The Lives of Animals

We all take reason for granted. Sometimes, a grand attempt at refuting our natural reason is really intriguing. At the 1997-98 Tanner Lectures sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, J. M. Coetzee gave a lecture called "The Lives of Animals", which is told in a narrative form about a woman name Elizabeth Costello, who is herself lecturing at a college about animal rights. And this woman's dialectic is extremely intriguing.

Her argument is basically this: that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life. She pushes for re-conceiving our devotion to reason as a universal value.
Accepted philosophy says that through the application of reason, we can come to understand the rules by which the universe works. This proves that reason and the universe are of the same being. And the fact that animals, lacking reason, cannot understand the universe have to simply follow its rules blindly. This proves that, unlike man, they are part of it but not part of its being: that man is Godlike, animals thing-like.
To Costello, this does not hold. She believes that we are capable of thinking about the animal like we do ourselves. There is no bound to the extent in which we can think ourselves into the being of another. If we open our hearts to them, exposing our sympathies, we can change the way the structure works. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. “If we are capable of thinking out our own death, why on earth should we not be capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat?”


Costello takes up Descartes specifically, and his likening animals to machines. "To be alive is to be a living soul. An animal – and we are all animals – is an embodied soul. This is precisely what Descartes saw, and for his own reasons, chose to deny." She sees reason as a vast tautology. Of course reason will validate reason as the first principle of the universe – what else should it do? Dethrone itself? Reasoning systems, as systems of totality, do not have that power. If there were a position from which reason could attack and dethrone itself, reason would have already occupied that position: otherwise it would not be total. So, is God a God of reason? She says, “Reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God. On the contrary, reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought.”
"Cogito ergo sum" implies that a living being that doesn't "think" is somehow subordinate. To thinking, cognition, she opposes 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 – a heavily affective sensation -- of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world. Not a pea rattling around in a shell." Animals have this kind of sensation of being that may be different from man, but is not so far away. And it is precisely their sensation of being in the world, their "extension into space", which we as humans imprison.

In Descartes’ defense, he had no access to information about apes or brilliant marine mammals. Little cause to question that animals could think. No access to the fossil record, didn’t know the science of any graded continuum of anthropoid creatures.

So, do animals have souls or are they just biological automatons? Once upon a time, the cry of man, raised in reason, clashed with the roar of the lion, and a great war was fought for centuries. The war has been won, and animals have no more power. Our captives only have silence with which to confront us.

I believe Costello's brick against the wall reason here is used well, but outside the scope of her argument, used against hundreds of years of philosophy, can't break down anything.

www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/Coetzee99.pdf