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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Exposures Cary Wolfe

ONEThe Difficulty of Realily and th e Difficulty

of Philosophy Cora Diamond

43

TWO

Companionable Thinking Stanley Cavell9'

THREEComment on St;Jnley C;i\ell"s

"Companionable h i n k i n g ~John McDowell

'27

CONCLUSION

DeHections Ian Hacking

'39



INTRODU TION

EXPOSURES

CARY WOLFE

In his novt>l Disgrace J.M. Coetzec tells the story of

David Lurie. a literature profe ss or in Sou th Africawhose career comes to an abrupt end after he has allaffair with a female undergraduate and is charged with

sexual harassment. Lurie moves to the country. wherehis daughter Lucy has a small farm, ;md begins vol-untf'ering at the' local animal shelter. where he assistsin t'uthaniL:ing the' scores of animals. mainly dogs. forwhom no homes can be found. Lurie has never thoughtof himself as a s ( n t i m e n t a l i s t . ~as he puIs it. and hetakes to tht' work rductantl). But then, gradually. hebecomes absorbed in iLl He had thought he would getused to it , Coetzee writes. ~ B u tthat is nol what hap-

pens. he more killings he assists in the more jittery



he gets. TIlCn. olle Sunday night as he is driving backfrom the clinic, it hits him; he actually has to stop atthe roadside to recover himself. Tears flow down hisface that he cannot stop; his hands shake. He does notumlerstand what is happening to him. For reasonshe doesn't understand, ~ h i s\\hole being is gripped b)

what happens in the [surgical] t h e a t r e ~(143).This moment in Coetzee's emotionally and po

litically complex novt>l is i I kind of amplification of apassage from his contemporaneous work. The Lives

o J\lIimah. which serves as a tOllchstone in the essays that follow. In Till> Lives o AMimals thC' main

charaller. novelist Eli .:abeth CostC'llo, is haun tcd w o u n d e c . l . ~to use a figure that Cora Diamond highlights in Thf- Difficulty of R.eality ;tnd the Difficulty

of Phi1osophy -by how we trf-at nonhuman animals

in practices such as factory farming, a systemized

and mechanized killing that she compares (to the

consternation of somc) in its scale and its violence tothe Holoc.lust of thc Jews during the Second WorldWar. At a dinllcr aftcr one of her invited public lcctures, she is asked by the prcsident of the universitywhether her vf'gf'tarianism ~ < : o m e sout of moral conviction, and she responds, against the expectationsof her hosts, ~ N o ,r don't think so It comes out

of a desi re to savc my soul. And when the universityadministrator politely repl ies. Well. I haw' a greatTf>SPf>ct for it,w she retorts impatiently, ~ I mwearing

I N T R O D U C T I O N EXPOSURES

leather shoes. I'm carryillg a leather purse. I wouldn't

have overmuch respect if 1 Wf>re you.What haunts Costello here, and what suddenly

shakl's David lurit> to his very soles as he is drivinghome that night. is the shecr weight and gravity of

what has becomf> one of the central ethical issues of

our time: uur moral rt>spollsibilities toward nonhuman

animals. But ooth moments Ul Coetzee's v.·ork insist011 something else. too, something that also. in a diffcr·ent v.ay, unsettles the \'C'ry foundations of what we call~ t h ehuman, and in so doing reveals the characteriza

tion J just ofTcred (of our responsibilities to animals asan ethical i s s u f > ~ )to be a kind of evasion of a problem

that is not so easily disposed of. r-:or both moments ;tC

knowlec.lge a se olld kind of unspf'akability : not onlythe ullspeakability of how we treal animals in practicessuch a< faLlor) fimn in g but also the unspeakability of

the limits of our own thinking in confronting such a

reality-the trauma, as Diamond puts it. of' f'xperienc·es in which we take something in reality to be resistantto our thinking it. or possibly 10 be painful in its incx

plic:lbilit( ( Tht> Difficulty of R.eality. 45-4 6).Writ large. in tht' terms of the (post -)Enlightenment

p h i l o ~ ( ) p h i c a ltradition, Ihis is oftf>n referred to as theproblem of philosophical · s k e p t i c i s m . ~and part of

what Diamond is interested in pressuring here is theextent to which the h ~ oquestions that anchor this vol

ume (philosophkal skepticism and its conse<[uences

I N T R O D U C T I O N EXPOSURES 3



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 paperscollected here agree on this point; on the contrary, itseems to me that we find three r ather different viewson this matter-a situation that is brought into particularly sharp focus in John McDowell's response to bothCavell and Diam ond and the extent to which Cavell'sessay does justice to his own insights in this matter. Forhis part, Cavell has explored the question of skepticismwith remarkable nuance and range over the past fortyand more years. Working through figures as diverseas Kant, Descartes, Emer son, Wittgenstein, Austin,and Heidegger (among others), Cavell has plumbedthe consequences of what it means to do philosophy inthe wake of what he calls the Kantian settlement withskepticism . As he characterizes it in In Quest of he Or-dinary To settle with skepticism . . . to assure us that

we do know the existence of the world, or rather, thatwhat we understand as knowledge is of he world, theprice Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to knowthe 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 thatsettlement: Thanks for n o t h i n g . ~ lBut if, on Cavell'sreading of Kant, ~ r e a s o nproves its power to itself. overitself (30) by logically deriving the difference betweenthe world of me re appearances (phenomena) that we

I N r R O O U C T I O N EXPOSURES

can know and the world of the ing an sich (noumena), which our knowledge never touches, then we findourselves in a position that is not just odd but in factprofoundly unsettling, for philosophy in a fundamental sense then fails precisely insofar as it succeeds. Wegain knowledge, bUI only to lose the world.

The question in the wake of skepticism thus becomes: What can it mean to (continue to) do philoso·

phy after philosophy has become, in a certain sense,impossible? One thing it does not mean (if we believethe essays collected here) is that such resistance Wof

the world (Uthe difficulty of reality, to use the phraseDiamond borrows from novelist John Updike) couldbe dissolved or overcome by ever -more ingenious or

accomplished propositional arguments, ever-more re-

fined philosophical concepts. Indeed, to think that itcan- to mistake the difficulty of philosophy for thedifficulty of e l i t y ~(as Diamond suggests is the case

with the philosophical ~ R e f l . e c t i o n s Wpublished at theend of he Lives of Animals -is to indulge in a deBec-t i o n ~(to use Cavell's term) of a reality that impingesupon u s - b e f a l l s ~us, as Wittgenstein once put i t inways not masterable by the crafting of analytical ar-guments. (This is why, Diamond suggests, ElizabethCostello does not offer an argument in defense of hervegetarianism, and it is also why Costello is quick topoint to the inconsistency of her own practices with reo

gard to animal products.) It is that impingement, that




~ p r e s s u r e Wof reality, that overtakes David Lurie on thedrive back from the clinic. He literally does not knowwhat is happening to him; he has no reasons for it andcannot explain it. And yet it is the most real thing inthe world.

These fundamental chaJlenges for (and to) philosophy are sounded by CaveU in his reading of he philosopher most important to him, Ralph Waldo Emerson,who writes in his most important essay, Experience w

:

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects,which lets them slip through our fingers then when wedutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of ourcondition. w For Cavell, this moment registers the confrantation with skepticism, certainJy, but it also voicesan understanding of how philosophy must changein the wake of that confrontation. For the unhandsome n here names not just the Kantian Ding an sichbut also, Cavell writes, what happens when we seek

to deny the stand-offishness of objects by clutching atthem; which is to say, when we conceive thinking, saythe application of concepts in judgments, as graspings o m e t h i n g _ ~When we engage in that sort of deflect i o n ~ we only deepen the abyss- wmn we clutch hard-est -between a f thinking and the world that we wantto understand. The opposite of clutching , on the otherhand-what Cavell will call the most handsome partof our condition -is facing the fact that the demandfor unity in our judgments, thaI our deployment of

I N T R O O U C T I O N EXPOSURES

concepts, is not the expression of the conditionednessor 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 ourrelation to nonhuman animals behind at this juncture,but as both Cavell and Jacques Derrida remind us intheir readings of Heidegger, the figure of the handin relation to thought and to species difference is a

linchpin of philosophical humanism. As Cavell pointsout, harbored in Heidegger's famous contention that

thinking is a handicraft is the fantasy of the apposable {sicJ t h u m ~that separates the human from theanimal not just anthropologically but also ontologically.s As Heidegger writes, in a moment emphasizedby Derrida: Apes, for example. have organs thai cangrasp, but they have no hand. for their being is subordinated to utility rather than devoted to thought andthe reflection on things as such, which is possible

for only for beings who possess language.6

1hus, theopposite of the clutching or grasping that will findits apotheosis for Heidegger in the world dominationof technology is a thinking that is instead a kind of rec e p t i o n ~or welcoming (Cavell, Conditions, 39)- Or asDerrida puts it, If there is a thought of the hand ora hand of thought, as Heidegger gives us to think, itis not of the order of conceptual grasping. Rather thisthought of the hand belongs to the essence of the giftof a giving that would give. if this is possible, without




taking hold of anything ( Geschlecht l I ~ 173). Andthus Heidegger's insistence , as Cavell reminds us, onthe derivation of the word thinking from a root for

t h a n k i n g , ~as if giving thanks for the gift of thinking{Conditions, 39).

Philosoph y can therefore no longer be seen as mastery, as a kind of clutching or grasping via analyticalcategories and concepts, which seemed , for Heidegger ,

a kind of sublimized violence (Conditions, 39). Rath-er, the duty of thinking is not to deflect but to receiveand even sufTer (remember Costello's woundedness)what Cavell calls our e x p o s u r e ~to the world. That Dia-mond is much attracted to this term is clear not justbecause she begins her essay with a reading of a poemabout a photograph but also because it underscoresan important connection between the exposure of ourconcepts to the confrontation with skepticism and thephysical exposure to vulnerability and mortality that we

sufTer because we, like animals, are embodied beings.As Diamond put s it in a key moment in her essay, unpacking her sense of Costello's startling assertion thatI know what it is like to be a c o r p s e ~

The awareness we each have of being a living body,being alive to the w o r l d ~ carries with it exposureto the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheeranimal vulnerability, the vulnerability we sharewith them. This vulnerability is capable of panick-

8 I N T R O D U C T I O N EXPOSURES

ing us. To be able t o acknowledge it at all , let aloneas shared. is wounding; but acknowledging it asshared with other animals, in the presence of whatwe do to them, is capable not only of panicking onebut also of solating one, as Elizabeth Costello is iso-lated. Is there an y difficulty in seeing why we shouldnot prefer to return to moral debate, in which thelivingness 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 fini·tude that is crucial here as well. as practiced readersof Heid egger (or, for that matter, of Cavell or Derricla)will have already guessed: our exposure in a radicalsense, our subjection-to language and writing in waysthat bear very directly upon what it means to do phi

losophy. what philosophy c n do in the face of theseexistential and ethical challenges. For one further consequence of everything I have been saying thus far isthat the relationship between philosophical thinking( concepts ) and philosophy as a writing practice nowtakes on unprecedented importance (which is whyHeid egger and Derrida and CaveU Iite the way theydo wh ich is to say, unphilosophically ). Against thebackdrop of what is often referred to as the Ulinguisticturn in twentieth-century philosophy, there is a direct

I N T R O O U C T I O N EXPOSURES



line of connection between the problem of philosophi·cal skepticism and the work of Wittgenstein on language , which will prove so important to all three of thephilosophers collected here_ But it is also on this point,as I will try to bring out later , that crucial differencesemerge between this sort of work, emerging as it doesout of an especially adventurous wing of the analyticaltradition, and poststructuralist philosophy, particularlythe work of Jacques Derrida, who construes the consequences of the philosophy-language relation , of ourfinitude in relation to both, in ways that bear directlyupon how we may and may not think our relations toourselves and to nonhuman anima ls.

Diamond's earlier work is worth revisiting here insome detail because it addresses even more methodically the relations among language, th inking, and ourethical obligations to nonhuman others that form thefocus of this volume. As she insists in an essay from2 0 0 1 called ~ l n j u s t i c eand Animals, our grammaticalr e d e s c r i p t i o n ~ofa philosophical problem is crucial and

in some sense determinative of our ability to do justiceto the ethical challenges it entails.' In this light, for her,the fundamental question of ustice issues from an es-sentially different conceptual realm than the questionof rights. When genuine issues of justice and injustice are framed in tenns of i g h t s , ~she argues , theyare thereby distorted and t r i v i a l i z e d~ because of theunderlying tie between rights and a system of entitle-

1 I N T R O D U C T I O N EXPOSURES

r

ment that is concerned, not with evil done to a person,but with how much he or she gets compared to otherparticipants in the system (121). In rights discourse,she argues, the ch r cter of our conflicts is made ob-scure w by what Wittgenstein would call a poor grammatical description of the problem of justice (124)

Instead, what generates our moral response toanimals and their treatment, Diamond argues, is oursense of the mortality and vulnerability that we sharewith 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 Dia-mond, the QholTor at the conceptualizing of animals asputting nothing in the way of their use as mere stuffis dependent upon a comparable hOlTor at humanrelentlessness and pitiliness in the exercise of powertoward other humans (as, in for example. the torture of

other human beings) ~ I n j u s t i c e , n136 . What the rights

tradition misses, n her view, is that the capacity to re-spond to injustice as i n j u s t i c e ~depends not on workingout (from a safe ontological distance. as it were) whoshould have a fair share of this or that abstract good,based upon the possession of this or that abstract ~ n -

terest or attribute, but rather on °a recognition of ourow vulnerability -a recognition not demanded andin some sense actively avoided by rights-oriented thinking r 1njustice, 121). (And here, of course , we would dowell to remember the ~ w o u n d e dcharacter ofCoetzee 's

I N T R O O U C T I O N EXPOSURES 11



Elizabeth Costello, a rawness that pushes ber moralresponse to our treatment of animals beyond proposi

tional argument-and sometimes beyond the decorumof polite society.)

What such an insight points toward, Diamond con

tends, is the fact that "there is something wrong withthe contrast , taken to be exhaustive , between demanding on e ' s rights and begging for kindness-begging forwhat is merely kindness. The idea thatlhose are the onlypossibilities is one of he main props of he idea that

doing injustice is failing to respect rights" ("Injustice,"129). Contemporary moral theory thus "pushes apartjustice, 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 thata kind of loving attention to another being, a possiblevictim of injustice, is essential to any understanding of

the evil of injustice" ([31-32). In fact, she agrees withSimone 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 whichwe cannot count on the kind of understanding of evilthat depends on loving attention to the victim" (139).

There are, in other words , two different and in factincommensurable kinds of value here (121)-01. point

12 I N T R O D U C T I O N : EXPOSURES

missed by botlt "sides" of what Diamond calls "thatgreat arena of dissociated thought, contemporary debate about animals' rights." 1 The problem with b 11t

sides of the debate--represented by, say, Peter Singer,on one side. and, on the other, philosopher MichaelLeahy and his avatar Thomas O Hearne in The ives oAnimals-is that they are locked into a model of justicein which a being does or does not have rights on thebasis of its possession (or lack) of morally significantcharacteristics that can be empirically derived. Bothsides argue "that what is involved in moral thought is

knowledge of empirical similarities and differences,and the testing and application of genera principles of

evaluation." ' And so. as Diamond puts it in the essayincluded here, "the opposite sides in the debate mayhave more in common then they realize . In the voiceswe hear in the debate about animal rights, those of people like Singer on the one hand and those of Leahy andthe fictional O Hearne on the other, there is shared adesire for a 'because': because animals are this kind of

being, or because they are that kind of being, thus-andsuch is their sl.1nding for our moral thought" ("TheDifficulty of Reality, " 71). But what Diamond hears inboth sets of voices is an evasion of our "exposure" to anarena of moral complexity in which (to quote Cavell)"the other can present me with no mark or feature onthe basis of which I can settle my attitude" (quoted in"The Difficulty of Reality ," 7[-'72).

I N T R O D U C T I O N : EXPOSURES 1



Part of the reason for that, of course, is that suchattitudes are far from the thin, if-P-then-Q abstractionsthat a certain kind of philosophy takes them 10 be. Theyare thick with psychological vexation and rife with contradiclory impulses and attachments. So Diamond isconcerned 10 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 lifo For her, proponents of animalrights in the analytical tradition are wrong when theyinsist that the distinction between human and animalis not ethically fundamental. At the same time, how-ever, those who oppose animal rights within that sameanalytical tradition are wrong about how the differencebetween humans and animals s relevant. T he notion'human being' is of the greatest significance in moralthought ( Losing Your C o n c e p t s ~264). she argues,but not because it is a b i o l o g i c a ln o t i o n ~(264). Rather,the concept of human being is a main source of thatmoral sens ibil ity that we may then e a ble to extend tononhuman animals. We can come to think of killingan animal as in some circumstances at least similar tohomicide, she continues, but the significance of do-ing so depends on our already having an idea of whatit is to kill a man; and for us (as opposed to abstractMoral Agents) the idea of what it is to kill a man doesdepend on the sense of human life as special. as some-

4 I N T R O O U C T l O N : EXPOSURES

thing set apart from what else happens on the planet( Experimenting, 353).

For Diam ond, then, it is crucial to take account of

what human beings have made o the difference be-tween human beings and animals ( Experimenting,351). As she puts it elsewhere,

if we appeal to people to prevent suffering, and we, inour appeal, try to obliterate the distinction betweenhuman beings and animals and just get people tospeak or think of diffe rent species of a n i m a l s

there is no footing left from which to tell us what weought to do The moral expectations of other hu-man beings demand something of me as other thanan animal; and we do something like imaginativelyread into animals something like such expectationswhen we think of vegetarianism as enabling us tomeet a cow's eyes. There is nothing wrong with that;there is something wrong with trying to keep thatresponse and destroy its foundation. iO

So for Diamond . it is not by denying the special sta-tus of human being but rather, as it were, by intensifying it that we can come to think of nonhuman animalsnot as bearers of interests or as rights holders butrather as something much more compelling: fellowcreatures. That phrase does not mean, biologically,an animal, something with biological life,· but rather




our uresponse to animals as our fellows in mortality,in life on this earth ( Eating, 329). And hence, thedifference between hum n and nonhum n animalsmay indeed start out as a biological difference , but it

becomes something for hum n thought through be-ing taken up and made something of by generationsof human beings , in their practices, their art, their literature , their r e l i g i o n ~( E x p e r i m e n t i n g , ~35l), thosepractices that enable us to Mimaginatively read intoanimals expectations that originate , as it were, in thehum n , the other than an animal.

At this juncture , Diamond's work is worth comparing, I think, with Jacques Derrida's recent investigations of what he calls the question of the animaL Atfirst glance, Derrida's work seems remarkably consonant with Diamond's, beginning with three main fea-tures. First, Derrida emphasizes, like Diamond, thefundamental ethical bond we have with nonhum n

animals as residing in our shared finitude, our vulnerability and mortality as fellow creatures a phrase he,too, invokes at key moment s in his argument). Second,Derrida shares with Diamond a certain understandingof what ethics is: not propositionally deriving a set of

rules for conduct that apply generically in all cases butrather confronting our exposure to a perm nent condition in which (to use Cavell 's phrase) there is no wayto settle our attitude, And third, Derrida also insiststhat crucial to both of these is to s h o w as Diamond


puts it in an earlier essay, how philosophical misconceptions about language are connecled with blindnessto what our conceptual life is l i k e ~( Losing Your Concepts : 26}).

As for the first point, Derrida in his late work turns ,oddly enough , to the philosopher who is central to Pe-ter Singer's work , the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. Butwhat Derrida draws from Bentham's famous contention that the fundamental ethical question with animals is not can they talk? or can they r e s o n ~» butcan they suffer? is someth ing quite different from (and

finally opposed 10) Singer's derivation of animals' fun·damental interests. For Derrida, putting the questionin this way ~ c h n g e severything because philosophyfrom Aristotle to Levinas has posed the question of theanimal in terms of capacities (prototypically, for reason or language), which in turn Udetermines so manyothers concerning power or c p bility [poulloirsj, and at-

tributes [alioirsJ: being able, having the power to give,to die, to bury one's dead, to dress, to work, to invent atechnique. u What makes Bentham's reframing of theproblem so powerful for Derrida is that now the question is disturbed by a certain passivity. It bears witness ,manifesting already , as question , the response that testifies to sufferance , a passion, a not·being-able. Whatof the vulnerability felt on the basis of this i n a b j l j t y

he continues; ~ w h tis this non-power al the heart of

power? , , . What right should be accorded it? To what

I N T R O O U C T I O N : EXPOSURES 7



extent does it concern us? I t concerns us very directly,of course, because Umortality resides there, as the mostradical means of thinking the finitude that we sharewith animals, the mortality that belongs to the veryfinitude oflife, to the experience of compassion theanguish of this vulnerability ( ~ T h eAnimal, 396).

In Derrida as in Diamond, then, the vulnerabilityand finitude that we share with nonhuman animalsand the compassion that this commonali ty makes pos-sible are at the very core of the question of ethics-not

just U mere kindness, but justice. s Derrida puts it,what is still presented in such a problematic way as

animal rights has a force quite independent of -and if

we believe Diamond , quite antithetical toll-the philo-sophical framework that usual ly accompanies it. ForDerrida, as well, the point of the animal rights move-ment, however flawed its articulation. is to awakenus to our responsibilities and our obligations withrespect to the living in general, and precisely to thisfundamental compassion that, were we to take it se·riously, would have to change even the very basisof the philosophical problematic of the animal ( TheAnimal, 395). And it is this very shifting of the termsof the problematic that Diamond finds Coetzee cagilyusing the difference between literature and philoso-phy to stage-a fact not quite grasped in her view bythe philosophical commentaries appended to the endof The Lives o Animals

18 I N T R O O U C T I O N : EXPOSURES

This leads, in turn, to the second important pointof contact between Diamond's work and Derrida's. Forboth, the question of the animal requires an alterna-tive conception of ethics to what we find in the liberaljustice and rights tradition of analytical philosophy asit manifests itself in work such as Singer's. For Singer,as we have seen, ethics means the application of whatDerrida will elsewhere characterize as a ucalculab leprocess ll-in Singer's case, it is quite literally theutilitarian calculus that would tally up the U i n t e r e s t

of the particular beings in question in a given situa-tion, regardless of their species, and would determinewhat counts as a just act by calculating which actionmaximizes the greatest good for the greatest number.In doing so, however. Singer would reduce ethics to thevery antithesis of ethics in Diamond's and Derrida'sterms because he would overleap what Derrida callsthe ordeal of the u n d e c i d a b l e ~which ~ m u s tbe gone

through by any decision worthy of the a m e ~( F o r c e .

24). For Derrida, U decision that didn't go throughthe ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free deci-sion, it would only be the programmable applicationor unfolding of a calculable process. It might be legal;it would not be just ( Force, 24) Ordeal is indeedthe word we want here, which is one reason Diamondrivets our attention more than once on Elizabeth Coe,

tzee's rawness of nelVes, her sufferance of a respon-sibility that is both undeniable and unappeasable. But

I N T R O O U C T I O N : EXPOSURES 9



what the rights view of ethics gives us instead is a ~ d e

AectionH of this fully ethical ordeal, one in which, asDiamond puts it, we would be given the presence orabsence of moral community (or thus-and-such degreeor kind of moral community) with animals H ( The Dif-

ficulty of Reality, 72).Aside from being the very antithesis of the ethical in

Diamond 's and Derrida 's se nse , such a ~c a l c u l a t i o n,

in its empirical derivation of the shared interests H

of

human and nonhuman animals-what Diamond callsour p r o p e r t i e s ,~ our ~ m rk s and features H( The Dif-ficulty of Reality,» 72)--<onfuses what Diamond callsbiological concepts with the concep ts proper to thi-

c l thought. This is what Derrida has in mind (andmore, as we are about to see) in his criticism of a biological continuism, whose sinister connotations we arewell aware of, one that ignores the abyssal rupturebetween human and nonhuman forms of lifeY Hehas thus never believed H he writes, in some homogeneous continuity between what calls its lf man andwhat he calls the animal rThe Animal, 398) .

At this juncture, however-and it is marked quiteprecisely by Denida's emphasis on what calls its lfman and what he calls the animal -some fundamental differences between Derrida and Diamond beginto come into view, not least of all in the articulationof this peculiar thing called the human. We can be-gin to get a sense of this difference by returning to the


crucial role that vulnerability, passivity, and mortalityplay here for both Diamond and Derrida. Let us recallDiamond's contention that we can come to think of

killing an animal as in some circumstances at leastsimilar to homicide, but the significance of doing sodepends on our already having an idea of what it isto kill a man ( Experimenting. 353). Such an ideadepend s, however, on a relation to our own mortalitythat is rejected in Derrida's work. For Derrida, contraDiamond, we never have an idea of what death is Jarlis-indeed, death is precisely that which can never befor lis-and if we did, then the ethical relation to theother would be immediately foreclosed.

