He himself is an Outsider. Has a distant personality. Focuses on the solitary individual.
His work has been compared favourably with Nabokov, Kafka and Conrad.
Coetzee’s writings question any easy correspondence between fictional representation and the rapid changes in the 20C.
He seeks to problematize rather than produce.
Coetzee is considered a postmodern and post-colonial writer.
Presentation:
Just for the record, I am not an animal rights activist.
Recognition that the ability to choose a certain diet/lifestyle entails the privilege to choose in the first place. Understand that life eats life. But I cannot understand unnecessarily killing. In the context of my urban environment, I do not need to use animals or animal byproducts in order to be healthy or more broadly to live.
Costello is accused by her son and daughter-in-law to have a terrible delivery. Could this be why Coetzee chose to deliver a lecture in the Tanner Lectures on Human Values via a novella? Perhaps he knows that his delivery may be flat and thus not persuasive.
In 2007, Hugo Weaving read a speech written by Coetzee for Voiceless, an Australian animal rights group. The speech is called “I feel therefore I am.”
http://old.voiceless.org.au/About_Us/Misc/A_word_from_J.M._Coetzee_-_Voiceless_I_feel_therefore_I_am.html
“[Practices which] we might also call cruel and inhuman but for the fact that inhuman is the wrong word, such practices are all too human.”
Debates about whether Elizabeth Costello is John Maxwell Coetzee’s alter ego?
I think Coetzee is speaking through the voices of John Bernard (who is a little bit sympathetic to Costello) and Elizabeth Costello. Maybe Coetzee is still working out his own paradoxes and inconsistencies in his thoughts and actions relating to animal ethics? Brainchatter? Left brain ‘taking over’ right brain? I suspect that LoA is semi-autobiographical.
Private versus public reasoning? LoA written in 1999. Fictional characters allow Coetzee to separate his private and public reasoning but he (speaking as Coetzee) has become more outspoken on animal issues in the last few years.
Coetzee is known to be elusive. Rarely giving interviews or making public appearances.
Apparently he has also rarely been seen smiling. This brings to my mind the austere sisters in Babette’s Feast and unfortunately reinforces the notion that vegetarians/vegans are austere people who are “missing out in life”.
Speaking for myself, I disagree. To eat with a fuller conscience allows me to enjoy my foods so much more. In religious terms, eating vegan allows me to experience grace.
Why food animals? They are the most exploited animals on earth.
Coetzee’s speech (Hugo Weaving): “We can make a long list of the ways in which our relations to animals are wrong, but the food industry, which turns living animals into what it euphemistically calls animal products – animal products and animal by-products – dwarfs all others in the number of individual animal lives it affects.”
Vegetarianism does not equal compassionate towards animals. I agree. There is no homogenous concept of vegetarianism or veganism. The motives to go veg also differ.
Health, environmental, religious, etc. For me, veganism is a way of life (as opposed to a diet fad) that is congruent with my personal ethics and philosophy of ahimsa (non-violence/harm), of minimizing harm to others and to my surroundings. It is also a lifestyle that makes sense to me in my urban environment in which animal and animal byproducts are not necessary for my survival. My veganism is expressed by my rejection of all animal and animal byproducts as food, clothing and beyond.
Veganism as an alternate way of being in relations to non-human-animals. (Seeing animals not as food or property but as fellow creatures brings me tremendous joy than I cannot express through words but I feel it. “Who feels it knows” – Bob Marley).
“Desire to save my soul” parallel with religious awakening.
Just as James argues that the philosophy of religion is insufficient to explain complex religious experiences, Costello shows that philosophy in itself is inadequate to address the complex question of how we as human-animals should treat our fellow non-human-animals. I observe that the ‘revelation’ of my own animal ethics is an authority for myself alone. However, I am in agreement with James that the intuitive feeling of this knowledge is rooted in the embodied senses, through the identification of one’s self with the ‘Other’ (the non-human-animal via poetic/artistic imagination). In this way, salvation is, in theory, is attainable by all but first, a willingness to be open to salvation, to open one’s heart to non-human-animals is absolutely essential. Abstaining from animal foods and beyond is part of what constitutes a good life to me.
Coetzee notes that the field of animal ethics is “a curious one in one respect: that the fellow beings on whose behalf we are acting are unaware of what we are up to and, if we succeed, are unlikely to thank us. There is even a sense in which they do not know what is wrong. They do certainly not know what is wrong in the same way that we know what is wrong. So, even though we may feel very close to our fellow creatures as we act for them, this remains a human enterprise from beginning to end.” (speech read by Weaving).
Coetzee/Costello also points more broadly to limits of the power of language to touch on ethical issues.
Reason vs. Passion – continuum, not a dichotomy – Humean morality.
I see value in approaching the issue of animal ethics via philosophy as well as through poetic/artistic imagination.
Philosophy can help to clarify thoughts and/or to show holes in one’s arguments.
Poetic/artistic imagination has the power to move us in ways that philosophy cannot.
But to debate ceaselessly about which medium is more important is not particularly useful.
Animal ethics/rights implicit but the main topic (to me) is
Can vegans/vegetarians and meat-eaters have a genuine/serious/civil/respectful dialogue or are the competing ideologies so deeply divided rendering meaningful discussion futile?
Appreciate that Coetzee/Costello notes that while vegetarianism/veganism may be an ideology, so is meat-eating (based on what I feel is an arbitrary judgment on the ‘value’ of human-animals v. non-human-animals).
Quote from a member of the blog, vegansofcolor: “I find it frustrating that the dominant ideology – to eat meat, in this case – is not recognized as an ideology, that the status quo is unquestioned & those disagreeing with it can be accused of moralizing while those in line with it are not espousing any moral view at all.” – Think Norma. Think social justice issues. Meat-eating is a male dominant ideology (for those who are interested in this, I suggest reading Carol J. Adams).
