A blog for English 368: Literature and Cultural Studies, spring 2008.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
For tomorrow
Just to be clear: The only required reading for tomorrow are "Lessons" 3 and 4 from Elizabeth Costello, pp. 59-115. The earlier pages are merely "recommended." And of course you should read Willie's commentary below.
The notion that thought or reasoning cannot by itself sustain the motive force for human debate, an idea formulated by Hume, pervades modern philosophies—as discussed in the third lecture in Elizabeth Costello—about the human capacity for insightful action. The assertion that “thought alone has no inherent power without passion” is presented to us as Costello’s main argument (more or less) in her lesson entitled “The Lives of Animals”. She attempts to convince her audience that humans and animals share the capacity for passion and will, and that it is, therefore, solely an animal’s inability to express cognition or reasoning that separates them from the humans who kill them:
“In the olden days the voice of man, raised in reason, was confronted by the roar of the lion, the bellow of the bull. Man went to war with the lion and the bull, and after many generations won that war definitively. Today those creatures have no more power. Animals have only their silence with which to confront us. Generation after generation, heroically, our captives refuse to speak to us (pg. 70).”
Costello “reasons” that it is the language of reason that separates humans from animals, and not the presences of reason itself. It becomes necessary then for “people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else (pg. 79)” (an author of fiction does just that) to enter into an animals’ experience in order “to know what it is like to be a bat, as a bat is a bat (pg. 76).” She counters the argument that “our minds are inadequate to the task—our minds are not bats minds” with an irrelevant reference to Descartes’ assertion “I think therefore I am”:
“The knowledge we have is not abstract—‘All human beings are mortal, I am human being, therefore I am mortal’—but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can…Now I ask: if we are capable of thinking our own death, why on earth should we not be capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat? (pg.79).”
She continues this line of reasoning with a comparison of animal slaughter houses to the concentration camps of the Holocaust (an argument that demonstrates an utmost lack of sympathy to the suffering of human beings, which is ironic since she is preaching about sympathy towards animals) with the intent to further dramatize her point that “the horror is that the killers refused to think themselves in the place of their victims.” In this way, she aims to equate those who kill animals, and even those who live in the presence of animal death, to the Nazi regime and the Germans who turned a blind eye to their cruelty.
Costello’s parallelism between the Holocaust and animal imprisonment is unstructured and unreasonable and, sadly enough, degrades the victims of concentration camps and most of humanity (and definitely this reader) in such a way that her argument about the rights of animals is completely overshadowed by the drastic, sensitive (and inappropriate) comparison. On those who are forced into confinement, whether they are animals or people, Costello says:
“It implies that a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class. To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation—of being a body with limbs that have extension in space. Fullness of being is a state hard to sustain in confinement…suggests that the freedom of the body to move in space is targeted as the point at which reason can most painfully and effectively harm the being of the other (pg. 78).”
So, if this is Costello’s belief—that the effects of imprisonment are devastating to a point “where the flow of joy comes from living not in or as a body but simply from being an embodied being has no place (79)”—it would then seem to follow then, in a linear argument, that imprisonment inhibits one’s (man or animal) ability to reason and that it therefore creates an environment where animals are unable to reason effectively (reason being the institution that separates the two species in her initial claim). However, this is not the route Costello takes. Instead, she argues that the act of imprisonment upon another is what causes one to be inhumane (the Nazis and thus those who kill animals), and does not discuss how those who are imprisoned (victims of the Holocaust and animals) come to be treated as if they are inferior to humans. In other words, she argues that animals are not given the same compassion as humans because of their inability to reason, and yet it is the humans who imprison them that debase them of their reasoning abilities. However, at the same time, she also argues that it is not the animals at all who lack the ability to reason, but “people who have the capacity (to imagine themselves as someone else) but choose not to exercise it.” We are ultimately left with the conundrum: who exactly is more human, the captive or the captor?
Furthermore, she (unintentionally) circles back to her original topic of debate that “reason is not the being of the universe nor the being of God (but) the being of human thought.” Thus, if reason is a man-made creation “which for its own motives it tries to install at the centre of the universe” then it follows (according to Costello) that an animal’s lack of reason does not mean that they can’t understand the universe. If we (as beings of reason) could open our minds to the idea that they might be able to understand the universe we might no longer consider them inferior to humans.
While this argument has initial potential, by the end of the lecture she has completely contradicted herself. In an attempt to intellectually reason her way through the conviction that animals should be treated better, her argument rests on minimizing the significance of the ability to reason. By doing this, however, she fails to produce a reasonable case, and consequently destroys the power of reason itself. By the end of her lecture, Costello does nothing more than remind her audience of the essentiality of reason. Without “reason” we are left only with the chaotic “passion” that is Costello’s lecture.