This is clearest, perhaps, in Derrida's reading of

Heidegger and his concept o f b e i n g - t o w a r d - daconcep t that appears-but only appears-to do justiceto the passivity and finitude in which the ethical re-sides. As Richard Bearsdsworth characterizes it. from

Derrida's point of view, Heidegger appropriates the limit of death ~ r a t h er than returning it to the oth r of time.In Beardsworth's words , The existential of 'being·towards-death' is consequently a 'be ing-able' pollvoir-etre), not the impossibility of all power whose radicalpassivity and vulnerability ties the self to the other inan ethical relation. As he explains, for Derrida,

the i m p o s si b i l i t y~ of death for the ego confirmsthat the experience of finitude is one of radical




passivity. That the ~ I ~cannot experience its o w n ~

death means, firstly, that death is an immanence

without horizon, and secondly, that time is thatwhich exceeds my death, that time is the generationwhich precedes and follows me Death is not alimit or horizon which, re·cognized, allows the egoto assume the ~ t h e r e ~[as in Heidegger's ~ b e i n g · t o -

ward·death ]; it is something that never arrives in

the ego's time, a ~ n o t · y e twhich confirms the prior.ity of time over the ego, marking, accordingly, theprecedence of the other over the ego. S

For Derrida, then, no relation to death can appear assuch, W and i f t h e r eis no 'as' t o d e a t h , ~then the relation

to death is always mediated through em other. The 'as'of death always appears through an other's death,fo r an·other (Beardsworth, Derrida, lIS) . In Derrida's words:The death of the other thus becomes . . . 'first: always

firsf' (quoted in Beardsworth, Derrida 1I9). Hence,Beardsworth argues, ~ T h erecognition of the limit of

death is always through another and is, therefore, at thesame time the recognition of the other 118). And since

the same is true of he other in relation to its own death,what this means is that ~ d e at h impossibilizes e x i s t e n c e ~

and does so both for me and for the other since deathcan no more e for the other than it can for me (132).

Bul it is, paradoxically, in just this impossibility that thepossibility of justice resides, the (as it were) pennanent

I N T R O D U C T I O N : EXPOSURES

call of the other in the face of which the subject alwaysarrives too l a t e Or, to put this is somewhat differ·ent terms, when Diamond a ffinns Costello's assertionthat I know what it is like to be a corpse, Derrida'sresponse would be, No, you don't. Only the other does,and for that you are held hostage (to use Levinas's term)in unappeasable ethical debt to the other hence theotherwise odd idea of he giftb of death (to borrow from

Derrida's book by the same title). To put it another way,there is the suggestion in Diamond, I think, that imagi-native and literary projection can somehow achieve inthis instance what propositional, syllogistic philosophycannot achieve (the nonconceptual, nonlogical forceof know what ifs like to be a corpse ), but Derridawould see this, too, as ' . d e f l e c t i o n ~of e x p o s u r e ~ :ex-

posu re not just to mortality bu t also to a certain est rang-ing operation of language, to a second kind of finitudewhose implications are enonnous (a point I'll return to

in a moment).Such is the full resonance, I think, of Derrida's

contention with regard to Bentham that the wordcan pouvoir] changes sense and sign here once oneasks 'can they suITer?' The word wavers henceforth.

As soon as such a question is posed what counts isnot only the idea of a transitivity or activity (being ableto speak, to reason, and so on); the important thing is

rather what imp s it towards self-contradiction, some·

thing \.lit: will later relate back to auto.biography rThe




AnimaV 396; emphasis mine). What Derrida has inmind by the auto- of auto·biographyH is exemplified, I think, in Diamond's picture of the human inrelation to ethics, a picture in which, as in Heidegger .vulnerability. passivity. and finitude appear to be recuperated as a ~ b e i n g - a b l e Hand a transitivity that,despite itself. reont ologizes the split between the human and th e animal. across which the human thenreache s. as it were, in an act of benevolence toward another that w i m a g i n e ~is enough like us to warrantethical treatment. This see ms dear enough, for example, in Diamond' s contention, which I mentionedearlier, that the moral expectations of other human

beings demand something of me as other than an animal; and we do something like imaginatively read intoanimals something like such expectations when wethink of vegetarianism as enabling us to meet a cow'seyes ( ~ E a t i n g ,333). And it is also unde rscored byher contention in the same essay that our hearing themoral appeal of an animal is our hearing it speak-asit were-the language of our fellow human beingsW

( Eating,W 333-34),Part of the strength and attraction of Diamond's

remarkable essay Th e Difficulty of Reality and theDifficulty of Philosophy, I think, is that it in a sensemoves beyond-or perhaps I should say. moves with-out-this sort of formulation of the relations amongethics, language. and species difference, In this sense,


the essay's strength is precisely its weakness, Wherethe emphasis in earlier essays was on our ability (Derrida's pouvoirs to extend imaginatively an apparentlysecure sense of the human to anima ls (hearing themspeak our language, seeing in them expectations of

us as othe r than animal ), here, when we try to putinto words the experience of the difficulty of realirythat we find bodied forth n Ted Hughes's Six YoungMen or Coetzee's The Lives o Animals Mthe words failus, the words don't do what we are trying to get themto do, The words make it look as if I am simply un,able to see over a wall which happens to separate mefrom something I very much want to see . But the factthat the words are apparently too w eak to do what I amdemanding from them does not mean that the experience here of powerlessness has been shown to involve akind of grammatical error (67).

The force of this tum in Diamond's thought and its

consequences for ethics can e extended and elaborated, I think, by means of Derrida's work. which wouldhelp us to articulate more fully the implications of thefact that there are two kinds of finitude here, tlvo kindsof passivity and vulnerability, and that the first type

(physical vulnerability. embodiment, and eventuallymortality) is paradoxically made unavailable, inappro-priab/e to us by the very thing that makes it available

namely, a second type of passivity or not being able, Wwhich is the finitude we experience in our subjection

I N T R O D U C T I O N : EXPOSURES S



to a radically ahuman technicity or mechanicity oflanguage, a technicity which has profound consequences,of course, for what we too hastily think of as our concepts, which are therefore in an important sense not

o u r s ~al all.And her e, then, we arrive at the third point of con

tact-but also finally of difference--between Diamondand Derrida that I noted above: how philosophical

misconceptions about languag e are connected withblindness to what our conceptual life is like, to useDiamond 's phrase. For Derrida 's point would be notonly that ~ w e ~don t have a concept of the human butalso that it's a good thing, too, because it is only on thestrength of that weakness, you might say, that we areable to avoid both horns of the dilemma brought tolight in Diamond's work: on the one hand, the constantthreat of ethnocentrism that a certain understandingofWittgenstein Airts with (we do what we do because

of what we have made of the difference between humans and a n i m a l s , ~which keeps us from lapsing into~ b i o l o g i c a lcontinuism ); and, on the other hand, themining for ethical unive rsals that , for philosopherssuch as Singer and Regan, would attempt to counterthis very threat by uncovering first principles of ethicsvia the anti-ethnocentric autonomy of Ueason. Der-rida, I am suggesting, makes available a thir d way,whose re sponse would be thai, yes, it is true that whatwe think of as the principles of personhood, morality,

26 INTRODUCTION: EX, OSURES

and so on are inseparable from who we are, from ourdiscourse as a mode oflife (to put it in Wittgenstein'stenns). But, at the same time, we are not we ; weare not that a u t o · ~of ~ a u t o b i o g r a p h y(as in Derri·da's The Autobiographical Animal ) that humanism~ g i v e sto itself. Rather, we are always radically other,already in- or ahuman in our very being - not just inthe evolutionary, biological. and zoological fact of our

physical vulnerability and mortality, our mammalianexistence, of course, but also in our subjection to andconstitut ion in the materiality and technicity of a language that is always on the scene before we are, as aprecondition of our subjectivity. And this means thatwhat he calls 'man,' what ~ w e call we, always cov-

ers over a more radical not being able that makesour very conceptual life possible. Even more important, perhaps-at least for the topic at hand-is thatthis passivity and subjection are shared by humans

and nonhumans the moment they begin to interactand communicate by means of any semiotic system,As Derrida puts it in a well-known passage from theinterview 'Eating Well' :

If one reinscribes language n a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it ir-reducibly from the inside, everything changes. I amthinking in particular of the mark in general, of thetrace, of iterability, of differana These possibilities

I N T R O D U C T I O N : EX, OSURES 27



or necessities , 'Nithout which there would be no language, eire themselves not only hum n And whatI am proposing here should allow us to take intoaccount scientific knowledge about the complexityof animallanguages,W genetic coding, all forms of

marking within which so-called human language, asoriginal as it might be, does not allow us to 'cut' onceand for all where we would in general like to cut. 16

There is no need to rehearse here Derrida's theorization of iterabilty. dilflrana:. trace. and so on; rather. I simply want to mark how th is second kind o£ not e i n g a b l e ~

renders uncertain and unstable- unsettled, in Cavell'sterms-the relationship of the human to itself becauseit renders unstable not just the boundary between human and animal but also that between the organic andthe mechanical or technological. And for these very reasons-because of the estrangement of the the hwnan n

from the auto- that ~ w e ~give to ourselves - the rela·tion betv.leen the human and nonhuman animals is constantly opened anew and, as it were, permanently. It is awound, if you will, that can never e healed, Derrrida

summarizes this in a 2004 interview:

Beginning with OjCrammatology the elaboration of

a new concept of the tract had to be extended to theentire field of he living, or rath er 10 th lifeJdalth rela·tion beyond the anthropological limits of spoken

8 I N T R O O U C T I O N E X P O S U R E S

language, , . , At the time I stressed that the concepts of writing, trace, gramma, or grapheme ex·ceeded the opposition human/nonhuman. All thedeconstructive gestures I have attempted to performon philosophical texts . , . consist in questioning theself-interested misrecognition of what is called theAnimal in general, and the way in which these interpret the border between Man and Animal Y

I stress this intercalation of the boundary betweenthe biological/organic and the mechanical/technicalin relation to the infra- and transhuman in no smallpart because Diamond herself is very interested ini t - m o s t conspicuously, of course, in her reading of

the e x p o s u r e ~of the photograph in Ted Hughes 'sSix Young Men -a technological, archival artifact

that confronts us with a shuddering awareness of

death and life together ( The Difficulty of Reality,

73). Here, however. Diamond and Derrida pull usin different and perhaps even opposite directions,for Diamond then glosses that exposure w in termsof Elizabeth Costello 's contention, I know what itis like to be a corpse w a contention whose signifi.cance she unpacks along the following Jines in thefinal paragraph of her essay, as a kind of rejoinder topragmatism: ~ Alanguage, a form of thought, cannot(we may be told) get things right or wrong, fit or failto fit reality ; it can only be more or less useful. What




I want to end with is not exactly a response to that:it is to note how much that coming apart of thoughtand reality belongs to flesh and b l o o d ~(78). Derrida'spoint, however, is that this coming apart is not just

of flesh and blood but i s also born of the fact that our

relation to flesh and blood is fatefully constituted bya tec.hnicity with which it is prosthetically entwined ,a diacritical, semiotic machine of language in thebroadest sense that exceeds any and all presence, including our own. t

That it is ~ i n the broadest sense can be broughtout, [ think, by looking briefly at Derrida's own con·frontation with an e x p o s u r e ~of the sort Diamond isinterested i n i n this case, an exposure of a piece of

film. In a set of conversations with Bernard Stieglerpublished in English under the title Echographies ofTelevision, Derrida is concerned to differ with RolandBarthes's suggestion in Camera Lucida that the photois literally an emanation of the referent. From a realbody which was there proceed radiations that come totouch me, I who am here A kind of wnbilical cordties the body of the photographic thing to my gaze. 19Instead, Derrida insists that the modem possibility of

the photograph joins, in a single system, death and thereferent Echographies, I15). What he means by thisrather enigmatic formulation is that a kind of MSpec_

trality- inheres in the technology of th image becauseof its fundamental iterability:


As soon as there is a technology of the image, visi·bility brings night [BJecause we know that, onceit has been taken, captured, this image will be re-producible in our absence, because we know this al-ready we are already haunted by this future, whichbrings our death. Our disappearance is al readyhere And this is what makes our experience sostrange. We are spe<:tralized by the shot, captured orpossessed by spectrality in advance.

What has, dare I say, constantly haunted me in thislogic of the specter is that it regularly exceeds all theoppositions between visible and invisible, sensibleand insensible. A specter is both visible and invisible,both phenomenal and nonphenomenal: a trace thatmarks the present with its absence in advance. (II7)

Derrida then tells a story that is haunting in its ownright about his participation in the Ken McMullen filmGhostdanu where he improvised a scene with Frenchactress Pascale Ogier, in which he asks her, And whatabout you, do you believe in g h o s t s ~and she replies~ s now I do, yes: MBut imagine the experience Ihad , Derrida says ,

when , two or three years later , after Pascale Ogierhad died , [ watched the film again in the UnitedStates , at the request of students who wanted todiscuss it with me. Suddenly I saw Pascal's face ,




which I knew was a dead woman's face, come ontothe screen, She answered my questions: Do youbelieve in ghosts? Practically looking me in theeye, she said to me again, on the big screen: Yes,now I do, y e s ~Which now? ] had the unnervingsense of the return of her specter, the specter of herspecter coming back to say to m e - t o me here, now:Now, . . now, . , now, that is to say, in this dark

room on another continent, in anothe r world, here,now, yes, believe me , I believe in h o s t s ~

But at the same time, I know that the first timePascale said this, already, when she repeated this inmy office, already, this spectrality was at work. It wasalready there, she was already saying this, and sheknew, just as we know, that even if she hadn't died inthe interval. one day, it would be a dead woman whosaid, ] am dead, or I am dead, ] know what I'mtalking about from where] am, and I'm watchingyou, and this gaze remained dissymmetrical, ex-changed beyond all possible exchange. . the othergaze met, in an infinite night. (I20)

So here is Elizabeth Costello again, then , in a differentlight: What] know is what a corpse cannot know: thatit is extind, that it knows nothing and w ll never knowanything anymore_ For an instant, before my wholestructure of knowledge collapses in panic, ] am aliveinside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same


time (quoted in Diamond, The Difficulty of Reality,74). And here is Hughes, by the light of day that is alsothe light of death, the light of night:

That man's not more alive whom you confrontAnd shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud.Than any of these six celluloid smiles are,Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead;No thought so vivid as their smoking blood:To regard this photograph might well dement ,Such contradictory pennanent horrors hereSmile from the single exposure and shoulder outOne's own body from its instant and heat.

In the end, however-and this is the final differencebetween the Cavell/Diamond line and Denida that I willwant to mark-Derrida derives from this dementingforce, which bleeds together organism and machine.liv-ing and dead, prehistoric beast and one's own humaninstant and heat, a kind oflaw or general economy,

the fundaments of which reach all the way back to hisearliest work. As he puts it in chographies of eleviswn(and this descends directly from my earlier discussionof the non·appropriability of death that constitutes myindebtedness to the other), this relationship constitutesan ~ i nh e r i t a n c e a ~ g e n e l o g yof the law (I22); beforethe specter of the dead we are 'before the law,' withoutany possible symmetry, without reciprocity (120):

I N T R O O U C T l O N : EXPOSURES 33



The wholly otber - and the dead person is the whollyother-watches me, concerns me, and concerns orwatches me while addressing to me, without however answering me, a prayer or an injunction , aninfinite demand, which becomes the law for me; itconcerns me, it regards me, it addresses itself onlyto me at the same time that it exceeds me infinitelyand universally, without my being able to exchange aglance with him or with her. 120-21)

This is most obvious, perhaps, in the most well-knownexample of the spectral phenomenon that Derrida discusses-S hakespeare 's Hamiet, where the relationshipbetween inheritance, law, responsibility, and spectrality is particularly (even OedipaIly) pronounced-but

it would also seem to be the case with Hughes's sixyoung men in the photograph , to whom we, as the liv-ing, feel a strange kind of responsibility and debt thatis unsettling because unanswerable, a point powerfullyput in motion early in Diamond 's essay. In Derrida'swords: the other comes before m e ~122).

In Derrida 's derivation of a general economy or~ l a wof h e t e r o n o m yfrom this spectrality, Diamondand Cavell would no doubt find him seeking his ownkind of solace, engaging in his own kind of deflectionby the force of reason that they see their philosophy asdedicated to resisting. For what is lost in such a fore-closure, in their view, is the rawness testified to by an


Elizabeth Costello and the ethical stakes of attending tothat rawness, of not making it (as Diamond might putit) just another example of some general principle. AsCavell has put it elsewhere in his discussion of Derrida 'scritique of J L Austin's phonocentrism, the problemwith the Derridean st rateg y is that its emphasis on thegeneral economy of iterability is a kind of deflectingattention, as rushing too quickly away from, the act orencounter entailed in the historical and individual pro-cess of inheriting Quest, 131) a process that involvesnot the overcoming of the voice but its assumption orarrogation: as Cavell puts it.lO For Cavell, the problem

with the Derridean general economy-and the critiqueof phonocentrism is only one example of i t - i s that itcontinues the project of metaphysics while announcingmetaphysics' demise, and it does so in flight from the~ o r d i n a r y ,the ~ e v e r y d a y ,and its power to shoulderus out from our light and heat. The metaphysicianin each of us, Cavell writes, will use metaphysics toget out of he moral of the ordinary, out of our ordinarymoral o b l i g a t i o n s ~Passages, 74-'75), out o f ~ t h erespon·sibility you bear-or take, or find, or disclaim-for yourwords Quest, 135), because metaphysics ~ n a m e sourwish (and the possibility of our wishing) to strip our·selves of the responsibility we have in meaning. ~ S u c h

courses, Cavell suggests, seem to give up the game;they do not achieve what freedom, what useful ideal of

myself, there may be for me, but seem as self-impo sed




as the grandest philosophy-or, as Heidegger might al-

most have put it, as unself-imposed n Quest, 13l).Given the date of its rendering (1988), Cavell's ob-

servation could not have taken account of Derrida 'slater work on the animal, in particular ~ h eAnimalThat Th erefore I Am (More to F o l l o w ~(2002), whichpresents less a token for a systematic philosophy than alimit before which we are in a profound sense interrogated and humbled. As Derrida writes of being staredat by his cat (in a moment either famous or notorious,depending on your point of view), he finds himselfliterally naked and, in Diamond's terms, exposed:

No, no, my cat, the cat that looks at me in my bedroom or in the bathroom, this cat does not ap-pear here as representative, or ambassador, carryingthe immense symbolic responsibility . If I say itis a real cat that sees me naked, it is in order to

mark its unsubstitutable singularity I see it asthis irreplaceable living being that one day enters myspace, enters this place where it can encounter me,see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever takeaway from me the certainty that what we have hereis an existence that refuses to e conceptualized

( The Anim,], 37&-79)

And so, he suggests, the gaze ca lled animal -and

that qualification , c a l l e danimal, is important-


offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human:the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, thatis to say the bordercrossing from which vantageman dares to announce himself to himself, therebycalling himselfby the name that he belie ves he giveshim self. And in these moments of nakedness , under the gaze of the animal , everything can happen tome. I am like a child ready for the apocalypse. I amfollowing) the apocalypse itself, that is to say the ul-

timate and first event of the end, the unveiling andthe verdict. ( The Animal, 381-82)

If such is the case, then we are led back, perhaps, towhere we began, in all its vexation and rawness: to DavidLurie parked on the side of the road, weeping, wondering what has overtaken him; and to Elizabeth Costello,who, in confessing to her son just how haunted she isby the specter of our fellow creatures and the infernal

holocaust we have inflicted on them, presses upon her-self the question to which this volume offers not an an-swer, exactly, but a kind of understanding: I no longerknow where I am Yet I'm not dreaming. I look intoyour eyes, .. and I see only kindness, human-kindness.Calm down , I tell myself, you are making a mountainout of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes toterms with it. why can't you? Why can t you? (69)

I N T R O D U C T 1 0 N : EXPOSURES 37



NOTES

I. J M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999),43. Further references are given in the text.

2 . J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals ed. and intro.Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPres s, 1999), 43. Further references are in the text.

3. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of he Ordinary. LinesofSkeptieism and Romanticism (Clticago: University of ClticagoPress. 1988 ,31. Further references are in the text.

4. Stanley CaveU This New et Unapproachable Amer-ica (Albuquerque , N.M.: Living Batch Press, 1989), 86.Further references are given in the text.

). Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Un-handsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Peifectionisrn(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 38-39.Further references are in the text. I have discussed thesimilarities-but also the important differences-be

tween Cavelland

Derridaaround

Heidegger's figureof

the hand in In the Shadow ofWittgens tein's Lion n inZoontologies: The Question oflhe Animal ed. Cary Wolfe(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),20-21.

6. Jacques Derrida, Geschkcht II: Heidegger's Hand n

trans. John P. Leavey J . in Deconstruction and Philosophy,ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1986), 173. Further references are in the text.

7. Cora Diamond , Injustice and Animals,n in SlowCures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Mtdi-


cine, and Bioethies, ed. Carl Elliott (Durham, N.c.: DukeUniversity Press, 2001), 123. Further references are giv·en in the text.

8. Cora Diamond, Losing Your Concepts,n Ethics 98no. 2 (January 1998): 276. Further references are inthe text.

9. Cora Diamond, ~ x p e r i m e n t i n gon Animals: AProbl em in Ethics, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein,Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press ,991),350. Further references are given in the text.

TO. Cora Diamond , MEating Meat and Eating People:in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgcnstein, Philosophy, and theMind (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 333. Furtherreferences are given in the text.

I I Jacques Derrida, T h eAnimal That Therefore IAm (More to F o l l o w , ~trans. David Wills, Critical In·quiry 28 (Winter 2002): 386, 395. Further references aregiven in the text.

12. For Diamond's explicit discussion of animal rights

andthe

difference between animal rights and animalwelfare , see ~ I n j u s t i c eand Animals, 141-42.13. Jacques Derrida, Force of Law The 'Mystical

Foundation of Authority,' trans. Mary Quaintance, inDeconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. DrucilaCornell, Michal Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson(London: Routledge, 1992), 24. Further references aregiven in the text.

14. As Derrida has suggested in his reading of Heidegger and the animal in f Spirit: Heidtgger and theQuestion, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby




(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 , those sinister c o n n o t a t i o n s ~o f ~ c o n t i n u i s m ~ w h i c hHeidegger'shumanist separation of human and animal is dead-setagainst-include raosm the use of naturalism to countena nc e xenophobia, and much else besides 56)-

5 Richard Beardsworth, Cknida and tht: Political(london: Routledge, 1996), t30-31. Further referencesare given in the text.

16. Jacques Derrida, 'Eating Well,' or The Calcula·tion of the Subject: An In terview with Jacques Derrida,in Who Comes After the SUbject? cd. Eduardo Cadava,Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 116-17.

17. Jacque s Derrida, ~ V i o l e n c eAgainst Animals, inJacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What To-morrow : A Dialgoue trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.:Stanford University Press, 2004), 63; emphasis mine.

r8. For a brilliant exploration of the technicity andmechanicity of language in relation to prosthetics and

the question of technology, see David Wills, ThinkingBack: Dorsality Technology Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming), and his earliervolume Prosthesis (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University

Press, J995).19. Roland Barthes, Camera l.ucida: Reftectums on

Photography trans. Richard How ard (New York: Hill andWang. 1981), 76, 80-81; quoted in Jacques Derrida and

Bernard Stiegler. Echographie:s o Tekvision trans. Jenni.fer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 113. Furtherreferences are given in the text.

40 I N T R O D U C T I O N X P O S U R S

20. On the ~ a r r o g a t i o nof voice, see chapter I of

Stanley Cavell, A Pitch oj Phi/csophy (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Pr ess, 1995). His engagement withDerrida's reading of Austin takes place both in Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein Emerson.Austin Denida (Oxford: Basil Blackwell , T995). 42-90and in the chapter ~ C o u n t e r P h i l o s o p h yand the Pawnof Voice. in A Pitch oj Phi/csophy 53-128. Further refer

ences to both books are in the text.

I N T R O O U C T I O N XPOSUR S 41



ONE

THE DIFFICULTY OF RE LIT Y

AND THE D I I C ULT Y

O F P I LOS O PH Y

COR DIAMOND

I am concerned in this paper with a range ofphenome·

na, which, in the first four sections of the paper, I shallsuggest by some examples . In the last three sections, Itry to connect the topic thus indicated with the thought

of Stanley CavelL

I SINGLE EXPOSURE

First example a poem af ed Hughes s, from the mid·5 S , called uSix Young M e n ~The speaker in the poem

looks at a photo of six smiling young men, seated in afamiliar spot. He knows the bank covered with bilber-ries, the tree and the old wall in the pboto; the six menin the picture would have heard the valley below them

43



sounding with rushing water, just as it still does. Fourdecades have faded the photo; it c me from 1914. Themen are profoundly, fully alive, one bashfully lower·ing his eyes, one chewing a piece o f grass, one is rio

diculous with cocky p r i d e ~Within six months of thepicture's having been taken. all six were dead. In thephotograph. then. there can also be thought the deathof these men: the worst flash and rending of war fall·ing onto these smiles now forty years rotted and gone.

Here is the last stanza:

That man s not more alive whom you confrontAnd shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud,Than any of these six celluloid smiles are,Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead;No thought so vivid as their smoking blood:To regard this photograph might well dement,Such contradictory permanent horrors hereSmile from the single exposure and shoulder outOne's own body from its instant and heat.

