to simply speak on his view of animals would be him attempting to engage philosophy over the issue. Instead, he constructs a work of fiction—of poetry, one could say—to depict a feeling, exactly as his protagonist
Elizabeth Costello says we should do in relation to animals. To understand Coetzee and his views, we must feel through his text what he conveys, rather than think with him about the animal question.
I will also examine both parts of his book—“The philosophers and the Animals”, and “The Poets and the Animals”—separately to determine what each of them contributes to the work as whole, and how they play off of each other. Specifically I will be arguing that the philosophical chapter reveals the danger of viewing the question of how we treat animals as an ethical issue that ought to be discussed. My analysis supports a reading that calls on us to embrace ourselves as physical beings and relate to animals in that way, a
way of physicality, rather than through argument. In the next section, The Poets and the Animals, I will show what I ultimately disagree with in this paper—the suggestion that the poetic approach, while better than the philosophical approach in Coetzee’s mind, is not up to the task of effecting real change. Eventually I will use the example of PETA’s campaigns to argue that this ethos of feeling has come to pass and is resulting in legal and societal changes in our relationship with animals.
In my second chapter, I will take what I have established to be Coetzee’s criticisms of philosophy and see how they hold up against two real philosophical texts, Paola Cavalieri’s The Death of the Animal and Kelly Oliver’s Animal Lessons. As with Coetzee’s work, I will examine the particular form and function of Cavalieri’s piece and put forth two primary interpretations for her choice of a dialogic structure. One reading is that the form is ironic. Putting her piece in the same style as the dialogues of ancient philosophers like Plato and Socrates can be read as playfully self conscious—that Cavalieri is poking fun at the tendency of philosophical thinkers to take themselves too seriously and follow too much in the stead of those they consider great. The second reading I put forth is built on Coetzee’s claim that humans require an experience to change their attitudes. I read Cavalieri’s form as showing that the experience need not necessarily be of a physical connection to animals, but perhaps one of interaction with other humans. A dialogue could be the experience that a person needs to change their mind.
Throughout the rest of the chapter, in following Coetzee’s critique of philosophy as distanced from animal reality, I will look for instances of deflection from physicality (both human and animal), the presence or lack of attention to real animals as opposed to
the concept of “the Animal”, and the distance between philosophical argument about and the practical application of animal rights. I will also engage with Posthumanism in this chapter, specifically with Kelly Oliver and her work Animal Lessons. I compare Oliver’s disdain for making animals in to honorary humans with Cavalieri’s attempts to use the same logic of universal human rights to extend rights to animals. I will look at some of the examples occurring in the real world today wherein the human/animal line is blurred, and attempt to understand this blurring through the lenses of both Cavalieri and Oliver. I will also pay particular attention to physicality and physical appetites like food and sex, and how they ought to relate us more to animals, as well as arguing that they are at odds with philosophy in Cavalieri’s text.
In my final chapter, I will analyze PETA’s “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign in light of this philosophy/poetry debate. My conclusion is that when
understood in relation to these arguments, the campaign is a highly significant—and highly promising—illustration of the movement toward feeling with animals. I will show that in practice, the animal rights community has in fact done what Coetzee says
philosophy has not done, and moved beyond old notions of “the Animal” to actual feelings of physical empathy with real animals. By taking this poetic approach further than linguistic poetry and bringing in to the realm of human bodies acting out animal suffering, and projection of those images as campaigns for animal rights, PETA has done what Coetzee’s Costello could not do and found a practical application for poetic feeling of animal embodiment, and through their focus on changing laws they have also
My analysis will show that viewing the campaign in this light is also necessary in understanding why critiques of the ads as sexist or misogynist are ill founded. Instead, such criticisms should be understood as reinforcing gender and species binaries that are extremely problematic not only for animals but for humans as well. To show this, I will draw again on Oliver and Posthumanism, and depict the danger of using classic
philosophical hierarchies to promote one group while subjugating another.
I argue that this ability of the animal rights community to take the ethos of feeling with animals in to the practical realm of real engagement with animal issues like eating meat or using animal bodies for clothing shows the positive and productive direction of the animal welfare movement that is very different from the pessimistic projection Coetzee gave in The Lives of Animals. If we are to understand the way forward then, we must go further than his Costello did, and not discount philosophy or poetry entirely. Philosophical argument has its place in legal discourse, as shown by the attempts by PETA to secure legal rights for animals, and the poetic approach has found a real practical application in their controversial campaign, and both of these methods are pulling us down a road of more rights and recognition for animals and a blurring of the distinction between ourselves and our fellow creatures.
I: Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals
Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals centers around two opposing current methods of dealing with the relationship between humans and eating animals. These two positions are
described by his character Elizabeth Costello as one of “thinking, [and] cogitation” and one of “fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being” (Coetzee, Lives of Animals, 33). In relation to the human/human relationship, I suggest that they can be understood as trying to think about animals, or trying to think as animals. In Coetzee’s book, they are separated under the headings Philosophy and Poetry. Philosophy tells us how to think about animals, from our human point of view, with the human tools of reason and language, while poetry presents a way to think as an animal, to embody it, to engage with it.
Costello clearly attempts the latter way, using feelings to guide her and believing that there is “no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another.”(Coetzee, Lives, 35). It is my argument that Coetzee shows his Costello
interacting with both of these attitudes, the philosophical and the poetic, and through her embodiment of this conundrum Coetzee exposes a failure in current ways of thinking about the human/animal relationship that perhaps helps explain the high level of ambivalence towards issues like vegetarianism. We cannot square our heads with our hearts. Between these two ways of thinking, anticipates the difficult of finding a way to go from embodying and feeling as animals to affecting them as humans.
I will show that through showing the human-centricity of philosophy and the absence of practical application of poetry, Coetzee perfectly captures the present state of affairs: we are stuck trying to use age-old philosophical methods to address a problem that requires new and creative emotional, poetic embodiment, without a way to do both at the same time, and unless we find a middle ground the movement, as well as the animals in
question, will not survive. In my last chapter, I will offer an understanding of the animal welfare movement that differs from the bleak projection Coetzee leaves us with, based on the PETA campaign “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur”, but in the meantime, I want to understand why Coetzee’s vision of a poetic approach appears too weak to survive in this world.