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Reasoning Through the Significance of Reason
The notion that thought or reasoning cannot by itself sustain the motive force for human debate, an idea formulated by Hume, pervades modern philosophies—as discussed in the third lecture in Elizabeth Costello—about the human capacity for insightful action. The assertion that “thought alone has no inherent power without passion” is presented to us as Costello’s main argument (more or less) in her lesson entitled “The Lives of Animals”. She attempts to convince her audience that humans and animals share the capacity for passion and will, and that it is, therefore, solely an animal’s inability to express cognition or reasoning that separates them from the humans who kill them:
“In the olden days the voice of man, raised in reason, was confronted by the roar of the lion, the bellow of the bull. Man went to war with the lion and the bull, and after many generations won that war definitively. Today those creatures have no more power. Animals have only their silence with which to confront us. Generation after generation, heroically, our captives refuse to speak to us (pg. 70).”
Costello “reasons” that it is the language of reason that separates humans from animals, and not the presences of reason itself. It becomes necessary then for “people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else (pg. 79)” (an author of fiction does just that) to enter into an animals’ experience in order “to know what it is like to be a bat, as a bat is a bat (pg. 76).” She counters the argument that “our minds are inadequate to the task—our minds are not bats minds” with an irrelevant reference to Descartes’ assertion “I think therefore I am”:
“The knowledge we have is not abstract—‘All human beings are mortal, I am human being, therefore I am mortal’—but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can…Now I ask: if we are capable of thinking our own death, why on earth should we not be capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat? (pg.79).”
She continues this line of reasoning with a comparison of animal slaughter houses to the concentration camps of the Holocaust (an argument that demonstrates an utmost lack of sympathy to the suffering of human beings, which is ironic since she is preaching about sympathy towards animals) with the intent to further dramatize her point that “the horror is that the killers refused to think themselves in the place of their victims.” In this way, she aims to equate those who kill animals, and even those who live in the presence of animal death, to the Nazi regime and the Germans who turned a blind eye to their cruelty.
Costello’s parallelism between the Holocaust and animal imprisonment is unstructured and unreasonable and, sadly enough, degrades the victims of concentration camps and most of humanity (and definitely this reader) in such a way that her argument about the rights of animals is completely overshadowed by the drastic, sensitive (and inappropriate) comparison. On those who are forced into confinement, whether they are animals or people, Costello says:
“It implies that a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class. To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation—of being a body with limbs that have extension in space. Fullness of being is a state hard to sustain in confinement…suggests that the freedom of the body to move in space is targeted as the point at which reason can most painfully and effectively harm the being of the other (pg. 78).”
So, if this is Costello’s belief—that the effects of imprisonment are devastating to a point “where the flow of joy comes from living not in or as a body but simply from being an embodied being has no place (79)”—it would then seem to follow then, in a linear argument, that imprisonment inhibits one’s (man or animal) ability to reason and that it therefore creates an environment where animals are unable to reason effectively (reason being the institution that separates the two species in her initial claim). However, this is not the route Costello takes. Instead, she argues that the act of imprisonment upon another is what causes one to be inhumane (the Nazis and thus those who kill animals), and does not discuss how those who are imprisoned (victims of the Holocaust and animals) come to be treated as if they are inferior to humans. In other words, she argues that animals are not given the same compassion as humans because of their inability to reason, and yet it is the humans who imprison them that debase them of their reasoning abilities. However, at the same time, she also argues that it is not the animals at all who lack the ability to reason, but “people who have the capacity (to imagine themselves as someone else) but choose not to exercise it.” We are ultimately left with the conundrum: who exactly is more human, the captive or the captor?
Furthermore, she (unintentionally) circles back to her original topic of debate that “reason is not the being of the universe nor the being of God (but) the being of human thought.” Thus, if reason is a man-made creation “which for its own motives it tries to install at the centre of the universe” then it follows (according to Costello) that an animal’s lack of reason does not mean that they can’t understand the universe. If we (as beings of reason) could open our minds to the idea that they might be able to understand the universe we might no longer consider them inferior to humans.
While this argument has initial potential, by the end of the lecture she has completely contradicted herself. In an attempt to intellectually reason her way through the conviction that animals should be treated better, her argument rests on minimizing the significance of the ability to reason. By doing this, however, she fails to produce a reasonable case, and consequently destroys the power of reason itself. By the end of her lecture, Costello does nothing more than remind her audience of the essentiality of reason. Without “reason” we are left only with the chaotic “passion” that is Costello’s lecture.
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