“God Hath Hardened Their Hearts”:
The Subversion of Empathy toward
Helene Dwyer Animals in Christian Theology
This paper is somewhat hybrid, invoking several
disciplines: it originated in the analysis of a contemporary poem, which led me
to reflect on some texts from the Christian Church fathers from the point of
view of my own discipline, philosophy. Aside from its hybridity, however, this
paper has little to do with the prevailing postmodernist approach to animals
that characterizes some of the most exciting work currently being done in
animal studies. In its reference to texts that are not only not postmodern, nor
even modern, but pre-modern, it may nevertheless provide an interesting
footnote about the historical roots of contemporary attitudes and behavior.
The paper has two parts. In the first I
draw on one of the ancients, Aristotle, in his exploration of the mechanisms by
which empathy is engaged and conversely, how this engagement fails. In the
second I re-read some historically important texts from the Christian theology
of animals with a focus not on natural rights or divine commands or ontological
hierarchies, but on the conflict between emotional response and intellectual
commitment to theory, and the resulting refusal of emotional response as a
guide to behavior toward animals. I recognize that discussion of empathy is
absent on principle in many of the intellectual frameworks within which animals
are currently being discussed, and I acknowledge that the subsequent discussion
belongs to an alternate form of discourse. Perhaps this discussion of ancient
texts will show something about the absence of empathy to animals in other than
premodern contexts.
In this paper the term empathy serves
as an umbrella term covering compassion, sympathy, pity, and in general the
imaginative participation in another sentient being’s experience.
I am using the term in a different sense from that employed by aesthetic
theorists such as Titchener and Paget/Lee. The eminent ethicist, teacher, and
all-round great colleague Daniel Putman defines empathy as “a process by which
individuals who share a given commonality [a common essence] can imaginatively
share each other’s particular situations or characteristics.”
I will not attempt to argue here that humans and non-human animals share an
“essence” in the Aristotelian sense, but only suggest that shared sentience
provides the necessary basis for empathy. Empathy on Putman’s definition
includes all forms of experience, the pleasant as well as the unpleasant. Pity,
compassion, and sympathy, on the other hand, are defined as responses to
undesirable experiences; pity, as Aristotle has it, is a painful emotion
directed at another’s misfortune or suffering. Although I use the term empathy
in this paper, rather than pity, sympathy, or compassion, the experiences of
animals that are most pertinent here are the unpleasant ones.
Following
Martha Nussbaum in her 1996 paper on compassion,
I draw on Aristotle’s analysis of pity in his Rhetoric in order to
investigate the conditions under which pity/compassion/empathy of one human
person for another is engaged and withheld. I extend this analysis to the
failure of empathy for non-human animals. Finally, I examine cases in which
there is not merely a non-engagement, but an outright refusal of empathy for
animals in the face of an acknowledged realization of their sufferings. In
particular, I examine some historical rationalizations for this refusal.
The Failure of Empathy
Martha Nussbaum begins her analysis of
compassion with the story of Philoctetes who, abandoned and friendless on the
island of Lemnos, engages the compassion of the Chorus of soldiers. The soldiers,
seeing his situation,
pity
him—thinking of how, with no living soul to care for him, seeing no friendly
face, wretched, always alone, he suffers with a fierce affliction, and has no
resources to meet his daily needs.
For Nussbaum, the story displays the
structure of the emotion of pity or compassion, the very same emotion defended,
under various names,
by Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Adam Smith, and criticized by the Stoics,
Spinoza, Kant, and Nietzsche. Aristotle’s analysis of the structure of pity is
more than two millennia old and was crafted in a different social context;
still, the Aristotelian analysis arguably describes the functioning of empathy
of one human person for another in the contemporary Western Judaeo-Christian
cultural milieu. I contend that it is also possible to apply this analysis to
empathy for non-human animals, although Aristotle himself would not have made
this application.