What interests me there is the experience of the mind'snot being able to encompass something which it en·counters. It is capable of making one go mad to try tobring together in thought what cannot be thought: theimpossibility of anyone's being more alive than thesesmiling me n , nothing's being more dead. {No one ismore alive than is the person looking at the photo; no

THE O I F f l U l T Y O f REALITY

one is more alive than you are, reading the poem. InPart VI J turn back to the 'contr adictory pennanenthorrors' of the imagination of death.}

Now it's plainly possible to describe the photo soit does not seem boggling at all. It is a photo of menwho died young, not long after the picture was taken.Where is the contradiction?- Taking the picture thatway, there is no problem about our concepts being ad·equate to describe it. Again, one might think of howone would teach a child who had been shown a photoand told it was a photo of her grandfather, whom sheknows to be dead. If she asks, ~ h yis he smiling ifhe's dead?\ she might be told that he was smilingwhen the picture was taken, because he was not deadthen, and that he died later. The child is being taughtth e language ·game, being shown how her problem dis·appears as she comes to see how thing s are spoken of

in the game. The point of view from which she sees aproblem is not yet in the game; while that from whichthe horrible contradiction impresses itself on the poet·speaker is that of someone who can no longer speakwithin the game. Language is shouldered out from thegame, as the body from its in stant and heat.

What Hughes gives us is a case of what J want tocall the difficulty of reality. That is a phrase of JohnUpdike's, l which I want to pick up for the phenomenawith which I am concerned, experiences in which we

take somelhing in reality to be resistant to our thinking

THE O l f F I C U LT Y OF REALITY 5



it or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, dif-ficult in that way or perhaps awesome and astonishingin its inexplicability_ We take things so. And the thingswe take so may simply not , to others. present the kindof difficulty. of being hard or impossible or agonizingto gel one's mind round.

II WOUNDED ANIMAL

Few of us are not in some way infirm, or >Yen dis-eased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly.

William lames, The Varieties o Religious Experience

Second example The example is complex: part of it isthe set oflectures delivered by the South African nov-elis t J. M. Coetzee as his Tanner Lectures. These lec-tures were published under the title The Lives oJ Ani-

mals together with an introduction by Amy Gutmannand comments by several other people; the introduc-tion and comments also form part of the example as Iwant to understand it. l Coetzee's lectures themselvestake the form of a story. In the story, an elderly womannovelist , Elizabeth Costello , has been invited to give anendowed lecture at Appleton College. She is a womanhaunted by the horror of what we do to animals. Wesee her as wounded by this knowledge, this horror, andby the knowledge of how unhaunted others are. Thewound marks her and isolates her. The imagery of the

4 6 T H E O I F F I C U LT Y O F R E A L I T Y

Holocaust figures centrally in the way she is haunted,and in her isolation. For thinking this horror with theimagery of the Holocaust is or can be felt to be pro-foundly offensive. J

I want to describe Coetzee's lectu res. then. as pre-senting a kind of woundedness or hauntedness. a te r-rible rawness of neIVes. What wounds this woman.what haunts her mind ; is what we do to anima ls. This,in all its horror , is there , in our wo rld. How is it pos-sible to live in the face of it? And in the face of the factthat, for nearly everyone. it is as nothing, as the mereaccepted background of life? Elizabeth Costello gives alecture, but it is a lecture that distances itself in variousways from the expectations of a lecture audience. Shedescribes herself as an animal exhibiting but not ex·hibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound which herclothes cover up, but which is touched on in every wordshe speaks. So the life of this speaking and woundedand clothed animal is one of the 'lives of animals' thaithe story is about; if it is true that we generally remainunaware of the lives of othe r animals, it is also truethat, as readers of this story, we may remain unaware,as her audience does. of the life of the speaking animalat its center.

I say thai that is how I want to describe Coetzee'slectures; but it is not how the commentators on thelectures describe them. Amy Gutmann, in her intro-ductory essay. sees Coetzee as confronting the ethical

T H E O I F F l C U LT Y f R E A L I T Y 47



issue how human beings should Ireat animals, and aspresenting, within a fictional frame, arguments whichare meant to support one way of resolving thai issue.Peter Singer also reads Coetzee as having been en-gaged in the presenting of arguments within the frameof a fiction, a rguments for a kind of radical egalitarian-ism 91) as the appropriate way to organize our rela-tions to animals. He thinks the arguments in Coetzee slectures are not reatly very good ones, since they failto make clear the source of the mOTal significance of

the lives of animals. s The fact that the arguments arethose of a character in a story he sees as simply mak-ing it possible for Coetzee to distance himself to somedegree from them and to avoid taking fun intellectualresponsibility for them. Another one of the commenta·tors. Wendy Doniger, takes the lectures to be deeplymoving, but begins her response by attempting toidentify the ideas implicit in the lectures. She readsthe implicit idea as an argument from the appropriateemotions towards animals and emotional bonds withthem to conclusions about appropriate actions towardsthem. And BarbaTa Smuts, a primatologist, describesthe Coetzee lectures as a text containing a discourseon animal rights .

For this kind of reading, the wounded woman, thewoman with the haunted mind nd the raw nerves,has no significance except as a device for putting for-ward jin an imaginatively stirring way) ideas about the

8 T H E OIFFICULTY OF REALITY

resolution of a range of ethical issues, ideas which canthen be abstracted and examined. For none of the com-mentators does the title of the story have any particularSignificance in relation to the wounded animal that thestory has as its central character. For none of the com-mentators does the title of the story have any signifi·cance in how we might understand the story in relationto our own lives, the lives of the animals we are.

So we have then two quite different ways of seeingthe lectures: as centrally concerned with the present-ing of a wounded woman, and as centrally concernedwith the presenting of a position on the issue how weshould treat animals. The difference between the tworeadings comes out especially sharply if we considerthe references to the Holocaust. references which areof immense significance in Coetzee s lectures. Gut-mann treats them as a use by Coetzee of an argumentfrom analogy. Singer also treats the Holocaust imag-ery as playing a role in the argumentative structurewhich he reads in the lectures. He sees the referencesto the Holocaust as part of the argument by ElizabethCostello for her brand of radical egalitarianism. Therewould. he believes, be nothing illegitimate in arguingthat both the behavior of the Nazis towards the Jewsand the world s response. or failure of response , to ithave some points of resemblance to our treatment of

animals and our failures to attend to what we do to ani-mals. But the problem he sees with Elizabeth Costello s

T H E O I F F I C U LT Y OF REALITY 9



argument is that she equates the cases, which ignoresthe differences in moral significa nce between killinghuman beings and killing animals .?

Gutmann and Singer , then, take the Holocaust imagery in the lectures as constituting part of an argument.111at there is a woman haunted by the Holocaust as itseems to be replaying itselfin our lives with animals, thatthere is a wounded woman exhibiting herself as wounded through talk of the Holocaust that she knows will of-

fend and not be understood this drops totally away inSinger s reading and almost totally in Gutmann s. Gutmann does consider the presence in the text of a character, Abraham Stem, who takes Elizabeth Costello s use of

the Holocaust to verge on blasphemy; Gutmann sees thepresence of Stem as enabling Coetzee to represent thedifficulties we may have in und erstanding each other sperspectives. But perspective is too general and bland aterm for the rawness of nerves we have in both Stem andCostello, in contrast with the unjangled, unraw nerves of

the other characters. The contrast is made sharply present through Costello s own allusion to one of the mostsearing poems about the Holocaust, with its image of hehuman being in the ash in the air, as part of her portrayalof how we protect ourselves with a dullness or deadnessof soul. s (Gutmann describes S tem as Costello s academic equal , but they are better seen as equals ratherin the way their rawnervedness propels them towards or

beyond the borders of academic decorum.)

5 T H E D I F F I C U LT Y OF REALITY

The difference between the two contrasting types of

readings concerns also the question whether Coetzee slectures can simply be taken to be concerned with a mar·al or ethical issue. Or rather, this isn t a question at all forone of the two kinds of readings; nei ther Gutmann norSinger considers whether there is any problem in takingthe lectures that way which is the way they themselvesunderstand discourse about animal rights .9 Of cou rse,Coet2ee s lectures might indeed be intended to grapplewith that ethical issue; but since he has a character in thestory he tells , for whom it is as problematic to treat thissupposed issue as an ethical issue for serious discussion as it is problematic to treat Holocaust denial as anissue for serious discussion, one can hardly, I think, take

for granted that the lectures can be read as concernedwith that issue , and as providing arguments bearing onit. If we see in the lectures a wounded woman, one thingthat wounds her is precisely the common and takenfor-granted mode of thought that how we should treatanimals is an ethical issue , and the knowledge that shewill be taken to be contributing, or intend ing to contribute, to discussion of it. But what kind of beings are we

for whom this is an issue ? (It is important here that thelectures bring us to the writings of Jonathan Swift and toquestions about reading Swift, while none of the commentators except Garber even mentions Swift. or takesthe pages devoted to Swift to be significant in their r o

construction of what Coetzee is concerned to do. HI

T H E OIFFICULTY OF REALITY 5



Elizabeth Costello says that she doesn't want to betaken to be joining in the tradition of argumentation .She is letting us see her as what she is. She is someone immensely conscious of the limits of thinking, thelimits of understanding, in the face of all that she ispainfully aware of (45). So what then is the role of theargument-fragments which are contained in the Caetzee lectures? My comments on this are inconclusive,but are meant to reflect the idea that we cannot understand their role in Caetzee's lectures without first tak-ing seriously how argument is treated within the story,by Elizabeth Costello. She does not engage with others in argument, in the sense in which phi losophersdo. Her responses to arguments from others move outfrom the kind of engagement in argument that mighthave been expected. She comments on the argumentsput to her, but goes on from them in directions whichsuggest her own very different mode of approach. She

does not take seriously the conventions of argumentation of a philosophy text, as comes out in her imageof the dead hen speaking in the writings of Camus onthe guillotine. fhis is dearly, from the point of view of

the conventions of argumentation, no way to respondto the argumentative point that animals cannot speakfor themselve s and daim rights for themselves as wecan. The image itself is reminiscent of Wittgenstein'simage ofthe rose having teeth in the mouth of the cowthat chews up its food a.nd dungs the rose.) Elizabeth

5 THE D I f f i C U LT Y OF RE LITY

Costello's responses to arguments can be read as 'replies' in the philosophical sense only by ignoring im-portant features of the story, in particular the kind ofweight that suc h responses have in Costello's thought.In the life of he animal she is, argument does not havethe weight we may take it to have in the life of the kindof animal we think of ourselves as being. She sees ourreliance on argumentation as a way we may make unavailable to ourselves our own sense of what it is tobe a living animal.l1 And she sees poetry, rather thanphilosophy, as having the capacity to return us to sucha sense of what animal life is u (Another way of try-ing to confront the issues here: to think of Coetzee'slectures as contributing to the 'debate' on how to treatanimals is to fail to see how 'deb ate as we understandit may have built into it a distancing of ourselves fromour sense of our own bodily life and our capacity to re-spond to and to imagine the bodily life of others.)

[ am not sure how helpful it is to say Coetzee's lec-tures have to be read first ofa11 as l i t e r a t u r e ~becauseit is not dear what is meant by reading them as literature. But what is meant not to be done is at least somewhat dear: not pulling out ideas and arguments as if

they had been simply clothed in fictional fonn as a wayof putting them before us. [ his is perhaps particularlydear in connect ion with the use of Holocaust imagery,where the desire to see the point being made by Cae

tzee by using the imagery leads to various formulations

THE D I F F I C U LT Y OF RE LITY 53



of the point in general terms: Coetzee is making clearthe question whether there is any way of resolving ethi·cal conflicts in cases in which people's sensibilities are

far apart (Gutmann); or he is engaged in putting for·ward an argument, which he himself mayor may notaccept, for radical egalitarianism (Singer).-Elizabeth

Costello asks herself , at the end of the story, whethershe is making a mountain out of a molehill. The mind

does, though, have mountains; has frightful no·man·

fathomed cliffs: ~ o l dthem cheap may who ne er

hung there". What is it like to hang there? What com·

fort is offered by her son? "There, there , it will soon beover"? "Here creep , wretch, under a comfort serves in

a whirlwind: all life death does end and each day dieswith sleep." If we do not see how the Holocaust imagoery gives a sense of what it is to hang on these cliffs,what it is to have nothing but the comfort of sleep and

death n the face of what it is to hang on those cliffs, it

seems to me we have not begun really to read the lec·tures. But it equally seems we may be driven , or takeourselves to be driven, to such a reading by philosophy,as we hear it pressing on us the insistent point thatthat portrayal is simply the portrayal, however movingit may be, of a subjective response , the Significance of

which needs to be examined.)If we take as central n our reading the view Coetzee

gives us of a profound disturbance of the soul , it may

seem natural to go on to suggest something like this:

S THE D I ff i C U LT Y O F REALITY

We can learn from the 'sick soul' how to see reality,

as William James said in his Gifford Lectures. The'sick soul' in the Coetzee lectures lets us see one of

the difficulties of reality, the difficulty of human lifein its relation to that of animals, of the horror of

what we do , and the horror of our blotting it out of

consciousness.

The trouble with that view of what we may learn fromthe lectures is that it is fixed entirely on ElizabethCostello's view, and implicitly identifies it as Coetzee's.

But he shows us also that her understanding of our

relation to animals seems to throw into shadow the ful lhorror of what we do to each other , as if we could notkeep in focus the Holocaust as an image for what wedo to animals without losing our ability to see it andto see fully what it shows us of ourselves. So there is

a part of the difficulty of reality here that is not seen

by Costello: so far as we keep one sort of difficulty inview we seem blocked from seeing another. And thereis also a further important theme of the lectures whichwe cannot get into view so long as we stay entirelywith her understanding, the difficulty of attempting tobring a difficulty of reality into focus, in that any suchattempt is inextricably intertwined with relations of

power between people. Elizabeth Costello responds tothe allegations tha t dietary restrictions, and arguments

in favor of them, are a way of allowing some group of

THE DIFFICULTY OF REALITY



people to claim superiority over others; but the lecturesthemselves leave us with a picture of complex dynamics within her family, in which her grandchildren'sresponsiveness to animals and to eating baby animalscannot be pulled apart from the mutual resentment be-

tween her and her daughter-in-law.Elizabeth Costello, talking about Ted Hughes, says

that writers leach u s more than they are aware of; writing about Wolfgang Koehler, she says that the book weread is not the book he thought he was writing. Garbersays that we can take both remarks to be about Caetzee, but she then more or less drops the point. I wouldpick it up and use it this way: Coetzee gives us a view o f

a profound disturbance of soul, and puts that view intoa complex context. What is done by doing so he cannottell us, he does not know. What response we may haveto the difficulties of the lectures, the difficulties of real·ity, is not something the lectures themselves are meant

to settle. This itself expresses a mode of understandingof the kind of animal we are, and indeed o f the morallife of this kind of animal.

Ill. DEFLECTION

I have suggested that Coetzee's lectures present amode of understanding of the kind of animal we are,where that understanding can be present in poetry, ina broad sense of the term. There is also the idea that

s T H E D I H I C U LT Y OF RE LITY

an understanding of the kind of animal we are is present only in a diminished and distorted way in philosophical argumentation. Philosophy characteristicallymisrepresents both our own reality and that of others,in particular those 'othe rs ' who are animals. What wethen see in the response to Coetzee's lectures by Gut·mann and Singer (and to a lesser degree by Dorugerand Smuts) is that the lectures are put into the contextof argumentative discourse on moral issues. I want aterm for what is going on here, which I shall take fromCavell, from n o w i n gand Acknowledging . Cavellwrites about the philosopher who begins we imagine)from an appreciation ofsomethingappaUing: that I maybe suffering, and my suffering be utterly unknown oruncared about; and that others may be suffering and Inot k n o w ~(1969b: 247). But the philosopher's under·standing is deflected the issue becomes deflec ted, as thephilosopher thinks it or rethinks it in the language of

philosophical scepticism. And philosophical responsesto that scepticism, e.g., demonstrations that it is confused, further deflect from the truth here (26o). I shallreturn to Cavell's ideas; here I simply want the notionof deAection , for describing what happens when we aremoved from the appreciation, or attempt al appreciation, of a difficulty of reality to a philosophical or moralproblem apparently in the vicinity.

et me go back briefly to my first example, the poemfrom Ted Hughes. What is expressed there is the sense

T H E D I F F I C U LT Y OF H U T Y 7



of a difficulty that pushes us beyond what we can think.To attempt to think it is to feel one s thinking come un-hinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our con-cepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there; thedifficulty, if we try to see it, shoulders us out oflife, isdeadly chilling. How then can we describe the philo-sophical deflection from a difficulty of reality , as we seeit in Gutmann and Singer? I have in mind centrallytheir taking Coetzee as contributing to the discussionof a moral issue: how we should treat animals. Shouldwe eat them, should we grant them rights? And so on.Philosophy knows how to do this. I t is hard, all righi,but that is what university philosophy departments arefor, to enable us to learn how to discuss hard problems,what constitutes a good argument. what is distortedby emotion, when we are making assertions withoutbacking them up. What [ have meant to suggest bypicking up Cavell s use of the term deflection is that

the hardness there, in philosophical argumentation, isnot the hardness of appreciating or trying to appreciatea difficulty of reality. In the latter case, the difficultylies in the apparent resistance by reality to one s ordi-nary mode of life, including one s ordinary modes of

thinking: to appreciate the difficulty is to feel oneselfbeing shouldered out of how one thinks, how one isapparently supposed to think , or to have a sense of theinability of thought to encompass what it is attemptingto reach. Such appreciation may invo lve the profound

58 1 H E D I F F I C U L 1 Y OF REALI1 Y

isolation felt by someone like Elizabeth Costello. Re-

call here her reference to her body as wounded: herisolation is felt in the body, as the speaker in Hughes spoem feels a bodily thrownness from the photograph.Coetzee s lectur es ask us to inhabit a body.H But, justas, in considering what death is to an animal we mayreject our own capacity to inhabit its body in imagina-tion , so we may, in reading the lectures, reject ourown capacity to inhabit in imagination the body of thewoman confronting, trying to confront, the difficultyof what we do to animals. The deflection into discus -sion of a moral issue is a deflection which makes ourown bodies mere facts facts which mayor may not e

thought of as morally relevant in this or that respect,depending on the particular moral issue being ad-dressed as our sentience, for examp le, might be takento e relevant to our having moral status ). So here Iam inviting you to think of what it would be not to be

deflected as an inhabiting of a body (one s own, or animagined other s) in the appreciating of a difficulty of

reality. This may make it sound as if philosophy is in-evitably deflected from appreciation of the kind of dif-ficulty I mean, if (that is) philosophy does not knowhow to inhabit a body (does not know how to treat awounded body as anything but a fact). I shall returnto that question later, and also to Coetzee on imagin-ing one s own death, on having a genuinely embodiedknowledge of being extinguished. For thai is another

1 H E D I F F I C U L 1 Y O F REALI1 Y 59



important point in the lectures, not mentioned by anyof the commentators.

IV BEAUTY AND GOODNESS AND SPIKINESS

I said at the beginning that I was concerned with arange of phenomena ; and so far I have had only twoexamples , which cannot by themselves adequately suggest the range . I want briefl y to mention some otherexamples to go a part of the way to remedying that.

My first example involved a poem about life anddeath: the second example involved the horror of whatwe do to animals. But I would include in what I call thedifficulty of reality some things that are entirely different. Instances of goodness or of beauty can throw us.I mean that they can give us the sense that this shouldnot be, that we cannot fit it into the understanding wehave of what the world is like. I t is wholly inexplicablethat it should be; and yet it is. That is what CzeslawMilosz writes about beauty: Mit should not exist. lbere

is not only no reason for it but an argument against.Yet undoubtedly it is And he writes of the mystery that may seem to be present in the architecture of

a tree, the slimness of a column crowned with green ,or in the voices of birds outside the window greetingthe morning. How can this be?- In the case of ourrelationship with animals , a sense of the difficulty of

reality may involve not only the kind of horror felt by

6 T f O I F f l C U LT Y OF REALITY

Elizabeth Costello in Coetzee s lectures, but also andequaUy a sense of astonishment and incomprehension that there should be beings so like us, so unlikeus, so astonishingl y capable of being companions of

ours and so unfathomably distant_ A sense of its be-ing impossible that we should go and eat them maygo with feeling how powerfully strange it is that theyand we s hould share as much as we do and yet alsonot share ; that they should be capable of incomparablebeauty and delicacy and terrible ferocity; that someamong them should be so mind-bogglingly weird orrepulsive in their forms or in their lives. Later I willcome to Cavell s remarks about human separatenessas turned equally toward splendor and toward horror,mixing beauty and ugliness, but those words, which hecalls on to help give the felt character of human separateness, are very like words we might call on to expressthe extraordinary felt character of animal life in rela-tion to our own.

Ruth KlOger in her memoir Still Alive: A Holocaustirlhood Remember ed describes her own astonishment

and awe at the act of the young woman at Auschwitzwho first encouraged a terrified child, Ruth at 12 to tella lie that might help save her life, and who then stoodup for her , got her through a selection. Kluger saysthat she tells the story in wonder, that she has neverceased to wonder at that girl s doing, the ~ i n o m p

rable and i n e x p l i c l e goodness that touched her that

T H E D I F F I C U LT Y OF REALITY 61



day (1°3-1°9). In discussing Hughes's poem, I mentioned that the photograph and what it shows wouldnot be taken to boggle the mind by everyone. The men

were alive, and now are dead; what's the problem?KlUger says lhat when she tells her story in wonder.

people wonder at my wonder. lbey say. okay somepersons are altruistic. We understand that; it doesn'tsurprise us. The girl who helped you was one of

those who liked to help.

Here. as in the case of the Hughes poem. what is ca·pable of astonishing one in its incomprehensibility. itsnot being fittable in with the world as one understandsit. may be seen by others as unsurprising. Kluger asksher readers not just to look at the scene but to listen toher and not take apart what happened, to absorb t ~ asshe tells it (108-109). She asks for a kind ofimagination that can inhabit her own continued astonishment.The 'taking apart' that she asks us to eschew would be

a distancing from the story, a fitting of what went oninto this or that way of handling things, a deflectingfrom the truth.

(In a discussion of concepts of the miraculous, R.

F. Holland sets out one such concept as that of the oc-currence of something whjch is at one and the sametime empirically certain and conceptually impossible.The story in the New Testament of water having been

6 THE DIFFICULTV OF REAlITV

turned into wine is the story of something that couldhave been known empiricaUy to have occurred, and itis also the story of the occurrence of something whichis conceptually i m p o s s i b l e ~To be the miracle story itis, Holland says, it has to be both; the sort of occurrence he means is one which, for us, is impossible tothink. and yet it is there. Kluger in introducing thestory of what happened to her describes it as an act of

grace, and do not want to suggest that that is the sameas seeing it as a miracle, in Holland's sense. But [ dowant to connect the astonishment and awe that Klugerexpresses as related to the astonishment and awe thatone would feel at a miracle in Holland'S sense, and indeed to the astonishment Milosz expresses at the exis-tence of beauty.)

Mary Mann's story. uLittie Brother', is described byA S. Byatt (in her introductory essay for the OxfordBook o English Short Stories as uplain, and brief, andclear and t e n i b l e ~Mann's telling of the story is ~ s p i k y

with morals and the inadequacy of o r a l s ~Byatt saysno more than that; and it is therefore not entirely obvi-ous what she means by the telling's being spiky withthe inadequacy of morals, and how that is related to theterribleness of what is related. (What is related is theplaying of two poor children, who have no toys with thecorpse of their newborn. stillborn brother. His stiff littlebody is the only doll they have had. The narrator hadtold the mother what she thought of the desecration;

THE OIFFICULTY OF REALITV 63



the last word is given to the mother.) The telling, fullyfelt, shoulders us from a familiar sense of moral life.from a sense of being able to take in and think a moralworld. Moral thought gets no grip here. The terrible·ness of what is going on and the terribleness of the feltresistance of the narrated reality to moral thought areinseparable. A story which seems to me comparable inits 'spikiness' with morals and the inadequacy of moralsis leonard Woolfs ~ P e a r l sand S w i n e ~On one level,the story is a criticism of racism and colonialism; but itis also a telling of the kind of terribleness that, fully felt,shoulders one from one 's familiar sense of moral life.)Again here I should want to note that the sense of this oranother narrated reality as resisting our modes of moralthought is not something everyone would recognize.

v TURNE TO STONE

Hughes's poem again: The contradictory permanenthorrors shoulder out one's body from its instant andheat. To look is to experience death, to be turned tostone. Losing one's instant and heat, being turned tosomething permanent and hard and cold, is a centralimage in Cavell's discussion of scepticism and knowl·edge in The Winter s Tale and Othello (1979: 481-96).He says of Winter s Tale that Hennione's fate of beingturned to stone can be understood as her undergoingwhat is in a sense the fate of Leontes. Leontes's fail ·

6 THE O I F ff C U LT Y O f REALITY

ure or inability to recognize her makes her as stone;h e n c e ~ ,Cavell says, that is what it does to him. One

can see this as the projection of his own sense ofnumbness, of living death ; and Cavell then asks whythat was Leontes's fate (481). Cavell links the two playswith a play on words: in both plays, ~ t h econsequencefor the man's refusal of knowledge of his other is animagination of stone : stone as what is imagined andstoniness as what has befallen the imagination. Othel·10 imagines Desdemona's skin as having the smooth·ness of alabaster (481-2). He imagines her as stone,says that she stones h r heart. It is Othello, though,who uwill give her a stone heart for h r stone body ; hisuwords of stone transfer to h r what he himsel f hasundergone. a heart turned to stone (492). What doesthis to Othello is the intolerableness to him of Desdemona's existence, her separateness. About the possibil·ity of that separateness Cavell says that it is preciselywhat tortures Othello: The content of his torture is thepremonition of the existence of another, hence of hisown, his own as dependent , as partial . (493) Separate·ness can be felt as h o r r o r ; l such a response is whatputs Othello ~ b e y on aid .