A) Form and Function i) Literature or Lecture
Coetzee’s book presents a difficult problem when it comes to interpretation. It is not straightforwardly fiction, nor nonfiction, nor an argument for animal rights, nor an argument against them. Coetzee himself gave a lecture at Princeton University for the1997-1998 Tanner Lectures (Gutmann, Live of Animals Introduction, 3) and his lecture included the fictional lectures of Elizabeth Costello, which are collected in his book The Lives of Animals along with the reflections of several important figures from various fields— philosopher Peter Singer, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, religious scholar Wendy Doniger, and primatologist Barbara Smuts (Gutman, 8). When trying to analyze what this book says about the question of eating animals, it is impossible to know which views are Coetzee’s and which are those of the fictional Costello. As Peter Singer pointed out in his reaction, “Coetzee’s fictional device allows him to distance himself from [Costello’s arguments].”(Singer, Lives of Animals, 91). I ultimately disagree with Singer about this. Coetzee’s work is fictional, but that does not mean he is distanced from it. Rather, it means
that the piece must be understood as something more complex than a straightforward argument for animal rights.
Singer’s understanding of Coetzee’s form makes itself clear to me through
Singer’s own chosen form of response. He writes a fictional dialogue between himself and his daughter discussing the nature of Coetzee’s argument, in which it seems that he simply gets his point across by having his daughter pose questions and arguments to which he can respond and clarify his views. In his final paragraph, Singer proposes that Coetzee’s device distances himself from the views so much so that Singer himself can no longer pick out Coetzee’s ideas, and Singer’s daughter’s suggestion that he use “the same trick”(Singer, 91) in response shows how Singer is viewing Coetzee’s work. A trick. A gimmick. A device. Ending his piece with the question, “When have I ever written fiction?”(Singer, 91) clearly points to the fact that the piece we have just read is this fictional response, Singer’s take on Coetzee’s “trick”. Singer is wrong, however, in thinking that his piece does the same thing that Coetzee’s does, at least in terms of my analysis. In fact, Singer’s piece succeeds only in giving us an example of exactly what he accuses Coetzee of doing—using fiction to mask his own straightforward views.
As Singer has in fact written explicitly on animal rights and liberation, many of the thoughts expressed in his fictional piece can be verified in his nonfiction work. Still, he calls his piece “fiction”, or alludes to it as such, if we accept my understanding that the comment clearly implies that the piece we just read is the answer to his own question, “When have I ever written fiction?”. The fictional aspect then, must be the dialogue form, the exchange with his daughter Naomi. I would argue that it is not strictly a dialogue in the same sense that Paoloa Cavalieri’s The Death of the Animal is a dialogue (which I examine
in depth in the next chapter), as it reads more like a short story than a philosophical dialogue and Singer himself refers to it as “fiction”, not “dialogue”. Further, it is meant in response to Coetzee’s work, which is a fiction, not a dialogue. Building on this
understanding of the piece as a fiction, it could have taken any form, so it makes one wonder why he would have chosen the particular form that he did, a conversation between himself and his daughter. I argue that this straightforward form was the simplest way to do what Singer perceives Coetzee as doing, putting forward several views about the nature of animal rights in the mouths of vaguely recognizable but ultimately fictionalized characters.
Yet I maintain that it is different from Coetzee’s actual form. The reason is this: Coetzee’s form only functions as it does because it is fictional. It is one tenet of this thesis that Coetzee work can be read as calling for a movement away from thinking about animal rights and towards an ethos of feeling and empathy for animals, an emotional
understanding rather than a logical one. As such, as I will explore in more depth later in this paper, a factual, literal speech on the subject would fall short of doing what Coetzee wants us to do. If Coetzee himself stood up and tried to reason with us or convince us, he would be engaging in the kind of argument and philosophical discussion that I will show his book argues against. Rather than telling us what to think, a fictional work can be taken as an impression left on us, a feeling we get, an emotional response to the characters. It is more about the feeling than the facts, and allowing a work to be fiction relieves us of the cumbersome burden of dealing in argument and rhetoric. Fiction therefore is the perfect form for an ethos of feeling. The only more suited form might be poetry itself—which, in a way, all fiction is, with its attention to words, rhythm, and pattern.
Singer’s dialogue is simply a “trick”. A gimmicky way to get across what Singer wants to say, which is that he cannot find Coetzee in the work and that he finds the views strange and noncommittal. Those views would be no different whether he was saying them to us in a speech or to his fictional daughter, who functions as a convenient means of fleshing out his argument. Coetzee’s form is not a trick and not a deflection, but a carefully chosen embodiment of his very point. It is an intentional departure from the world of rhetoric and arguments and a step towards feelings, emotions, and impressions. In comparing the two, it helps understand Coetzee’s work by seeing Singer get it wrong. Seeing what a simple fictional deflective trick looks like makes it makes it starkly obvious that Coetzee’s work is not an example of that.
Singer’s frustration continues with Coetzee, and in Singer’s piece he says that Coetzee writes about the issues without “really committing himself”(Singer, 91) and that Coetzee does not even have to write in any kind of defined structure because the critique of bad structure will fall on the character Costello’s poor arguing skills rather than Coetzee’s lecture structure. Along with the aforementioned misunderstanding of the function of fiction in Coetzee’s piece, I read all of these responses as oversimplifying Coetzee’s argument by focusing only on the animal right aspect and not on what the piece says about our human relationship to animals. There are no animals in Coetzee’s story and yet Singer talks mostly about animals and their rights in his response. To understand the depth of Coetzee’s work, we must also look at his primary characters, the people, and see what this talk of animals does to them—to us. We are shifting in our views towards animals, and as such, we are of as much interest to Coetzee as the animals themselves. To further explore
this, I want to build on the arguments of Cora Diamond in her piece “The Difficulty of Philosophy, The Difficulty of Reality.”
Diamond takes issue with Singer’s reading—in fact, with all four of the responses at the end of the book, arguing that each of them is too quick to call it a piece about animals (Diamond, 48). She argues that this leads to two very different readings of the book, “as centrally concerned with the presenting of a wounded woman, and as centrally concerned with the issue of how we should treat animals,”(Diamond, 49). As evidence of her point, that all four commenters overlook the importance of the actual character Elizabeth Costello, we ought to look to the title of the work, which she draws attention to in her piece. The Lives of Animals is not simply about non-human animals, but also refers to “the lives of the animals we are”[emphasis mine] (Diamond, 49). Viewing ourselves as animals as well, particularly in relation to our physical bodies, is something that becomes absolutely crucial to my view of the way we are moving forward. Later I will discuss how the PETA campaign captures this perfectly by having human bodies act out the physical suffering of animals, and the impact that this has on calling all people to feel with animals as well arguing about them.
Attention to the title calls in to question the point of the form Coetzee chose to gives his lectures, what the function of this form might be. If the function was to buoy animal rights arguments, then it seems to have missed its mark. Singer, like many
outspoken theorists in the animal rights community, might reasonably be disappointed if he was hoping to count Coetzee among the animal rights community based on this book alone. He may understandably ask, Where is Coetzee in all this? The more interesting question to me, however, is not Where but Why. Why is Coetzee writing himself out, giving Costello a
voice—but a wavering, somewhat disorganized voice—on a topic that he could very well have lectured on himself?