According to Aristotle, the possibility
of pity depends on three beliefs: first, the belief that the other person’s
suffering is serious rather than trivial; second, the belief that the sufferer
is not to blame for the suffering; and third, the belief that the onlooker
resembles the sufferer closely enough that the same plight might have befallen
him or her. As examples of serious matters, Aristotle gives death, bodily
assault or ill-treatment, old age, sickness, weakness, lack of food, loss of
friends, disfigurement, immobility, reversals to expectations, and the absence
of good prospects. As Nussbaum points out, those who are afflicted or deprived
often adapt to their conditions and in a certain sense do not “suffer”; on the
other hand, some who are not seriously afflicted or are not deprived of
something genuinely valuable may feel afflicted or deprived. In both of these
cases the onlooker refers to a conception of genuine “flourishing” when
responding emotionally to the other’s experiences:
Pity
takes up the onlooker’s point of view, informed by the best judgment the
onlooker can make about what is really happening to the person being
observed—taking the person’s own wishes into account [though they may be for
something trivial or even destructive], but not always taking as the last word
the judgment that the person herself is able to form [if, for example, she has
adapted to, and does not complain about, a condition that obstructs genuine
flourishing].
Aristotle assumed that there could be a
universal, cross-cultural understanding of human flourishing. I neither defend
nor attack this conviction, but find it much less controversial when the notion
of flourishing is applied to animals, even in a post-modern context.
According to Aristotle, pity depends on
a judgment that the one suffering does not deserve to so
suffer—that the sufferer did not bring the suffering upon herself, or at least,
that the suffering is more than she deserves. Pity is proportionate to
perceived innocence. When we deal with non-human animals, the question of
guilt/fault/culpability/responsibility becomes interesting. Theoretically,
animals cannot be morally responsible; one of the usual ways to assert human
superiority or at least distinctiveness is to deny moral agency to animals. On
the other hand, as will be discussed below, imputing responsibility in some
sense to animals serves as a way to disengage empathy.
Aristotle’s third requirement for the
activation of pity is a similarity between the onlooker and the sufferer, a
judgment that what befalls her might also befall me. Aristotle is thinking of
such things as poverty, betrayal by friends, loss of social status, or the
death of a loved one. Although these are harms to which all humans are in fact
vulnerable, if the onlooker feels invulnerable to such losses, then she is less
likely to identify enough with the sufferer to feel pity. She doesn’t feel pity
and then dismiss it; rather, her feelings are never engaged. If the experiences
are even further beyond the reach of the onlooker, a proportionately greater
exercise in imagination is required before empathy is activated. If I have no
understanding of a certain experience—because it is not available in my
culture, is not accessible to someone of my gender, or is beyond the physical
possibilities of a member of my species (as is swinging by one’s tail, or the
identification of individuals by their smell, for example)—then I cannot
empathize with the loss or disruption of this experience. I am not likely even
to notice such a loss, much less to feel pity over it.
Now to apply this analysis of pity to
our responses to animals. Attacks on the seriousness of animal suffering focus
on denials that animals can “suffer” in any true sense. Events that happen to
non-human animals under the same conditions that would elicit pity if human
persons were to endure them are interpreted as inappropriate for pity.
There are various ways in which this writing-off is accomplished. Currently
popular is the declaration that pain and suffering are different in kind
(and seriousness) accompanied
by a denial that non-human animals suffer. Daniel Dennett
even holds that some pain is unconscious, a seemingly counter-intuitive
proposal; although humans have some unconscious pain, the concept is largely
reserved for non-human animals and functions
well to relieve concern that human use of animals might in fact hurt them.
Attempts to find non-human animals blameworthy
in their sufferings as grounds for refusing them empathy might be thought to
have ended with the medieval trials and executions of “criminal” animals.
Attempts to literally blame the animal now are probably reserved for game
animals, whose engineered over-large population allows blame for crop incursion
and road accidents, or for predators who compete with humans for these game
animals or who eat domesticated animals intended for human consumption. The
terms used to suggest the appropriateness of suffering—for example,
blameworthiness, guilt, culpability, fault, and responsibility—may be ambiguous,
and one meaning of a pair of meanings may be allowed to color the other. For
example, “responsibility” is often used merely to assert a causal connection
between two events, as in “his smoking is responsible for his emphysema.”
This easily slides into “He is responsible for his emphysema”
(and therefore does not deserve any pity). This ambiguity allows for movement
from “the large deer population is to blame for the increase of deer-car
accidents” to “the
deer killed in the collision deserved her fate.” This is one way that animals
are blamed for their sufferings with the result that pity is denied them. Another,
more subtle form of blaming consists in finding the animal responsible for her
own victimization; an example of this is found in the contempt humans have for
domesticated or “tamed” animals, a contempt that allows one to despise the
animal as unworthy of sympathy.
