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Philosophy and Animal Life
Philosophy and Animal Life offers a new way of thinking about animal rights, our obligation to animals, and the nature of philosophy itself. Cora Diamond begins with "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy," in which she accuses analytical philosophy of evading, or deflecting, the responsibility of human beings toward nonhuman animals. Diamond then explores the animal question as it is bound up with the more general problem of philosophical skepticism. Focusing specifically on J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals , she considers the failure of language to capture the vulnerability of humans and animals.
Stanley Cavell responds to Diamond's argument with his own close reading of Coetzee's work, connecting the human-animal relation to further themes of morality and philosophy. John McDowell follows with a critique of both Diamond and Cavell, and Ian Hacking explains why Cora Diamond's essay is so deeply perturbing and, paradoxically for a philosopher, he favors poetry over philosophy as a way of overcoming some of her difficulties. Cary Wolfe's introduction situates these arguments within the broader context of contemporary continental philosophy and theory, particularly Jacques Derrida's work on deconstruction and the question of the animal. Philosophy and Animal Life is a crucial collection for those interested in animal rights, ethics, and the development of philosophical inquiry. It also offers a unique exploration of the role of ethics in Coetzee's fiction.
Stanley Cavell responds to Diamond's argument with his own close reading of Coetzee's work, connecting the human-animal relation to further themes of morality and philosophy. John McDowell follows with a critique of both Diamond and Cavell, and Ian Hacking explains why Cora Diamond's essay is so deeply perturbing and, paradoxically for a philosopher, he favors poetry over philosophy as a way of overcoming some of her difficulties. Cary Wolfe's introduction situates these arguments within the broader context of contemporary continental philosophy and theory, particularly Jacques Derrida's work on deconstruction and the question of the animal. Philosophy and Animal Life is a crucial collection for those interested in animal rights, ethics, and the development of philosophical inquiry. It also offers a unique exploration of the role of ethics in Coetzee's fiction.
184 pages, Paperback
First published May 19, 2008
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About the author
Stanley Cavell
97 books106 followersStanley Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 24, 2018
Cora Diamond's essay would get 4,5 stars; Cavell's, McDowell's, etc. just show how Philosophy can detach itself from the real world, from life, and therefore are nothing but ridiculous attempts at delving into a so-called intellectual way of thinking.
August 17, 2016
Philosophy and Animal Life is a volume of essays which, along with Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal, continues the rich critical reflection on J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and on the peculiar depths and surface of its protagonist, Elizabeth Costello.
The core of this volume is Cora Diamond's studied and abundant The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy. Diamond begins with a descriptive account of a poem by Ted Hughes, "Six Young Men", wherein the speaker describes a photo of six smiling young men seated in a familiar spot.
Stanley Cavell's own contribution, Companionable Thinking, of which I'll say little only so as not to reduce it, is both a commendation and a criticism of Diamond's essay, but it is also a continuation of his engagement with Emerson, Wittgenstein, scepticism, and perfectionism.
John McDowell responds to Cavell's criticisms of Diamond's essay with a commentary of his own, characteristically singular and sharp, that engages with his own writings on Wittgenstein and "seeing aspects". He (McDowell) rehearses his own peculiar methods of resolution, which come through in performance not by way of unfolding new and grand systems in place of the old, but by attention to the delicate and the situation of obstacles that still, and have stilled, our flow of thought. According to McDowell, Cavell, in his own obtrusive way, "does not do justice to the wonderful way Diamond has found to throw light on Cavellian themes".
Cary Wolfe's Exposures, which introduces the volume, reads for closeness and situates the live work of Cavell and Diamond in the context of treatments of the human and the animal in a broader picture, while taking from the more conspicuously philosophical elements under consideration to draw comparisons between Diamond and Derrida - comparisons that work, rather than to disown or disparage one or the other, more to bring out their strange affinities .