I argue that the commenters have done exactly what Diamond urges readers not to do—engage in “pulling out ideas and arguments as if they had been simply clothed in fictional form as a way of putting them before us.”(Diamond, 53). The fact that the
commenters do seem to do this reflects not only a misinterpretation of the text, but reflects a much bigger and more significant problem in relation to how we talk about the way we should treat animals. I will explore in the next chapter the way that the willingness of the commenters to take the piece as an argument for animal rights reflects the problem with their way of viewing the entire animal question, which is further supported by Diamond’s article.
ii) Representing a Moral Hydra
Rather than viewing Coetzee’s use of a fictional narrative to frame the issue of animal rights as noncommittal, as Singer seems to, I argue that it can be seen as an embodiment of the issues facing the animal rights movement today. There are very few certainties and not much solid ground. The questions of animal rights are complicated and multifaceted, an absolute moral hydra, where addressing one issue causes several more to pop up in its place. One of the members of the audience at Costello’s lecture expresses this problem when he is called on during the question-and-answer time immediately after her first talk, Animals and Philosophy. Though he should theoretically only be asking one question of Costello, the man asks,
“Are you saying we should close down the factory farms? Are you saying we should stop eating meat? Are you saying we should treat animals more humanely? Are you saying we should stop doing experiments on animals? Are you saying we should stop experiments with animals, even benign psychological experiments like Kohler’s? Can you clarify?” (Coetzee, Lives , 36)
After this question, Costello’s son John thinks approvingly that “His mother could do with some clarity.”(Coetzee, Lives 36). Costello’s response is that she “was hoping not to have to enunciate principles”(Coetzee, Lives, 37) and that she has “never been much interested in proscriptions”(Coetzee, Lives, 37). Perhaps in this moment Costello is somewhat Coetzee’s proxy, but not just in relation to the direct questions about Costello’s speech—rather, this sounds like a very good answer for why Coetzee would have chosen this particular fictional framework. Coetzee is contending that language are argument are not the right way to convey animal suffering, but laying out his views in his own voice would constitute putting forth some sort of argument. Instead, he is able to give us the feeling of his attitude towards animal suffering through the experiencing of a piece of literature. It is less literal and more poetic—just as he argues we ought to be in relation to the animal question as a whole.
There is no one united animal rights movement, and several of the groups that seem to advocate the same thing actually have startlingly different views, both theoretically and practically. Both animal rights activists and Posthumanist thinkers, for instance, call for a change to the current system of human/animal relations, but do from very different
platforms and with different desired results. Rather than seeing animals as a group that need to gain rights in the same way that women gained rights, Posthumanism suggests that all creatures ought to be liberated from thinking that lumps them together in terms of often arbitrary sameness or differences in search of a ethical philosophy that applies to all groups (Oliver, Kelly, Animal Lessons). I will examine this more in the next chapter. Rather than moving up and down on the hierarchical totem pole, Posthumanist wants to abolish the hierarchy all together, raze the fundamental philosophy of sameness and difference, break down traditional groupings like male or female, human or animal, and establish a new and sustainable ethics.
Animal rights activists, as represented by groups like PETA, are less concerned with the philosophy of humans and more narrowed in on the practical existence and rights of animals. This view does not call for a reevaluation of human categories. Rather, in a tradition dating from Singer through the modern day, much animal rights thinking suggests that we view animals as another category that, along with categories like gender or race, has different realities than the group “human” but deserves no less moral and ethical consideration.
Even within movements against eating meat there are distinctions like vegan and vegetarian, which may seem small but are actually quite significant. Choosing to abstain from partaking of the flesh of animals is a different stance than choosing to oppose animal exploitation for food by giving up butter or eggs, which do not require the death of animal but do result in the animal being something of a production machine for goods that we want and use for our own benefit. Further, there are many products that are only available because they are tested on animals, from frivolities like makeup to life saving medicines,
and the question of whether or not to use those products is highly contested in the animal rights community.
Even the question of how to address the issue, whether through philosophical reflection on the nature of animals, through some medical or scientific distinction between species, through emotional connection or lack thereof with certain animals, or through another avenue entirely, is still unclear—something explored by Coetzee’s pitting of Philosophy against Poetry in Costello’s lectures.
Not only does Coetzee have these questions addressed and examined within the fictional world of Costello’s lectures, but the very form of the piece seems to pose them. How could one person articulate one solid, undiluted stance on animal rights? Perhaps each character in the book is a part of Coetzee, and the debates they have are the debates he has with himself. Perhaps they are the voices of different opinions within the animal rights community, and Coetzee is more like Costello’s son (interestingly named John, like Coetzee himself) who looks on somewhat nonplussed and unsure of where he stands, not feeling particularly strongly in any direction—though that does not seem likely given his other writings on the subject. What seems even less likely, though, is that Coetzee is declining responsibility by choosing this particular form for his piece.
Instead of attempting to pin himself down to one point of view on animal rights, Coetzee seems to suggest with this piece that the only way to honestly and thoroughly examine the question is to concede that there is no one sure point of view from which to address it, particularly not through language or argument. His form reflects the highly fraught, ambiguous landscape in which current views on animal rights seem to stand and the difficulty of expressing those views in writing or speech. Most people appear conflicted
and ruled by hypocrisy, like Costello herself, who in response to a compliment on her vegetarianism says, “I am carrying a leather purse, I am wearing leather shoes. I wouldn’t have overmuch respect if I were you.”(Coetzee, Lives, 43).
In this reading, I align myself with Stanley Cavell, who writes that Costello’s response here reflects the feeling that “there is still disproportion between what I know and how I feel and ways I behave, if less than there might be.”(Cavell, Companionable
Thinking, 119). It is a feeling he says he has felt himself, when he reflects, “I do not imagine it has been a sense of poor argumentation on vegetarianism that has thwarted my becoming a vegetarian,”(Cavell, Companionable Thinking, 102). This break between what we think, feel, and do is clearly an issue not only for Costello, but for all people who attempt to live in ethical relation to animals in a world where their mistreatment is made absolutely normative and habitual.