This shades off into the third of Aristotle’s requirements for pity: a
sufficient similarity between the onlooker and the one who suffers.
Historically, most destructive to the
exercise of empathy toward animals are attacks on the similarity between
the human onlooker and the animal she beholds. These attacks throw up both conceptual
and experiential blocks to accepting a connection between all that is
human and all that is not. Eileen Crist enumerates some of the experiential
blocks in discussing why we do not readily feel sufficient similarity with
insects: their appearance is aesthetically foreign, they inhabit different
spatial dimensions, and we are unable to share their phenomenological worlds
(of pheremone communication or ultraviolet sight, for example).
Even non-human mammals, however, elicit our xenophobic recoil for having such
features as tails, which seem to provoke a combination of contempt and envy.
By “conceptual blocks” to a
sense of similarity and therefore to empathy I mean the philosophical arguments
diminishing non-human animals which were originally consciously framed but
which now function as subconscious lenses, through which we view animals
without focusing on the interpretive schemata themselves. When these function
to preclude the emotional response of “imaginative participation in another’s
experience,” empathy never arises and so is not exactly “refused.” Val Plumwood
discusses some of the conceptual blocks that we throw up to preclude empathy
with animals we wish to eat. In consigning them to the category of “meat,” we
create “a sphere of radical otherness marked by rational deficiency,
reduction to an impoverished, mechanistic concept
of ‘body’, and exclusion from communicative
status.” Attempts to
establish, in “meat” animals, rationality, an ability to communicate, or a
lived body similar to that of human beings often meet with ridicule or sheer
denial. Some animals not intended for consumption—animals no more rational,
less machine-like, or more able to communicate, animals similar in almost every
way but their acceptability as “food”—may escape relegation to this “sphere of
radical otherness.”
Consider, for example, the similarity between dogs, often beloved family
members, and pigs, usually consumed as food. Both are mammals with similar
vulnerability to pain, similar intelligence, and similar responsiveness to
human interaction; neither has a face very different from nor very
similar to a human face; they exist in approximately the same spatial
dimension. Why, in some Western nations at least, is one consumed and one
coddled? The answer lies in a conceptual block that prevents one from seeing:
the animal’s similarity to us is clearly visible but is not noticed.
Plumwood suggests that examining the
concept of “meat” illustrates “how ‘taxonomy’ connects ontology with ethics—how
certain strategies of representation normalize oppression by narrowing
ethically relevant perception [and] erasing key ethical dimensions of
situations. . . .”
Names are powerful and confer being, as the Biblical story of Adam naming the
animals illustrates. Feminist theorists have pointed out how supposedly
gender-neutral language subliminally influences attitudes towards women.
Similarly, words used to describe animals influence attitudes towards animals
and may even control perception of them, “erasing key ethical dimensions” of our
interactions with them. For example, animals destined to be consumed as food,
who are living feeling beings, are represented as wholly identified with what
is only a part of their being, their consumable flesh. The consuming human
being is represented as radically other, as essential subjectivity against the
essential carnality of the animal designated as meat.
Paradoxically, this purely carnal body
is alternately interpreted as machine-like, a la the lingering Cartesianism
that colors human perception of the non-human. A notorious eye-witness account
of the practices of some post-Cartesian vivisectors of the Port-Royal Jansenist
seminary makes clear the practical implications of reducing body to machine and
declaring that “soul,” the seat of feeling, belongs only to human beings:
They
administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those
who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were
clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little
spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They
nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see
the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation.
There could
hardly be a stronger evidence of the power of ideology to distort perception.
When kinship between human and non-human is denied in this way, empathy becomes
impossible.
The Refusal of Empathy
The behavior of the Port-Royal
Jansenists illustrates remarkable callousness—but does it demonstrate a refusal
of empathy? If the vivisectors truly believed that the animal victims were
nonsentient machines, then their empathy was never engaged. If this was the
case, then Aristotle’s three conditions for the activation of pity were all
absent. In this second part I am concerned not with such cases, where empathy
never arises in the first place. I am concerned, rather, with cases in which
empathy is suppressed after it has arisen or in which the conditions under
which it might arise are carefully avoided with full knowledge that if it were
activated, it would interfere with certain practices. In these cases there is
recognition that animals are similar enough to human beings that they suffer in
ways that humans suffer; that these sufferings are serious rather than trivial;
and that the animals don’t deserve the suffering in any usual sense of desert.
