© Columbia University Press
Philosophy and Animal Life
June, 2008
Cloth, 184 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14514-5
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Excerpt from the introduction: "Exposures"
Cary Wolfe
In his novel Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee tells the story of David Lurie, a literature professor in South Africa whose career comes to an abrupt end after he has an affair with a female undergraduate and is charged with sexual harassment. Lurie moves to the country, where his daughter Lucy has a small farm, and begins volunteering at the local animal shelter, where he assists in euthanizing the scores of animals, mainly dogs, for whom no homes can be found. Lurie has never thought of himself as “a sentimentalist,” as he puts it, and he takes to the work reluctantly. But then, gradually, he becomes absorbed in it. “He had thought he would get used to it,” Coetzee writes. “But that is not what happens. The more killings he assists in, the more jittery he gets.” Then, one Sunday night as he is driving back from the clinic, it hits him; “he actually has to stop at the roadside to recover himself. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake. He does not understand what is happening to him.” For reasons he doesn’t understand, “his whole being is gripped by what happens in the [surgical] theatre” (143).
This moment in Coetzee’s emotionally and politically complex novel is a kind of amplification of a passage from his contemporaneous work, The Lives of Animals, which serves as a touchstone in the essays that follow. In The Lives of Animals, the main character, novelist Elizabeth Costello, is haunted— “wounded,” to use a figure that Cora Diamond highlights in “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy”—by how we treat nonhuman animals in practices such as factory farming, a systemized and mechanized killing that she compares (to the consternation of some) in its scale and its violence to the Holocaust of the Jews during the Second World War. At a dinner after one of her invited public lectures, she is asked by the president of the university whether her vegetarianism “comes out of moral conviction,” and she responds, against the expectations of her hosts, “No, I don’t think so. . . . It comes out of a desire to save my soul.” And when the university administrator politely replies, “Well, I have a great respect for it,” she retorts impatiently, “I’m wearing leather shoes. I’m carrying a leather purse. I wouldn’t have overmuch respect if I were you.”
What haunts Costello here, and what suddenly shakes David Lurie to his very soles as he is driving home that night, is the sheer weight and gravity of what has become one of the central ethical issues of our time: our moral responsibilities toward nonhuman animals. But both moments in Coetzee’s work insist on something else, too, something that also, in a different way, unsettles the very foundations of what we call “the human,” and in so doing reveals the characterization I just offered (of our responsibilities to animals as an “ethical issue”) to be a kind of evasion of a problem that is not so easily disposed of. For both moments acknowledge a second kind of “unspeakability”: not only the unspeakability of how we treat animals in practices such as factory farming but also the unspeakability of the limits of our own thinking in confronting such a reality—the trauma, as Diamond puts it, of “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability” (“The Difficulty of Reality,” 45–46).
Writ large, in the terms of the (post-)Enlightenment philosophical tradition, this is often referred to as the problem of philosophical “skepticism,” and part of what Diamond is interested in pressuring here is the extent to which the two questions that anchor this volume (philosophical skepticism and its consequences for ethics, and the question of our moral responsibilities to nonhuman animals) are and are not versions of the same question. This is not to say that the papers collected here agree on this point; on the contrary, it seems to me that we find three rather different views on this matter—a situation that is brought into particularly sharp focus in John McDowell’s response to both Cavell and Diamond and the extent to which Cavell’s essay does justice to his own insights in this matter. For his part, Cavell has explored the question of skepticism with remarkable nuance and range over the past forty and more years. Working through figures as diverse as Kant, Descartes, Emerson, Wittgenstein, Austin, and Heidegger (among others), Cavell has plumbed the consequences of what it means to do philosophy in the wake of what he calls the Kantian “settlement” with skepticism. As he characterizes it in In Quest of the Ordinary, “To settle with skepticism . . . to assure us that we do know the existence of the world, or rather, that what we understand as knowledge is of the world, the price Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant human knowledge is not of things as they are in themselves. You don’t—do you?— have to be a romantic to feel sometimes about that settlement: Thanks for nothing.”3 But if, on Cavell’s reading of Kant, “reason proves its power to itself, over itself” (30) by logically deriving the difference between the world of mere appearances (phenomena) that we can know and the world of the Ding an sich (noumena), which our knowledge never touches, then we find ourselves in a position that is not just odd but in fact profoundly unsettling, for philosophy in a fundamental sense then fails precisely insofar as it succeeds. We gain knowledge, but only to lose the world.