Coetzee’s chosen form reflects an admission of hypocrisy and inability, an
inability to adequately express or argue for one point of view. Words and structure will fail to get across the reality of the animal rights question, no matter how artfully they are constructed and the ambiguity of Coetzee’s form reflects the failing of any and all forms that attempt to convey reality through argument. This leaves us with the question, if arguments, lectures, or books are not the right way to understand how we ought to treat animals, then how are we to figure it out? In his sections on philosophy and poetry, Coetzee suggests an answer to this that departs from our typical reliance on reason and argument and pushes towards a new ethos of feeling.
i) Philosophical Deflection
It is important to note that the aforementioned questions (“Are you saying we should close down factory farms?...”) and request for clarification come after the Philosophy section of Costello’s lectures. At the end of her The Animal and The Poet lectures, the two questions her son John overhears are not nearly as practical. One revolves around Costello’s views in relation to another poet, Ted Hughes, (Coetzee, Lives, 52) and the other deals with whether she thinks it is the essence of human nature to do partake in exploitation and cruelty (Coetzee, Lives, 55). These questions are related to animal rights but do not address the day-to-day realities that many animal rights groups address, like animal experimentation or food production reform. Philosophy’s reputation as a theoretical rather than practical realm (something Singer’s daughter accuses him of in his Reflections chapter (Singer, Reflections, 88) ) is here reinforced by Costello.
While Costello says at the beginning of her lecture that she wants to talk to the audience in a way that is “philosophical rather than polemical” (Coetzee, Lives, 22), she seems to argue that philosophy is the wrong way to address the animal question. Pitting philosophy as the opposite of polemical is an interesting choice and can be read as a nod to the idea of philosophy as a calm, reasonable pursuit of knowledge, and one in which we should engage to figure out the proper way to behave. Particularly as the two lectures are Philosophy and Poetry, philosophical thought is clearly opposed to poetic feeling.
In her first response to the audience member’s question, Costello says, “If principles are what you want to take away from this talk, I would have to say, open your
heart and listen to what your heart says.”(Coetzee, Lives, Lives, 37). Rather than reason or practicalities, she advocates feeling our way in to what is right. Here it sounds as if she advocates a more poetic understanding of the human/animal relationship, one in which we know what is right because our hearts, rather than our heads, tell us so. If this is the case, why then would she claim to want to speak philosophically? Costello tells us that she has a literal mind (Coetzee, Lives, 32), and I argue that the best way to take this claim that she wants to speak philosophically is literally. She wants to, but she cannot. She cannot
because philosophy is not the right way to address the multifaceted issues of understanding humans relation and responsibility to animals.
As her talk goes on, she states explicitly that she is not a philosopher and will not speak about the typical philosophical issues, saying, “…if you had wanted someone to come in here and discriminate for you between mortal and immortal souls, or between rights and duties, you would have called in a philosopher, not a person whose soul claim to your attention is to have written stories about made-up people.”(Coetzee, Lives, 22). Saying that she would not have been asked to speak if the audience had been wanting to listen to a philosopher gives some agency to the hosts of the Tanner Lectures. Costello does not say “If you wanted someone to speak on these things, you should have called in a philosopher,” she says “you would have called in a philosopher.” She is not suggesting that what she is saying will come as a shock to them or even that they are not expecting it, rather, this statement implies that the hosts of the Tanner Lectures knew exactly what they were getting in to when they asked Costello to speak. This implies that the world is perhaps ready for a new way of addressing such issues—we are outgrowing philosophy.
Returning to Cora Diamond’s essay “The Difficult of Reality and The Difficulty of Philosophy” is helpful at this time, as her essay suggests that the four commenters included in The Lives of Animals do not take this statement of Costello’s to heart. Not only is she not a philosopher, but I believe Coetzee’s work suggests that she is speaking on a subject that ought not be philosophized. Diamond’s reading, particularly her reaction to the readings of the four commenters, supports this. According to Diamond, the commenters, particularly Peter Singer and Amy Guttman, view animal rights as an “‘ethical issue’ for serious discussion” (Diamond, 51), while the character Elizabeth Costello shows herself to be quite wary of such “serious discussion”, of philosophical argument in general.
I argue that thus is important in understanding exactly where philosophy fails in relation to animals—it distances us from them. It takes in to the realm of discussion that which ought to be felt. This is another reason that I believe the PETA campaign and other poetic approaches are so powerful—they stay out of the realm of talk and go straight for the emotions. Yet, emotions can be ambiguous and ill adapted to actual change, and this lack of clarity and direction is one thing that I see in Coetzee’s Costello.
As her son John points out within the text, Costello’s ideas are jumbled and “ill argued”(Coetzee, Lives, 36). During her question an answer segment, when she asks of the audience member “Did that answer your question?” she receives only “a huge, expressive shrug”(Coetzee, Lives, 36). Upon first reading, this seemed to me reflective of the
labyrinthine nature of animal rights discourse, the inability of any person to stick to one question within the issue, where every question suggests another. Diamond offers what I confess to be a more sophisticated understanding of Costello’s argument style, that it “does not take seriously the conventions of a philosophy text”(Diamond, 53). This dismissal of
typical rhetorical argument strategies is exactly what I argued earlier is missing in Singer’s piece. Singer attempts to copy Coetzee but actually just copies those that Coetzee is
dismissing—philosophers, those who argue logical points by trying to one-up each other in arguments, rather than focusing on how we humans feel in relation to animals.
I argue that the entire foundation of argument as the basis for understanding an issue is called in to question by Coetzee’s text. I believe that the commenters at the end of the novel overlooked this critique to their detriment, focusing too much on what they believe Coetzee was arguing rather than how he was arguing it. As evidence of my idea, I turn to Diamond’s analysis, which comes to a similar conclusion. Costello eschews typical argument style because , as Diamond points out, “She sees our reliance on argumentation as a way we may make unavailable to ourselves our own sense of what it is to be a living animal.”(Diamond, 53). In her continual attention to the idea of people as “living
animal[s]”, Diamond relies heavily on the title of the work to structure her argument, and in doing so draws attention to the other commenters’ lack of attention to that detail. Her attention to the title is very important in understanding what I believe to be the function of Coetzee’s form. Unlike the other commenters, she takes the title to point to the life of Costello, and the way that Costello, as a living animal, feels and functions in the world. I believe that it is through this way of being—this understanding of the self as a physical animal—that Costello has come to eschew typical philosophical argument.
Costello’s feeling of herself as a living animal keeps her from engaging in “deflection”(Diamond, 57), which is perhaps the key problem with the philosophical approach towards understanding how we treat animals. Deflection, a term that Diamond takes from Stanley Cavell’s “Knowing and Acknowledging”(Diamond, 57), is used by
Diamond to refer to the process of moving from what she calls “appreciation, or attempt at appreciation, of a difficult reality”(Diamond, 57) in to the realm of philosophical argument, which distances us from the issue. Using Diamond’s reading of “deflection”, I argue that philosophy gives us a way to make palatable that which should not be palatable, to allow us to become distanced from something that we ought to feel intensely and intimately. (I look in to this further in my next chapter when I examine two philosophical texts in relation to this idea of deflection.) In the case of animals, these realities are things we should be feeling physically.