In short, I will discuss cases in which empathy is deliberately refused.
I begin this discussion with a poem by
the American poet Galway Kinnell, “To Christ Our Lord”:
The legs of the elk punctured the
snow’s crust
And wolves floated lightfooted on the
land
Hunting Christmas elk living and
frozen;
Inside snow melted in a basin, and a
woman basted
A bird spread
over the coals by its wings and head.
Snow had sealed the windows; candles
lit
The Christmas meal. The Christmas grace
chilled
The cooked bird, being long-winded and
the room cold.
During the words a boy thought, is it
fitting
To eat this
creature killed on the wing?
He had killed it himself, climbing out
Alone on snowshoes in the Christmas
dawn,
The fallen snow swirling and the
snowfall gone,
Heard its throat scream as the gunshot
scattered,
Watched it
drop, and fished from the snow the dead.
He had not wanted to shoot. The sound
Of wings beating into the hushed air
Had stirred his love, and his fingers
Froze in his gloves, and he wondered,
Famishing,
could he fire? Then he fired.
Now the grace praised his wicked act.
At its end
The bird on the plate
Stared at his stricken appetite.
There had been nothing to do but
surrender,
To kill and
to eat; he ate as he had killed, with wonder.
At night on snowshoes on the drifting
field
He wondered again, for whom had love
stirred?
The stars glittered on the snow and
nothing answered.
Then the Swan spread her wings, cross
of the cold north,
The pattern
and mirror of the acts of earth.
The boy wonders whether it is right to
kill and eat an animal. His questioning is couched in phrases that recall the
liturgical language of the Catholic Mass, in which bread becomes Christ’s body:
“it is right and fitting”; “take and eat. . . .” The sound of the bird’s
beating wings—an oft-used symbol of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the
Blessed Trinity— had “stirred his love”; but after the feast, after the
consumption of the bird, he wonders “for whom had love stirred?” His answer
comes when he sees a swan in flight, cruciform against the sky, which turns his
thoughts to Christ’s crucifixion, “the pattern and mirror of the acts of
earth.” Sacrifice, archetypically the sacrificial death of Jesus, provides the
model by which suffering on earth, even the suffering of innocent animals, is
to be understood. Since this suffering is part of a divine design, guilt and
regret over killing the animal are subverted.
In fact the death of innocent animals,
the more innocent the better (and thus young and unblemished, like the Pascal
lamb or the red heifer without spot) have long provided symbols for the
sacrificial death of Jesus. In The Bestiary of Christ,
a compendium of religious animal symbolism, Louis Charbonneau-Lassay discusses
several such animal representatives of the sacrificed Christ, including bovines
such as the bull, the steer, the bull calf, the heifer; sheep, including the
ram, the ewe, and the lamb; the buck goat, the she-goat, and the kid; fish; and
birds of all kinds, including the swan the pelican, the dove, and the sparrow.
While not all of these were actually sacrificed in religious ceremonies, in
Christian tradition the deaths of all have been glossed, and glossed over, as
symbols of the redeeming death of Jesus.
Kinnell invokes the cross, or the
sacrificial death of Jesus, as “the pattern and mirror of the
acts of earth.” There is a Platonic ring to “pattern and mirror”: it suggests
that the suffering and death of earthly creatures, including innocent beasts
such as the Christmas goose, both mimic the Form
set by Christ’s suffering and death, and therefore are inevitable elements of
the post-lapsarian divine economy; and are reflected in,
and given a higher status by, that suffering and death, which mirrors (and
thereby dignifies) earthly suffering. Both of these notions can be found in
Christian tradition, especially that stream of tradition drawing on Plato’s
thought as it was incorporated into Augustinian theology. The upshot is that
suffering has higher meaning, even the suffering of dumb and unredeemable
(because unsouled) beasts. The love the boy in the poem felt did not have the
material animal as its object, but rather what the animal’s suffering
represented. More to the point, the boy can put aside his unease about killing
the goose; her death is part of the divine economy, and guilt and regret would
be unseemly.