Finally, Ian Hacking's Deflections is a roaming piece of commentary, decidedly more literary than philosophical and yet argumentative at its own pace, on all that came before it. "Roaming" is the word I use, because Hacking moves so swiftly and unsteadily from here to there. And yet, his vision is never hazy after a jump. He focuses, illuminates something the foregoing authors had missed in each other, and re-says in order to be faithful to them. He seems to capture, in his somewhat deliberate performance, the ordinary that had gone out of the world.
The core of this volume is Cora Diamond's studied and abundant The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy. Diamond begins with a descriptive account of a poem by Ted Hughes, "Six Young Men", wherein the speaker describes a photo of six smiling young men seated in a familiar spot.
"He [the speaker] knows the bank covered with bilberries, the tree and the old wall in the photo: the six men in the picture would have heard the valley below them sounding with rushing water, just as it still does. [...] The men are profoundly, fully alive, one bashfully lowering his eyes, one chewing a piece of grass, one 'is ridiculous with cocky pride'."A photograph from 1914, of six young men, smiling, who, six months from when the picture was taken, were all dead.
"In the photograph, then, there can also be thought the death of these men: the worst 'flash and rending' of war falling onto these smiles now forty years rotted and gone."Diamond says, after quoting the final stanza, "What interests me there is the experience of the mind's not being able to encompass something which it encounters." This coming apart of our everyday thinking, which Diamond illuminates in great detail, is what she finds in Coetzee's lectures and in the experience of Elizabeth Costello. This is the difficulty of reality with which Diamond is concerned. Then, drawing on the theme of deflection in the work of Stanley Cavell, Diamond questions what philosophy can say of these experiences. Unfortunately, what philosophy can and does do too often, as perhaps is best seen in Singer's response to Coetzee, is to deflect from these difficulties into an abstract philosophical problem in the vicinity. That is, as in Cavell's original use in his discussion of scepticism, philosophers will re-say the problem in terms of an abstract philosophical game of tokens and thus deflect from the real. But can philosophy practice itself without deflection?
Stanley Cavell's own contribution, Companionable Thinking, of which I'll say little only so as not to reduce it, is both a commendation and a criticism of Diamond's essay, but it is also a continuation of his engagement with Emerson, Wittgenstein, scepticism, and perfectionism.
John McDowell responds to Cavell's criticisms of Diamond's essay with a commentary of his own, characteristically singular and sharp, that engages with his own writings on Wittgenstein and "seeing aspects". He (McDowell) rehearses his own peculiar methods of resolution, which come through in performance not by way of unfolding new and grand systems in place of the old, but by attention to the delicate and the situation of obstacles that still, and have stilled, our flow of thought. According to McDowell, Cavell, in his own obtrusive way, "does not do justice to the wonderful way Diamond has found to throw light on Cavellian themes".
Cary Wolfe's Exposures, which introduces the volume, reads for closeness and situates the live work of Cavell and Diamond in the context of treatments of the human and the animal in a broader picture, while taking from the more conspicuously philosophical elements under consideration to draw comparisons between Diamond and Derrida - comparisons that work, rather than to disown or disparage one or the other, more to bring out their strange affinities .
Finally, Ian Hacking's Deflections is a roaming piece of commentary, decidedly more literary than philosophical and yet argumentative at its own pace, on all that came before it. "Roaming" is the word I use, because Hacking moves so swiftly and unsteadily from here to there. And yet, his vision is never hazy after a jump. He focuses, illuminates something the foregoing authors had missed in each other, and re-says in order to be faithful to them. He seems to capture, in his somewhat deliberate performance, the ordinary that had gone out of the world.
December 8, 2017
This is a thought-provoking, slim, gem of a book on the questions of animal life and philosophical thinking about animal life. At its centre is Cora Diamond's 'The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,' a piece that everyone who thinks about animal 'rights' or 'welfare' should read. The essays collected here are not overly-technical (i.e. one need not have committed herself to years of academic philosophy to make sense of them) but they are deeply profound. This is a book I can see coming back to again and again for its ability to trouble my own thinking about nonhuman animals.