Cavell has in many of his writings traced connec·tions and relations between on the one hand the multifarious forms in which we take in or try to take in orresist taking in that difficulty of reality that he refersto most often as separateness and on the other hand

r H E D i f f i U LT Y OF REALITY 65



scepticism: scepticism as itself both a presence in our

lives and as, intellectual ized, a central part of our philosophical tradition. The early direction his tho ughts tookon these issues can be seen in his statement of one

form of the 'conclusion' towards which he took thosethoughts 10 be heading , that "skepticism concerningother minds is not skepticism but is tragedy". 6 Earlierstill, he had been particularly concerned, in Knowingand Acknowledging" 1969b), with what he took to beinadequate in the Wittgensteinian response to scepticism: I mean the response of such Wittgensteinians as

Norman Malcolm and John Cook, not that of Witt gen·stein. Malcolm and Cook had taken the sceptic aboutothe r minds to be confused about what can be said in

the language-game in which we speak about o ur ownsensations and those of others, in which we expressour own feelings and in which we may speak of wh atwe know of the feelings of othe rs, what we doubt orare certain of. Thus Cook 1965) h a d criticized the ideathat it is some sort of limitation on us that we cannotactually feel what another person feels, cannot havethat very feeling; such an idea reflects (he thinks) one'staking the inaccessibility of the feeling as like the inaccessibility of a flower in a garden on the far side of awall over whidl one cannot see. What Cook was criticizing was the idea I may have of the position that Icannot be in in respect to the pain of the other person.the position that that person himself is in the decisive

66 THE DIFFICULTY OF REALITY

position. His argument was an attempt to show thatthe sceptic takes to be a kind of inabil itywhal is really amatter of the difference between two language·game;:in the language-game with pain, there is no such thingas the position in which one has tl lt which the otherperson has. We are not 'unable' to be there if here is nothere where we are unable to be. Cook's account wasthus meant to enable us to see the confusion in thesceptic's view. Cavell's response was astonishing. Heplaces Cook's argument in the situation from whichthe sceptic speaks; leads us to imagine that situationand to recognize the pressures on words; shows uswhat may happe n with our experience of distance fromwhat others undergo. When we put, or try to put, thatexperience in words, the words fail us, the words don'tdo what we are trying to get them to do . The wordsmake it look as if I am simply unable to see over a wallwhich happe ns to separate me from something I wantvery much to see. But the fact that the words are apparently too weak to do what I am demandin g from themdoes not mean thai the experience here of powerlessnesshas been shown to involve a kind of grammatical er·ror. But why. then, since words seem not to be able todo what I want, did J call on them? Why in particular,

does the experience appear to be an experience of notbeing able to know what is there in the other becauseJ cannot have what he has? Cavell says I am filled

with this feeling of our separateness, let us say and

THE OIFFICULTY OF REALITY 67



I want you to have it too. So I give voice to it. And thenmy powerlessness presents itself as ignorance a

metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack . (1969h:263) His criticism of Cook, then. takes the form of al-lowing us to hear Cook s own voice differently. WhenCook, in repudiating the sceptic s idea, speaks of it asinherently confused , Caven lets us hear his voice as

responding with correctness to the voice of philosophical scepticism. 17 When I spoke of Caven s response asastonishing, I meant his teaching us a way of hearingboth Cook and the scept ic whom he is criticizing, away of hearing these voices that puts them back intothe situation within which the humanness of the otherseems out of reach, and thereby shows us where andhow philosophy has to star t . This takes us back to thesubject of deflection.

In Part III, I quoted Cavell s description of how wemay be filled with a sense of the facts, the ineluctablefacts of our capacity to miss the suffering of others andof the possibility of our own suffering being unknownand uncared about; we may be filled with a sense of

these facts, of our distance from each other, and ourappreciation be deflected, the problem itself be deflected, into one or another of the forms it is given inphilosophical scepticism. I quoted also Cavell s remarkabout the anti-sceptical response as a further deflection, a deAection that ignores the fundamental insightof the sceptic (1969b: 258-60). the sense the sceptic

8 T H E D I F F I C U LT V O F R E A l I T V

has of the other s position with respect to his own pain,and the light in which it casts his position in relationto tllal other. The image of deflection is implicit alsolater on in Cavell s writings, when he describes the dif-ficulty of philosophy as that of not being able to findand slay on a path {New Yet Unapproachable Anu:rica

1989: 37}; for we can here see deflection as deflectionfrom a path we need to find and stay on; but it is alsodeAection from seeing, deflection from taking in, thetormenting possibility central to the experience of thesceptic. What he sees of the human condition, whatunseats his reason, is converted into and treated as anintellectual difficulty (1979: 493). I shall come back tothis, but first I want to make further connections withCoetzee s lectures and Hughes s poem .

VI ORRE TNESS AND EXPOSURE

There is in Coetzee s second lecture a response by afictional philosopher, Thomas O Hearne, 10 ElizabethCostello s ideas (1999: 59-65). It is implicitly a re-sponse also to some of the arguments in favor of animal rights put forward by philosophers like Singer andTom Regan. But here I want to consider a response by areal philosopher, Michael Leahy, a response which hassome resemblances to O Hearne s but which will moreeasily enable us to see the connections with Cavell sthought. Leahy s argument has two parts. He first tries

T H E O I F F I C U LT V O F REALITY 9



to establish what the language-game is within whichwe speak of animals and their pains and desires and soon.1S His argument is that animalliberationists characteristically fail to recognize that the language-game inwhich we speak of the mental life of animals, of a dogfearing this or a chimpanzee believing that, is vitallydifferent - from the language-game in which we usesuch terms of human beings (138-9). Leahy relies onthat point when he goes on to argue that the practiceswithin which we use animals in various ways (as pets,food, experimental subjects, sources of fur and so on)~ d i c t t ethe criteria for our judging what constitutesneedless suffering 198), and that is the second partof the overall argument. The two parts ofllis argumenttogether are thus meant to undercut the case made foranimal rights. Leahy's response to the liberationists isnot unlike Cook's response to scepticism about otherminds: like Cook, he takes the failure to recognize the

difference between distinct language-games to be theultimate source of the confusion he wants to diagnose.l e re are various questions that might be raised abouthow the two parts of his argument are connected, aboutwhether the recognition of the differences between thelanguage-games has the practical implications thatLeahy thinks it has. 19 But that is not my concern here.I am interested rather in Leahy's voice, and its relation to the anti-sceptical voice exemplified for Cavell in·Knowing and Acknowledging by the voices of Mal-


colm and Cook. The Coetzee case is not an exact paral·lei to Cavell's; and the philosophical debates about animals cannot be treated as more than partially parallelto the debate about scepticism.l(l But we are concernedin both cases with a repudiation of the everyday; with asense of being shouldered out from our ways of thinking and speaking by a tormentor reality. In both cases,the repudiation may be heard as expressing such-and

such position in an intellectualized debate; in bothcases, the opposite sides in the debate may have morein common than they realize. In the voices we hearin the debate about animal rights. those of people likeSinger on the one hand and those of Leahy and the fictional O'Hearne on the other, there is shared a desirefor a 'because': because animals are this kind of being,or be<ause they are that kind of being, thus-and-suchis their standing for our moral thought. If we listento these voices in the way Cavell has taught us to, can

we hear in them a form of scepticism? That is, a formof scepticism in the desire for something better thanwhat we are condemned to (as the kind of animal weare)? But what might we be thought to be 'condemnedto'? Cavell, in 7 u: Claim ofRwson uses the word exposure' in discussing our situation: Being exposed, as Iam in the case of ,my concept of the other', means thatmy assurance in applying the concept isn't providedfor me. ~ h eother can present me with no mark orfeature on the basis of which I can settle my attitude»




(433). He says that to accept my exposure, in the caseof my knowledge of others, seems to imply an acceptance of the possibility that my knowledge of othersmay be overthrown , even that it ought to be ; it impliesacceptance of not being in what I may take to be the

ideal position , what I want or take myself to want (439;see also 454). Our 'exposure ' in the case of animals liesin there being nothing but our own responsibility, our

own making the best of it. We are not , here too, in whatwe might take to be the 'ideal' position. We want to beable to see that. given what animals are, and given alsoour properties . what we are like (given our marks and

features' and theirs). there are general principles thatestablish the moral significance of their suffering com

pared to ours, oflheir needs compared to ours, and wecould then see what treatment of them was and whatwas not morally justified. We would be given the presence or absence of moral community (or thus-and -such

degree or kind of moral community) with animals. Butwe are exposed-that is, we are thrown into findingsomething we can live with . and it may at best be akind of bitter-tasting compromise. There is here only

what we make of our exposure, and it leaves us endlessroom for double-dealing and deceit. The exposure ismost plain in the Coetzee lectures at the point at whichElizabeth Costello is asked whether her vegetarianism comes out of moral conviction, and replies that itdoesn't; comes out ofa desire to save my soul , and

7 THE DIFFICULTY OF I IEALITY

she adds that she is wearing leathe r shoes, and carry·ing a leather purse. 21

The title of this essay is The difficulty of reality andthe difficulty of philosophy , but a word I'd want to addto the title is: t:xposure Ted Hughes's poem is abouta single t:Xposurt: hut the single exposure is our exposure, as we find for ourselves . or are meant to find, in ashuddering awareness of death and life together. In thebackground is perhaps a reference to Wilfred Owen'sExposure , in which the sense of war as not making

sense, the sense of loss of sense, is tied to death literally by exposure, exposure to cold that transforms themen to iced soHdity.-I have not more than scratchedthe surface of CaveU's use of the idea of exposure; but

there is also more to the idea in Coetzee's lectures,Elizabeth Costello, in Coetzee's first lecture, speaks of

her own knowledge of death, in a passage which (in

the present context) takes us to the Ucontradictory per

manent h o r r o r s ~spoken of in Hughes's poem. U or aninst ant at a time . she says, I know what it is like to bea corpse, The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it. She goeson to say that we all have such moments, and that theknowledge we then have is not abstract but embodied,

o r a moment we art: that knowledge, We live the im

possible: we live beyond our death, look back on it yetlook back as only a dead self a n ~ She goes on. mak·ing the contradiction explicit: ~ W h a tI know is what

THE DIFFICULTY OF REALITY 73



a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it knowsnothing and will never know anything anymore. Foran instant, before my whole structure o knowledgecollapses in panic . I am alive inside that contradiction,dead and alive at the same time 32). The awarenesswe each have o being a living body. being alive to theworld . carries with it exposure to the bodily sense o

vulnerability to death, sheer animaJ vulnerability, thevulnerability we share with them. This vulnerability iscapable o panicking us. To e able to acknowledge it atall, let alone as shared, is wounding; but acknowledging it as shared with other animals. in the presence o

what we do to them, is capable not only o panickingone but also o isolating one, as Elizabeth Costello isisolated . Is there any difficulty in seeing why we shouldnot prefer to return to moral debate, in which the liv-

ingness and death o animals enter as facts that wetreal as relevant in this or that way, not as presences

that may unseat our reason?

VII THE DIFFICULTY OF PHILOSOPHY

Can there e such a thing as philosophy thai is not deflected from such realities? ll This is a great questionfor Simone Weil. She wrote

Human thought is unable to acknowledge the reality o affliction. To acknowledge the reality o affiic-

7 T H E D I F F I C U LT Y OF REALITY

tion means saying to oneself: may lose at any mo-ment, through the play o circumstances over whichI have no control, anything whatsoever that I pos-sess, including those things which are so intimatelymine that I consider them as being myself. Thereis nothing that I might not lose. It could happen a lany moment that what I am might be abolished andreplaced by anything whatsoever o the filthiest andmost contemptible sort.

To be aware o this in the depth o one 's soul is toexperience non·being. (l986: 70)

Weil's writings show that she saw the difficulty o

what she was doing as the difficulty o keeping to suchawareness, o not being deflected from it. I give her asan example o a philosopher concerned with deflectionfrom the difficulty o reality, but a philosopher very dif-ferent from Cavell.

In the concluding two paragraphs o 11te airn o

Re.ason Cavell speaks o Othello and Desdemona, ly.ing dead.

A statue, a stone. is something whose existence isfundamentally open to the ocular proof A humanbeing is not. The two bodies lying together form anemblem o this fact, the truth o skepticism. Whatthis man lacked was not certainty. He knew every·thing, but he could not yield to what he knew, be

T H E D I F F I C U LT Y OF REALITY 75



commanded by it. He found out too much for his

mind, not too little. Their differences from one an

other- the one everything the other is not- form

an emblem of human separation, which can be ac-

cepted, and granted, or not. (I979: 496)

Cavell returns to the audience: we are here, knowingthey are 'gone burning to hell'. He asks: . . . . . can philosophy accept them back at the hands of poetry? , and

answers, ~ C e r t a i n l ynot so long as philosophy contin

ues, as it has from the first, to demand the banishment

of poetry from its republic. Perhaps it could if it coulditself become literature. But can philosophy becomeliterature and still know i t s e l f ~

What follows is not meant to answer that last ques

tion, but to bear on it.It may seem as if Cavell is here taking for granted

that literature can accept-no problem -such realitiesas throw philosophy. I do not think that that is an implication, but I won't discuss it,u I want to look insteadat Cavell's question whether philosophy can acceptOthello and Desdemona back, at the hands of poetry.

For philosophy to do so would be for philosophy to ac-cept human separateness as "turned equally towardsplendor and toward horror, mixing beauty and ugliness; turned toward before and after. toward flesh andblood ; for philosophy not to acce pt them back is forphilosophy not to get near, but to ge t deflected from, the

7 T H E D I F F I C U LT Y f REALITY

forms which our exposure to that separateness takes.But if hat suggests a conception of he difficulty of philosophy, the difficulty of staying turned toward beforeand after, toward flesh and blood, towards the life of

the animals we are, how is it related to what Cavell sayselsewhere about the difficulty of philosophy?

In Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Witt-genstein's Investigations , Cavell says that the mediumof philosophy, as Wittgenstein understands it, lies indemonstrating, or say showing, the obvious»; he thenasks how the obvious can fail to be obvious. What is thehardness of seeing the obvious?-And he then says thatthis must bear on what the hardness of philosophizingis. (1996: 271-2) This question is present also in his re-flections on Wittgenstein's aim of bringing words backfrom their metaphysical to their everyday use . Whatcan lhe difficulty be, then, of bringing or leading wordsback? What is the everyday, if it is so hard to achieve?It is within the everyd ay that there lie the forms andvarieties of repudiation of our language-games and distance from them, the possibility of being tormented bythe hiddenness, the separateness, the otherness of oth

ers (1989: passim). As a form of repudiation of the Ian·guage-game in which there is no contradiction betweenthe young men being profoundly alive and then totallydead may be in the life of the Hughes poem; which isitself not to be thought of as outside life v. :ith the wordswe use for thinking of life and death.

THE D i f F I C U LT Y OF REALITY 77



In Part I when I introduced the phrase a difficultyof e a l i t y ~I said that , in the cases J had in mind thereality to which we were att ending seemed to resist our

thinking it. That our thought and reality might fail 10

meet is ilselfthe content of a family offorms of scepticism , to which one response is that the very idea of

such a failure is confu sed, that what I have spoken of

asthe

content ofsuch

formsof

scepticis m isnot

a content at all, A language , a form of thought, cannot (wemay be told) get things right or wrong , fit or fail to fitreality; it can only be more or less useful, What I wantto cnd with is not exactly a response to that it is to notehow much that coming apart of thought and reality be-

longs to flesh and blood. I take that, then, to be itself a

thought joining Hughes, Coetzee, and Cavell.

NOTES

This paper was presented at a symposium, Accountingfor Literary Language , al the University of East Angliain September 2002 , and at the Hannah Arendt / ReinerSchurmann Memorial Symposium, on Stanley Cavell,held at the New School in New York, in October 2002.I am very grateful for the comments of the audience onboth occasion s. I was helped to think about the issuesby Anal Matar' s reply to my paper at the conference inEast Angiia. [ am also very glad to nave had commentsand suggestions from AHce Crary and Talbot Brewer.

8 T H E O I F F I C U LTY OF REALITY

The paper was originally published in Partial Answers

vol. I (2003), and J am grateful for many suggestionsand careful editorial attention from Leona Toker and herassistants.

J. J believe [read it in a New Yorker essay of his in the1980s, but cannot trace it.

2. The two Coetzee Le<:tures have been reprinted asLessons 3 and 4 in Coetzee 2003.

3. The description of her as 'haunted' has, for me inthis context, two particular sources. One is Ruth Klilger'sdiscussion of Sylvia Plath and of Plath's use of Holocaustimagery in her poetry, her defence of Plath against thosewho object to her taking over what has happened to us,to the Jews, in expressing a private despair. (She waswriting about Alvin Rosenfeld in particular, but had inmind others who shared his view, and who felt as he didthat there was an 'unforgivable disproportion' in Plath'sexpression of her own anguish in language drawing on

the Holocaust. See her 1985, especially r84-5.) Klilger

speaks of how 'others' (other than we who ask the worldto remember what happened to us) may be haunted bywhat has happened to the Jews and claim it as their ownoutofhuman kinship. as part of heir private terrors andvisions of death . The second source is Coetzee's story,in which Elizabeth Costello mentions Camus and thehaunting imprint on his memory made by the death-cryof a hen, which, as a little boy, he had fetched for hisgrandmother , who then beheaded it (63).

4. I use the word 'mind' here with some hesitation,since (within the context of discussion of animals and




ourselves) it may be taken to suggest a contrast withbodily life. Conceptions of mind are at stake within thelectures. In particular, there is involved a critical stancetowards the idea that, if one were to imagine what it islike to be a bat or other animal, or to be another hu·man being, one would need to imagine what is going on'in its mind ', rather than to imagine its fulness of being(see, e.g., 33 51 65). So to speak of Elizabeth Costello as

having a haunted mind in a sense o f , mind' which takesthat understanding of embodiment seriously is to speakof how her life is felt.

5. ' Fail to make clear' is my way of putting the criti·cism; see Singer, 87 90. Singer's response doesn't takeon Elizabeth Costello's rejection o f the form of argu·ment that Singer thinks is appropriate, argument whichresponds to the therefore arguments of those who justifytreating animals as we do by their own different there·fore.arguments. She comments on such arguments afterone of the other characters in the fiction speaks of the

'vacuum of consciousness' within which animals live(44). We say such things as that they have no conscious·ness, but what she minds is she says, what comes next:1 hey have no consciousness therefore Therefore h a t ? ~ .

Against those who say that therefore we may treat themas we like, she does not reply that animals are conscious ,therefore we may not eat them, or that they have otherrelevant properties, therefore we should recognize theirrights . etc. See also below note 12.

6. See n t r o d u c t i o n ~8. When she describes Coetzeeas arguing by analogy, Gutmann is actually speaking


about Marjorie Garber's discussion of Coetzee's use of

the Holocaust, but interestingly Garber herself, althoughshe has quite a long discussion of the use of analogiesby Coetzee and others. never refers to the cases in ques·tion as the presentation of a kind of argument. While Iwould disagree with Garber's reading, she does at anyrate, unlike all the other commentators, begin by takingfor granted that we have in front of us something to be

thought about in literary terms, and that this matters.7. I do not in this essay try to judge, or even to exam·ine what would be involved in trying to judge, ElizabethCostello's use of the imagery of the Holocaust. Later inthe present section I do though, discuss how the effortto take in one difficulty of reality may block us from see·ing another.

8. r had meant Paul Celan's Todesfuge ; J am in·debted to Ruth KlUger for pointing ou t to me tha t NellySachs makes use of that image too ( Dein Leib im Rauchdurch die L u f t .

9. See especially the opening paragraph of Gutmann'sintroduction, intended to help ix the terms of our read·ing of the rest of the book: the lectures. she says, focuson an important ethical issue the way human beingstreat animals; cf. also the following page, where that de·scription is repeated.

10. I cannot here go into the discussion of Swift inCoetzee's lectures. It is important for various reasons,among which is that it takes up the question where wemight gel if we push Swift's tales further than we usu·ally do, and suggests an 'ex·colonial' perspective on what.

T l H OIFFICULTY OF R E A l i T Y 81



thus pushed, the tales might say about the kind of beingweare.

I I There is an issue here that I can merely indicate. Ihave found, in teaching undergraduates how utilitariansdiscuss the killing of babies , that my students react verystrongly indeed to claims that killing a baby does notwrong the baby, that it does not interfere with what thebaby might be taken to want for itse lf, since the baby is

not as yet capable of grasping such a choice. Killing anolder child might (on this view) go against what it wants,but that is possible only because the older child can understand what it is to go on living, and can thereforewant to do s o . I n response to that sort of argument,the students say that you are wronging the baby; thatthe baby is attached to life: In the struggle of a baby or

animal whom someone is trying to kill, you can see thatit is clinging to life. They reject the idea that there is nointerference with what a baby or animal might e said towant. Their rejection of the utilitarian argument is con

nected with their rejection of the kind of argumentativediscourse in which the utilitarian wants the issue cast, aform of discourse in which one's imaginative sense of

what might be one's own bodily struggle for life, one'simaginative sense of an animal's struggle for life, cannotbe given the role they want it to have. I t is as i f hey felta kind of evisceration of the meaning of 'wanting to goon living'.

12. Gutmann in fact does recognize some of the fea-tures of the lectures which I have just described, buttakes Costello's responses to argument as showing that

8 2 T H E O I F F I C U LT Y OF REALITY

she is after all willing to engage in argument to at least alimited degree. She speaks of Costello as employing phi-losophy in demonstrating the weakness of argumentsopposed to her own view. but Gutmann's treatment of

the argument-fragments which the story contains isshaped by her basic reading of the story as a way of pre-senting a stance on an ethical issue. My reading of he ar·guments in the Coetzee lectures would go in a different

direction , and would focus on some of the specific cases,in particular Elizabeth Costello's rejection of the there-

fore-arguments that go from characteristics of animalsto its therefore being permissible to treat them this orthat way, as we do. Earlier I mentioned Singer's responseto such arguments with contrasting therefore-arguments:a very different response that in some ways resemblesElizabeth Costello'S is that of Rush Rhees, in Humansand Animals: A Confused Christian Conception , whichis not an essay but two sets of exploratory notes and aletter to a friend. A theme in the notes and in the letter

is the unexamined use of therefore arguments the condusion of which is the supposed greater importance of

human life ; in fact a criticism of the therifore is the starting point of the first set of those notes, which characterize such arguments as reflecting ~ t h illusion of a reasonwhich justifie s one in treating animals wit less respector less consideration than human beings . So a questionfor Rhees in these informal notes is how to think hisown response to what he takes to be illlL ;ion.

13· See 51; here I am taking a remark of ElizabethCostello' s as deeply Coetzee's.

T H E O I F F C ULT Y O f REALITY 83



14. Central to the lectures: see 65; also 32 . I return tothis region ofCoetzee's thought in Part VI.

15. Cavell says that human separateness is turnedequally toward splendor and toward horror, mixingbeauty and ugliness; turned toward before and after, to-ward flesh and b l o o d (492). My discussion is partial atthis point , emphasizing as it does horror over splendor.But see also 494 6.

16. Foreword to Claim oj Reason (1979: xix . WhatCavell says is more complex than my quotation: Hesays that he knew (in 1973 and 74) the direction that theconclusion of his work in progress was hauling itselft o w a r d ~and that thai conclusion had to do with theconnection o f ~ n o w i n gand Acknowledging and TheAvoidance of Love , the reciprocation between the ideasof acknowledgment and of avoidance, for example as thethought that skepticism concerning other minds is notskepticism but is tragedy (xviii-xix) .

[7. ~ n o w i n gand Acknowledging (1969b: 259 - 60);

the term 'voice of correctness' comes from Cavell's Avail-ability ofWittgenstein's Later Philosophy (1969a: 71)

18. All of chapter 5 of gainst Liberation (1991) is relevant, but p. 126 is particularly helpful in making clearLeahy's method and aims.