I would like to examine now two of the
Church Fathers, Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, for their positions on
the seemliness of pity for animals that suffer.
There can be found in Augustine some of
the techniques discussed in the first part of this paper—techniques for
blocking empathy with animals before it is ever engaged. For example, in
denying that animals are made in God’s image, Augustine takes as his examples
animals that his audience would have found “aesthetically foreign”:
[Do
not] think, as some impious people say, that human souls return to cattle,
dogs, pigs, ravens. The human soul was made in the image of God: He did not
give His image to dogs and pigs.
However,
there also can be found in Augustine a deliberate refusal of emotional
identification with the sufferings of animals. As a part of the Platonic
tradition, he distrusted emotion in general; as Gillian Clark points out,
Latin
passio and Greek pathos are usually translated as ‘emotion’, but
Augustine (like most Greek and Roman philosophers) regards them not as
movements or responses from within, but as invasive disruptions of the soul. In
City of God he defines such disturbance, perturbatio, as ‘a movement
of the soul opposed to reason’, and says (in parenthesis) that comparable
experiences in animals are not disturbances because they cannot be contrary to
reason, which animals lack. The absence of reason would, of course, rule out
for him any possibility that animals can experience true happiness, namely the
love of God, or true misery, namely its absence.
Note
three things here: first, emotion, at least the kind of emotion covered by the
concepts passio and pathos, is considered a disruptive invasion
into the realm that should be controlled by reason. Empathy seen as a
participation in the emotional experiences of others would be the spread of
disruption from one unfortunate individual to another—a kind of contagion.
Second, emotion as perturbatio originates within the soul, but in
the “part” of the soul that can oppose the reasoning part, and thus it is not
to be cultivated. Animals can have comparable experiences, but these
experiences cannot be considered “disturbances” because animal souls have no
reasoning part to be disturbed. Third, true happiness and true misery are not
emotional states in the usual sense of the word “emotion,” since they have to
do with the love of God, and thus animals, lacking reason, cannot experience
them; animal suffering therefore is less than genuine “misery.”
Even if animals cannot experience true
misery, however, Augustine acknowledges that they can suffer. As he says
in another place,
For
living creatures [animals] show their love of bodily peace by their avoidance of
pain, and by their pursuit of pleasure to satisfy the demands of their
appetites they demonstrate their love of peace of soul. In just the same way,
by shunning death they indicate quite clearly how great is their love of the
peace in which soul and body are harmoniously united.
But
here, as elsewhere when discussing animals, Augustine moves on quite quickly to
make a contrast between the poorer powers of animals and the higher powers of
human beings, which will lead us to a life where “there will be no animal body
to ‘weigh down the soul’ in its process of corruption; there will be a
spiritual body with no cravings, a body subdued in every part to the will.”
The acknowledged suffering that animals
experience is not something that Augustine is concerned with; animals merely
provide a means for human progress towards moral goodness. When condemning, in
the Confessions, the Roman games in which massive numbers of
animals were slaughtered for entertainment, his concern is not for the animals
but for what Clark calls “the swamping of human reason by the collective
blood-lust of the spectators.”
Like Kant centuries later, Augustine recognizes that sensitivity to human
suffering is necessary if one is to act rightly towards the suffering person;
in order to preserve that sensitivity, we may not be cruel to animals. But,
says Kant, cruelty to animals is wrong only because it makes us hard in our
dealings with human beings, not because it is wrong in itself. In Augustine’s
terms, the cruelty inherent in blood-lust swamps reason, and reason is the
crucial human quality, by which the human participates in the divine. This is
why we should avoid cruelty, not because animal suffering is morally
significant.
In this Augustine prefigures Thomas
Aquinas who, more thoroughly and clearly than Augustine, instrumentalizes the
human response to animal suffering into a means for character improvement.
Aquinas explicitly acknowledges that animals can suffer: “even irrational
animals are sensible to pain.”
And again: “Man in a certain sense contains all things; . . . his reason, which
makes him like to the angels; his sensitive powers, whereby he is like the
animals. . . .” If humans
are like the non-human animals in sensitivity to pain, then our empathy is likely
to be stimulated by the sight of animal suffering. Aquinas realizes this, but
his theoretical framework, a hierarchy within which reason and human persons
are higher, feelings and non-human animals are lower, and what is lower serves
the higher, forces him to the counter-intuitive proposal that being moved by
animal suffering is important only as a rehearsal for responding to human
suffering: “it is evident that if a man practice a pitiable affection for
animals, he is all the more disposed to take pity on his fellow-man. . . .”