February 25, 2024
A slim but challenging collection of essays, Philosophy and Animal Life takes up a difficult moral question — should we eat animals — in a unique and challenging way. Instead of a (predictable) set of arguments and replies around whether eating animals can be morally justified, this collection focuses on whether philosophical argumentation in the face of the fact of humanity's eating (and *enjoying* eating) of other animals is a type of deflection. As Stanley Cavell describes Cora Diamond's framing: "The [philosophical] arguments, familiarly in terms of animal rights, she finds not just too weak, but the impulse to argument at this level to be itself morally suspicious" (p. 102). In other words, simply responding to our treatment of animals with philosophy seems to deflect from coming to grips with the fact of that treatment itself.
Cavell has devoted much difficult and beautiful work to similar questions, mainly with respect to skepticism, and his essay collected here does not disappoint. For example, Cavell has argued (convincingly, I think) that attempts to philosophically defeat skepticism about the existence of other minds have failed because they don't address the root of this skepticism — namely, the feeling and fear of being absolutely alone, disconnected from others, unable to *truly* know whether another is suffering and whether one's own suffering will touch others and be recognized. Accordingly, philosophical argument can do little in this case but offer a way to park or avoid these fears.
So it is with the eating of animals, Diamond contends. (That's a bit of a simplification, but only a bit.) We must face certain facts in their fullness, whether of beauty or horror, and how should we respond? Moreover, how can we explain the difference of response to these facts when there is nothing more to be known? That is, nearly all (indeed all?) of us know that humans eat animals. Why is it that some people consider this fact a historic tragedy on a par with or greater than the worst acts ever perpetrated, while others find it perfectly fine and even one of deep enjoyment?
This volume is philosophical enough (lol) to avoid providing answers. The essays can be uneven (McDowell in particular seems to miss a fair amount of what's going on), but overall the questions raised by when and how we appeal to philosophy are deep and compelling.
Cavell has devoted much difficult and beautiful work to similar questions, mainly with respect to skepticism, and his essay collected here does not disappoint. For example, Cavell has argued (convincingly, I think) that attempts to philosophically defeat skepticism about the existence of other minds have failed because they don't address the root of this skepticism — namely, the feeling and fear of being absolutely alone, disconnected from others, unable to *truly* know whether another is suffering and whether one's own suffering will touch others and be recognized. Accordingly, philosophical argument can do little in this case but offer a way to park or avoid these fears.
So it is with the eating of animals, Diamond contends. (That's a bit of a simplification, but only a bit.) We must face certain facts in their fullness, whether of beauty or horror, and how should we respond? Moreover, how can we explain the difference of response to these facts when there is nothing more to be known? That is, nearly all (indeed all?) of us know that humans eat animals. Why is it that some people consider this fact a historic tragedy on a par with or greater than the worst acts ever perpetrated, while others find it perfectly fine and even one of deep enjoyment?
This volume is philosophical enough (lol) to avoid providing answers. The essays can be uneven (McDowell in particular seems to miss a fair amount of what's going on), but overall the questions raised by when and how we appeal to philosophy are deep and compelling.
July 4, 2008
"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?" (Diamond, 74)
"Singer starts with the claim that animals have interests because they are sentient, capable of pain and pleasure. When I reflect on my own actions and responses, I see that I occasionally do something good for some other people who are far from my circle of friends, family, or even countrymen, and perhaps beyond the call of any common duty. But I do not do so because they have interests or because I respect their interests or because they are sentient--nor because they have rights. I often do not understand why I do it. It is partly what I have been trained to do, and childhood training does not readily wear off. It is also something else, a certain kind of sharing, of sympathy between myself and another, what Hume claimed was the basis of moral action. So say I; but it is Singer's invocation of rights that persuades people" (Hacking, 163).
