This unfortunately will only be skin deep.
Writing about animals takes time and space, neither of which I have in a lowly blog post, so I'll have to make due with - and you'll have to forgive me for - skimming the surface. I want to talk about what it means to live with animals, and to do that I'll be doing a reading of a reading. Raimond Gaita, an Australian expert on Wittgenstein, uses a particular passage from J.M. Coetzee's novel The Lives of Animals to show how they way we live with animals is something deeper, and richer, than we generally understand. But first, I should tell you about Hugo.
Hugo is the peach-faced lovebird my family has had since I was twelve. A replacement, for Sam, the first bird who foolishly flew into a window and broke his neck. Hugo has a different temperament than Sam, though they are brothers, and since he is still alive it seems best to speak of him. What has it meant for me to live, on and off, with this creature, for a decade? Well, not much on the face of it. Nowadays when I come over he swoops down onto my shoulder to nestle into the nape of my neck. We're on better terms than we used to be. There were times when I was younger that I screamed at him for eating one of my books or screeching in my ear as I was trying to concentrate. But if I pause for a moment, and consider the way the house is when he is there, I realize that indeed there is much to plumb in this extra-species relationship.
My deportment around the house is entirely in line with the fact that there is another creature there with me. This is not something conscious. At no point did I decide to behave differently whether the bird is there or not. One might reply to this by saying, "well yes, obviously you'll act different, that sheds no light on anything,"but that would be, I think, to miss something. Yes, I might act a little differently if I walked into my house and the entire inside was completely different (this in fact happened once I had moved out and my brother-in-law moved in), but I suspect that this "acting differently" is of a different kind than the kind of deportment I assume when around Hugo. First of all, the former is something conscious, while the latter is embedded in my being in the world. There is something about the way we live with animals that comes before - and indeed makes up - our rational understanding of them. From here I shall turn to Gaita, and Coetzee.
First, a quote from Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of three of Coetzee's books, the first being The Lives of Animals. Costello is a animal-rights thinker par excellence, and here she addresses the contention that animals cannot fear death and thus their deaths are lesser events than the death of a human.
Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the bring of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being of animals an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh. (The Lives of Animals, 65)
Gaita sees that within this particular line of argument, Coetzee, "challenges assumptions about the connection between our sense of an animal's body and our unhesitating preparedness to say that animals believe this or know that. He urges us to attend to the role that the living body, the body of flesh and blood, plays in the constitution of our concepts, including our concepts of belief and knowledge. Like Wittgenstein, he seems to believe that we misunderstand the importance of the infinitely subtle inflections and demeanours of the body, the many forms of its expressiveness, if we take them only on as the basis for hypothetical attributions of states of consciousness to animals. Rather (I take him to suggest), they partly determine the meaning that words like "knowledge" and "belief," "hope" and "fear," and so on have in our life with language - language, Coetzee emphasizes, as it is used in disciplined ways in literature, and elicited in imaginative living with animals" (The Philosopher's Dog, 71-72)
I doubt that Coetzee sees himself as being particularly Wittgensteinian. Considering that many, if not all, of his works exemplify aspects of deconstructionism, it is a safer bet that his position on the body comes from people like Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and, ultimately, Heidegger and Freud. Furthermore, it is unclear whether Costello is speaking for Coetzee here. Considering that he's a strict vegetarian, I'm inclined to side with Gaita, but there's no real proof that Costello is speaking Coetzee's thoughts. But Gaita is right to pick up the body as a central theme in Coetzee's work. The living body, for both animals and humans, is the place of communication and knowledge that comes long before anything like states of consciousness. Gaita's larger point in The Philosopher's Dog is that many of our basic concepts - concepts that we assume have nothing to do with animal life - are at least partly constituted by our lives with animals.
Our lives with animals are made up of bodily interaction, and not merely of a brutish kind. When Hugo nestles onto my shoulder, there is more going on than him landing on something warm. Is this some kind of intellectual interaction? No, but neither is it an example of a rational being interacting with an automaton - and let's be serious, birds are pretty stupid creatures generally. And so when considering how we should treat animals, we should note that we are not wrong to consider their feelings and grant them rights as living things, but secondly that we can go to far into anthropomorphism, ultimately asking meaningless questions about whether dogs or horses possess the concept of death. What does it matter if they have the mental apparatus to comprehend death when they can feel it coming with every inch of their bodies? The former means nothing in the face of the latter.
As I said, I can only skim the surface, but what I hope the quotes above, and my time with Hugo, suggest is that our deportment towards animals is more deeply felt than we give it credit, and more important in constituting how we are in the world - i.e. who we are - than we may understand. Is that why I myself shy away from eating meat? Well, it wasn't at first, but it surely is now.