Animal ethics rather than rights. The language of rights from the Enlightenment period is problematic on its emphasis on rationality.
Affirm similarities rather than differences.
Particularly with fellow mammalians.
Connections to female/male gender. Baffled by Kala’s want of a goat thinking that this goat will just produce milk for her. People seem out of touch with reality due to their distant relationship with the food-animals. Not cognizant that in order to get milk, you need to impregnate a mammal repeatedly (usually by a machine termed a ‘rape rack’ in the industry or by human arms).
Quote from my essay:
“I wished that instead of having Elizabeth talk about the unethical nature of consuming veal to her grandchildren that you had her instead relating the experience of a mother cow being artificially inseminated year after year, against her will, only to have her child torn away permanently from her shortly after childbirth, having her child denied her rightful food, the milk of her mother, having her milk then stolen from her to provide to human-animals who do not need bovine milk in order to live, having every child of hers turned into a commodity and having the emotional and physical pains from forced repeated pregnancies to Norma’s own painful and joyous experience of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.”
These are real lived experiences.
Following in Smuts’ lead, I would further argue that a more direct identification with non-human-animals is an important bridge to an animal ethics ‘salvation’.
Philip touched on the issue of sight (or the lack of it for most people).
Would we want to eat meat if slaughterhouses had CCTVs or glass walls?
“As with any violent ideology, the populace must be shielded from direct exposure to the victims of the system, lest they begin questioning the system or their participation in it. This truth speaks for itself: why else would the meat industry go to such lengths to keep its practices invisible?” ~ Melanie Joy
Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight – Timothy Pachirat
Deflection of personal responsibility reinforced by invisibility. Claiming ignorance. Awareness atrocities (genocide, war, cruelty to animals, etc.) but lack of guilt/shame. One could argue this is a decline in humanity. Once you have the exposure/awareness/knowledge, how does one deal with the trauma? (Costello and Red peter as wounded animals).
Sue Coe vegan artist who draws images from her experience in slaughterhouses.
How do you stomach being in the midst of a killing floor? Does making the images help you cope? Or do you become numb after a while? The images are about me retraumatizing you, the viewer. Trauma is like having acid thrown onto your brain: Like an etching plate, it eats into it, and you are compelled to keep imprinting it onto other people, until they feel it too. It’s not my stomach I worry about; it’s my mind, or wherever my soul is located, because it gets broken every time animals suffer. When I make art, I make more witnesses, and when there are enough witnesses, the horror stops. Insanity comes from isolation, feeling you are alone in seeing what most do not. Many animal-protection activists suffer immensely, because they have opened a door of consciousness that enables them to see a reality that very few want to see. Article: http://www.printmag.com/Article/Witness-to-Slaughter
Much of the language to justify the use of animals is the same language we used to justify slavery, colonial conquest.
From Aristotle’s Politics, slavery was ‘needed’ to built Greek civilization as we know it today. Was it really a ‘need’ or a ‘want’? Ditto in current context (do we really need the sweatshops and the cheap goods?) and pro-meat arguments in a context in which we do not need it.
For the human-animal, the non-human-animal companion in their care is thought of more as a family member, thus informally relegating the non-human-animal to the status of a ‘person’ rather than an object. Implicitly, these human-animals recognize the immorality of the law that degrades those nearest and dearest to us to nothing more than a thing. The (in)justice system that I find myself in will likely impose a harsher punishment to an individual who smashes the windows of a bank than to an individual who abuses a non-human-animal.
King speaks at length about unjust laws in which man-made laws “are out of harmony with the moral law” (para. 13). Animal ethics is complex issue but in general, it is a matter of aligning one’s conscience with one’s actions in a consistent manner. I feel a moral responsibility to ‘disobey’ the ‘monstrous’ cruelty inflicted on cows, pigs, chickens, etc. while I treat Kaslo, my dog as a member of my family.
Empathetic rather than sympathetic imagination. Feel with rather than for.
Animal rights vs animal welfare - parallels between social justice movements - radical vs. reformist.
We need to tie all social justice issues together. Veg does not equal humane/ethical. Need to tie in labour issues, economic issues, environmental issues, links to racism, sexism and beyond.
“In the tradition of Mencius, you consistently point to one’s heart to guide one to the ‘right path’. In pursuing and maintaining our own personal animal ethics, I am optimistic, although only mildly that this will in turn slowly create a domino effect of empathetic imagination, trickling down directly those closest to us, if we do not first alienate them by creating an ‘us versus them’ dichotomy.” This entails not behaving like a self-righteous vegetarian/vegan and not thinking that you are somehow better than the meat-eater becuase you are not.
Cultivating virtue and what constitute a good life by habit - Stoicism.
Questions for The Lives of Animals
1. Can vegans/vegetarians and meat-eaters have a genuine/serious/civil/respectful dialogue or are the competing ideologies so deeply divided rendering meaningful discussion futile?
2. Why is Elizabeth Costello’s Holocaust comparison ‘offensive’? The Transatlantic slave trade is often invoked as another point of comparison in the treatment of food-animals yet I do not hear the kind of uproar that is generated by the slavery comparison. Why?
3. What does our relationship with non-human animals teach us about our own ‘humanity’?
Discussion:
We should not dismiss abstract thinking altogether.
Why should we reform as a species? Duty to our planet, nature, fellow creatures including human-animals since we are a species that is single-handedly destroying the planet at a rapid speed. We do ask animals to reform (to behave in a certain way). If they do not, we may kill them (e.g. ‘tame’ bears).
Industrialization is the problem, not meat-eating.