The title is misleading. Ian Hacking, author of the fourth essay in this collection, writes that although animals "set the tone of the book," "none of the three essays collected here is about animals" (Hacking's contribution, I would say, comes closest). The essays are, rather, about our relation to death, the world, and each other, about skepticism, and about the limitations of logical argument, particularly its ethical limitations; they are also about the other essays, since each is twined argumentatively with the other.
As a critical engagement with Diamond and Cavell and as a review of their work in general, Wolfe's introduction to the collection, unlike most, merits close reading. Wolfe focuses on Diamond's attention to vulnerability, which Wolfe connects to Derrida's emphasis on the "not-being-able" of being (and here cf. Lawlor). As Wolfe argues, Diamond differs from Derrida on (at least) one chief point, viz., our relation to our own mortality: where Diamond characterizes this vulnerable exposure as a relation to our own death, Derrida argues for the impossibility for this relation (note, however, that Ian Hacking thinks Wolfe misread Diamond by omitting the tentativeness of Diamond's sense of this direct relation (142)). As is well known, Derrida discovers in this relation an analog--or another manifestation--of the relation to language, to our name, and to other iterable operations whose finitude is always beyond us. "Derrida's point...is that this 'coming apart' is not just of flesh and blood, but is also born of the fact that our relation to flesh and blood is fatefully constituted by a technicity with which it is prosthetically entwined, a diacritical, semiotic machine of language in the broadest sense that exceeds any and all presence, including our own" (30). For Derrida, then, our relationship is to the impossibility itself. Thus the passivity, the not-being-able, runs much deeper in Derrida than it does in Diamond, but this depth of dislocation is not necessarily a weakness in Diamond's thought: Wolfe offers--without full agreement--the potential critique, drawn from Cavell, that Derrida's attention to impossibility reinstitutes metaphysics by dislocating us from "ordinary moral obligations" and from the raw presence of our bodily vulnerability.
Diamond's contribution travels through Ted Hughes' poem "Six Young Men" and Coetzee's The Lives of Animals. Insofar as her work is about animals, she accords with Derrida's scorn for rights language as merely extending, without critiquing, what he called the "juridical machine," for she argues that we ought to begin our response to animals by considering justice rather than rights. This particular essay, however, is about the limits of thoughts and the limitations of philosophy in the face of our mutual vulnerability. For me, it is above all a demand that I rebuild my treatment of Coetzee's Lives of Animals. When I critiqued Costello for her persistent anthropocentrism, I missed Costello's disturbance at her exposure to vulnerability, her "being shouldered out of how one thinks, how one is apparently supposed to think" (58). When I assailed her for her "ethical provincialism," I missed that "Costello's responses to arguments can be read as 'replies' [to question of animals, chiefly:] in the philosophical sense only by ignoring important features of the story....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" (53). Coetzee's work, being literature, demands (at least) as deep attention to its affective content as to its logic.
The problem is probably mine, but I got very little from Cavell (whose essay is less about animals than it is about guilt) and McDowell (whose contribution, if I read it correctly, devotes itself to enumerating the ways Cavell gets Diamond wrong). The Ian Hacking, however, is a triumph. He argues, above all, for the wonderousness of reality, and, in this reminder of the non-linguistic nature of reality, accords implicitly with phenomenology (which makes, by the way, no appearance in this volume, which is, throughout, largely innocent of the "continental" contributions to the animal question). Despite his turn from vulnerability to wonder, I was most moved by the horror compelling his argument against Cavell's focus on perspective. Information, pace Cavell, matters: Coetzee realizes that flesh comes from living animals; Hacking realizes that commercially farmed turkeys cannot breed naturally (for more on human surveillance of animal sexuality, see the article on the Missiplicity Project in Representing Animals), that Harvard breeds copyrighted mice (whose particularity is their susceptibility to cancer), and that a slaughterhouse is successful if only 1 in 4 animals requires electric shock to move forward to its death. This last piece, drawn from Temple Grandin's bestselling Animals in Translation "was not highlighted--quite the opposite--but it caught my attention. It did not add much to my store of grisly facts about meat packing. But I experienced it strongly. We now need to torture only one beast in four before it is killed" (150). A change in perspective may be needed to be able to know this, but the knowledge itself, once it enters, cannot readily be transmuted into a morally neutral substance through a mere 'change in perspective.'