19. There are also questions about the first part of theargument , the attempt to establish the differences be-tween the language-game in which we speak about thethoughts, feelings and intentions of animals and thatin which we speak about our own. One question wouldconcern the idea of there being just the two language-

8 THE O I F F I C U LT Y OF REALITY

games he describes. The question is particularly acutein connection with the writings of Vicki Hearne, whichLeahy discusses and critic izes at various points in thebook. One way of putting her understanding of what isinvolved in talking about animals is that talking aboutanimals in connection with their 'work' (in her senseo f that term) is itself a distinctive language-game. TIllslanguage-game she takes to be inseparable from the

trainer's activity; the activity itself is carried on throughsuch talk, and the talk gets its sense through what itachieves in the shared 'work'. See, in addition to Adam s

Task (Hearne, 1986, the target of Leahy's criticism), heressay A Taxonomy of Knowing: Animals Captive, Free-Ranging, and at L i b e r t y ~(1995), 441 - 56.

20. Farone thing, I don't want to suggest that Leahy'suse of the concept of criteria in his argument is an ap·peal to criteria in Cavell's sense. But more importantthan that, there is a significant difference between thetwo cases in the conceptions of knowledge in play. The

sort of knowledge to which Elizabeth Costello appealswhen she discusses the attachment of animals to lifecan be contrasted with that which Othello takes himself to want. See , on knowledge and forms of perception in Oth ello, and on Othello's desire for proof, NaomiScheman's · Othello's Doubt / Desdemona 's Death: TheEngendering of Skepticism , in Pursuits o Reason. Scheman's essay itself helps to bring out also a connectionbetween the issues I have been discussing and issuesconcerning gender , both within Coetzee's lectures andmore generally.

T H E O I F F I C U l T Y OF R E A l i T Y 85



21. To forestall misunderstanding here, J want to notethat I am not (in this section or anywhere else) denyinga role, indeed a large and deeply significant role , to 'because' in moral thinking, and indeed to argument I amsuggesting we look with some serious puzzlement at attempts to establish moral community, or to show it to be

absent. through attention to 'marks and features _

2 2 Alice Crary has pointed out to me that my de

scriptions, earHer in this essay, of how philosophica.largument can deflect us from attention to the difficulty of reality may seem to have implied the answerGN o· to my question whether the re can be a non-deflecting practice of philosophy. That there can be such

a practice, and that argument may have an essentialrole in it, is not something I would wish to deny. There

are here two distinct points: philosophical argument

is not in and of itself any indication that attentionhas been or is being deflected from the difficulty of

reality, and (more positively) philosophical argument

has an important role to play in bringing to attentionsuch difficulty and in exploring its character, as wellas in making dear what the limits or limitations areof philosophical a rgument, and indee d of other argu·ment. See, for example, Cavell's arguments about the

argument that the human embryo is a human being

1'979' 372 - 8).2}. The kinds of difficulty which literature may have

in the face of a 'd ifficu lty of reality' are emphasized bySimone Wei in remarks about the representation of af-

fliction. See Human Personality (1986: 72 ).

86 T H E O I F F I C U LT Y OF RE LITY

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. 1969b. Knowing and Acknowledging . In MustWe Mean What We Say? New York: Scribner's, pp.238-66.

. 1 9 7 9 . The Claim o Reason: Wittgenstein SkepticismMorality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

. 1989. ~ D e c l i ni n Decline . In This New Yet Un-

approachable America: Lectures after Emerson afterWittgenstein. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, pp.

29-'75·. 1996. Notes and Afterthoughts on the Open

ing of Wittgenstein's Investigations

•

In Hans Slugaand David G. Stern, eds., 11Ie Cambridge Companionto Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, pp. 261-95.

Coetzee, j. M. '999. The Lives o Animals. Ed Amy Gu t-mann. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

. 200}. Elizabeth Costel/{ . New York: Viking.Cook, John. 1965. KWittgenste in on PrivacyB. me Philo-

sophical Review74: 281-314.Doniger , Wendy. 1999. · R e f l e c t io n s ~In Coetzee 1999:

93- r0 6 .

T H E D I f f i C U LT Y O F REALITY 87



Garber, Marjorie. 1999. R e f l e c t i o n s .In Coetzee 1999:7 84.

Gutmann, Amy. 1999. l n t r o d u c t i o n w . l nCoetzee 1999:

3- I

Hearne, Vicki. 1986. Adam' s Task: Calling Animals byName. New York: Knopf.

- - . 1 9 9 5 . "A Taxonomy of Knowing: Animals Captive.Free-Ranging , and at Liberty". In Social Research 62:

44 1-5 6 .Holland, R. F. 1965. MThe M i r a c u l o u s American Philo-

sophical Quarterly 2: 43-51.Hughes, Ted. 1957. "Six Young Men". In The Hawk in the

Rain London: Faber and Faber, pp. 54-55·James, William. 1960. Varieties o Religious Experience.

London: Coilins.KlUger, Ruth. (Angress, Ruth K. 1985. Discussing Ho·

locaust Literature". Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual

2: 179-192.. 2 0 0 1 . Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered.

New York: The Feminist Press at the City Universityof New York.

Mann. Mary. 1998. "Little Brother". In A S. Byatt, ed .The Oxford Bool: o English Short Stories. Oxford: Ox

ford University Press. pp. 93-9 6 .Milosz. Czeslaw. 1988. ·One More Day". In The Collected

Poems New York: ECCQ, pp. 108- 10 9.Rhees. Rush. 1999. Humans and Animals: A Confused

Christian C o n c e p t i o n In Moral Questions. Basing

sloke: Macmillan . pp. 189-9 6 .

88 T H E DIFFICULTY OF REALITY

Scheman. Naomi. '993. ~ O t h e l l o ' sDoubt/Desdemona's

Death: The Engendering of c e p t i c i s m ~ .In Ted Co

hen, Paul Guyer and Hilary Putnam, eds., Pursllitso Reason: Essays in Honor o Stanley Cavell. Lubbock:Texas Tech University Press, pp. 161-76.

Singer, Peter. 1999. R e H e c t i o n s ~ .In Coetzee 1999:85-91.

Smuts. Barbara. 1999. ~ R e H e c t i o n s .In Coetzee '999:107-120.

Wei , Simone. 1986. ~ u m a nP e r s o n a l i t y In SianMiles, ed., Simone Weil: An Anthology New York: Wei·denfeld and Nicholson. pp. 50-78.

Woolf, Leonard. 1921. ~ P e a r l sand Swine W

• In torit:S o

the East. Richmond: Hogarth Press, pp . 21-44.

T H E O I F F I C U LT Y OF REAlITY 8 9



TWO

C O M P N IO N BLE T IN K I N G

STANLEY CAVell

II was while I was thinking about preparing a text inwhich J would attempt to take further some earlierthoughts of mine concerning Wittgenstein's reRectionson the concept of ~ s e ei n g something as something ,

what he calls seeing aspects, which dominate Part J Iof Philosophical Investigations that I reread the paper I

This essay was written for and appears in W i l ~ n s i r iand Ihe

Moral Ufo: Essays in HO/1or o Cora Diamond edited by Alice

Crary. published by MIT Press in 2007. A version was given asthe Hetman lecture at Columbia University in 2006 The fur-ther thoughts · concerning Wingenstein's reflections on seeingas· occur in my paper The Touch of Words,· written for a vol.ume edited by William Day and Victor J Krebs for CambridgeUniversity Press. scheduled to appear in 2008.

9'



first encountered it as a lecture) that Cora Diamond a

philosopher whose work I have for years been particularly and continuously grateful for--entitles "The Dif-ficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy", apiece in which at a certain point she deploys an ideaof mine in a way I found heartening and distinctly instructive. Eventually, I found that the rereading of herpaper had made so strong an impression upon me thatI came to feel compelled to articulate a response to it,however unsure I felt my philosophical ground mightprove to be. Diamond's paper takes up certain extremities of conAict associated with phenomena of whatshe calls the difficulty of reality (call this a difficulty of

change, a difficulty that philosophy must incorporate),cases in which our human capacities to respond she

ineffec says the bases or limits of our human na turearc, for some, put to the test, threatening to freeze orto overwhelm understanding and imagina tion , whileat the same time, for others, the phenomenon, or fact,fails to raise, or perhaps it succeeds only in raising,an eyebrow. Examples range from instances of beingstruck dumb by sublime beauty, to speechlessnessbefore horror.) The principal matter Diamond treatsin her paper is the fact, and the understanding of thefact. of our entwinement with the non-human worldof animals , specifically and most extendedly our relation or relations to the mass preparation of animals asfood for humans. It is a matter to whose implications

9 C O M P N I O N B L E T H I N K I N C

I have hitherto not devoted consecutive thought a

matter I now feel I have avoided.I say at once that while relations to animals have

come up variously, if inte rmit ten lly in my writing overthe years, I am neither practiced in the theory of animalrights nor committed in my daily life 10 vegetarianism.But an idea which is said to test or threaten the limitsof human nature reminds me that in my early reAe<-tions on Wittgenstein 's study of seeing something assomething I raised the issue whether it makes senseto speak of seeing others or ourselves s human as op-posed to what?). If it does then it makes sense to suppose that we may f il to see ourselves and others so apurported condition I went on to call "soul·blindness".A subtext of y reflections to follow here is the question whether there is a comparable blindness we maysuffer with respect to non-human animals .

The obvious bearing ofWittgenstein's study of see-

ing something as something on Diamond's wish tohave us ponder the human and the intellectual challenges of the mass production of animals for food, liesin its suggestion that the extreme variation in humanresponses to this fact of civilized existence is not afunction of any difference in our access to information; no one knows, or can literally see, essentially any·thing here that the others fail to know or can see. Butthen if one concludes that the variation is a functionof a response to or of an attitude toward information

C O M P N I O N B L E T H I N K I N G 93



that is shared, one may suppose the issue is of somefamiliar form of moral disagreement. Diamond's dis·cussion specifically questions this supposition. Onepeculiarity of the case of breeding animals for the manufacturing of food, beyond the eKtremity of responsesranging from horror to indifference, unlike difficultiesover the death penalty, or the legitimacy of a war, orthe torture of prisoners, or euthanasia, or abortion, isthat the issue is one that touches the immediate andperhaps invisible choices of most of the members of

a soc iety every day. Further, those who are indiffer·ent to o r tolerant of the mass killing of animals forfood may well regard the purpose of the institution asproducing an enhancement of modes of hum n life'sgreatest pleasures, from the common pleasures of

sharing nourishment to the rare pleasures of consum·ing exquisite delicacies. It seems safe to say that noone of balanced mind thinks it an enhancement ofhu·

man pleasures to perform executions or abortions orto torture. (Nietzsche may have exceptionally divinedpleasure taken in such activities, and Himmler mayhave shared his view in warning the minions underhis command that their deeds of extennination mustbe carried out soberly and dutifully.) The variation of

attitudes that Diamond's discussion stresses betweenthe horror of individuals and the indifference of mostof society conside rs moments in which the variation of

response seems one between visions of the world, be·

9 C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G

tween how its practices are regarded, or seen, or takento heart. or not.

Wittgenstein's reflections on seeing aspects (mostmemorably using the Gestalt 6.gme of a duck-rabbit todemonstrate incompatible ways of reading or seeing asituati on) was brought into more general intellectualcirculation when Thomas Kuhn used the idea of a Ge-stalt switch Specifically in understanding certain crisesin intellectual history, particularly in the history of sci·ence. But in Wittgenstein's elaboration of his reRec-tions on the phenomenon he emphasizes that ~ h u g l y

many interrelated phenomena and possible concepts(p. 199) are brought into play, among them the conceptof merely knowing (p. 202), and of reading a poem ornarrative v.rith feeling and merely skimming the linesfor information (p. 214), and of being struck by, or blindto, a likeness, and of a picture as helping one to readwith the correct expression ibid.). I might characterize Diamond as raising the question of what I will callinordinate knowledge, knowledge whose importunateness can seem excessive in its expression, in contrast tomere or unobtru sive or intellectualized or indifferentor stored knowledge, as though for some the conceptof eating animals has no particu1ar inll rest (arguablyanother direction of quest ionable-here defective---expression). I think of a remark of Freud's in rehearsingthe progress of coming into one's own through the t lk-

ing cure: There is knowing, and there is knOwing.

C O M P N I O N B l f T H I N K I N G 95



And I suppose, in another register, this variability of

condition is what Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, cites in the phrase ~ n o wJ know in part .

I think too of my efforts to understand the appealto the ordinary in the philosophical practices of thelater Wittgenstein and ofJ. L Austin, hence of the tendency they counter in Western philosophy, since at leastPlato's Cave, of seeking systemat ically to transcend orto impugn the ordinary in human existence. The vividextremes in responding to the world-wide existenceof food factories is a cautionary, even lurid, examplewarning against supposing that the ordinary in humanlife is a given as it were a piau. [ would say rather thatit is a task, as the self is. I sometimes speak of the taskas discovering the extraordinary in what we call ordi·nary and discovering the ordinary in what we call ex·traordinary; sometimes as detecting significance in theinsignificant, sometimes as detecting insignificance inthe significant. These are reasonable abstracts of whatI recurrently find to be tasks of philosophy. And thesense of one familiar replacing a contrasting familiaris what I mark in the title of an earlier text of mine as~ h eUncanniness of the Ordinary .

I will not arrive here at some conclusion about howfar the concept of seeing aspects may bear on eitherinordinate o r insipid expression. Such a suggestioncomes up inconclusively a couple of times in what fol-lows. Its point is to specify moments at which we know


we stand in need of a convincing account of the ex-

treme differences of response to the eating, and otherquestionable uses, of non-human animals whether

or when we count this as ordinary or as extreme-

since in lacking it we betray a register of our ignoranceof ourselves.

In the paper of Diamond's that I begin from hereher reRections are principally cast as a commentaryon moments from the presentation depicted in a pairof slories by J M. Coetzee with the title The Lives of

Animals . The pair appear under this title as two of theseven chapters that make up Coetzee's novel flizabethCostello. The pOlir also appear in a separate volume alsoentitled The Lives o Anima/s this time accompanied byresponses from five writers from various disciplines.It is this latter volume that Diamond cons iders . Shestresses her finding herself, in one decisively consequential respect, in a different, isolated, position fromeach and all of these five respondents, despite the factthat she and they ll express unhappiness with the state,and the understanding of the state, of the human rela-tion to the non-human animal world. We shall come toDiamond's isolating difference in due course. I trustthat I shall not refer to subtleties in either Coetzee 's orDiamond's texts without quoting passages nom themsufficient for judging them.

The first of the pair of Coetzee's stories features alecture to a college audience in the United States given

C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G 9



to dinner, he omits to say why he had refused preciselyto break bread last night with Mrs. Costello. Was thisbecause her words have reached to the point of blasphemy , to dishonoring the work of God? (It is an is-sue for certain thinking about the Holocaust whether itshould be represented at all.) Or was it because she in·sults the memory of the dead? Or because she invokeshorror cheaply? Oddl y or ironically , these are causesCostello could well find pertinent to her own sense of

horror, or as she sometimes puts it, disorientation. Butthis is not how Stern introduced the idea of breakingbread. He was granting ( I assume) the truth of the ideathat we (are right to) refuse to break bread with the ex-ecutioners at Auschwitz. That black meal would, let ussay, curse communion, incorporating-symbolically, itgoes without saying, surely the human ingestion of

bread as the body and wine as the blood of divinity.Stem's refusal of communion with the execution

ers at Auschwitz forms a sort of major premise, as itwere, of the syllogism he attributes to Costello. Herminor premise is that the slaughterers of animals arein a moral or spiritual class with the executioners atAuschwitz. From which the conclusion follows thatwe (are right to) refuse to break bread with these fur-ther slaughterers. But are we to take it that Stern findsCostello's offensive fault of argumentative assimilationto warrant assimilating her to (receiving a treatment of

shunning precisely marking the treatment warranted

1 0 0 C O M PA N O N A B L E T H I N K I N

by) the executioners of Auschwitz. beyond the pale of

shared bread? This reaction would seem to make hisperception of Costello'S fault quile as inordinate as hetakes her perception of the slaughterers of animals tobe. And/or should this count as Stem's doing what hepromised at the outset ofms letter to do, name ly takingwhat Elizabeth said in her lecture seriously?

Taking expressions seriously, or a sense of difficultywith realizing this project, is a way I might characterizewhat Diamond names the difficulty of philosophy ,something she understands to inhabit or to be inhabited by the difficulty of reality . I associate this mutualexistence with what I have sometimes discussed as achronic difficulty in expressing oneself. especially in itsmanifestation as finding a difficulty or disappointmentwith meaning, or say with language, or with humanexpression, as such. I t is a disappointmen t 1 find fundamental to my reading ofWittgenstein's Philosophical

InvestigationsIn an essay from 1978 which she entitles Eating

Meat and Eating P e o p l e ~Cora Diamond identifies her-self as a vegetarian and specifies her motive in writingabout the question ~ o wmight I go about showingsomeone that he had reason not to eat animaJs?M asthat of attacking the arguments and not the perceptionsof philosophers who express the sense of ~ t h eawfuland unshakable callousness and unrelentingness withwhich we most often confront the non-human world .

C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N 1 1



The 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 sus picious. I haveI think felt this way when, in response to my expressingdoubt that there are moral truths for whose certaintymoral theory should undertake to provide proofs, philosophers more than once have proposed I t is wrongto torture c h i l d r e n ~as a certain truth to which moraltheory has the responsibility of providing an argument,and at leas t one philosopher added: an argument strongenough to convince Hitler. In he laim o Reason I re-ply to this train of thought by saying that morality is notmeant to check the conduc t of monsters.

I have not, I believe, anywhere considered in detailthe dangers of allowing oneself to judge another to ex-hibit monstrousness. Perhaps this has been because Ifelt sure that I would be told Ihatthe danger of such ajudgment is that others might take it into their heads

to judge me to be a monster, without argument. It doesnot, I have to say, make me feel safer to suppose thatmy defense against a judgment of my monstrousnessmust be to discover an argument to combat it. The danger I still feel worth pursuing is that, or how, I mightdiscover monstrousness in myself. What is Thoreauseeing when he declares, never knew a worse manthan myself ?

I do not imagine that it has been a sense of poorargumentation on behalf of vegetarianism that has

1 0 2 C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N C

thwarted my becoming vegetarian. A clear inkling of

the pertinence of the choice of that form oflife for mewas likely, I have thought, to present itself in consequence of my discovery of my love of Thoreau's multiple intelligence. I recall the a strong effect upon me of

his saying that he has no objection to young boys learning to hunt and to fish-taking him to mean that in theage of innocence (the period Emerson calls the ~ n e u -

trality of boys) the young should feel in themselvesthat they are part of, equal to, the wildness of nature,that they sense and relish, not fear, or distrust, theirown, let's say, animal aliveness-and his going on tocite the day on which, as Thoreau reports it, he discov-ered that in fishing he felt a certain lowering of respectfor himself. It is from about then, backed by further of

his obselVations, that I have sometimes half expectedan analogous feeling to come my way. (Despite the factthat there was no one in my early life from whom to

learn how to hunt and to fish.)In Diamond's earlier essay, she isolates a line from

a poem of Walter de la Mare's- If you would happycompany win (namely the companionship of ~

nimble titmouse )-and says of it (in contrast to theidea shared by the five commentators accompanyingCoetzee's stories) that it presents a different notion lofa non-human animal, namely], that of a living creature,or fellow creature which is not a biological concept ,p. 328). What she explains she means by her different

C O M P N I O N B L T H I N K I N C 103



notion is one that is not the concept of an animal pos-sessing this or that interest or capacity in common or

at variance with our human interests or capacities, but

one that means a being which may be sought ascomp ny [Diamond's emphasis] . It is the experienceof company, say of proving to us that we are not alonein the world, and not an argument about the animal'sbiological powers. that on Diamond's view places con-

suming the animal out of reasonable bounds.I recall passages in various texts of mine in which

I have over the years been prompted to record. com-ing it could seem from nowhere. encounters wit ani-mals. real and imaginary. Thinking of Emerson at themoment (perhaps it was Thoreau) observing a squir-rel arching across a field and his being prompted tosay that squirrels were not made to live unseen. I am

moved to record, from a time within the childhood of

my two sons, my watching almos t every day during the

early weeks of winter the following scene play itself outbeyond the kitchen window looking into the back gar-den of our house. We had strung a thin rope diagonallyacross a corner angle of the garden fence in order tosuspend from the middle of he rope a bird feeder. Thiswas designed to keep the two or three most familiarneighborhood sqUirrels away from the seeds before thebirds had a chance at them. hen initially the squirre lstried to maneuver themselves along the rope. some-thing about it (its thinness. or its slack) foiled them.

1 4 C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N C

11ten the next day one of the squirrels negotiated therope all the way to the feeder and tipped it so that someof its seeds fell to the ground. thus providing a repastfor his (or her) companions and, eventually. himselfor herself. I was surprised at how quickly it becameobvious to me that on successive mornings it was in-variably the same genius performing this mission onbehalf of this little group. Before our family devised a

further way to protect the birds' interests. I inwardlylooked forward each day to encountering and salutingthis gesture of virtuosity and careless sociability. Sinceit was in part my seeds that this benefactor distributedand ate, it expresses my sense of the situation to saythat. as I observed him while having my morning cof-fee and roll. [ was breaking bread with him. in com-mon if not reciprocally.

What would follow? This sense is. I agree, perfectlyincompatible with the idea of eating the fellow. But I

have in any case never had such an idea with respectto squirrels. The idea has in the past been proposed tome with respect to rabbit and to horse and to snails.In each case I as it were for the sake of philosophy,tried each just once. But my inward cringe at the ideaof repetition in these cases did not transfer to my othe rcarnivorous habits.

Nor am J tempted here to a hard conclusion aboutmy inconsistency, although I am impressed, as Dia-

mond is, by Costello's rueful admission. along with her

C O M P N I O N B l E T H I N K I N C lOS



inordinate knowledge of the use of animals for food,on her relative complaisance, anyway willingness, inwearing leather shoes and carrying a leather purse. I

suppose the admission is to ward off the attributionto herself of an unknowable purity of spirit.) Diamondspeaks in this connection of inescapable but bitterc o m p r o m i s e ~ . l 1 1 i sgreatly interests me and I mean to

return to it.

Diamond 's emphasis on company ---earning the

companionship of the t i tmouse-is a fairly exact precursor, etymologically, of Coetzee's Abraham Stem s

sense in his letter of breaking b r e a d ~an idea that

Stern charges Costello with pressing into cheap servicebut which Diamond takes from Costello with utmost

seriousness. This means that she takes seriously theinordinateness in Costello's response, I mean bringsinto question just what is disproportiona te about it.

(One could say she respects Costello's brush with mad

ness.) And perhaps she therewith brings into questionwhether proportionateness is the question. Here isa place we might ask whether it would be helpful tothink of Costello to be seeing animals s company. Butrather than intensifying insipid knowledge, this appealto seeing something as something seems here to etio

late inordinate knowledge , or rather to make the company of animals something less than a fact, namelythe fact that they re (not serve as) company (for some ,sometimes). Diamond emphasizes Costello's slate of

1 6 C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N

raw nerves or, as Costello sometimes describes it, her

insecurity with her own humanity.Diamond gets quickly in her Coetzee essay to that

moment she takes most signally to differentiate her

perception of his tale, hence to isolate herself, from theposition of those who had been invited to respond toit. She focu ses on the moment-one she discovers es·

sentially to be passed by in their responses-in whidl

Costello declares herself to be, analogously with Kaf.ka's great ape in Kafka s tale Address to an Academy ,[quoting Costello] -not a philosopher of mind but ananimal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of

scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothesbut touch on in every word 1 speak po 71). In thustaking her own existence to be one among the lives of

animals in the story, it becomes the chief subject. or

object. of the story, the singular life depic ted in it thatcounts as multiple, the human as the animal of mul

tiple lives, say drawn between wild and tame, or thisway with one person those ways with others, open and

hidden, old without being sure how to be old, capableof indecorousness in her work , suffering in, and suffering from, what she says, from her own indictmentby it. Since Diamond rejects, congenially to my way of

seeing things, the idea of way, or a set of ways. for all tosee, in which non-human animals differ from human

animals, a way that explains why w might not wish, or

allow ourselves, to eat them, I take the suggestion to be

C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G 1 7



that the realms differ, and hence are akin, endlessly, asin the case of the separation, or differences, betweenthe human and the divine. (The appearance of the re-ligious in Coetzee's tale repeatedly becomes pressing.This must be mostly for another time.) For example, ananimal's way of eating and so the diet integral to ananimal species' life form differs from human eatingas significantly as an animal's mating or parenting orbuilding or foraging or bonding or mortality or attention or expectation or locomotion differs from . and isanalogous to, one might some times say is an allegoryof, their forms in human life.