Such a disdain for feeling and emotion
informs all of Aquinas’s work. It is said that at the end of his life he had a
mystical vision, after which he refused to write any further, declaring that
all he had written up to then seemed like straw. Perhaps this vision was his
first experience of what feminist epistemologists call “connected knowing,” a
direct grasp of reality mediated by emotion more than by detached analysis.
As should be clear, empathy for the
suffering of another can be absent in two ways. First, it can fail to arise at
all. This happens if the suffering cannot be perceived because the sufferer is
so unlike the beholder. It also happens if the suffering can be perceived, but
is perceived either as not serious or as deserved. Second, empathy can arise
but then be refused and suppressed. This latter happens where a conflict
between reason and emotion is assumed, and the beholder of another’s suffering
conscientiously hardens his heart in order not to violate some theory of the
relative worth of things. This paper has focused on the refusal and suppression
of empathy that is motivated by a conscientious adherence to a
theological/philosophical position that makes empathy for non-human animals morally
unacceptable.
This
reading of some unfortunate tendencies in Christian theology does not negate
other more animal-friendly currents, but merely contextualizes these tendencies
in an analysis of empathy for animal suffering and when and why it is absent.
_
APPENDIX
The Bull-roarer
Gerald Stern
1
I only saw my
father’s face in butchery
once—it was a
horror—there were ten men
surrounding a
calf, their faces were red, my father’s
eyes were
shining; there might have been fewer than ten,
some were
farmers, some were my father’s friends
down from the
city. I was nine, maybe eight;
I remember we
slept a few hours and left
at four in
the morning, there were two cars, or three,
I think it
was West Virginia. I remember
the pasture,
the calf was screaming, his two eyes
were white
with terror, there was blood and slaver
mixed, he was
spread‑eagled, there was a rope
still hanging
from his neck, they all had knives
or ice
picks—is that possible?—they were beery,
drunk, the
blood was pouring from the throat
but they were
stabbing him, one of them bellowed
as if he were
a bull, he was the god
of the
hunters, dressed in overalls and boots,
the king of
animals; they seemed to know—
some of them
seemed to know—the tendons and bones,
they were
already cutting and slicing, pulling
the skin off,
or maybe that was later, I stood there
staring at
them, my father with a knife;
we didn’t
even have a dog—my mother froze
whenever she
saw one—we were living in Beechview,
we had the
newest car on the street, it was
an ugly
suburb, everything was decent,
there was a
little woods, but it was locust,
it would be
covered with houses, we didn’t even have
a parrot, my
father left at eight in the morning
and drove his
car downtown, he always wore
a suit and
tie, his shoes were polished, he spent
the day with
customers, he ate his lunch
at a little
booth, I often sat with him,
with him and
his friends, I had to show off,
I drew their
likenesses, I drew the tables and chairs,
it was the
Depression, none of them had brass rings
hanging from
their ears, they all wore socks,
and long‑sleeved
shirts, they ate and drank with passion.
2
My mother is
eighty‑seven, she remembers
the visit to
the farm, there was her brother,
my uncle
Simon, and there was his friend, MacBride,
Lou MacBride,
he was the connection, he was
a friend of
the farmer’s, maybe a cousin. I asked her
about the
killing—“that is the way those farmers
got their
meat, they lived like that, they butchered
whatever they
needed.” I asked if she could remember
anything
strange, was she nervous or frightened?
“There was
the tail, they cut the tail off
and chased
each other; it was like pinning the tail
to the
donkey.” Both of us laughed. I didn’t have the heart
to mention my
father’s face, or mention the knife—
and, most of
all, my pain. What did I want?
That he
should stay forever locked inside
his gold‑flecked
suits? That he should get up in the dark
and put his
shoes on with a silver knife?
That he
should unbutton his shirts and stuff the cardboard
into a chute?
That he should always tie
his tie with
three full loops, his own true version
of the
Windsor knot? And what did I want for myself?
Some childish
thing, that no‑one would ever leave me?