The question in the wake of skepticism thus becomes: What can it mean to (continue to) do philosophy after philosophy has become, in a certain sense, impossible? One thing it does not mean (if we believe the essays collected here) is that such “resistance” of the world (“the difficulty of reality,” to use the phrase Diamond borrows from novelist John Updike) could be dissolved or overcome by ever-more ingenious or accomplished propositional arguments, ever-more refined philosophical concepts. Indeed, to think that it can—to mistake “the difficulty of philosophy” for the “difficulty of reality” (as Diamond suggests is the case with the philosophical “Reflections” published at the end of The Lives of Animals)—is to indulge in a “deflection” (to use Cavell’s term) of a reality that impinges upon us—“befalls” us, as Wittgenstein once put it—in ways not masterable by the crafting of analytical arguments. (This is why, Diamond suggests, Elizabeth Costello does not offer an argument in defense of her vegetarianism, and it is also why Costello is quick to point to the inconsistency of her own practices with regard to animal products.) It is that impingement, that “pressure” of reality, that overtakes David Lurie on the drive back from the clinic. He literally does not know what is happening to him; he has no reasons for it and cannot explain it. And yet it is the most real thing in the world.
These fundamental challenges for (and to) philosophy are sounded by Cavell in his reading of the philosopher most important to him, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who writes in his most important essay, “Experience”: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.” For Cavell, this moment registers the confrontation with skepticism, certainly, but it also voices an understanding of how philosophy must change in the wake of that confrontation. For the “unhandsome” here names not just the Kantian Ding an sich but also, Cavell writes, “what happens when we seek to deny the stand-offishness of objects by clutching at them; which is to say, when we conceive thinking, say the application of concepts in judgments, as grasping something.” When we engage in that sort of “deflection,” we only deepen the abyss—“when we clutch hardest”—between our thinking and the world that we want to understand. The opposite of clutching, on the other hand—what Cavell will call “the most handsome part of our condition”—is facing the fact that “the demand for unity in our judgments, that our deployment of concepts, is not the expression of the conditionedness or limitations of our humanness but of the human effort to escape our humanness” (This New, 86–87).
We may think that we have left the question of our relation to nonhuman animals behind at this juncture, but as both Cavell and Jacques Derrida remind us in their readings of Heidegger, the figure of the hand in relation to thought and to species difference is a linchpin of philosophical humanism. As Cavell points out, harbored in Heidegger’s famous contention that “thinking is a handicraft” is the “fantasy of the apposable [sic] thumb” that separates the human from the animal not just anthropologically but also ontologically.5 As Heidegger writes, in a moment emphasized by Derrida: “Apes, for example, have organs that can grasp, but they have no hand,” for their being is subordinated to utility rather than devoted to thought and the reflection on things “as such,” which is possible for only for beings who possess language.6 Thus, the opposite of the “clutching” or “grasping” that will find its apotheosis for Heidegger in the world domination of technology is a thinking that is instead a kind of “reception” or welcoming (Cavell, Conditions, 39). Or as Derrida puts it, “If there is a thought of the hand or a hand of thought, as Heidegger gives us to think, it is not of the order of conceptual grasping. Rather this thought of the hand belongs to the essence of the gift, of a giving that would give, if this is possible, without taking hold of anything” (“Geschlecht II,” 173). And thus Heidegger’s insistence, as Cavell reminds us, on “the derivation of the word thinking from a root for thanking,” as if “giving thanks for the gift of thinking” (Conditions, 39).