Coetzee's book opens this way. ~ h e r eis first of

all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get usfrom where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to thefar bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problemof knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved

them push on.(In my piece on the aesthetics, or writing, of the -

v e ~ t i g a t i o n s[ am surprised to recall that I speak of anear and a far shore and of the river of philosophy thatruns between . The near shore is the perspective of

philosophical 8 pro blems , listed by Wittgenstein in hisPreface as uthe concepts of meaning, of understanding , of a proposition, of logic, and other things.The far shore is the further perspective I describe, orstandpoint, ~ f r o mwhich to see the methods of the In-

1 8 C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G

vtstigations their leading words home, undoing thecharms of metaphysics, a perspective apart from whichthere is no pressing issue of spiritual fervor, whetherfelt as religious, moral, o r aesthetic . And I go on tosay: O ne [shorel without the other loses the pivot ofthe ordinary, the pressure of everyday life; one with-out the other thus loses . to my way of thinking, thesignature of the Investigations. There remains a question of priority. From each shore the other is almostignorable, and each imagines itself to own the seriousness of the Investigations work. (The Cavell Reader pp.382-383.) [ should confess that I like to understandCora Diamond's title for her already classic collectionThe Rea/istic Spirit as encoding these banks or shores,indicating that philosophy is perpetually a matter of

tracing the loss and recovery (revised, reviewed) of theordinary, of subjecting to criticism what we would likein philosophy to insist upon as necessarily real spe-

cifically to criticism out of the spirit of realism, of howthe human animal actually, let us say, forms its life andits understanding ofits life.)

I take Coetzee's repetition, in his book's openingthat I just now quoted, of s o l v e ~or solving , threetimes in two adjacent sentences, ironically but tenderlyto picture p e o p l e ~ ,in attempting to make human lifea series of problems, as attempting to construe theirexistence as itself a problem, an intellectual puzzle tosolve and from which to push on. Nietzsche enters a

C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G 1 9



similar complaint of intellectualization against ourspecies, in its regarding life ~ a sa riddle, a problem ofk n o w l e d g e ~ ,in The Genealogy o Morals I cannot butth ink that Cora Diamond was as intrigued as 1 to seeCoetzee s opening chapter given the title ~ R e a l i s m ~ .

Philosophical Investigations is in effect a portrait of theunsatisfiability ofthe human species with its solutions,a portrait hardly the first-detailing human life asone of restlessness, exposure, i n security; and morespecifically, of what in an essay of mine on its aesthetics [ identify as its articulation of the modem subject,namely its expected reader, as someone characterized by, among other traits, perversity, sickness, self-destructiveness, suffocation, lostness, strangeness, etc.

This may helpfully return us to the question of akingseriously Elizabeth Costello s notation of herself as ananimal wounded, but with a wound (unlike other suffering animals) that she exhibits and does not exhibit.That she specifies her concealing it under her clothesimmediately alerts us to the most obvious, or banal,unlikeness between her condition and that of other animals, namely just that her species wears clothes. Andsince what is concealed. and not concealed, under herdothes. we are allowed to assume are we not? - is anaging but otherwise unharmed woman s body, the tor-ment she expresses is somehow to be identified withthe very possession of a human body, which is to say,with being human. I say ~ o t h e r w i s eu n h a r m e d ~I am

11 C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N

assuming that there is no visible remnant of harmfrom the event she describes in a later chapter when,half a century ago, she allowed herself to be pickedup by a tough who beat her up when she found shewanted to repel hi s advances. She suffered a brokenjaw and she describes its treatment and its healing.What counts as a wound persisting from that incidentis her perceptio n that the tough took evident pleasurein beating her; this produced in her what she describesas her first knowledge of evil, something not hiddenby clothes. 1 do not know Coetzee s attitude toward thework of Freud, let alone Lacan. but I cannot put asidea suggestion 1 take that there is something specificallywounded in the normal female body.)

r emphasize two peculiarities about this revelation of

the woundedness that marks being human. First, sincethe stigmata of the suffering are coincident with thepossession of a human body, the right to enter such aclaim universally to other such possessors, has roughlythe logic of a voice in the wilderness, crying out newsthat may be known (inordinately) to virtually none, butto all virtually. t is a voice invoking a religious, notalone a philosophical. register: it is uninvited. it goesbeyond an appeal to experie nces we can assume all hu-mans share . or recogni ze. and it is meant to instill be-lief and a commentary and community based on belief,yielding a very particular form of passionate utterance ,call it prophecy. We could say that the object of the

C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G



revelation is not simply to touch but to announce thewound that has elicited its expression and that gives itauthority: Costello had said, in matching our behaviorwith that in the Third Reich: Ours lour mass manufacturing of corpsesl is an enterpr ise without end_ It

is an inherently indecorous comparison, not to say offensive, and perhaps deliberately a little mad; ferventnews from nowhere. The right to voice it is not alonean arrogation of a claim every hum n is in a positionto make, the sort of claim philosophy requires of itself,in speaking for all; it is also a judgment that distancesitself from the hum n as it stands, that finds hum n

company itself touched with noxiousness, (As if themass slaughter of animals in effect negates or disenchants the concept, the possibility, of sacrifice.)

Here is a place at least to mention the apparent congruence between Costello's compa rison offood factoriesand concentration camps with a pair of sentences attributed to Heidegger in an interview (by Philippe lacouelabarthe, quoted by Maurice Blanchot), translated andprinted in an issue of ritical Inquiry a few years agodevoted to Heidegger and Nazism_ Heidegger is reported to have said: ~ A g r i c u l t u r eis now a mechanizedfood industry. [This much appears essentially word forword in Heidegger's well-studied text ~ h eQuestionConcent ing Technology" from 1955- The attributed pairof Heidegger's sentences continues:] As for its essence[that is, techno logy's essence] it is the same thing as the

2 C O M PA N I O N A B l E T H I N K I N

manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and thedeath camps, the same thing as the blockades and thereduction of countries to famine [a reference, J assume,to Stalin's starvation of four million Ukrainian kulaksin the ear ly 1930'sl, the same thing as the manufactureof hydrogen bombs." I rather imagine (but this is notessential to my reAections) that Coetzee knew this cita·tion linking the food industry with, among other things,

the death camps and that he meant to be putting Heidegger's words to the test in his novel, in effect to askwhether such a view is credible coming anywhere butfrom n old artist. tired of and sickened almost to deathby the responses she receives late in her life of words,crazed by their reality to her together with their loss of

interest to others and jarred or compel ed by her imagination into welcoming the offense she may cause . Oneof the moments in Heidegger's W tat Is Called Think·

ing? that J have been most impressed by is his descrip

tion of Nietzsche, in trying to reach his contemporarieswith his perception of the event of our murder of Cod.Heidegger writes: ~ m o s tquiet and shiest of men,[Nietzsche] endured the agony of having to s c r e a m ~1

find it illuminating to think of Elizabeth Costello, in herexhausted way, as screaming.

A further detail suggesting the presence of Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking? in Coetzee's text liesin that opening picture of a reader's journey, or a life'sjourney, as from a near to a far bank, posing a problem

C O M PA N I O N A B L [ T H I N K I N 3



from which p e o p l e ~are able to push on ; Coetzeecalls it, speaking for these problem-solvers, a bridging problem . Heidegger says early in this book of his,with respect to the passage from our scientific or intel·lectualized mentality to authentic philosophical think·ing, thai There is no bridge here only the l e a p . ~

I follows that the opening paragraph of Coetzee'snovel describes us, human beings pushing on, gettingon, going along, solving problems (in terms, I take it,dictated by others) as not in a position, or a place, forthinking, or for what is to be called thinking.

One in whose imagination Heidegger survives as aserious thinker is apt to have had to find a way beyondthe sense that his thought comes to direct itself as anapology for the practices of Nazism (despite certain of

his reservations concerning its theories). And, sinceit is Elizabeth Costello's comparison of food factorieswith death camps that invoked Heidegger's linking of

the camps with the agriculhtral industry, I mark herdifference from Heidegger al the point at which CoraDiamond (in contrast to the initial silence on the pointby the five commentators published together withCoetzee's pair of stories), unveils (as it were) her nowinescapable knowledge of her hidden yet unconcealedwound. Heidegger acknowledges no such wound forhim to confess (for him , nor any pain out of whichto scream, and it is perhaps in this continence, or ab-sence, that he is cursed.


I said that there are two peculiarities in ElizabethCostello's invocation of human existence as wounded.The first is what I described as her identification of

wounded ness judging from her own with the con-dition of human embodiment, the very possession of

the human body, as stigma. The second peculiarity isher claim that the evidence for her invisible/visiblewound, or expression of it, is present, or, as she putsthe matter, is touched on , in every word she speaks.In my experience, a precedent for such a thought, or vi-sian, is Emerson's way of speaking, epitomized in hisdeclaration in ~ S e l f - R e l i a n c e Hthat Every word theysay chagrins us (adding that we know not where toset them righq. But what differentiates -them from~ u s ~ ?Every word Emerson hears chagrins him, and allthe words he speaks are in essence, to begin with, thewords of others, common bread. What other wordsare there? This means that every word he speaks is

touched with, is fated to express, chagrin. To speak-the obvious signature expression of the human lifeform is to e victimized by what there is to say, orto fail to say.

A topic that brings Emerson's chagrin to fever pitchis slavery. From ~ F a t e H :~ a n g u a g emust be raked, thesecrets of the slaughter-houses and infamous holesthat cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tellwhat negro-slavery has been.H Earlier in that essayEmerson had said: You have just dined, and however




scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in thegraceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races. This somewhat extends his earlier in theessay having spoken of expensive r a c e s ~ r a c elivingat the expense of a c e ~I will not reargue here my sensethat the repeated presence of the slaughte r-house,together with the ambiguity of r a c eliving at the ex-pense of a c e ~ ~ m e a n i n gthe human race living at theexpense of animals but in this context unmistakenlymeaning at the same time the white race living at theexpense of the black y ields the perception, or vision,that slavery is a form of cannibalism. Essential to hisU a r g u m e n t ~is that the idea of language as having tobe raked compresses a suggestion that in mome n tshigh and low the house oflanguage is overrun, overcome, words must be searched for through wreck ageand then with force and craft aligned into parallel,justified ranks on a page to work decorously together .

Such matters recalling what Diamond speaks of asthe difficulty of reality and of h l o s o p h y w i l lhaveto be taken seriously if we consider whether it ex-presses the perception at issue to say that Emersonhere sees slavery s cannibalism. This would makethe concept of seeing-as a kind of explication of allegory, as when at the opening of Walden, Thoreau re-ports his vision of his townspeople of Concord, Mas·sachusetts as observing pract ices meant to tormentthemselves, as though they are choosing, and not


choosing, to make life a set of strange forms of penance, a vision that flares and fades; whereas I wantedto speak of the impression of cannibalism as pe rhaps irreversible.

I report also in this connection, as I have before,Thoreau's treating human feeding as such as a mailerfor anxious satire. In the account of his expenses, theliteral listing of dollars and cents expended, for surviv

ing his first year at Walden, Thoreau separately itemizes the cost of food, and he comments: ~ thus unblushingly publish my guilt. M Thoreau here perceiveshis very existence. the assertion of the will to live in theworld by feeding himself, as without certain justifica·tion there are debts in living, conditions of existence,uses to which he puts, or fails to put, the peaceablespace cleared for him before he cleared it, that are un-countable. What makes them insupportable is the de-gree to which they are unnecessary. Then the quest in

which an adventurous life may well be spent in search,or experiment, is to replace false by true necessaries,or means, to what one truly finds good a philosophicalquest as andent as Plato's Republic , perhaps promising to allow the cloaking of the wound of existing tobecome superAuous.

Of course one may wish to ask whethe r Thoreauwould not have more relevance to the way the worldis if he were a little more realistic, say more open tocompromise. {Albert Schweitzer in Africa, once a




more formidable guide to existence than I supposehe is now, instead of or in addition to) protecting hishoard from the ants, left little piles of sugar for themby his bed in his tent when he retired for the night. Issuch a practice, from our contemporary perspective,anything more than precious or quaint? But perhapsit was not meant as more than one man's solace.) YetThoreau's key term ~ E c o n o m y ~ ,the title of the open·

ing, longest chapter of Walden precisely projects anunfolding register of terms in which compromise atits best-keeping accounts in a fallen world of one'sinterests and means and losses and wastes and returnsand borrowings and dreams and terms (accounts ofall of one's terms -can best be articulated system·atically and lived. Its moral could even be taken to bethat of realism.

J predicted that J would want to return to the ideaof compromise. Here more fully is Cora Diamond's

response (in her Coetzee essay) when she takes up,in connection with my discussion in Part Four of I u:

Ckiim of eason of what J call our exposure to the other,Costello's reply to someone's suggestion that her vege·tarianism comes out of moral conviction. Costello hesi·tantly deflects the suggestion, saying instead, It comesout ofa desire to save my soul. Diamond glosses thisresponse as follows: [We are notl given the presence orabsence of moral community with animals. But weare exposed-that is, we are thrown into finding some·

8 I C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N

thing we can live with, and it may at best e a kind ofbitter.tasting compromise. There is here only what wemake of our exposure.

Can we specify more closely the cause and strengthof the bitter taste of compromise, in a region n whkhtaste may e thought to be everything? Taste----or somediscrimination beyond what we readily think of astaste-seems at play in Costello's cautioning, or rebuk·

ing, her questioner (who had assured her that he hasa great respect for vegetarianism as a way of life, thusin effect discounting her declaration of the threatenedstate of her soul beyond the matter of moral convic-tion) by saying: I'm wearing leather shoes and carl)'·ing a leather purse. I wouldn't have overmuch respectif I were you. n That is, there is still disproportion be·tween what I know and how 1 feel and ways I behave,ifless than there might be. Costello's questioner he isidentified as the president of the college honoring her)

~ m u n n u r s :~ C o n s i s t e n c yis the hobgoblin of smallminds. Surely one can draw a distinction between eat·ing meat and wearing leather.n 'Degrees of obscen·ity', she r e p l i e s ~Replies to him. I merely take noticeof this placement of Emerson's famous, and famouslymocked, crack about the hobgoblin of consistency,slightly misquoted in the mouth of a decorous collegepresident and used casuistically to take the sting from adeclaration of one's soul threatened. Here is a welcomeoccasion 10 show Emerson's uncompromising words




compromised: yesterday's radical words picked up bytoday's stuffed shirt.) But then what are we to make of

Costello's use of degrees ? She is implying her stateas participating in obscenity, but the fact is that wear-ing leather, or the vision of preparation ofil for humancomfort and vanity, does not seem to cause her bodydangerously to signal itself of its woundedncss. Is itthen in her case not the necessity of compromise that

causes bitterness, but rather the discovery that she is,that her body is, capable of compromise? (This maysuggest not a fastidiousness but a vanity of spirit.) Buthow does this reach to the sense of having to conceal.without concealing, a wounded body?

Is it a function of some perception of dispropor-tion between saving one's soul and finding alternativesto wearing leather? This is in fact no easy matter todetennine, especially if it begins to lead to question-ing more globally the conditions under which our

comforts generally are sustained and we undertake toexamine work houses as closely as slaughter houses.As Emerson phrased the matter: however graceful thedistance kept, there is conspiracy, expensive r a c e s ~1cannot doubt that Emerson is here (not for the onlytime) invoking Rousseau's perception of our stake inthe social contract as that of conspirators, even recog-nizing that the perpetual failure o f justice invites thethreat of madness, of taking my participation in thedifficult reality of my society's injustice or indifference


or brutality as it were personally, a sense that seemsto measure Elizabeth Costello's sense of isolation inher woundedness. The sense Iulppens happens evenbeyond sensibilities such as Hamlet's or Antigone's orPhedre's or Melisande's, unrelieved bearers of inordi-nate knowledge, of human exposure.

The direction out of Costello's condition as it wereagainst Kafka's report of a passage, or say bridge, to ahigher species), barring withdrawal from the humanrace that is, deciding to stay al ive is to sink withinthe race, or disguise herse lf as a voting member of it,at one with Hamlet in the perception that Man de-lights not me; no, nor woman n e i t h e r ~Not preparedto resign from humanity, nor to display rage againstothers for failing to do so, which would uselessly in-crease the human being's suffering from itself ( hor-ror of itself', Montaigne says, commending a moreamiable wisdom), she ins ists upon her adorning andcomforting herself with things of leather. I do nolpropose a competition between our degree of com-promise with the subjection of animals to human de-mand and that of our compromise with the degree of

injustice in our society. I remain too impressed withFreud's vision of the human animal's comp romisewith existence the defense or the deflection of ourego in our knowledge of ourselves from what there isto know about ourselves to suppose that a humanlife can get itself without residue into the clear. It is




true that I have sometimes felt vegetarianism to beway of declaring a questionable distance from the human animal, but that can hardly be the full reason fo rmy not taking that path when it has beckoned_

I am in any case in accord with Cora Diamond'scaution about what should count as a r e a s o n ~for or

against eating meat. And I think I may have in the

course of working through the present material tothis point, learned something about the wish to declare distance from the identifica ti on with one's fel-low human animals. I have in the past found that inmoral confrontation I can never say in my defense(here disagreeing with a moment in the work of JohnRawls), [ am above r e p r o a c h ~ ,or found rather thatto say so is to suggest that the other is morally lesscompetent than [ am. Now I find that, in response toreminders of the company we may keep with non-human animals, I cannot so much as say, I am ot abover e p r o a c h ~ .If the former defense falsifies my positionby claiming an insupportable difference from others,the latter etiolates my position by claiming nothingin particular (declaring a generalized guilt in a guiltyworld), absolving myself from the task of responding to a reason for abstinence either by denying thatI share the vision from which the reason derives itsforce (I do not see or treat all animals as companions),with or without urging a different vision (eating animals affirms my evolutionary stage as a carnivorous,


or rather omnivorous, animal), or by marking a difference in my taste that shields it from the vision (I donot eat species that I perceive as companions)_ What1 would like to say is simply, I am human -but towhom can this plea be directed?

Some concluding questions, as of notes to myself.Speaking of saving one's soul. how does one understand the characteristic of religions to impose dietaryrestrictions? Here are vast regions in which universalcommands, unlike moral considerations, serve effectively and consistently to define a separate community, and do not depend upon changing one's individualsensibility with respect to other of God's creatures. It

puzzled me, in some way offended me, when, duringmy preparation for my Bar Mitzvah. the rabbi cautioned a small group of us, in discussing the prohibition against eat ing pork, that we were not to claim thateating pork was in itself a bad practice. merely thatit was not our practice, and followed this announcement with a little shudder of disgust and an enigmaticsmile, which got a laugh from the small group_ Boththe smile and the laugh had a bad effect on me. Isabsolute obedience to a mark of difference, merely

s difference. a serious business or is it not: Embarrassed by, and not yet ready to repair, my ignorance of

the general state of philosophical argument concerning vegetarianism, for example concerning whetherreligious dietary restrictions a re expected to come into




consideration, I took an occasion to ask a young friendstudying theology whether the matter is current there.Without answering that, she pointed me back to theastonishing opening book of Daniel. in which Daniel,who ~ p u r p o s ein his heart that he would not defilehimself with the portion of the king's meat , contrivesto refuse Nebuchadnezzar's lavish hospitality, or saydictation, and instead to have substituted for himselfand his little group of young captives a meatless regime, and after ten days ~ t h e i rcountenances appearedfairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which dideat the portion of the king's meat. However, this storyof Cod's favor, or this part of it, feeds my suspicion of

vegetarianism as asserting a moral superiority to therest of humanity, and now based not on an entire wayof life but on the sheer fact of abstlnence from meat.I assume it is internal to the motivation for construct

ing a moral theory of animal rights to neutralize thisdanger.) But surely it is justified to decla re a difference from such as Nebuchadnezzar? No doubt, but inOUT wor ld this may require assigning to others the roleof Nebuchadnezzar.

Is the threat of inconsistency in relation to other

animals a cause of comparable anxiety, or ~ i t t e r ·

ness , with our inconsistency in our moral relationswith other humans - thinking, as examples, of thelong and terrible list of treacheries for which one asksforgiveness, or forbearance, every year on the Day


of Atonement?: asking pardon for sins, for wrongdoings, specifying transgressions committed underduress or by choice, consciously or unconsciously,openly or secretly, in our thoughts or with our wordsor by the abuse of power, or by hardening our heartsor by speaking slander or by dishonesty in our work,and so on. Take, as I like to, Emerson's remark aboutthe foolish consistency of minds (little or large) asmeant to have us consider what we are made of thatwe may be, and need not be , foolish (an affliction non·humans are free from). What is human flesh that itsappetites, even needs , express, and th reate n, the human soul? f there is a threat of madness (persistentand silent outrage or despair are perhaps enough) inreaction to horrors that others seem indifferent to, isthere not an equal threat in finding that one is oneselfinconsistent in responding to these horrors? What isa proper response to learning, and maintaining theknowledge, of the existence of concentration camps,or of mass stalVation, or of he hydrogen bomb? I confess my persistent feeling that a sense of shame at be-ing human at being stigmatized for having a human

body) is more maddeningly directed to the humantreatment of human animals than to its treatment of

its non-human neighbors. I think I do not overlookthe point that in relation to non-humans we can takemeaningful personal measures whereas in the human case, if we are conscious of it, we readily sense

C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N 25



helplessness. What then? Shall we unblushingly pub-lish our guilt in remaining sane in a mad world? Iassume philosophy is meant to help us here, say helpus to be philosophicaL ut it is up to us to ask, to gofirst, to wonder.

126 C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N C

THREE

COMMENT ON STANLEY CAVELL'S

COMPANIONABLE THINKING

JOHN MCDOWELL

Early in Companionable Thinking, Cavell asks him-sel f whether Cora Diamond's purpose in consideringJ.M. Coetzee's character Elizabeth Costello might behelpfully framed in terms of Wittgenstein's discus-sion of seeing aspects. What makes the suggestionplausible, he says, is that lhe extreme variation in hu-man responses to this fact of civilized existence is not afunction of any difference in our access to information;no one knows, or can literally see, essentially anythinghere that the others fail to know. Later he answers thequestion in the negative; he concludes that the ideaof seeing something s someth ing is not helpful herebecause if we frame Diamond's thinking in terms of

aspect seeing, we do not give proper weight to the fact

7



that for her other animals simply re our fellows, notthings we can see as our fellows i f we can achieve an

aspect switch, Diamond does not say so m ething analogous to ~ tcan also be seen as a duc k. But Cavell doesnot revoke the thought he expressed at the beginning,that all relevant knowledge is universally shared .

If Diamond's topic were how we should respond tothe treatment of nonhuman animals in the productionof food, Cavell's apparently offhand remark that no oneknows anything others fail to know would surely bewrong in an obvious way. [ think t is is actually irrelevantto Diamond's point. (In a less obvious interpretation, theremark might still seem questionable about Diamond,more relevantly but less straightforwardly . I shall cometo that.) But by letting it seem that his remark might beopen to objection in the straightforward way J have inmind now, Cavell begins to obscure Diamond's purposein invoking Coetzee's character . There is a twist to this,because the paper Cavell is responding to is a gracefulapproach to a central strand in Cavell's own thinking.Cavell's response does notdo justice to the wonderful wayDiamond has found to cast light on Cavellian themes.

1fil were right to think Diamond is raising an issuethat turns on how nonhuman animals are treated inthe food industry, knowledge about that wouJd surelybe relevant. And it seems obvious that, contrary to whatCavell seems to say, such knowledge is unevenly distributed. Many people know nothing, or next to noth-

28 O M M ~ N TON C O M P A N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N C

ing, about how food (in general, not just meat) is produced. And even if we restrict attention to those whoare open to concern about whether all is well in meatproduction, so that they try not to be ignorant aboutit, there is surely always room to learn more detail. It

seems obvious that some know more than others. Butas I said, I think this is irrelevant to Diamond's point.

Let me give a brief and necessarily oversimplified

sketch of Diamond's attitude toward eating meat. First,consider eating human beings. Imagine a world inwhich dead human beings are rendered into unrecognizable foodstuffs and fed to the living with a lieabout the source, as in Edward C. Robinson's last film,

oyltnt Green If someone thought there was a topicfor debate here, about whether this might be all rightI mean independently of the obvious problem about

the lie), that would merely show that Diamond's useof the phrase human b e i n g ~does not express every-

thing many of us mean by it. (Wha t we mean by it now,that is; nothing ensures that we keep our concepts.)In a s imilar way, for Diamond it is not a matter fordebate whether it might be all right to eat our fellowcreatures. (Which ones? How should they be treatedbefore being killed? And so on.) Those who make meateating into a philosophical topic of the usual kind jus treveal that they do not mean what Diamond means by~ f e l l o wcreature. And it would e missing her point ifone relocated the demand for argument as a request

C O M M f N T O N C O M P A N I O N A B l l T H I N K I N C 29



for a justification-at any rate a justification of he sortphilosophers typically want fo r the claim that nonhuman animals are OUT fellow creatu res in a sense thathas that power to exclude debate.

Cavell s remark that no one knows anything concerning meat eating that others do not know mightnow seem questionable in a deeper way. It is tempting to say that Diamond thinks she knows somethingmany others do not know: that nonhuman animals areour fellow creatures in he r sense. But perhaps Cavell sremark is not so offhand, after all, and perhaps it iscloser to correct at this deeper level. It is not that Diamond thinks she has a piece of inform tion others lack.That would make Diamond s thinking merely a specialcase of the kind of philosophical approach she rejects.How could one reject a challenge to just ify the claimthat the supposed information is indeed that? And howcould one avoid casting the supposed information as

the basis for an argument that meat eating is wrong?For Diamond, as I said, it is not a topic for philosoph

ical argument, at least of the usual sort, whether meateating might be all right. It should not seem to changethe situation if we imagine anima l husbandry being asit is depicted in a certain genre of children s stories, inwhich the relations between farmers and their animalsare like the relations between people and domesticpets. Such stories necessarily leave unmentioned howthe animals lives end, and if one views animals as Dia-

130 C O M M E N T ON C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G

mond does, one would have to see sending them to beturned into food however friendly one s previous relations with them were, as a betrayal. Factory fanning isnot like farming in the chi ldren s stories, and this amplifies the evil of meat eating. But it is not the essentialthing, whereas if one does not share Diamond s visionof nonhuman anima ls the cruelty of factory farmingeasily becomes the essential thing. II enters into arguments of an ordinarily philosophical kind, addressingthe question whi h meat one should not eat and leavingit possibly all right to eat meat produced from animalsthat are treated well as in the children s stories.