That there
would always be logic—and loyalty?
—I think that
tail goes back to the Paleolithic.
I think our
game has gory roots‑some cave,
or field,
they chased each other—or they were grimmer,
pinning that
tail, some power was amassed,
as well as
something ludicrous, always that,
the tail was
different from the horns, or paws,
it was the
seat of shame—and there was envy,
not just
contempt, but envy—horns a man has,
and he has
furry hands and he has a mane,
but never a
tail. I remember dimly
John Portmann, When
Bad Things Happen to Other People (Routledge, 2000) takes the position that
sympathy and pity differ, following such thinkers as Hobbes who argues that pity
arises from a perceived inequality between persons. Nussbaum claims to the
contrary that the term “pity” acquired nuances of condescension and superiority
from the Victorian era onward, but did not have them originally. Martha
Nussbaum, “Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion,” Social Philosophy and
Policy 13 (1), p. 29.
Daniel Putman,
“Empathy: Referring and Remembering,” Journal of Social Philosophy XV
(1): 34-42.
Sophocles, Philoctetes,
ll, 169-75.
See Nussbaum,
“Compassion,” p. 29, nn. 3 and 4 for the interrelations of the concepts denoted
by the terms eleos, misericordia, pitie, Mitleid, and their English
equivalents.
Nussbaum, “Compassion,”
p. 32.
Freud considers even
some pity directed toward humans as excessive and sentimental, a manifestation
of a non-genuine altruism which is merely a reaction-formation against sadism.
See “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.”
See, for example,
Portmann, When Bad Things Happen, pp. 48-52.
See Daniel Dennett, Kinds
of Minds (Basic Books, 1996), pp. 162-3.
This slide is made
easier by the assumption that people exercise free choice with regard to such
things as smoking.
It is forgotten that
the responsibility for the size of the deer herd in contemporary rural America
lies for the most part with those who set the number and type of hunting
permits.
See Karen Davis,
“Thinking Like a Chicken: Farm Animals and the Feminine Connection,” in Carol
J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist
Theoretical Explorations, (Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 192-212. Davis
point out the irony of manipulating the breeding of animals to reduce their
self-sufficiency, and then despising them for their “stupidity.”
Eileen Crist, review of
Donald Griffin’s Animal Minds, J. S. Kennedy’s The New
Anthropomorphism, and Barbara Noske’s Humans and Other Animals, in Society
and Animals II(1) (1994): 77-88.
Witness Gerald Stern’s
poem “The Bull-roarer.”
Val Plumwood, “BABE:
The Tale of the Speaking Meat,” in Marketta Seppala,
Jari-Pekka Vanhala
and Linda Weintraub, eds., Animal. Anima. Animus. (Frame Publications,
1998): 243-263.
Ibid., p. 244 (italics
mine). Exclusion from communicative status is necessary; “when we have ‘been
introduced’ and have intimate and individual knowledge of the particular animal
to be eaten, we tend to experience powerful tensions and often profound
discomforts,” ibid., p. 250. The absurdity of having meat speak is used to
comic effect by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
when “the meat of the day” hawks his appetizing qualities to the distress of
the restaurant’s patrons.
See Plumwood’s
interesting discussion of “pets” in the context of “the colonizing contract,”
ibid., pp. 254-261, and her comparison of pets to housebound wives, ibid., n.
5, pp. 261-2.
Nicholas Fontaine, Memoires
pour servir a l’histoire de Port-Royal (Cologne, 1738), 2:52-53; quoted in
L. Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: The Theme of Animal
Soul in French Letters from Descartes
to LaMettrie (Oxford University Press, 1940).
Louis
Charbonneau-Lassay,The Bestiary of Christ,
translated and abridged by D. M. Dooling (Arkana, 1991). First published in
1940.
Expositions of Psalms
146.18; quoted in Gillian Clark, “The Fathers and the Animals: The Rule of
Reason?” in Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto, eds. Animals on the Agenda,
(University of Illinois Press, 1998).
From Augustine, Concerning
the City of God against the Pagans, quoted in Animals and Christianity: A
Book of Readings (Crossroad, 1988), p. 87.
Clark, “The Fathers and
the Animals,” p. 79.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Theologica II, I, Q 102, art. 6.
Ibid., II, I, Q 102,
art. 6.