"Singer starts with the claim that animals have interests because they are sentient, capable of pain and pleasure. When I reflect on my own actions and responses, I see that I occasionally do something good for some other people who are far from my circle of friends, family, or even countrymen, and perhaps beyond the call of any common duty. But I do not do so because they have interests or because I respect their interests or because they are sentient--nor because they have rights. I often do not understand why I do it. It is partly what I have been trained to do, and childhood training does not readily wear off. It is also something else, a certain kind of sharing, of sympathy between myself and another, what Hume claimed was the basis of moral action. So say I; but it is Singer's invocation of rights that persuades people" (Hacking, 163).
The title is misleading. Ian Hacking, author of the fourth essay in this collection, writes that although animals "set the tone of the book," "none of the three essays collected here is about animals" (Hacking's contribution, I would say, comes closest). The essays are, rather, about our relation to death, the world, and each other, about skepticism, and about the limitations of logical argument, particularly its ethical limitations; they are also about the other essays, since each is twined argumentatively with the other.
As a critical engagement with Diamond and Cavell and as a review of their work in general, Wolfe's introduction to the collection, unlike most, merits close reading. Wolfe focuses on Diamond's attention to vulnerability, which Wolfe connects to Derrida's emphasis on the "not-being-able" of being (and here cf. Lawlor). As Wolfe argues, Diamond differs from Derrida on (at least) one chief point, viz., our relation to our own mortality: where Diamond characterizes this vulnerable exposure as a relation to our own death, Derrida argues for the impossibility for this relation (note, however, that Ian Hacking thinks Wolfe misread Diamond by omitting the tentativeness of Diamond's sense of this direct relation (142)). As is well known, Derrida discovers in this relation an analog--or another manifestation--of the relation to language, to our name, and to other iterable operations whose finitude is always beyond us. "Derrida's point...is that this 'coming apart' is not just of flesh and blood, but is also born of the fact that our relation to flesh and blood is fatefully constituted by a technicity with which it is prosthetically entwined, a diacritical, semiotic machine of language in the broadest sense that exceeds any and all presence, including our own" (30). For Derrida, then, our relationship is to the impossibility itself. Thus the passivity, the not-being-able, runs much deeper in Derrida than it does in Diamond, but this depth of dislocation is not necessarily a weakness in Diamond's thought: Wolfe offers--without full agreement--the potential critique, drawn from Cavell, that Derrida's attention to impossibility reinstitutes metaphysics by dislocating us from "ordinary moral obligations" and from the raw presence of our bodily vulnerability.
Diamond's contribution travels through Ted Hughes' poem "Six Young Men" and Coetzee's The Lives of Animals. Insofar as her work is about animals, she accords with Derrida's scorn for rights language as merely extending, without critiquing, what he called the "juridical machine," for she argues that we ought to begin our response to animals by considering justice rather than rights. This particular essay, however, is about the limits of thoughts and the limitations of philosophy in the face of our mutual vulnerability. For me, it is above all a demand that I rebuild my treatment of Coetzee's Lives of Animals. When I critiqued Costello for her persistent anthropocentrism, I missed Costello's disturbance at her exposure to vulnerability, her "being shouldered out of how one thinks, how one is apparently supposed to think" (58). When I assailed her for her "ethical provincialism," I missed that "Costello's responses to arguments can be read as 'replies' [to question of animals, chiefly:] in the philosophical sense only by ignoring important features of the story....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" (53). Coetzee's work, being literature, demands (at least) as deep attention to its affective content as to its logic.