For a sort of parallel, consider this. (The sense inwhich it is a parallel needs care, and it is noteworthythat Coetzee s Costello does not give such questionsthe care they need.) Suppose someone said the projectof eliminating Europe s Jews would have been a lesserevil if its victims had been treated wit the utmost consideration and kindness in all respects apart from being deprived of life, which would of course have beendone, in this fantasy, as humanely as possible. Sucha judgment could be seriously advanced only in thesomewhat crazy environment of academic philosophy.It distorts the way how things actually were matters.How things actually were amplifies the horror, somewhat as the cruelty of factory fanning amplifies theevil of meat eating, as Diamond sees things. But if wesuppose ethical argument might warrant judgments to

C O M M E N T O N C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H ( N K I N G 3



the effect that it would have been better if the FinalSolution had been put into practice in such and such adifferent way, we bring that horror into the domain of

debate, where it does not belong,For another case of what I mean by talking of ampUfi

cation,let me mention another of Diamond's examples of

the difficulty of eality. In Ted Hughes's poem Six Younge n ~the poet-speaker contemplates, in the 1950S.a pho

tograph taken in 1914, in which six young men are viv-

idly present to the viewer. They were all dead soon afterthe photograph was taken. The poem is about a kind of

impossibility the poet finds in trying to combine that fact,in a single mental embrace, with the vibrant alivenesswith which they are present in the photograph. Diamonddoes not remark on this, but the sense of dislocation thepoet expresses, from his ordinary means of taking in

reality, surely comes more easily because of the specificfacts about the photograph. His frame of mind is colored

by the thought that the deaths of th s young men werepointless in a way that goes beyond the pointlessness of

just any death. But this is another kind of amplifier. It

would have been a harder poem to write, but the sense of

dislocation could still have been voiced if he young men

had died peacefully after long and fulfilling lives.I have brought in the Hughes poem partly because

I want to stress that Coeaee s Costello is only one of

Diamond's examples. Another is a kind of experienceof beauty, in which one seems to confront something

32 C O M M E N T O N M C O M P A N I O N A B U T H I N K I N G

beyond the reach of one's ordinary equipment for tak-ing in what one finds in the world. And there are othe rs, 100. Cavell notes, of course, that Diamond's topicis something with multiple instances, not just the dif·ficulty Costello finds in the reality she takes to be con·stituted by human treatment of nonhuman animals.But he talks as if Diamond's purpose in discussingCoetzee's work-which certainly occupies much of herattention in the paper he considers - were somethingon the lines of inducing meat eaters to reflect on theirpractice, or on the spirit in which they engage in it.I think that obscures the point of Diamond's paper.Costello figures, for Diamond, only as exemplifYing,in a richly elaborated way, something that is also ex-

emplified in Hughes's poem, and the specifics of whatobsesses Costello are in a way irrelevant.

As J said at the beginning, it is Cavell's own thinkingthat is getting short-change< here. et me try to explain.

Hughes's poem ends like this:

To regard this photograph might well dement,Such contradictory permanent horrors hereSmile from the single exposure and shoulder outOne's own body from its instant and heat.

Here we have in genn the structure Diamond finds inCostello's response to human treatment of nonhumananimals.

C O M M E N T O N C O M P A N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G 33



The poet acknowledges that contemplating the reality his poem is about might well dement. The putativereality Costello contemplates does something close todementing her. Her response is over the top, notablyin the unqualified way she equates our treatment of

nonhuman animals with the Holocaust.The kind of difficulty both cases exemplifY arises

when something we encounter defeats our ordinarycapacity to get our minds around reality, that is, ourcapacity to capture reality in language. That dislodgesus from comfortably inhabiting OUf nature as speakinganimals, animals who can make sense of things in theway the capacity to speak enables us. The special kindof animal life we lead comes into question. [t is as if abeaver found dam building beyond its powers. In thepoem the contradictory horrors shoulder out / one'sown body from its instant and beat. For Costello, it -

comes a problem to live her particular case of the livesof animals: a life in which words are not just a distinguishing mark, as they are for human animals in general, but the central element Her being as the animalshe is, which is her bodily being, becomes a wound.

What Diamond aims to display by invoking Costellodoes not depend on whether what Costello respondsto i s the reality she take s it to be. Diamond , too , takesit to be a reality (though she manages not to be un·hinged by it), but that is not the point. What Diamondreads Coetzee's depiction of Costello as conveying is

34 C O M M E N T O N C O M P A N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G

something that, explicitly bypassing that question, Ican put like this: ifit is indeed a reality that most of uscasually make a practice of eating our fellow creatures,with ~ o wcreatures in that fonnulation of the pu·tative reality bearing the sense it bea rs for Diamondand, presumably, Costello, then it is a reality such thatto contemplate t head-on can shoulder out one's ownbody from its instant and heat, can dislodge one fromcomfortably living one's life as a speaking animal. Onecan appreciate that even if one does not suppose it is areality; that is even if one does not share that vision of

nonhuman animals as fellow creatures.Diamond 's interest in Elizabeth Costello is as much

in the commentators on Coetzee's Tanner Lectures asin the fiction itself. ( Her topic is the Tanner Lectures,not the novel.) To varying extents, the commentatorstreat the fiction as a frame for presenting arguments-

from which, as storyteller, Coetzee can distance himself about the ethical standing of our treatment of

nonhuman animals. This is an instance of what Dia-mond calls-following Cavell- deflection. n Coetzee'sCostello responds , in a way that is not quite sane butis, in its way approp riate, to a putative reality that dislodges her from being at home n her life as a speakinganimal. The commentators substitute an issue that hasomy the different difficulty of academic philosophy.How convincing is such and such an argument? Doessuch and such a counterargument work? And so on.

C O M M E N T O N C O M P A N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G 35



Costello's vision of our dealings with other animalsunhinges her. For Diamond, this is an analogue to acertain unhinged, though again in its way appropriate.response to another perception or putative perception:here too, the point does not tum on its being, at leastin any straightforward way, correct). The content of

this other putative perception is that one is in a certainsense alone, profoundly unknowable by others. Whenone tries to get one's mind around this putative per·ception, one's ordinary linguistic repertoire fails one.That is what leads people to come out with forms of

words like this: ~ u r e l ysomeone else cannot know it ist is that [ am feeling. Such wordings are a desperateattempt to force language to express a perception thatis unhinging one in the way Diamond is interested in,threatening to dislodge one from one's life as a speaking animal.

In academic philosophy, this instance of the sensethat one is losing one's ability to live the life that is natural for one gets deflected into an issue that has only thedifficulty of ordinary philosophy: Do others have sufficient evidence for their judgments about one's innerlife, o r, symmetrically, does one have sufficient evidencefor one's judgments about the inner lives of others?

Wittgenstein gives an extensive treatment of thewish expressed by saying Someone else cannot knowit is t is that I am feeling, the wish to credit oneselfwith a language intelligible only to oneself. In stan-

136 C O M M E N T O C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G

dard readings, he is seen as addressing those academicquestions about the strength of our grounds for judgments about one another. He is seen as uncovering, inthe sense that skepticism is inescapable here, a merelyintellectual error. Such readings are cases of deflection ,like the commentators' responses to Coetzee's TannerLectures. They leave out what is really the whole point:that the impulse Wittgenstein treats originates in acase of being understandably unhinged by the sensethat one's words are failing one. that one is losingthe capacity to instantiate one's allotted life form as aspeaking animal.

Academic treatments of skepticism about empiricalknowledge in general can be seen in a similar light.They are a deflection from a response that is unhinged,though again in its way appropriate, to the perception,or putative perception, that in such supposed knowledge we are pervasively at the mercy of the world a

perception, say, of our finitude and dependence as empirical knowers.

That is a drastically abbreviated sketch of how Cavellexplains the significance of philosophical skepticism.The role of Coetzee's Costello in Diamond's paper isnot to raise the question whether Costello's unhingingperception is a perception of bow things indeed a r e -

that is, whether meat eating is what she thinks she seesit to be, which would certainly have implications aboutwhether we meat eaters should continue with the

C O M M E N T O N C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G 137



practice. The role of Coetzee s Costello for Diamondis rather to provide an analogue for the unhinging per-ceptions of separation and finitude that, according toCavell himself, constitute the real point of philosophi·cal skeptic ism. And just as importantly the role of

Coetzee s commentators for Diamond is to provide ananalogue for how philosophy n the academic mode, inCavell s ow n reading, avoids what is really at issue n

its engagements with skepticism.

138 C O M M E N T ON C O M PA N I O N A B L E T H I N K I N G

CONCLUSION

DEFLECTIONS

IAN HACKING

Cora Diamond s essay is deeply perturbing. It givescause to think, to sto p; that is, it gives cause not tospeak while it is being taken in.

Elizabeth Costello began her first talk at AppletonCollege by saying,

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human be-ings that will be cool rather than heated, philosoph-ical rather than polemical Such a language isavailable to me, I know. It s the language of Aristo tleand Porphyry

(Coetzee, The ives of Animals,22

Her list of proper names ends with Tom Regan.

39



simple minds. This is a philosophical dialogue composed by a great novelist. Diamond draws attention toits further implications about philosophical writing, indelail. in her footnotes 5 and 12 .

Coelzee's two lectures form a dialogue in anothersense, a dialogue of two parties. poetry and philosophy.That quarrel was launched in dialogue form by Platohimself. The first lecture is called The Philosophersand the A n i m a l s ~the second, ~ T h ePoets and the Ani

mals. H Two primary poems in the second part are TedHughes's vivid portraits of the Jaguar (Coetzee, TheLives o Anima/s 50---)1). There it is before you, sheeranimal life, immensely powerfu.. , caged and mocked bymere people. This passage reinforc es Costello's retort

to Thomas Nagel in the first lecture: she knows what itis like to be a bat. First of all. it is to be full of life, ballife, the joy of being a bat. In her much better words,

To be a living bat is to be full of being. Bat-being inthe first case, human being in the second, maybe;but those are secondary considerations. To be fullof being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the

experience of full being is joy (33)

Here I need to say a word about ary Wolfe's introduction. Costello says, ~ F o rinstants at a time, I knowwhat it is like to be a corpse H p). Wolfe uses this line(without the for instants ) to comm ence a meditation on

142 C O N C L U S I O N : DEFLECTIONS

Death and the other. Indeed, he is taking up Diamond'sown use of the sentence to remind us of human vulnerability. Yet oetzee used it to introduce life and Joy, Hereis the argument if we can, for a moment of complicatedreflection, know what it is like to be a corpse, then we canthe more easily know what it is like to be a bat. Again,Costello's own words: Now I ask: i we are capable of

thinking our own death, why on earth should we not becapable of thinking our way into the life of a b a t ~(33).

This is a nice instance of a philosophical argument beingtried out in the course of a dialogue. Diamond shows usthat oetzee has written much more than a philosophicaldialogue, but let us not thereby forget that he does use allof the dialogical tricks of the trade inaugurated by Plato,

Diamond cited poets in her essay, which was first

used for a conference on literary language and only secondly for a conference in honor of CaveU, She also byimplication entered the lists against plato in the quarrelbetween philosophy and poetry. That is a nice uptake of

the two distinct lectures delivered by Coetzee himself.I would like to deflect the dismal tone of death that

may emanate from some earlier parts of this book.Death is not interesting. Ufe is. Diamond fills us with

foreboding. by starting with Hughes's poem. Coetzeeand Costello used two of his other poems to fill uswith pride of life, the joy of being, even when caged,Sure, we are caged, not by bars but by the nothingnesson both sides of our time. But we don't have to pace

C O N C L U S I O N : DEFLECTIONS 143



around, conscious only of death caging life. Costellotakes Hughes's poems to be a riff on Rilke's The Panther.» Jn the matter of death we need not accept what~ t h ebars compel on the panther, a concentric lope thatleaves the will stupefied , r c o t i z e d ~(50).

REALITY THE DIFFICULTY OF

Diamond used poets and novelists to make us experience some realities. Ted Hughes's poem makes us awareat one moment of six lads being so filled with l i fe and

dead so soon after the snapshot. Czeslaw Milosz presents us with the inexplicableness o f beauty, which is

just there. Ruth KlUger brings us face to face with theincomprehensible goodness of another person.

And then there is Coetzee, who portrays ElizabethCostello haunted by animal life distorted by breedingand killing. She is distraught by the reality of which

she is so intensely aware. She is shattered by the meatindustry, our callow inability to recognize and respectanimal lives as lived , O U f creation of imbecile experiments on them , and our arrogant philosophies aboutthem. She hates our incessant pointing at animalscombined with our complete indifference to all but thepets . Our means ~ w adults , not children.

In each case, reality brings the poet or novelist upshort, astonished, thunderstruck , whether by horror orby a sense o f the sublime , and sensitive readers catch

44 C O N C L U S i O N : DEFLECTIONS

that by reading these works of art. It is the sheer th r-

n ss of the realities that Diamond experiences. Yet

both Stanley Cavell and John McDowell evince, in verydifferent ways, a caution about that. Cavell does so bywondering if we need to import some idea of seeing anaspect, of seeing t is as the reality. McDowell does soby invoking putative reality.

SEEING AS

Cavell suggests that we start thinking about Diamond'sessay in terms of s e e i n gan aspect, in part becausewhat is needed, to come to share Costello's point of viewabout animals, is not more information but a differentway of seeing things. We do after all, know it all already,he suggests. McDowell rightly protests that a great dealof information about killing animals for human food isnot generally known, and much of it might align onewith Costello. In any event, the relations among see-ing, seeing aspects, and new information are subtle. Ishall give three examples to illustrate Cavell's quotationfrom Wittgenstein, how ~ h u g e l ymany interrelated phenomena and possible concepts are brought into play.Too many readers focus on duck-rabbits, which are precisely not the point. Cavell mentions 1bomas Kuhn asone such reader , the Kuhn of gestalt switches. We mightcall that the born-again version of seeing an aspect.Pascalian conversion (if J may so call it, only to make a

C O N C L U S i O N : DEFLECTIONS 145



contrast) is little by little, case by case, lived experience

by lived experience.

Here is a vignette from Coetzee's Boyhood, pub

lished around the time that he was giving h is Tanner

Lectures of 1997 and 1998. He classifies the book asnonfiction. This is its second paragraph:

At the bottom of the yard they put up a poultry

run and install three hens, which are supposed tolay eggs for them. But the hens do not flourish.

Rainwater, unab le to seep away in the clay stands in

pools in the yard. The poultry-run turns into an evilsmelling morass. The hens develop gross swellings

on thei r legs, like chicken elephant skin. Sickly and

cross, they cease to lay. His mother consults he r sister in Stellenbosch, who says they will return to lay

ing only afte r their horny shells under their tongues

have been cut out. So one after anothe r his mother

takes the hens between her knees, presses on theirjowls till they open their beaks. and with the point

of a paring· knife picks at their tongues. The hens

shriek and struggle, their eyes bulging. He shudders

and turns away. He thinks of his mother slappingslewing-steak down on the kitchen counter and cut

ting il into cubes; he thinks of her bloody fingers.]

No factory farming here. just three hens in a drab hOlls

ing estate in the parched uplands of Cape Province.

146 CONCLUS I O N : D H l ~ T I O N S

The boy shudders and turns away. He sees what he

sees, right there, but he also sus what he did not see be-

fore: the steak. bloody; his mother s fingers. bloody; the

flesh and blood of something that was once alive. likethe three chickens in the yard. He does not see it asblood. He sees it for what it is, blood. The experience

stuck with Coetzee all his life. There is no new information, but his eyes are opened.

Next take a simple fact about the meat industry that

is not widely known. Commercially farmed turkeys in

America are no longer biologically viable on their own.

The 10m has been bred to be so heavy that, aside from the

fact that he can no longer walk but only totters, he cannotfertilize a female, for if he mounts he r he will crush her

to death. This may seem so gross, so demeaning of ani

mal life, thai, at the least, one refuses to participate in theturkey industry, declining turkey at festive occasions.

This looks like a dear example of Mc Dowell's point.This is new information, not see ing an aspect of the

American Thanksgiving festival. But not so quick. Does

one have to experience this reality as gross, as demeaning, as insult not only to the birds but also to us who

have created these sorry fowl? What i one sees only an

efficient method of feeding low-fat protein t rich hu.

man beings hooked on meat? From the point of view

of evolutionary biology. the species turkey M. galiclpavo

now flourishes in successful symbiosis with the spe

cies man the latter providing th e artificial inseminat ion

CONCLUSION: D e f l E C T I O N S 147



needed for part of the reproductive cycle. If that is howyou see things, you may want to participate in the ritualsof basting , carving , and eating that contribute to this evolutionary success story, which begins with Mesoamerican civilizations domesticating the bird.

Does it all depend on how you see things? Just pos·sibly you can swilch back and forth between the turkeyas appaUing and the turkey as evolutionary success storyand so make thi s look like the classic seeing·as duck-rabbit. But that is not the way it goes. Cavell notes that bothCostello and Diamond are horrified not only by what isdone to animals but also by the widespread indifferenceof the humanity that eats them. He invites us to thinkof two different visions of the world. Quite so, but it alsocomes down to innumerable minutiae, whose effectmay differ from attentive person 10 attentive person.

is striking that English-language philosophizingabout animals is like so much else in analytic philosophy) usually about individuals. Points are made in tennsof the suffering or death of an individual, even if they arekilled en masse, in the herd. I have just pointed to the species. Cavell speaks f ~ r e e d i n ganimals for the manufacturing offood. Breeding can mean rearing, propagating;it can also mean creating a new kind of animal. In thecase of the turkey, we have bred a new kind of bird, ourcreation, just as stock-breeders have bred the Holsteinand the Guernsey cow. Then these birds are bred in theother sense of the word) by artificial insemination.

48 C O N C L U S I O N : D E f L E C T I O N S

We now speed up the process of creating newbreeds by genetic engineering. Dncomice are micegenetically alte red so they will get cancer when youngand so can be conveniently used in testing possibleremedies. In all the debates about genetic engineeringand animal rights, few worry about the monsters thatwe have brought into existence, millions of monstrousturkeys , tens of thousands of monstrous mice. deliber·ately made to get sick, suffer . and die. No one picketsHalVard University , which gets a royalty from each andevery oncomouse until the patent runs out

Finally, take what was, for me, new informationprovided by Temple Grandin. She is not a philosopherbut a person who rescued herself from autism by greatcourage and the sense that her anomalies make herbetter able than the rest of us to understand how animals think and feel. She has changed the practices of

most American abattoirs and in so doing has made theanimals last walk down the alley of death less horrible.She helps them to go not only more gently into thenight but also to meet their end in a way that is moredignified, for an animal.

She says she has done this by sharing their sensibilities. Autists and animals , she argues, t ink and experience in pictures , not words. S I am not so sure thai anautistic sensibility was needed to do one of he importantthings she did. The fact is , however, that only an autisticperson had the good sense to do it. She got down on her

C O N C L U S I O N : OEFLECTIONS 49



hands and knees and crawled along the final walkway,noticing what was scary as she passed. Her recommen·dations have been widely accepted: terrifYing angles,shadows, bright lights, and sudden noises have beenremoved or subdued. There is money in it for the butchers, of course. Dignity be damned: a complete ly terrifiedanimal on the death trip slows down production as badlyas an epileptic attack on an old·time assembly line.

Grandin's measure of success, in making a slaugh·terhouse more h u m n e ~ is that only am in four of the

victims becomes so frightened that it needs to be drivento its end with electric cattle prods. So here is the item of

what was, for me, new infonnation: A slaughter house isudged to be humane ifno more than qu rter of he animalshave to be drivt:n forward by electric shocks She states thisin a matter·of·fact way: she is not an animal activist, onlysomeone who, in this case, actively improves the deathsof animals. Her information was not highlighted--<Juitethe 0PJXlsite-but it caught my attention. t did not addmuch to my store of grisly facts about meat packing. ButI experienced it strongly. We now need to torture only onebeast in four before it is killed. In saying this, I in no waywish to minimize her achievement: it has done more toimprove animal death than any philosopher ever will

The word ~ t o r t u r ~here is encouraged by our memories of the use of electricity in torturing men: electr<xiesto the testicles and so forth. But it seems to me that theinformation itself does the trick , i t h as any effect. As a

1 5 C O N C L U S I O N ; D E f l E C T I O N S

matter of fact , it appears to have no effect at all. Readersdo not notice the information. Grandin's book was a run.away best-seller, on the New York Times list of the overalltop ten for months. But I have never heard anyone men.tion the industry norm, that no more th n a quarter of heanimals on death row should be driven by electric prods.

To what extent should we acknowledge a moral

component, to seeing matters differently or afresh?There is something wrong, morally lacking I feel)with someone who does not shudder with the boy atCoetzee's vignette, who is not appalled at the way wehave bred turkeys out of their turkeyness, who is notdismayed by the present standard for humane treat.ment of steers during their last few minutes.

PUTATIVE REALITY

McDowell resists seeing s ~ as the correct analysis of

such phenomena. To understand Costello's ~ d i f f i c u l t

of reality, we need not see things her way. We neednot share her vis ion, her horror at the breeding, theprodUcing, the kWing, the packaging, and the eating.All we need to grasp is what Costello holds to be the reo

ality. McDowell calls that putative reality. lbat sufficesto explain her difficulty.

Costello , says McDowell , Qis not quite sane in her

reaction to this putative reality. She is un hinged by it.That well expresses the reaction of Costello's daughter-

C O N C L U S I O N : O H L E C T I O N S 151



in-law, Norma. Actually, when I read Coetzee's book, Inever thought of Costello as other than sane. Wounded,yes. But unhinged? But let us proceed in the normal way,

that is, Norma's way. treating her as a bit unhinged.McDowell avoids a temptation that reeks of relativ

ism. to say that the reality is horrific -fo r her but neednot be so Mfor us.- The reality is horrific or it is not.

Leave aside the question of which it is; what Costellotakes to be reality is horrific. That is suffident. We canunderstand why she reacts as she does to this putativereality, without quibbling about what is in fact the case.

I shall try to explain why putative may not help.The trio of putative reality, unhinged, and not

quite sane in the same parag raph creates a problem . To

be unhinged is close to being deranged (one of the sensesgiven by the OED) which is close to being mad. Someforms of madness are accompanied by a very weak gripon reality. Some mad people suffer from delusions . Thoseare part of tluir putative reality. A man. already with someminor manifestations of paranoid schizophrenia, increasingly becomes convinced that the minds (and hencethe bodies) of his teenage children are being taken overby aliens , in the manner of Invasion o he Bod) Snatch-us. {111is is far from inconsistent with his experience.as many parents will agree.) He withdraws them fromschool, has them under constant surveillance, and moveshis family to a cabin in the mountains so any aliens canbe more readily slX'tted. His wife finally has to disappear

52 C O N C L U S I O N : O E F L E C T I O N S

with the children to preserve her and their sanity. So theyhave been abducted by aliens. This man's putative reality,if it were reality. would unhinge any father. But this manis not unhinged b) his putative reality. These delusions.this putative reality. show th t he is unhinged.

Doe s Costello's putative reality show that she is un

hinged? Or i s she unhinged by her putative reality?f course it is the second. For it to be clearly the

second, it must be reasonable to suppose that the putative reality is what is the case, is the reality. But thenCostello lives in a world . a reality , where her beliefsabout what is going on are reasonable. rfCostello doeslive in such a world (it's our world), then it is not putative reality but reality itself that unh inges her.

Perhaps we should speak not of the difficulty of reality but of the difficulty of experienced reality, of reality asexperienced. This allows Elizabeth Costello her horrorat the meat industry. the reality as she experiences it.It excludes the madman in his cabin because delusionsare not reality as experienced, even if they are as painfulto the deluded man as any experience he has ever had. rhope this is more faithful to Diamond's intentions thanether p u t t i vor seeing as.-

BARBED WtRE

Coetzee /Coste llo certainly managed to upset people byputting the comparison with the Holocau st up front.

C O N C L U S I O N : D E f l E C T I O N S 53



McDowell has the most balanced description: Costellois over the top. Cary Wolfe begins his introduction tothe present book by invoking Lurie in Coeaee s Dis·gract. The book ends with an extraordinary few pagesin which Lurie puts to death a crippled dog with whom

he has pieced together his own life (and the dog's too).

