BOOKS THAT SWERVED MY THINKING IN 2024: Part Two
Philosophy & Animal Life, by Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe
This post is the second is a (brief) series about the books I read in 2024 that have swerved my thinking, which is to say books that sent my thinking about the world, myself, and/or my work off on a new trajectory that’s likely to hold for a good while. Part One is available here.
Okay, so I’m going to say right at the jump that the second book I read this year that truly swerved my thinking, Philosophy & Animal Life by Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe, is a not an easy read. We might even be tempted to say that it’s a difficult book, perhaps even deliberately so. This collection of essays by relatively big figures in the philosophical world has all the hallmarks of an academic work that’s easy to dislike — a long introduction centered around notoriously difficult and obscure thinkers (Derrida and Heidegger) that can give one the feeling of being dropped late into a long conversation, most of which is and has been in French and German. The articles unfold as reflections upon reflections upon, among other things, a novel and a poem (viz., more stuff you probably don’t know about yet have to deal with.) The articles also focus, as does most philosophy, on clarifying the question or issue as to proposing solutions to a problem, which leaves the reader (as usual) with the problem in stark relief and without solutions, or, if you prefer, with solutions that one might justifiably find wholly unsatisfying.
Reader beware in other words. Now that I’ve warmed you up, time to (as the kids say) lock in. Here we go: Books that Swerved my Thinking in 2024: Part Two.
Philosophy & Animal Life, published in 2008, has at its center an essay by Cora Diamond called “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.” Diamond, longtime moral philosopher and vegetarian, takes up the fact of our eating animals and our response to that fact. She enters this discussion mainly through the Tanner Lectures given by the South African novelist and Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee that were published as The Lives of Animals. Coetzee didn’t show up to Princeton with a usual lecture but instead read two short stories in which the central character, Elizabeth Costello, is herself invited to give a lecture on literature but instead chooses to discuss the mass eating of animals. During her lecture, Costello equates the mass farming and consumption of animals to the Holocaust, which triggers a range of responses from the academic audience, including support, denial, and disgust.
Diamond is interested in Elizabeth Costello, both the book and the character, as an instance of the “difficulty of reality,” by which she means:
Experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present the kind of difficulty, of being hard or impossible or agonizing to get one’s mind around. (pp. 45-46)
Diamond sees the mass preparation and eating of animals as a key example of the difficulty of reality. Elizabeth Costello reacts with horror to our treatment of animals, a reaction prior and, more importantly, resistant to its intellectualization. Costello doesn’t talk about her reaction in her lectures so much as appear wounded or haunted by it to her audience, and she sees no other proper response to it even as she acknowledges that most people aren’t similarly haunted or wounded. In fact, most people find the eating of animals central to their experience of joy, something both routine and a highlight of special occasions (that Thanksgiving turkey, e.g.).
This point is just where philosophy could and should show up to be useful: We seem to have a clear moral question that the machinery of ethics is designed to take in and kick out the proper, moral response. And some of the responses to Costello’s lectures take this approach — viz., What is the moral status of animals? What rights do they have and what obligations do those rights place upon us? What moral facts will settle this question about how we ought to treat animals?
But Diamond responds that moving the question into the practice of philosophy, of giving arguments in favor of one conclusion or another, is itself suspect. It amounts to a kind of deflection, a clever way of distancing ourselves from our own fact of being living animals, which is to say susceptible (inevitably) to death. She writes:
To appreciate the difficulty is to feel oneself shouldered out of how one thinks, how one is apparently supposed to think, or to have a sense of the inability of thought to encompass what it is trying to reach (p. 58).
To put it a little crudely, non-human animals don’t (as far as we know) engage in philosophical argument, and the fact that we turn to it in this instance can be construed as a way of distancing ourselves from them and the fundamental fact of our shared precarity. Through engaging in philosophy, we flee the “exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with [non-human animals]” (p. 74).
How My Thinking Was Swerved
If you’ve read this far, congratulations and thank you. After all, we’re over 800 words in, and I’ve only discussed one of the five chapters in the book.
Here’s the swerve point: Diamond’s essay, and primarily Stanley Cavell’s response, bring into stark relief that some facts or issues or questions can be viewed by some as evil or incomprehensible but by others as commonplace and not even worthy of note (or even, in the case of eating animals, enjoyable). I’ve had some direct experience with this sort of thing in my own classrooms teaching introductory philosophy. Intro classes often include lots of students who need to satisfy a general education requirement and found my section open and squaring neatly enough with the stuff they actually wanted to take. I discovered very quickly that we couldn’t just read Plato or whatever, outline the arguments, and write a few papers about their strengths and weaknesses. Most people just don’t see most philosophical problems as problems at all, let alone ones that require fancy thought experiments, struggling with difficult and old timey texts, or special symbols and rules for working with them. My senses might just be deceiving me and the world might be just an illusion? Come on, man. That’s just crazy talk, and I’ve got lunch plans.
It is, of course, crazy talk, but that’s basically the point of philosophy.1
Still, I know (realize? find? acknowledge?) that eating animals is wrong in some general but important sense, yet I continue to do so. Q, my daughter, has become a vegetarian, not strictly for moral reasons but also for morally relevant reasons. What will it take for me to see the problem of eating animals as a profound problem, one that will shoulder me out of my way of thinking and behaving? Or do I continue in my “bitter compromise” because it’s what having a body can lead to?
So, swerve #1: How do we make others see problems as problems, especially if traditional tools like philosophy and argument are insufficient and likely attempts to avoid doing so? I find this question deeply pressing given that we are entering a time in this country where many in power will not be disposed to see the lives and suffering of others as facts worthy of acknowledgement let alone facts in need of consideration or remedy.
Now, swerve #2: What, and who, is ethics for? We want, desperately, for there to be moral truths that theories reveal so that we may be guided and as often excused. But such a want seems unable to survive the experience of living with others and oneself. And besides, morality seems powerless just when we need it most — as Cavell says in his essay in this book (and elsewhere), “morality is not meant to check the conduct of monsters” (p. 102). If not morality, then what? And, what if I am the monster whose conduct must be checked?
Like any good philosopher, I end here with the sharpened questions and without bandages for the cuts they may leave.
Reminds me of that famous quote by Wittgenstein in On Certainty where he imagines having a discussion with a philosopher who insists, while pointing at a tree, “I know that that’s a tree.” When a new person arrives, Wittgenstein remarks, “this fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”