My use of the idea of “deflection” focuses very much on the concept of the physical human body as a site of feeling and understanding. Part of being a “living animal” is inhabiting our bodies in a real way, as opposed to viewing our bodies as, to use
Diamond’s phrase, “mere facts”(Diamond, 59). I read Diamond’s text as supporting what Costello proposes—that we can imagine ourselves in to the being of another and that in doing this we are able to “appreciate” and experience difficult realities rather than distance ourselves from them. As Cary Wolfe points out, Diamond is not “denying the special status of ‘human being’, but rather, as it were, intensifying it”(Wolfe, Exposures, 15), and it is this feeling of intensification of the human experience that I believe is contributing to our shifting understanding of our relation to animals. In embracing our own physicality more, we are able to understand the physical realities of animals more thoroughly as well. (This issue is particularly relevant in my section on physicality in Cavalieri’s text.)
Like Wolfe, I interpret Diamond’s text as calling on us to feel more human, to be more aware of own physical needs as a living being, and in feeling more in touch with our bodies and ourselves we are able to more fully understand what it feels like for other
nonhuman creatures to inhabit themselves. I argue that relying on what Diamond calls the “language game”(Diamond, 70) of talking about animals within philosophical arguments, is what distances us from our feelings, from our bodies, and thereby, from our selves. Through engaging with Diamond’s ideas, I believe Coetzee can be read as suggesting that understanding what it is like to be an animal can only come from first experiencing realities as ourselves, something philosophical argument and language games keep us from doing.
ii) Animals, Physicality, and Sex
Diamond’s assertion that there is a need for a physical awareness—awareness of our physical weakness, vulnerability, needs, etc—in order for us to really experience what it is to be human and what it is to be animal brought to mind an undercurrent in Coetzee’s book that seemed to link animals to sex, and specifically human discomfort with sex. Upon first reading the text I could not see how this fit in with the overall work, but I believe Diamond’s argument can be used to shed some light on this. I argue that this sexual discomfort is indicative of current humanity’s distance from its physical reality, a physical reality represented by the animal. Sexual reproduction is a uniting factor between all mammals, and the sex drive is often talked about as a somewhat primal or animal facet of humanity. If, as Diamond suggests, philosophical argument distances us from the physical reality of ourselves as living animals, then sex takes on a particular significance. In sex, we can be seen as being more like animals than anywhere else in life, performing a primal act, driven by old instincts. Sex is an area in which one must be physical present, and
I argue that the treatment of sex within the text very much supports Diamond’s argument that in relation to the animal question, philosophy pushes us away from physical understanding and engagement with the realities of animal suffering. Upon Costello’s arrival, her son is very uncomfortable about the tensions that exist between his wife and his mother. That Norma has a PhD in philosophy (Coetzee, Lives, 17) seems an almost too obvious comment on the tension between philosophical methods of argument and those of feeling with that Costello proposes, and while Norma cannot be read to represent all incarnations of philosophy (I will discuss later where she differs in her treatment of
Costello from O’Hearne), in this case I do believe that she can be seen as a stand-in for that style of argumentation. John thinks to himself that while he is actually proud of his mother (Coetzee, Lives, 17), his anxiety comes from the fact that he will have to hear his wife’s complaints “in bed”(Coezee, Lives, 17).
It could be that we are to take this literally and read nothing more in to it. Perhaps it is only in bed that John and Norma would have the privacy for her to complain about his mother. Another possible reading does treat the phrase as weighted with implication but could take that implication only to be that the conflict between his wife and mother are so bad that it negatively affects his marriage, to the point of hurting his sex life with his wife. However, only slightly further down, John also comments that he and his wife are resisting getting their son a dog, not because they fear the commitment, the training, or the
responsibility—in fact, he says “they do not mind a puppy”(Coetzee, Lives, 17)—but because they “foresee a grown dog, with a grown dog’s sexual needs, as nothing but trouble,”(Coetzee, Lives, 17).
Once again, this side comment may seem innocuous, but it seems unlikely that Coetzee would have added such a detail without a purpose. Coupled with the previous mention of John’s anxiety about dealing with Norma’s frustration “in bed”, there appears to be an undercurrent of sexual unease about John and Norma’s life together.
Both cases of sexual unease are caused by the physicality of animals. Costello’s arrival, her physical proximity to Norma, and her beliefs about how we ought to treat animal bodies—specifically, not consuming them—lead to sexual strife within John’s marriage. The physical reality of the sexual needs of a dog makes them nervous. Sex would make one nervous, if the goal was distance and deflection. What is sex if not inhabiting another body, feeling that “the body is as the body moves, or the currents of life that move within
it,”(Coetzee, Lives, 51), all things which Costello says Ted Hughes’ poem allow us to feel in relation to a jaguar.
I do not mean to suggest that there is a sexual element in the attempt to feel as an animal, but rather that in the sexual act we are fully inhabiting our own physical bodies and aware of the physical body of another in a way that keeps sex staunchly outside the realm of what can be deflected by philosophical argument. As Norma seems to stand as a pillar of that style of philosophical argument, her apparent distance from or unease with sexuality supports the idea that philosophical language-games, as Diamond calls them, are the antithesis of embodied physical feeling. Coetzee tying her sexual unease to the physical reality of animals furthers this point, and illustrates that philosophy does not deal with proximity to or understanding of animals’ (or humans’) physical realities. Thus, Coetzee’s sexual subtext (perhaps I can coin the word “subsext?”) supports what Diamond proposes,
that only through such proximity, such physical empathy, can we find an alternative to philosophical argument.
iii) When Feeling and Philosophy Debate
Crucially, I do not read Coetzee as suggesting that because philosophy cannot fully represent the reality of how we treat animals, the argument for feeling with them cannot stand up under philosophical scrutiny. Rather, philosophy is the wrong tool for the job. Examining Costello’s son John and his severe anxiety and protectiveness over his mother illustrates, and eventually disproves, the typical understanding of what happens when logic encounters feeling—that feeling cannot hold up. John appears certain that his mother’s way of thinking is not strong enough to stand up to criticism, and that he himself is not strong enough to deal with the fallout her point of view causes. This can be seen in the great discomfort and anxiety John displays over his mother’s interactions with other people at the college and with Norma. Particularly in relation to Norma, John appears totally convinced that whatever his mother’s views are, they are no match for Norma’s, as shown when he begs her not to ask any questions after his mother’s talk (Coetzee, Lives, 36).