Quite a number of dogs are to be killed. In case any·body should miss the point, Coetzee writes that Lurieand the vet are engaged in one of their sessions of [ 0

sung. 6 Yes, that is the German for the final solution.Anyone who thinks Coeace is simplistic in his use

of the Holocaust comparison should read these pages.If you think Costello is upsetting , you ain't seen nothingyet. On the second to last page of he book, He has learnedby now, to concentrate ll his attention on the animalthey are killing, giving it what he no longer has diffiOllty

in calling by its proper name: love Disgrace, 218).That book is no more primarily about death than

are the Tanner Lectures. They are more about dignity.A little earlier in the book Lurie cannot bear to leave theanimals he has killed alongside hospital waste, roodkilL and the filthy remains from a tannery. He is not

prepared to inflict such dishonor upon them 44). He

cannot stand seeing the dogs, stiff w ith rigor mortis,smashed by laborers a few days later so they will fit in toan incinerator. So he takes the fresh corpses and bums

them. For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead;and what do dogs know of honor and dishonor any·

1S4 CONCLUSION: D E f l E C T I O N S

way? For himself then. For his idea of the o r l ~(146).We are reminded of Costello, who says her not eatingmeat comes less out of moral conviction than from a

desire to save her own soul (The Lives o Animals 43).Yes, to save the soul a word that Costello uses fifo

teen times), but also out of a sense of respect for fel-low creatures. Lurie is convinced the dogs know theirtime has come. Despite the silence and the painless-ness of the procedure despite the airtight bags inwhich they tie the newborn corpses, the dogs in theyard smell what is going on inside. They Ratten theirears, they drop their tails. as if they too felt the disgraceof dying (Disgrace, 143).

Grandin doubtless senses the same knowledge inthe animals in yards near abattoirs. The disgrace is notonly in dying: one is horrified by the insult to anima llife when turkeys are bred too big to walk or procreate;we have created a species that cannot have any dignity

In the three essays collected in this book. and in theintroduction. death seems to be what matters in our

treatment of animals. plus our indifference to the massslaughter. Coetzee is more nuanced. Costello is just asappalled by Kohler's experiments on apes and by thesheer loss of dignity in using a tuxedo to dress up Kaf-

ka's Red Peter, the chimpanzee that matches Kohler's

Sultan. One is reminded again of the hugely many in-terrelated phenomena and o n e p t s ~that bear on the

ideology of Cost ella. and. I dare to say it, ofCoetzee.

CONCLUSION: DEFLECTIONS SS



To spin out the interrelations further, look at Barbed

Wire an astonishing book by Reviel Netz ? He tells howbarbed wire was invented to keep cattle out of, or in,bits of the prairies, by inflicting sharp wounds on thedumb beasts, Thus was the Wild West won, and alsothe U.S. steel industry launched. On to the British in-

vention of concentration camps in South Africa, on to1914 and the Great War, which was les s trench warfarethan barbed·wire warfare. (One of Hughes S youngmen ~ l a ycalling in the wire, then this one, his bestfriend, Went out to bring him in and was shot too. )On, of course, to the Holocau st and the gulags. Netzends briefly with a muted scream about animals that ismore ironic than Costello's, but just as impassioned.

9 4 AND ALL THAT

Ted Hughes' s poem Six Young Men had nothingmuch directly to do with animals or even the Halo·caust, we all thought, until Netz reminded us of thestrictly historical interrelations among the barbaricphenomena of cruelty.

I do not trust my own reactions to his poem. bis is

not a wholly personal matter, it bears on the question of

information, what we know about reality , and how weexperience it. There are several distinct points to make.

Among the difficult realities are the young men, theircoming death, a stup id war, and the poem itself. McDow·

56 C O N C L U S I O N O E F L E C T I O N S

ell points to the relevance of 1914: the deaths of these

young men were pointless in a way that goes beyond thepointlessness of just n y d e a t h ~(He, I, and doubtless thepoet, share the judgment that the Great War was point·less stupidity; many people , induding my own father, aloyal soldier in a later war, would not have agreed.)

What if the six had slamme d their car into a treeafter a drunken party? That would demand a whollyother poem; one can imagine several poems, each dis-locating in a new way. McDowell himself continues ina more complex vein, saying that a different. harderpoem to write would be about a photo of six youngmen who died after long and fulfilling lives . Would thatreally have the amplification, the sense of dislocation ,of which he speaks so well?

What about a snapshot-no a digital image takenon a cell phone--of four youngish Englishmen takenon 8 January 2005, their shoes shining, one bashful,one full of cocky pride-who were all four dead, exactlysix months later, along with fifty·two other passengerswhom they blew up on London Transport? In everycase it is the rich embeddedness of he photograph thatwill mean something and that a great poet can tum

into poems. It is not only knowledge that counts but amore general aura of meaning. The poem means mostto a rather small class of readers, those 10 whom I914

means something. The death of young men in point.less war is monstrous, but does the poem with all its

C O N C L U S I O N OEFLECTIONS 57



allusions mean much to a citizen of one of the Koreas,dose though she is to potential war?

McDowell notes that Cavell does not discuss thepoem with which Diamond so powerfully begins heressay. l1tere is a good reason for Cavell's abstinence.He is a grand master of American myths, and foreignones carry no emotional weight for him In British mythology of several generations, '9 '4 looms very large,even reaching , barely, to the present. It has nothinglike that role in American se lf-identity.

To use the words of Elizabeth Costello, ~ h i sis aperspective you might expect from an e x c o l o n i a l ~(The

ilies o Animals 57). She is Australian; I imagine thatuex-colonial might not mean former colonial butsomething as precise as ~ r o ma country that is a fanner

Euro·pean white colony and retains many marks of hat.l1te year 1914, or rather '915. is central to Australianmythology. ANZAC day. 25 April, is a national holiday,commemorating the Australian dead at Gallipoli, whichhappens to be exactlywhere and when Hughes' six youngmen died. It is important in Canadian mythology (mutatis mutandis, Vimy Ridge). There is an (absurd) movement afoot to give the last surviving Canadian soldierof the Great War a state funeral when he completes hisallotted five sco re years and ten. Twenty-one guns, theGovernor General, and lots of Mounties on horseback.Veterans of later wars sti ll sell poppies on the streets onArmistice Day r ln Flanders Fields the poppies blow

58 C O N C L U S I O N ; D E f l E C T I O N S

between the crosses row on row, penned by a Canadianmedic at the battle ofYpres, May 1915). Americans whocome up to give talks in Toronto in early November askbemusedly, Why are you wearing those cute little redRowers on your l a p e l s ? ~I have perhaps said enough tosuggest why I do not trust my reactions to the poem.McDowell is an ex-coIonial; Coetzee, too. Diamond, of

course, is not but studied in Oxbridge about the sametime I did, and I can infer her exposure to the myths.

I found it salutary to stumble upon some of TedHughes 's words about the poem. Speaking in NewZealand in 1976 he said:

This is a meditation of a kind-on a photograph of

six youths. And it's taken in a valley just below where1 lived in Yorkshire and just before the outbreak of

the First World War. l1tese six youths were ll friendsof my father's. And the war came, and this photo

graph is just one among family p h o t o g r a p h s ~ sI'vebeen hearing stories about these characters on thisphotograph for as long as I've been picking up thephotograph and looking at it All these Yo rkshire.men joined the lancashire Fusiliers-they were allin the same company. They all trained together. Theyall went out together. They all fought together and sothey tended to get killed together. So this w ~sort of

the fairy-tale-my ear ly stories-just a poem aboutthese early anecdotes that I heard about these men.'




Later in the evening he read a three-part poem. Thefirst [part] 1 called, The Dream Time', and the last one

is Remembrance Day', which is the November daywhen they sell poppies for the Armistice.· He continued: The poem is called 'Out' , and the idea is to get rid

of the entire body of preoccupation. ·

DEFLECTION

Hughes deflected his early obsession with his father'swar. Coetzee did not deflect his boyhood horror of the

hen-yard blood. I am using Diamond's word deflecthere in a generous way. She took it from Cavell, who

used it in a stunning metaphor about solipsism . Dia

mond said that initially, I simply want the notion of

deflection, for describing what happens when we are

moved from the appreciation, or attempt at apprecia

tion, of a difficulty of reality to a philosophical or moralproblem apparently in the vicinity. Deflection in this

sense substitUles a painless intellectual surrogate for

real disturbance. Jusl as I deRect a blow by protectingmyself with my forearm, or deRect justified anger by

sincere humility , so (in Cavell's story) 1 deflect the re

ality of loneliness, of aloneness, or of unshared and

unshareable mental or spiritual pain , by transposing it

into the philosophical conundrum of skepticism aboutother minds, which has become an unemotional aca

demic pursuit. We might call such deRection escapist.

16 C O N C L U S I O N : D E f L E C T I O N S

Don't knock deflection. Deflecting is one ofthe things

that we do quite well. Deflecting blows and deflecting

anger is a good thing. Man is the Deflecting Animal. Indaily WClOtern life, women tend to be better at nonescap

ist deflection than men, who are dogged and dogmatic.In folklore , that is, in jusl-so stories about prehistory. it

was early women who made the key de1lections. Theydeflected fire from feared to friend. They deRected theirfamilies from foraging into planting, thereby setting

our species on the road to planelary domination.

Deflection can be perfectly healthy, although we may

prefer other words: Hughes worked out an obsession

by writing certain poems, and then could cast it out.On the other hand it is not for Coetzee to deflect his

memory of he chickens or. a little later, of sheep . The boy

goes to relatives who havea sheep fann because wool getsa good price in those days. He watches the weekly killing

of a sheep for dinner, from the moment the workman

picks out the one to die, ~ t the use of a hannJess-lookinglittle pocket knife w to extract the great blue stomach fullof grass, the intestines (from the bowel he squeezes outthe last few droppings that the sheep did not have lime

to drop), the heart, the liver, the kidneys - all the thingsthat a sheep has inside him and that he has inside himt ~ Boyhood. 9 ~ 9 .He also watches the castration of

the lambs. Inside , the animal is just like me; outside, too,

in the castration scene. When he has become a novelist,

Coetzee does not deflect his boyhood shock by talking

C O N C L U S I O N : O U L [ C T I O N S 6



about the interests of the lambs being infringed, or therights of the sheep being denied. ]nste<ld, he reinforceshis feeling of the sheep as fellow creatures, so like himself, inside and out. He has no desire to cast this feelingout: later in life he delivers his Tanner Lectures.

RGUMENT S RHETORIC AND lOGIC

S FORENSICS

It is seldom obvious at first sight whether deflection is

unhelpful or helpful, escapist or healthy escape. Returnfor a moment to CaveU and skepticism. Suppose someone really did experience solipsism, rather than just believing that what it means is right. Suppose f urther thatthis cast him into the depths of despond . Deflecting hisproblem by turning it into philosophical debate might

be the best possible way out of his difficulty--escapism,but an escape to better health. A deeper deflection, per

haps Wittgenstein s at various times in his life, mightbe better, and certainly would be better philosophy, but

we cannot all be the best of philosophers.Diamond believes that philosophizing about animals

deflects reality in a way that she thinks is pernicious . It

is well to put beside that the fact that Peter Singer is themost influential living philosopher. I do not mean thathe is the most important or that he has a great influenceon phi losophers. I mean that he has influenced more

people than any other philosopher alive . Ever since r973

62 C O N C L U S I O N : O E F L E C T t O N S

he has been the intellectual leader of movements foranimal liberation and rights. 9 His first book on animalliberation sold half a million copies. Costello and Diamond think that his arguments miss the main points:perhaps that explains , at a deep level, why I , at a surfacelevel , do not think they are logically compelling.

Singer starts with the claim that animals have interests because they are sentient. capable of pain and pleasure. When [ reflect on my own actions and responses,I see that I occasionally do something good for someother people who are far from my circle of friends,family, or even countrymen, and perhaps beyond thecall of any common duty. But 1 do not do so becausethey have interests or because I respect their interestsor because they are sen tient -nor because they haverights. I often do not understand why I do it. I is partlywhat [ have been trained to do, and childhood trainingdoes not readily wear otT It is also something else, acertain kind of sharing, of sympathy between myselfand anothe r, what Hume claimed was the basis of

moral action. So say I; but it is Singer s invocation of

rights that persuades people.The place of Singer s reasons may be more fo-

rensic than moral. We need codes and precedents toregulate civil society. Singer and his fellows are forging the laws of omorrow. Laws have moral stature notonly because they create legal duties and obligationsbut also because they are bendunarks from which

C O N C L U S I O N : O E F l E C T I O N S 63

•



to move on. Grandin s norm for abattoirs has the

same virtue.

Singer does present arguments, but they should befiled under the heading of rhetoric, not logic. Somemisreading of Aristotle has conned American collegesinto teaching symbolic logic to all and humane rhetoric to none. Rhetoric matters. I doubt that Diamond,Cavell, or McDowell undervalues the influence of

Singer, even though theirs is a different way in whichto practice the philosophical arts. I am not disagreeingwith them in what I have said, nor do I disagree withDiamond that Singer deflects from reality. I am repeating myselr: Don't knock deflection.

ASTONISHMENT AND WE

Czeslaw Milosz demands that we be astonished at thevery existence of beauty-awed by it. ~ t should notexist. Ruth Kluger insists that the act of a woman inAuschwitz who so meaningfully helped her when she

was a terrified child should fill us with astonishmentand awe.

Diamond writes. n s t a n c e sof goodness or of beautycan throw us we cannot fit it into the understanding we have of what the world is like. She includesthis experience among the difficulties of reality. I shallseem an ungracious philistine by asking why it is a dif-ficulty of reality.

64 C O N C L U S I O N : O E f l E C T l O N S

I t may be that philosophers speaking the languageof principles, propositions, and arguments cannot fitawe in the face of beauty into their discourse. Perhapsthat is a difficulty of philosophy. Poets do not makesense of beauty either. They do not fit it into the understanding of what the world is like. Need that matter?We do not have to follow plato and cast our lot only

with philosophers to the exclusion of poets, and I am

sure that Diamond would not want us to.The following well·known lines express something

important.

For Beauty's nothingbut beginning of terror we're just able to bear,and why we adore it so is because i t serenely

disdains to destroy uS .1

1dislike Rilke's evident sense oflt is own self-importance.o use Diamond's paraphrasing of Milosz, J prefer the

humility of t h e mystery that may seem to be presentin the architecture of a tree, the slimness of a columncrowned with green, This mystery is part of my reality,perhaps just because it is not fillable into the world as J

understand it. Rilke's awe is fitting. The fact that we cannot talk it and can at best quote Rilke is less a difficultyof reality than part ofit.

It is true that philosophers want to express verydearly in well·understood words evt rything that is to be




experienced. Rilke had something to say about saying,

in a less well known poem publi shed in 1908. DerE i n s a m e ~Une Solitary M a n ~begins as follows:

No, what my heart will be is a tower,And I will be right on its rim

Nothing eJse ..viII be there, only painAnd what can't be said, only the world,lI

The solitary, as opposed to the dependent, man is also

mentioned in the fourth of Rilke s L e t t t ~to oungoet (16 July 903). Unsayability is there qualified with

an ~ a l m o s t nwhich, to a philosophical mind, seemswise. Speaking of complex emotions of love and sex,

Rilke says that even the most articulate people are un-

able to help, since what words point to is so very deli·cate, is almost unsayable. n

GR CE

Diamond continues by introdUcing Ruth Kluger.Goodness presses in upon us, not as with Hughes or

Costello, with pointless death or selfish indifference towanton cruelty. Certainly we deAect the intense aware.

ness of good if we take it for granted, i we recite a sort

of banality of goodness: by a s hrug , OK, some persons

are altruistic. no surprise in that. Here , as in the case

of the Hughes poem, writes Diamond, what is ca-

166 C O N C L U S I O N : OEFLECTIONS

pable of astonishing one is its incomprehensibility. Is

that the right word? Why should we be astonished Ihal

there is so much in t he world that we do not compre

hend? Can we not be s mply filled with wonde r. withthe apprehension of what Kluger calls grace?

Of course, Diamond must agree. Her point is that

we cannot comprehend it by taking it apart . We must

see whole. and not deAect with analysis. Diamond the

philosopher is making us stop and experience whal we

might have passed by. As philosopher, she is restoring

her readers' capacity to experience unanalyzed wonder,

to make goodness and beauty awe-full again.

THE D NGER O TOO MUCH L NGU GE

McDowell offers a diagnosis of the difficulty of reality,

by way of an account of what so deeply troubles Eliza

beth Costello.1 2 Alluding to both Hughes's poem and 10

Coetzee's lectures. he w rites:

The kind of difficulty both cases exemplifY arises when

something we encounter defeats our ordinary capac

ity to get our minds aroun d reality. that is. our capacityto capture reality in language. That dislodges us frolll

comfortably inhabiting our nature as speaking ani

mals, animals who make sense of things in the waythe capacity to speak enables us. l b e special kind of

animal life we lead com es into question. (134)




l b e difficulty will be even greater for Costello, the nov

elist whose life work is words. This is a very complexthought, which many will find helpful, in thinking

through Diamond's essay. Nevertheless it seems to me

to overplay the importance of saying in a way that Diamond does not.

Notoriously, philosophers who characterize Manas the Talking Animal have gone on to draw conse

quences for the ways in which we ought to relate to

nonspeaking animals. McDowell does no such thing.

He does not define Man as a creature whose nature itis to speak, but his words may still invite the thought

that speaking, above all , is what makes people special,the special kind of animal life we lead .

He uses the two phrases to characterize one and the

same capacity, namely, our capacity to capture reality in

language and our ordinary capacity to get our minds

aroun d reality. lbe former too much recalls Cavell's animadversions on clutching. to which Diamond alludes.

And although getting my mind around reality sounds

lovely as metaphor. it may not be a philosophically felicitous way to describe an ordinary capacity of ours.

As a precautionary note , we should record that

Temple Grandin would certainly protest, if she werewilling to talk this way, that she gets her mind around

many important aspects of reality just because she

does not think in words. What we call her disability

is compensated by other abilities, a theme now popu-

68 C O N C L U S I O N : D E F L E C T I O N S

lar in what may be called the autism liberation front. I

do not, however, wish to lay emphasis on abilities thaiwe may take to be grounde d in pathologies.

Here is an ordinary, personal fact. As I write this

summer I am privileged. here on a hillside, lookingout on tall pines that grow out of the earth far below

me. When I look straight ahead over my computer

monitor , I see them halfWay up, at the top of their baretrunks , and just before their crown begins. This is an

extraordinarily beautiful and peaceful sight. It is also

alive , varying. because often the clouds rise to this level.

and the trees are wraithed in mist.There: I have just given you some idea of the vista

I am so blessed as to have before me . I cannot possi

bly ~ c p t u r ethis reality in language.H

I am not thereby

dislodged from comfortably inhabiting my nature as a

speaking animal because other aspects of my nature

are far more involved in what I experience, now, than

is my ability to describe.You can see why, in this setting. I resonated with Mi·

loszon trees. You may also see why the metaphor of get

ting my mind around reality did not help. It simply doesnot conned As I pause and look out again, I ask. do I get

my mind around t is reality before me? If that means

to poss ss it , of course not , the very thought is insulting.

Bul when I will myself to talk this way, it does seem to

me that. as I sit here. my mind is around this reality ifthat means anything at aU . I am almost literally on the




rim of a tower, for a moment solitary, with ~ w h a t c a n ' tbesaid, only the w o r l d . ~

McDowell is referring not to something serene butto Hughes 's 19'4 reality and Costello's p u t a t i v e ~reality.Nevertheless, I have been making use of the third in

Diamond's series of examples, so what I have just saidis relevant. The ana logies do seem to carry through. Onreading Hughe s's poem I get my mind around the lousyreality (if that means anything at all). I stopped shortwith his other poem, ·O ut , partly because my capacityto speak about its reality had to e actively stopped. It

will be said that I totally miss McDowell's point.I began by quoting Costello. She spoke of philo·

s o p h i c a l l a n g u a g e . ~Perhaps for a moment she wouldallow McDowell to speak for her. If so, she might saythat philosophical language does not U c a p t u r e ~the reality of animal life that she exper iences . Indeed , nothingcan fully capture it. But her words, both philosophicaland non philosophical , in the course of both her lec-tures, certainly say a lot about it With Cora Diamondwe may come to think that the propositions, principles ,and arguments of animal rights discourse deflect real·ity but that Costello, the novelist, has other resources.

NOTES

I. For references, see the notes to Cary Wolfe's introduction.

7 0 C O N C L U S I O N DEFLECTIONS

2. I was brought in to this discussion only i>e<ause Iwrote one of the first long reviews of Coetzee's TannerLe<:tures (The Ntw York Rtvitw o Books 29 June 2000,20-26 , and a follow-up, On Sympathy: With Othe rliving Creatures, Tljdschrift voor Filosofie 63 (2001):683-'712. A few lines from the review are repeated in thepresent comments.

3. J M. Coetzee, Boyhood: ScentS from Provincial Lifo

(London: Seeker and Warburg, 1997). 1- 2.4. Except in Canada, whose Supreme Court ruled for

the Patent Office and against HalVard, so that oncomiceand their ilk cannot be patented in Canada. (Patent laws,for historical reasons of precedent, are surprisingly dif·ferent in neighboring common-law iurisdictions .) Oneargument before the court was that once altered, oncomiee breed just like mice, and so cannot be patented. Anargument for allowing turkeys to be patented? l be question of breeding monsters was not introduced in court,only that of patenting life forms which, once generated,

can regene rate themselves.5. Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, nimals

in Translation: Using the Mysteries o utism to Decode

nimal Behavior (New York: Scribner, 2005).6. J.M. Cocaee, Disgraa: (London: Seeker and War-

burg, 1999), 217.7. Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology o Modernity

(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).8. Ted Hugh es at the Adelaide Festival Writers' ~ k

March 1 97 6 , ~http://www.zeta.org.au/-annskea/Adelaide.him

C O N C L U S I O N DEFLECTIONS 171



9· Starting with his article in the New York Review o

Books, 5 April 1973 , followed in 1975 by Animal Libera-tion: ew Ethics for ur Treat/ IUnt o Animals 2nd ed.(New York: New York Review/Random House , 1990).

10. Ranier Maria Rilke ,"'The First Elegy W in The Du-

ina Elegies. trans. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender(London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), lines 4 7 .

II Poem 87 of 96 in New Poems, trans. J. B. Leishman

(London: The Hogarth Press, 1964). -Nein: ein Turm solisein aus meinem Herzen / und ich selbst an seinen Randgestellt: / wo sonst nichts mehr ist, noch einmal Schmerzen / und Unsagiichkeit, noch einmal Welt (in Der neuenGedichte Anderer reil [Munich: Inse Verlag. 1908]) .

12. The expression ~ t much language" in the subhead is from Bertold Brecht , precisely in making ruderemarks about Descartes. See the second of my "FiveParables," in Philosophy in Its Con text ed . R. Rorty, J

Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. 1984), 1°3 24 .

72 C O N C L U S I O N : O E F L E C T I O N S

w



1\ is more urgtnt than ever to el(plore and assessour undel'lltandingof animallife not only from a lCienlificpoint of view but from a philosophicalone. Thi.. l

book ill a bndmark for such an undertaking.With contributions from the verybest and most thoughtful philosophersof our time. it providesa new bench·

mark fOT doing justice to this t h e ~ n djustice to aninuis, OUT RlO$t otherothers," I ' ' 'ON Ci NOIN 'MCi, Thol.-.loa S d I I X I I a t r. c - l a o r d l ' l ; i l l l b l S d r a t t

In Philosophy jiM AIIimal Ufo Cora ~ m o n dbegins with "The DifficultyofRality and the Difficultyof Philc.ophy." in wttich she accuses anaIytia.I phi.Icl.ophy of evading. or deR«ting. the responsibilityof hulTW1 beings tawm1nonhuman anU'lUllI. Diamond then uploms the animal question in the more~ r i Iproblemof philoeophicaJIkepticism_Focusingspedfially on ,. M _Cae-~ s Tlw: LilltJo AllimAls.she considers the failureofbngtUlge to capture thevuJntnbility or humans and animals.

S ~ n l ~Cavell re lponds to Diamond's ifllument with his own close readingofCoetzee'swork, connKting the human.,anirnalTebtionship to further tht>mesof monlity and philosophy. John McDowellfollows with a critiqueofboth Dia·mond and CaveU. and Ian I-lacking explains why Cora Diamond'sessay is sodeeply perturbing and. p.mdoxically, ravolII poetry over philosophy in overcom·ing her difficultieJ.Cary Wolfe's introduction situates these argume nts withinthe broadercontextof contemporaryco nlincntal philosophyand theory, particu-larly Jacques Dcrrida's workon deconstruction and the question of me anirml

S TAN l U CAVi l l Is thr Wahn M C<lboc Prof6lOTEmmnuof 1 C I ; m dIhr Gen-eral Tbt1ll'J'ofValut at Harvard Uni'mJIt)'.His boob lndude Philclsopllr1M Doiyliflo

_ mi no : ClAi ,o Rt.IIso I; 1V1UpIUIriIo, Momlil)\ And ~

CO lA OlAJooI O ND i i WtlllamR. KmmJr. Profe. . rofPbilotophyand professorofliwatthe UnlwnilJ ofVirpnia.

tOMN MCOO . l l l UmvenilJProftuOl'ofPhibophyat the UniYmiIJolPitlJbwah.

philosophy and animal life

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