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September 1997 Remembering Bobby Book Review by Martin Rowe

 

Animals and Their Moral Standing by Stephen R.L. Clark. Routledge: New York (1997). $17.95 pbk. 208 pages

Animal Acts: Configuring the Human In Western History edited by Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior. Routledge: New York (1997). $17.95 pbk. 252 pages

During their internment in Camp 1492 during World War II, some French soldiers, among them the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, were befriended by a dog called Bobby. Bobby, wrote Levinas 30 years later, "would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men.... This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany...."

This quote, taken from David Clark's excellent essay on Levinas in the diverse and always interesting Animal Acts, encapsulates much of our idiosyncratic attitude toward animals. As Clark notes, Levinas was aware of the irony that a dog should show more of the categorical imperative of respecting individual human rights -- and thus be more human -- than the Nazi captors. Levinas knew from bitter experience that the Nazis considered Jews such as him less than human while a less-than-human animal knew he was human. But, to Clark, Levinas could not bring himself to draw the further conclusions of his arguments. Levinas knew Bobby could never be a Kantian in the strict sense, because as an animal he lacked the ability to reason which Kant considered the sine qua non for possession of rights. However, Levinas did not believe that Bobby called into question all notions of the separation of human and animal by responding so fully to humanity in the prisoners. Secondly, Clark notes that while Levinas admitted that we routinely intern and consume animals, he could not quite acknowledge that there is a commonality between animal slaughter and the Holocaust. For Levinas, that way madness lay and Bobby remained only an anthropomorphic figure, a metaphor of being human for whom we must always resist the ultimate human consideration: that animals' experiences are in essence ours, and we are thus duty-bound to consider their interests.

For 20 years or so, ways of arguing this conclusion has been the project of Stephen R. L. Clark, professor of philosophy at the University of Liverpool, England. In Animals and Their Moral Standing, a collection of his thought-provoking and challenging essays from 1978 to 1994, Clark offers a sterling defense of animal rights. He argues that animal rightists see "not that certain people...are wicked [in their abuse of animals], but that all of us inherit a way of life, a set of attitudes, that rest in the end on a mistake." That mistake is based on that very limited sense of rights-holders as possessors of reason and cognizant of the meaning of duty. In contrast, Clark generally advocates a libertarian-tinged, rights-based philosophy which respects the rights of both human and non-human animals.

Refreshingly, Clark is content to admit into his philosophy human specialness, that our emotions are cognitive faculties, and that we are, like most animals, relational beings. He rejects the Enlightenment determination that existence is made up of discreet autonomous beings, in favor of a world "full of accidental and historically grounded associations and taxonomies," where extraordinary, varied animal lives and minds share to a greater or lesser extent our story. It is also a philosophy which has room for a cosmic mandate to respect the world. "If our special human gift," he writes, "is to contemplate and serve the cosmos... it behooves us to attend more carefully than we yet have to the other creatures that share the world with us, among whom we live both at the domestic and at a more cosmic level."

As Clark acknowledges, philosophers and biologists may never know what animals really are and think: philosophers will in effect have to retreat to their prior convictions and biologists to a sense of wonder. Nevertheless, Clark's own "inexpugnable conviction is that the creatures I encounter are aware and living creatures, with lives that I can in various measures share but which do always escape my final comprehension."

As is made abundantly clear in Animal Acts, the idea that animals are more like us than we know and yet fundamentally Other, has been present in Western philosophy and art for at least a millennium. Animal Acts charts the progressive disenchantment of the Western world and the raising up of the white male human as the paradigm of spiritual completeness. Yet, there have always been philosophers and artists who have, as it were, taken the side of animals to puncture human aggrandizement. Matthew Senior, for instance, discusses the fables of La Fontaine as a counterblast to Descartes' deanimation of animals. Senior intriguingly points out that Descartes' view that animals were machines may have been influenced by the mechanical birds and animals that were being displayed at the time throughout the courts of Europe.

The trope that animals represent the beast within us, barely tamed by our veneer of humanity, is, as amply shown in Animal Acts, a common one: shared in essence by Rabelais and Nietzsche, Kafka and Wedekind. After Darwin, the notion of wild animality becomes in some ways the paradigm of an authentic state of being. Whether it is Nietzsche's blond beast or Kafka's Gregor, the "humanimal" (to use Charles Minahen's phrase in his sprightly essay on cartoonist Gary Larsen) comments devastatingly on a hypocritical human society.

For Levinas, a victim of the political perversion of Nietzsche's blond beast philosophy, after the Holocaust there could be no more metaphors, animal or otherwise. After such destruction, what purpose could be served by pointing out the obvious (that humans are animals, too) or the dangerous (that animals might be human, too)? Yet, and this is perhaps the final irony, Levinas could not forget Bobby. Bobby always broke out of his role as a comfortable, metaphorical figure, to be the real, live animal he was -- one who saw not "life unworthy of life," but fellow beings. David Clark, it should be said, treads with great delicacy and subtlety over this explosive terrain, and in effect admits in the end that extending the ultimate question of "who is my neighbor?" to non-human animals in as profound a way as we do (or would wish to have done) to human beings may need to remain a question and a meditation. Writing of Bobby in Levinas's work, Clark says: "For a disconcerting moment, the prisoners and the dog threaten to exchange their differently silenced spaces -- a crossing made all the more troublesome in an essay that begins...by asking us to consider the butchery of animals against the backdrop of the extermination of the Jews. Can we find the words to answer for the contiguity of these silences? How not to speak of it? How to read the Nazi subjection of the Jews and Levinas' subjection of the animals slowly enough?"

This review first appeared in a longer form in The Boston Book Review.

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