Philosophy can therefore no longer be seen as mastery, as a kind of clutching or grasping via analytical categories and concepts, which seemed, for Heidegger, “a kind of sublimized violence” (Conditions, 39). Rather, the duty of thinking is not to “deflect” but to receive and even suffer (remember Costello’s woundedness) what Cavell calls our “exposure” to the world. That Diamond is much attracted to this term is clear not just because she begins her essay with a reading of a poem about a photograph but also because it underscores an important connection between the exposure of our concepts to the confrontation with skepticism and the physical exposure to vulnerability and mortality that we suffer because we, like animals, are embodied beings. As Diamond puts it in a key moment in her essay, unpacking her sense of Costello’s startling assertion that “I know what it is like to be a corpse”:
The awareness we each have of being a living body, being “alive to the world”, carries with it exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them. This vulnerability is capable of panicking us. To be able to acknowledge it at all, let alone as shared, is wounding; but acknowledging it as shared with other animals, in the presence of what we do to them, is capable not only of panicking one but also of isolating one, as Elizabeth Costello is isolated. Is there any difficulty in seeing why we should not prefer to return to moral debate, in which the livingness and death of animals enter as facts that we treat as relevant in this or that way, not as presences that may unseat our reason? (“The Difficulty of Reality,” 74)
But there is yet a third type of exposure or finitude that is crucial here as well, as practiced readers of Heidegger (or, for that matter, of Cavell or Derrida) will have already guessed: our exposure—in a radical sense, our subjection—to language and writing in ways that bear very directly upon what it means to do philosophy, what philosophy can do in the face of these existential and ethical challenges. For one further consequence of everything I have been saying thus far is that the relationship between philosophical thinking (“concepts”) and philosophy as a writing practice now takes on unprecedented importance (which is why Heidegger and Derrida and Cavell write the way they do—which is to say, “unphilosophically”). Against the backdrop of what is often referred to as the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century philosophy, there is a direct line of connection between the problem of philosophical skepticism and the work of Wittgenstein on language, which will prove so important to all three of the philosophers collected here. But it is also on this point, as I will try to bring out later, that crucial differences emerge between this sort of work, emerging as it does out of an especially adventurous wing of the analytical tradition, and poststructuralist philosophy, particularly the work of Jacques Derrida, who construes the consequences of the philosophy-language relation, of our finitude in relation to both, in ways that bear directly upon how we may and may not think our relations to ourselves and to nonhuman animals.
Diamond’s earlier work is worth revisiting here in some detail because it addresses even more methodically the relations among language, thinking, and our ethical obligations to nonhuman others that form the focus of this volume. As she insists in an essay from 2001 called “Injustice and Animals,” our “grammatical redescription” of a philosophical problem is crucial and in some sense determinative of our ability to do justice to the ethical challenges it entails. In this light, for her, the fundamental question of justice issues from an essentially different conceptual realm than the question of “rights.” “When genuine issues of justice and injustice are framed in terms of rights,” she argues, “they are thereby distorted and trivialized” because of “the underlying tie between rights and a system of entitlement that is concerned, not with evil done to a person, but with how much he or she gets compared to other participants in the system” (121). In rights discourse, she argues, “the character of our conflicts is made obscure” by what Wittgenstein would call a poor grammatical description of the problem of justice (124).
Instead, what generates our moral response to animals and their treatment, Diamond argues, is our sense of the mortality and vulnerability that we share with them, of which the brute subjection of the body— in the treatment of animals as mere research tools, say—is perhaps the most poignant testament. For Diamond, the “horror at the conceptualizing of animals as putting nothing in the way of their use as mere stuff” is dependent upon “a comparable horror at human relentlessness and pitiliness in the exercise of power” toward other humans (as, in for example, the torture of other human beings) (“Injustice,” 136). What the rights tradition misses, in her view, is that the “capacity to respond to injustice as injustice” depends not on working out (from a safe ontological distance, as it were) who should have a fair share of this or that abstract “good,” based upon the possession of this or that abstract “interest” or attribute, but rather on “a recognition of our own vulnerability”—a recognition not demanded and in some sense actively avoided by rights-oriented thinking (“Injustice,” 121). (And here, of course, we would do well to remember the “wounded” character of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a rawness that pushes her moral response to our treatment of animals beyond propositional argument—and sometimes beyond the decorum of polite society.)
What such an insight points toward, Diamond contends, is the fact that “there is something wrong with the contrast, taken to be exhaustive, between demanding one’s rights and begging for kindness—begging for what is merely kindness. The idea that those are the only possibilities is . . . one of the main props of the idea that doing injustice is failing to respect rights” (“Injustice,” 129). Contemporary moral theory thus “pushes apart justice, on the one hand, and compassion, love, pity, tenderness, on the other” (131), but Diamond’s understanding of the question “has at its center the idea that a kind of loving attention to another being, a possible victim of injustice, is essential to any understanding of the evil of injustice” (131–32). In fact, she agrees with Simone Weil’s suggestion that “rights can work for justice or for injustice,” that the concept of rights possesses “a kind of moral noncommitment to the good” (128). In an important sense, then, “rights” are beside the point of justice per se, and “the language of rights is, one might say, meant to be useful in contexts in which we cannot count on the kind of understanding of evil that depends on loving attention to the victim” (139).