A huge amount of his time is spent feeling nervous about his mother’s interactions with others and anticipating problems that have not yet occurred, and do not, in the end, ever occur. At the dinner following his mother’s philosophy lecture, he wonders what will be on the menu and then gets anxious that his mother will give what he calls her “Plutarch Response”(Coetzee, Lives, 38) if someone asks her why she does not eat meat, but his mother does not do this. His wife never asks a directly rude question, no tension eve erupts
in to a disagreement between his wife and Costello, the menu options are vegetarian or fish, and his mother gets along well with everyone at the dinner table with no mention of the “Plutarch Response.” John’s anxiety does not square with Costello’s suggestion that the audience would have asked someone else if they wanted a different kind of speaker, and particularly in light of his fears never amounting to anything, his anxiety appears quite unnecessary.
Though John’s fears do not come to pass, he is correct in his assertion that his wife is exasperated by his mother’s views. We are told that Norma has a PhD in philosophy with a special focus on the philosophy of the mind, and as it is only in relation to her that John’s anxiety appears to have any validity, it is shown that it is this tie to philosophy that is so problematic. The people seated with his mother at the dinner are from various other fields —psychology, political science, and head positions at the university are mentioned (Coetzee, Lives, 39)—and none of them clash with his mother at all. Thus, it can be read that John’s association with philosophy, through his marriage to Norma, is the cause of his strife.
John’s feelings towards his mother in relation to Norma are protective, and he attempts to keep Norma from voicing her questions or debating too fiercely with Costello both during the lecture and at the dinner afterwards, as well as in their own home while Costello visits. I read this as suggesting that in his eyes Norma and her philosophy would run roughshod over Costello and her poetry. If Norma were the only character with a link to philosophy, this might be read as Coetzee suggesting that an argument for animal rights based on emotion cannot stand up to any attack of reason. However, Costello’s interactions with Thomas O’Hearne call for a different interpretation.
Thomas O’Hearne is the professor of philosophy and the man with whom
Costello’s last engagement, a debate, will take place (Coetzee, Lives, 59). Based on John’s heightened anxiety and attempts to keep his wife from raising any philosophical arguments with his mother, one might suspect that the debate would go badly for Costello, that she would be humiliated or treated with derision or shown to be completely not up to the task of answering to philosophy and reason. This is not the case. O’Hearne shows respect to Costello by letting her know beforehand a general idea of what he will be asking (Coetzee, Lives, 60), which is explicitly acknowledged as a “courtesy”(Coetzee, Lives, 60) in the text. When he is delivering a point that he believes will be “particularly harsh”(Coetzee, Lives, 64) he apologizes beforehand. In all his actions, even during a debate, O’Hearne behaves courteously and respectfully.
This alternate depiction of the interaction between Costello’s brand of animal advocacy, based on emotion or poetic feeling, and a philosophically reasoned approach, does not have a clear winner or loser. Coetzee does not show Costello ably fielding all of O’Hearne’s question, nor does he show her unequal to the task of answering them in her own way. John’s fears, therefore, seem unnecessary, and his assumption that philosophical reasoning will always overpower alternate ways of approaching the question is rejected.
As for the Philosophical views themselves, there is a definite sense that they do not fit with what Costello is proposing. Often, she seems not necessarily unable to answer the questions posed to her but unwilling, as if the language of philosophy is incapable to expressing what she wants to say about animal rights. She begins her Philosophy talk by quite clearly establishing that language itself is at play here, and that she has at her disposal the “language of Aristotle and Porphyry, of Augustine and Aquinas…”(Coetzee, Lives, 22),
a name-dropping that reveals that she is quite knowledgeable about the philosophers and therefore her choice not to use them is intentional and not borne of ignorance. She
continues to demonstrate her knowledge by briefly touching on a few other philosophical ideas, and again her previous claim that she “wants to speak philosophically” makes more sense. There are all these ideas here, already articulated by someone else, with which she is familiar, with which others are comfortable, and she can recite them now. Yet they are not enough, and she must reject them, and that will be a hard business.
When she does make her ultimate rejection of philosophy, it is on the grounds of reason. “Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking.”(Coetzee, Lives, 23). Yet Costello is not rejecting using human reason—after all, she admits that she came to this conclusion through “reason and seven decades of life experience”(Coetzee, Lives, 23). So what exactly is she attempting to do with reason? I argue that she merely means to dethrone it, but can go no further than that. She does not, like Posthumanist thinker Kelly Oliver, explicitly say that the entire system of binary oppositions represented by man/animal needs to be “explode[d]” (Oliver, Animal Lessons, 132) in favor of a new framework of ethics.
She does not say that reason should be done away with entirely. Rather, she argues that it should be recognized as what it is—a human device, a “tautology” (Coetzee, Lives, 25) that reinforces itself.
iv). Philosophy and Language
Importantly, she ties both philosophy and reason to language, saying that she could “fall back on the language [of the [philosopher’s],”(Coetzee, Lives, 22), has the language of
Aristotle et al available to her (Coetzee, Lives, 22), and finally that “In the olden days the voice of men, raised in reason, was confronted by the roar of the lion, the bellow of the bull.”(Coetzee,Lives 25). Here is where I think the text makes the most explicit links between the problems of language and reason in relation to animals.
By comparing the voice of reason to a roar and a bellow, Costello implies that each is in some equal to the other. Each is the power-cry of one species, matched against the others in some older time. Now that we are the dominant species, Costello says that animals still use language to confront us, not by their use of it but through their lack thereof. “Animals have only their silence left with which to confront us. Generation after generation, heroically, our captives refuse to speak to us.”(Coetzee, Lives, 25).
As this passage is being delivered through many layers of speech—initially out loud by Coetzee in language, through the fictional haze of Costello delivering it out loud in language, and now to the reader through printed words that are meant to reflect spoken words (and another set of printed ones, as we know Costello is reading her speech off a sheet (Coetzee, Lives, 19) ), we must read this judgment on language with a question to its form.
If language is something animals do not have in the same was that we have it, and if it is tied to reason, and reason is our particularly human crutch, then how is it possible to use language and reason to understand how we ought to relate to animals? This form indicates to me the difficulty behind trying to break down the barriers between ourselves and “the animal”, by showing that the very tools which we are trying to use to discern between us are actually tools with their own agenda, who reinforce our sense of difference and superiority.
