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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

living with animals « Previous | |Next »
July 08, 2006

In her article, "Eating Meat and Eating People" Cora Diamond explores the meaning of our lives when they are open to animals. In the article Diamond explores vegetarianism and the reasons for it in debate with animal liberationists. She shows the positions of Peter Singer and Tom Regan to be dehumanizing. She believes there are reasons to respect animals, but they are not those given by Singer or Regan. Both these animal liberationists, she charges, have misunderstood how important our sense of humanity is in creating our moral universe, and she thinks they do violence to our moral fabric when they level the nuanced distinction between us and animals for their purposes. Rather, Diamond suggests, we should think about how our sense of humanity already has possibilities in it fordeepening our moral relations with animals.

The problem is, it is hard to make sense of what Diamond means in the short space of an article. What would it look like to find possibilities in our sense of humanity for deeper moral relations with animals? Don’t we already think it is human enough to slaughter them at will and in the most degrading and industrial of manners? Diamond did not explain enough of what she meant. Raimond Gaita in his book The Philosopher’s Dog, examines how his shared life with animals, especially his German shepherd Gypsy, allows us to see what it is to be meaningfully human. Not surprisingly, being meaningfully human is enriched through relationships with animals. Heidegger or Agamben could have said that, too. The question is, specifically, why? What do animals show us and we them? What do we share? How is life enriched?

Gaita understands, following Diamond, that the question of marking the difference between humans and animals is not derived from any special properties. Rather, it is something in our form of life: a way we bring up our young and treat each other, formed out of so many factors we could not responsibly enumerate them.

Death for us is not the same as death for the dog. To deny that is to be oblivious to meaning. Dogs howl at the death of their fellows, and they can miss each other and people terribly. But they do not revisit the shrines of their ancestors, or bring flowers to their parents’ grave three decades after their deaths. There is nothing speciesist in acknowledging such facts. On the positive side because we can form a relation with animals that relation is meaningful, we can treat them in some respects as we would want to be treated and care for them as fellows on this "death-bound journey." The issue is whether what we do to them is a meaningful and rich relation flowing from our sense of our own humanity.

Gaita's argument is that we do not have to live with factory chicken farms and that, out of a desire to
live meaningfully, we should not treat animals as beasts of burden. We can relate to animals so much we mourn for them or we can simply care that they have a fair chance in life even when, eventually, we kill them. Relating to animals opens up our lives and makes them more meaningful, because it deepens our reverence for life.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:53 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)
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» Steve Irwin--in memoriam from Public Opinion
I was rather harsh in this previous post about zoos, conservation and tourism---too harsh perhaps? Steve Irwin used the money gained from being a celebrity in the US to preserve wildlife habitat in Australia and he understood about living with animals.... [Read More]

 
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agreed.