There are, in other words, two different and in fact incommensurable kinds of value here (121)—a point missed by both “sides” of what Diamond calls “that great arena of dissociated thought, contemporary debate about animals’ rights.”8 The problem with both sides of the debate—represented by, say, Peter Singer, on one side, and, on the other, philosopher Michael Leahy and his avatar Thomas O’Hearne in The Lives of Animals—is that they are locked into a model of justice in which a being does or does not have rights on the basis of its possession (or lack) of morally significant characteristics that can be empirically derived. Both sides argue “that what is involved in moral thought is knowledge of empirical similarities and differences, and the testing and application of general principles of evaluation.”9 And so, as Diamond puts it in the essay included here, “the opposite sides in the debate may have more in common then they realize. In the voices we hear in the debate about animal rights, those of people like Singer on the one hand and those of Leahy and the fictional O’Hearne on the other, there is shared a desire for a ‘because’: because animals are this kind of being, or because they are that kind of being, thus-andsuch is their standing for our moral thought” (“The Difficulty of Reality,” 71). But what Diamond hears in both sets of voices is an evasion of our “exposure” to an arena of moral complexity in which (to quote Cavell) “the other can present me with no mark or feature on the basis of which I can settle my attitude” (quoted in “The Difficulty of Reality,” 71–72).
Part of the reason for that, of course, is that such attitudes are far from the thin, if-P-then-Q abstractions that a certain kind of philosophy takes them to be. They are thick with psychological vexation and rife with contradictory impulses and attachments. So Diamond is concerned to show not just that such a picture of ethics confuses the question of justice with the “mediocre” level of mere rights (“Injustice and Animals,” 121) but also that it bears no resemblance to what she suggests is our moral life. For her, proponents of animal rights in the analytical tradition are wrong when they insist that the distinction between human and animal is not ethically fundamental. At the same time, however, those who oppose animal rights within that same analytical tradition are wrong about how the difference between humans and animals is relevant. “The notion ‘human being’ is of the greatest significance in moral thought” (“Losing Your Concepts,” 264), she argues, but not because it is a “biological notion” (264). Rather, the concept of “human being” is a main source of that moral sensibility that we may then be able to extend to nonhuman animals. “We can come to think of killing an animal as in some circumstances at least similar to homicide,” she continues, “but the significance of doing so depends on our already having an idea of what it is to kill a man; and for us (as opposed to abstract Moral Agents) the idea of what it is to kill a man does depend on the sense of human life as special, as something set apart from what else happens on the planet” (“Experimenting,” 353).
For Diamond, then, it is crucial to take account of “what human beings have made of the difference between human beings and animals” (“Experimenting,” 351). As she puts it elsewhere,
if we appeal to people to prevent suffering, and we, in our appeal, try to obliterate the distinction between human beings and animals and just get people to speak or think of “different species of animals,” there is no footing left from which to tell us what we ought to do. . . . The moral expectations of other human beings demand something of me as other than an animal; and we do something like imaginatively read into animals something like such expectations when we think of vegetarianism as enabling us to meet a cow’s eyes. There is nothing wrong with that; there is something wrong with trying to keep that response and destroy its foundation.
So for Diamond, it is not by denying the special status of “human being” but rather, as it were, by intensifying it that we can come to think of nonhuman animals not as bearers of “interests” or as “rights holders” but rather as something much more compelling: “fellow creatures.” That phrase “does not mean, biologically, an animal, something with biological life,” but rather our “response to animals as our fellows in mortality, in life on this earth” (“Eating,” 329). And hence, the difference between human and nonhuman animals “may indeed start out as a biological difference, but it becomes something for human thought through being taken up and made something of—by generations of human beings, in their practices, their art, their literature, their religion” (“Experimenting,” 351), those practices that enable us to “imaginatively read into animals” expectations that originate, as it were, in the human, the “other than an animal.”
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