I argue that this strange form—reading a fictional lecture that occurred within a real lecture—demonstrates why we cannot expect language and reason to adequately address the issue. Not only does Costello concede that she used reason to get to her place of disavowing reason, but the reader can see that she is using language as she addresses the problems with language, and knowing that the piece is Coetzee’s particular fiction leaves everything in the open. Who is speaking through whom, where does reason end and Costello begin, or Coetzee end and the fiction begin? For the reader, no extraction is possible. We cannot find Coetzee, or locate the exact departure from reason, or know how to use language to talk about not using language. In this way, the piece almost turns in on itself and recognizes its own limitations.
Reason and language cannot capture something that is outside of them, as animals are, just as someone literal-minded like Costello is cannot quite make sense of her own point and is accused of “rambling” (Coetzee, Lives, 31). She is rambling because there is no one, linear, reasonable way to talk through the animal question. Since she cannot articulate this within the bounds of reason and language, her character shows us, by rambling and avoiding “proscriptions”. The only solution that seems to be suggested to this problem of representing and understanding something outside of reason is in the next lecture, titled The Poets and the Animals.
C)
The Poets and The Animals i)
What Cannot Be Put in to Words
Part of the power of the question of how we ought to feel about animals, and
specifically about eating animals, as it is represented by this piece, is the ultimate logical incomprehensibility of it. As shown in the last section, old ideas of philosophy and reason are not able to address the issue because they reinforce their own point as they try to understand it. Since Costello gives two lectures, The Philosophers and The Poets are set up as clear foils of each other and the difference between them can be seen even outside of the actual lecture.
Whereas in the philosophy lecture, John was present from the beginning (his nerves and anxiety aflame), he enters the Poets speech late, after hours of meetings (Coetzee, Lives, 50). We, the reader, entering with him, also miss the first part of the lecture and after a few pages, when Costello ends her speech with “Does that answer your
question?”(Coetzee, Lives, 51) realize that we are actually already in the Question and Answer section. We have in fact missed the entire body of the lecture. We are here only to hear the questions the actual talk raised.
I believe this is because the entire point of attempting to relate to animals through feeling or poetry, to embody them, is separate from the practicalities of what to do with that embodiment. Even for Coetzee, I think, this is a field of feeling, a stance that can question but never quite put forth, because its point is not be a unified argument, but a shifting, feeling, flexible state of mind. As language is so linked to reason and philosophy in this text, not putting the body of the argument in to language is a significant refusal on Coetzee’s part to tie this poetic way of viewing the human/animal relation to typical philosophical methods of argument and representation.
It seems an elegant choice, then, to leave the body of Costello’s talk on poetry and feeling out of the text. It is not something that can be captured by language. Unlike
philosophy and reason, which are there from the beginning, fighting (like Costello and Norma) and causing strife (as shown through John’s anxiety), the question of
understanding human/animal relations through poetry is a relatively new one. It does not have all the language of philosopher’s attached to it, and, significantly, I think, is based on doing new and creative things with language. Poetry does not have to tell a story as much as it has to convey a feeling. Costello suggests that poetry like Ted Hughes’ on the jaguar is the way to “inhabit that [animal] body”(Coetzee, Lives, 51). This statement is a clear retort to Thomas Nagels’s philosophical proposition that “Insofar as I can imagine…it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves.”(Coetzee, Lives, 31), that Costello addressed and disagreed with in the Philosophy lecture.
ii)
The Limits of Poetry
While Costello argues that we can feel what it is like to be an animal when we feel through poetry and emotion rather than reason, there are some problems with putting this in to practice. When discussing the jaguar poem, Costello says “So—leaving side the ethics of caging large animals—Hughes is feeling his way toward a different kind of being-in-the-world”(Coetzee, Lives, 51). The caging of large animals is central to the poem, about a jaguar in a cage, and leaving it aside so casually seems a most strange decision for a woman giving a talk on animal rights. The significance of this phrase seems to be the understanding that when attempting to reach a new way of being-in-the-world, the
benefactor is the person who experiences this being, not the animal. Costello furthers this point by conceding that animals cannot understand poetry, so writing a poem about an animal is not like writing a love poem which has an intended receiver, it “falls within an entirely human economy in which the animal has no share.”(Coetzee, Lives, 51).
This poetic approach is therefore more about finding the proper way of feeling in relation to animals than the proper way of behaving in regards to them. It is from this point of view that one like Costello could understandably be a vegetarian who is still carrying a leather bag and wearing leather shoes. She has reached a place of feeling for the animals that makes the consumption of their flesh disgusting to her, but she is “leaving aside the ethics of caging large animals”. She is hesitant to answer the questions “Are you saying we should shut down factory farms? Should we stop experiments on animals?” and the like.
These questions require a realist solution, a practical and reasoned plan, and a definite philosophical understanding of the difference or similarity between animals and people. Changing the way we use animals on a large scale would require real-world engagement, and Costello is not physically up for it, as shown by John’s frequent
comments her age and apparent frailty (Coetzee, Lives, 15). Her views do not seem quite up for that either, as apparently being the jaguar in the cage is not the same as advocating its release.
Costello leaves with no more clarity than when she came. Upon her first arrival she appeared old—“her shoulders stoop, her flesh has grown flabby”(Coetzee, Lives, 15), and as her son hugs her in the car at the very end of their visit, he smells “the smell of cold cream, old flesh.”(Coetzee, Lives, 69). It is interesting that the word “flesh” is used, as it is also used when John preemptively worries about his mother’s “Plutarch Response”, which
begins “You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I for my part…am astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh.”(Coetzee, Lives, 38). Both at the beginning and the end, Costello is spoken of in the same terms as the animal meat she avoids eating, and it signals her decay.
I argue that her weak state embodies the major problem with trying to understand the human/animal relationship. If we understand it as a human, from a philosophical point of view, we will always view ourselves as superior, through our own reason and language we will talk ourselves in to a slave/master relationship and continue to cage and eat animals that cannot reason and speak as we do. If we do the opposite, and try what Coetzee pitched as the “poetic” approach without translating it in to real world action, we embody the animals, we understand them more honestly, but we must “leave aside the ethics of caging large animals”. We still carry a leather purse.
When, at the end of her trip, overwhelmed by everyone else’s treatment of animals, Costello begins to cry, she has to be comforted by John, who has up to this point felt nothing more than extreme discomfort at her presence. When he hugs her he smells her “old flesh” and says “There, there. It will soon be over.”(Coetzee, Lives, 69). Again, the use of the word “flesh” directly before this phrase clearly bring to mind death, and animal death in particular. Not only is Costello here shown to be close to death, but the animals she is tied to through the word “flesh” and through her own talk of “embodiment” are dying as well.
John seems to interact with his mother much like many people interact with animals —because she does not reason the way that he does, he feels pity and compassion for her but not understanding. He has never been able to embody her, or imagine his way in to her
mind. Now, seeing her distress, he pities her, like a person pitying a wounded animal, but still not understanding them. He does not offer her a solution; he does not discuss a way to change things. His words of comfort echo those that could be said to any animal on the way to slaughter, any animal who has not been able to reason with philosophy to spare his own life, and is faced with a person who has never been able to feel what he feels. “There, there. It will soon be over.”
Conclusion:
Coetzee’s two-lecture setup suggests that philosophy and poetry have different and opposing takes on the human/animal question. As Costello carries out both lectures, it becomes clear that philosophy deals in reason while poetry deals in emotion. The question then becomes, which of these is better for evaluating the current state of human/animal relations. Coetzee’s piece suggests that philosophy is certainly the wrong way of understanding the issue, that argument and language-games cannot ever do more than deflect the reality of the situation from us. Yet the problem remains that Coetzee’s piece appears to suggest that the emotional, feeling ethos, advocated by Costello within the text and Diamond outside it, is incapable of addressing any practical animal welfare concerns. The picture for animal welfare is somewhat bleak—none of the forms we have of
discussing it are working. A philosophical approach is too human-centric, an emotional approach too lacking in real world applicability. Costello’s final moment with her son emphasizes the fate of the animal rights movement if some new bridge between the poetic and the philosophical is not established—death, for the movement and for the animals.
II. Philosophical Text: The Death of the Animal
Introduction
Coetzee presents a view of philosophy that depicts it as unequal to the task of addressing the way we ought to treat animals. His criticisms appear to me to focus on philosophy’s propensity for argument, which called Diamond called “language games”, and which treat ethical issues as calculations, the subjects of which are mere facts. Philosophy makes sanitary that which is dirty, dry that which should be raw. In light of these claims, it seems necessary to examine contemporary philosophical writings on the question of how we treat animals. For this, I will focus primarily on The Death of the Animal by Paola Cavalieri and Animal Lessons by Kelly Oliver.
I anticipate that this examination will show that while Coetzee’s critiques are correct, that philosophy exists outside of what we might call the “real”, the physical reality of ethical issues, there are those within the philosophical tradition attempting to radicalize traditional ideas, like perfectionism or the Socratic idea of a moral agent. Despite this innovative attitude, the works still have markedly little real world application or awareness of suffering as a physical reality, rendering them ultimately unable to meet the needs of the actual animals suffering at the hands of humans, and leaving the need for a more emotional, physically empathetic approach very much apparent.
A) Form and Function i) A Dialogue
Cavalieri’s piece seems particularly apt to be examined in relation to Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals not only because Coetzee himself is included in the “Roundtable”
commentary section, but because it is also a work whose form is somewhat puzzling in relation to its subject matter, and which also blurs the line between literature and philosophy. Just as there is disagreement between Singer and Diamond on whether Coetzee’s work should be read primarily as literature or primarily as doctrine on animal rights, Cary Wolfe suggests in his essay “Humanist and Posthumanist Antispeciesism” that Cavalieri’s work is framed in a way that “unsettle[s] the boundaries between philosophy and literature in ways whose implications are not to be underestimated.”(Wolfe,
Antispeciesism, 47).
This is because it is written in the form of a dialogue, between the imaginary Alexandra and Theo, whose relationship is somewhat ambiguous throughout the text. The problem with this form, Wolfe argues, is that it makes unclear whether the argument is convincing because the argument itself is actually a convincing one, or because the form leads one to believe that one has been convinced, because the other character in the
dialogue has been. Wolfe does not seem to propose an answer to his query—neither do the other commenters, directly. In answer to Wolfe’s question, I have two theories, which are not mutually exclusive, as to the function of Cavalieri’s form.
The first is that the form is somewhat ironic. After all, Cavalieri’s form mirrors the famous Socratic dialogues written by Plato, wherein Socrates is the main character and a slowly educates a questioner about particular philosophical issues. By staging her piece as a dialogue, Cavalieri self-consciously asserts her piece to be one in a tradition of
philosophical dialogues. It does not feel entirely serious; particularly as it is a dialogue about philosophy and philosophical traditions, there appears to be a certain playfulness in Cavalieri’s decision. Further, as the main speaker Alexandra, or simply ‘A’, is rebutting many of what she feels to be antiquated philosophical attitudes, including those of Socrates, it seems doubly ironic that she is using a form so famously associated with his brand of philosophical text.
In light of the fact that some of Alexandra’s arguments still appear plagued by flaws that she calls out in other philosophers, I argue that the form also points out
Alexandra’s failures—which can perhaps be read as the failures of philosophical argument at large. Much of Alexandra’s argument is based around her critique of other philosophical arguments, yet she engages in some of the very practices that she criticizes. Specifically, she seems to council against “slippery slope arguments”(Cavalieri, Death of the Animal, 22) that she says “simply duplicate”(Cavalieri, Death of the Animal, 22) arguments and oppose certain ideas because of what might happen in an extreme case instead of addressing the idea as it is. Yet not much later she argues against a code of ethics that centers around what a being is conscious of by arguing that as we do not have the
conscious desire to breathe this code could be used to suggest we are not harmed by being deprived of oxygen (Cavalieri, Death of the Animal, 30).
At this point even Theo points out that the leap “is more than
implausible”(Cavalieri, Death of the Animal, 30), which suggests to me that Cavalieri is aware that such a leap is an example of the very “slippery slope” thinking Alexandra criticized earlier. As it appears that Cavalieri is in on the joke, it can be read that though she is engaging in the philosophical tradition she recognize some of the problems with it— particularly that some of the argument strategies that are easy to critique in others are almost inextricable from the form of argument itself. Instead of writing from her own voice and attempting to avoid these pitfalls, Cavalieri can be seen as acknowledging them by writing in the dialogue form and allowing her main character to act out some of these problems.
Moving from a critique of Alexandra to a critique of Cavalieri, Wolfe contends that the dialogue form itself shows Cavalieri to be guilty of what Derrida calls “the logic of the supplement”(Wolfe, Antispeciesism, 49). Wolfe describes this as the phenomenon of attempting to “complete” a thing that is already “self sufficient and self contained, as argument”(Wolfe, Antispeciesism, 49). While I think it is an interesting point that a dialogue seems to suggest the need to convince a person of a truth that the dialogue proposes to be self evident, thus simultaneously implying that it is not self evident, I read this not as a failure of Cavalieri’s form but as a failure of philosophical argument, pointed out in The Lives of Animals, that is admitted by Cavalieri’s form.
The failure is this: If reason is as self evident as it proposes itself to be, and if there is but one logical conclusion, then it follows that any (reasonable, rational) person who follows a train of thought logically will come to the same conclusion as another