The problem is probably mine, but I got very little from Cavell (whose essay is less about animals than it is about guilt) and McDowell (whose contribution, if I read it correctly, devotes itself to enumerating the ways Cavell gets Diamond wrong). The Ian Hacking, however, is a triumph. He argues, above all, for the wonderousness of reality, and, in this reminder of the non-linguistic nature of reality, accords implicitly with phenomenology (which makes, by the way, no appearance in this volume, which is, throughout, largely innocent of the "continental" contributions to the animal question). Despite his turn from vulnerability to wonder, I was most moved by the horror compelling his argument against Cavell's focus on perspective. Information, pace Cavell, matters: Coetzee realizes that flesh comes from living animals; Hacking realizes that commercially farmed turkeys cannot breed naturally (for more on human surveillance of animal sexuality, see the article on the Missiplicity Project in Representing Animals), that Harvard breeds copyrighted mice (whose particularity is their susceptibility to cancer), and that a slaughterhouse is successful if only 1 in 4 animals requires electric shock to move forward to its death. This last piece, drawn from Temple Grandin's bestselling Animals in Translation "was not highlighted--quite the opposite--but it caught my attention. It did not add much to my store of grisly facts about meat packing. But I experienced it strongly. We now need to torture only one beast in four before it is killed" (150). A change in perspective may be needed to be able to know this, but the knowledge itself, once it enters, cannot readily be transmuted into a morally neutral substance through a mere 'change in perspective.'
June 1, 2018
Not particularly impressive.
October 30, 2023
I think they said 'meat is murder' but I'm too English-brained to understand most of this. Note to self: don't try to read whole philosophy books in one sitting.
May 21, 2025
Very moving. This book kick-started my vegetarianism
August 11, 2016
Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe (all but the last being professors of philosophy) examine a range of issues surrounding animals—with particular attention being given to J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals. I was struck in reading the book how much writing style matters in framing an argument: Cavell and Diamond are discursive (sometimes annoyingly so) whereas Wolfe is dense and allusive (sometimes bafflingly so). Both Hacking and McDowell bring in their own experiences with ideas in a way that is refreshingly personal. More than anyone, Diamond reminded me of how brilliantly Coetzee fashions the personality of Costello as an exemplum of the limitations of philosophy—forcing us to recognize the pain, inexplicability, and the unsuitability-for-the-academy that the artist must confront (and that the suffering of animals encapsulates). In that regard, this volume is at its core an examination of how philosophical language faces up to/comes face to face with/faces down the language of poetry, fiction, and even photography in attempting to describe (what we know about) animals, and, beyond that, what it is possible to know at all. As I found when I read The Lives of Animals, analytic or moral philosophers tend to circumscribe how they talk about what is going on in The Lives of Animals (and in his work in general)—a point made by a number of folks in this volume—and so fail, I think, to capture Coetzee's subtlety and depth and the perturbation that his writing causes. Diamond comes close and I think Wolfe (the only non-philosopher) does well. But Coetzee is "ahead" of all of us, I think. This book suffers a little from not being edited (the chapters are all collected speeches and could have been tightened and the typos fixed), but it is an intellectually stimulating volume that I recommend.
January 11, 2014
I've only read Cora Diamond's essay and Cary Wolfe's "introduction" ('I like your ideas here, but I'm feeling like, maybe, ... Derrida?'), but Diamond's essay is amazing. She puts the rest of the scholarship on Coetzee's "The Lives of Animals" to shame, and provides some incredibly troubling challenges to the theoretical study of ethics. In particular, she shows how our attempts to theorize ethical problems in our lives often results in a kind of deflection where, in a slight of hand, we replace all of the components of the real problem with abstracted philosophical tokens. Theory then ceases to be a grappling with real matters of life and death and devolves or is deflected to a game of manipulating and playing with these tokens. So, it's a great discussion of the limits of philosophy and a powerful exegesis of Coetzee's work. And if you haven't read "The Lives of Animals," read it right now.
July 17, 2008
A mixed bag. Some of the essays are quite good, some I found almost unreadable.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews