The Lives of Animals

This is an odd, good book.

J. M. Coetzee was invited to give the Tanner Lectures at Princeton in 1997-98. Instead of giving actual lectures, he invented a fiction, a character named Elizabeth Costello who was invited to give lectures at fictional Appleton College. So his lectures are the story of her lectures.

And Elizabeth Costello throws her own curveball. Invited as a distinguished novelist, she doesn’t give a talk about writing or about literature, but one on animals and our relationships, how we understand or fail to understand them, how we treat them, how we ought to treat them, who or what they are to us and us to them.

The devices give Coetzee a chance to break himself into separate pieces, characters in a dialogue centered on show more Costello, each, in my reading anyway, voicing different perspectives that Coetzee finds himself moving among, never resolving the questions that come up in and after Costello’s lectures.

Two quandaries compel Costello’s lectures. And they do compel her lectures — she seems at a loss to know how to go forward in her thinking and in her life. She’s aging, and her mind is vulnerable. And she’s taking it for all it is.

One quandary is the direct one — how do we and should we treat animals? We are full of conflicts if not contradictions. We institutionally torture them, slaughter them for food, make rituals of preparing their corpses to be eaten, we employ them as willing or unwilling servants, we place them in exhibits for spectators, we study them (with more institutionalized torture), . . . And we make pets of them, we adore young born calves, we venerate them in books and movies, we can’t stand the sight (or smell) of that institutionalized torture, we idolize them at times even in ritual sacrifice , . . . We don’t know what to do with (or think about) them.

The question is a quandary because we can’t know, and apparently we can’t decide, the moral status of animals. They feel pain. Do they have conscious lives anything like our own? Which animals are we even talking about? Horses? Dogs? Cattle? Chickens? Do we have any way of knowing what the lives of animals are like?

And how do we get away with lumping them all together under the single category of “animals”? Everything from lions, chimpanzees, and pigeons, to mosquitoes and tardigrades. The act of separating us from all of them at once echoes our belief that we alone are created in the “image of God”.

Those questions about who exactly animals (and we) are lead to the second quandary, which is actually the combined title topics of Costello’s lectures — philosophers, animals, and poets. Philosophers are thinkers, reasoners above all. Poets create experiences, provoking feeling as much as knowing..

At Appleton College, like Princeton, the philosophers have center stage (okay, not philosophers per se, but intellectuals of the ultra-rational kind). Costello’s son, John, is an astrophysicist at Appleton, and his wife, Norma, a philosopher without an appointment of her own.

In speaking of poets, Elizabeth is calling on something lived and produced by living and experiencing, not by thought itself, something that may be covered over with the dead leaves of thought. The conversations and frustrations among Elizabeth, John, and Norma touch both sides, the intellectual side and the relationships they live out.

Is knowledge exclusively the product of reasoning and thought, like what John and Norma produce professionally? Or is it also, or if not exclusively maybe predominantly and at its foundations, a matter of direct experience? Not just sense experience of the empiricist kind, but also something like “lived experience” — the knowledge embedded in muscles, felt emotions, and seemingly automatic actions and responses. Philosophers or poets?

Costello’s lecture is not an answer to the question, but it is a plea to find the poets in ourselves, to not shut them down, especially with regard to the question of animals and who they are in our lives.

Her way of speaking, her manner, and the course of her lectures all embody the quandaries she raises. She rambles, she seems to find herself at a loss for words, or reasons, at points.

At a very particular point, (page 33 in my text) Elizabeth stops speaking philosophically and starts speaking poetically, a point at which she rejects Descartes’ separation of body and soul, with more than intellectual objections — she expresses a kind of alienation, not quite the disgust she experiences at even the thought of eating an animal, but getting there. In her own words, she enthusiastically proposes “fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being” as opposed to a consciousness that stands back from it all and observes it.

“Sympathy” is the attitude, or maybe the comportment, she is recommending with respect to animals and other humans — placing ourselves in their place via our imaginations, feeling what they feel. Rather than thinking about what they must feel, feeling it ourselves.

Her lectures are followed by discussions among the eminent thinkers of Appleton, predominantly thinkers of the “philosopher” type, like John and Norma, but taking different angles — religious, biological, . . . All, to my reading again, are Coetzee, poking at the question from his own perspectives, settling on none of them but airing out all of them.

Appleton’s president, Garrard, sums up Elizabeth’s lecture and the discussion at dinner — “Much food for thought.” Coetzee’s little joke, I’m sure.

We get no resolution from the lectures and discussion. At least I don’t.

The text of Coetzee’s lecture/story/novel is followed by responses from invited speakers. These are “real” people, not conjured by Coetzee, but invited to comment on Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures. But they mirror the eminent thinkers of Appleton, gathered around the fictional lecturer. Some of them, especially Peter Singer the philosopher specializing in ethics and animal rights, are at a loss as to how to go about responding to lectures that aren’t lectures but fictions of other lectures (this whole thing is getting good).

One commentator, Marjorie Garber (a professor of English at Harvard), says that the comparison in Costello’s lecture between philosopher and poet “goes not to the advantage of the poet.” But my own reaction was on the side of the poet — cutting through the abstractions and the arguments to the heart of the matter, that direct, plain, feeling-infused experience of animals — the wonders, loves, horrors, . . . all of it, out of which some speaks to Costello’s disgust with how we treat animals. It also speaks to the fear of falling prey to the over-intellectualized life (which I may be practicing right now).

Different proposals for how to distinguish animal from human lives bubble up. Animals don’t think about or plan their futures. Or do they? How do we know? And in any case, is that sufficient to justify killing them (even painlessly) and eating them??

But unexamined, unassisted feelings and experiences are poor judges of morality — we can’t toss reflection and critical thinking out the window. That would open a lot of doors to ugly bias and prejudice (e.g., racism, homophobia, misogyny, . . . ).

The commentator that may have spoken most strongly to me was Barbara Smuts, a primatologist who has done field work with baboons, living with them, not just studying them. Correspondingly she emphasizes learning about animals by spending time with them and sharing a mutual world with them, as equals, not by just observing them.

Smuts is urging us to cross the line that Jane Goodall crossed when she gave names rather than numbers to the chimps she was studying, incurring the wrath of established research practice. It was more than a matter of giving the chimps names, it was methodological heresy. Goodall was learning about the chimps through intersubjectivity, not the objectivity that science prides itself on. And in doing that, she was bringing the two of us, humans and chimps, closer.

Many of us have some familiarity with what Smuts is talking about. We live with our pets -- I live with my dog. And in doing so, we break down the separation between us. I may be guilty of idealizing (or poetizing) a bit, but I don’t share my world with my dog, and he doesn’t share his with me. We live in a mutual world of our own making — an “intersubjective” world. A different way of “knowing.”

Once we cross that line, “animals” look very different to us. show less

I love Coetzee's writing and especially his character Elizabeth Costello, so re-reading her two lectures 'The Philosophers and Animals' and 'The Poets and Animals' was of course a pleasure. If I am not mistaken, this version has annotations which the original Elizabeth Costello book didn't have so it was good to go chase some links and discover even more on this topic.
I like the idea of a literary debate and all the commentaries are interesting. I particularly enjoyed the literary theorist Marjorie Garber's writing and of course Barbara Smuts' 'from the heart' experience of befriending animals.

Maybe the fourth star is for agreement, nothing else. The whole concept of giving this kind of lecture strikes me as wonderfully perverse, though, and the piece radiates a kind of intensity. Garber's claim that the subject here isn't simply interspecies relations seems on-point as well: beyond the commentary on the academic scene (the jousting at dinner, the university "types"—the rancorous, employmentally-challenged philosopher of mind, the well-meaning but ineffectual natural scientist...), questions of language and its capabilities, of sympathy and communication, even between humans, find cutting expression. "He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. 'There, there,' he whispers in her ear. 'There, there. It will soon be show more over.'" (The old woman out of place in both the family and the academy, a being unable to communicate with her son, the only consolation some vague "end"—yikes!)

(My clear lack of disinterestedness...)

Peter Singer's Peter Singer: "The value that is lost when something is emptied depends on what was there when it was full, and there is more to human existence than there is to bat existence." After all, humans can use human languages, plan for the future, manipulate complicated conceptual systems, in short, do the things that many humans do, and how could the existence of a being that can't do the things that many humans can be as valuable or rich as a human's?

Responses by Wendy Doniger and Barbara Smuts (especially the latter) strike me as well-written...

Costello's comparison between Ramanujan and Red Peter and Red Sally seems... well, unfortunate. show less

The audience of the 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton probably expected South African novelist Coetzee to deliver a pair of formal essays similar to those on censorship he presented in Giving Offence. Instead, he gave his listeners fiction: a philosophical narrative about an imaginary feminist novelist, Elizabeth Costello, and the lectures she reads at the fictional Appleton College on the subject of animal rights. Platonic in structure and coolly tight-lipped in style, Coetzee's two stories, "The Philosophers and the Animals" and "The Poets and the Animals," mirror the sometimes acrimonious exchanges in academic debate. While Coetzee is on Costello's side, he does not make her infallible; she is not only uncompromising and sometimes show more rude, but also an extremist in her antirationalism and an occasionally muddled reasoner. The Appleton professors score intellectual points off her even as she implores them to open their hearts to animals. Coetzee's fictional gambit makes it awkward for the real-life scholars who respond to him in the ultimate section of the book, "Reflections." The criticisms of literary critic Marjorie Garber, bioethicist Peter Singer, religious scholar Wendy Doniger and primatologist Barbara Smuts seem redundant after the overdetermined self-criticism of the novel.

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world.

Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority.

At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target.

Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play.

As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation. show less

I read this for my book club; I’m the one who suggested this book. I’d wanted to read it for many years. I had thought that it was a novel whose main character is an animal rights advocate. It’s not and for me that was a disappointment.

It’s mostly essays by other authors than the main author, referring back to Coetzee”s pieces: Amy Gutmann, Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, and Barbara Smuts. Except for Singer’s, which is a fiction piece, they’re basically non-fiction pieces.

The author’s portions are two fiction chapters/essays that make up one story. Short story? Novella? But not novel. They were written to be lectures. I’d say perhaps they’d be more interesting to listen to as lectures but I don’t show more think for me they would be any better than reading them as I did.

I found most of the book dry and even boring at times, and definitely not what I’d expected. Philosophizing via a fiction piece could be interesting. Maybe I’d have found it interesting in the 1970s or 1980s when I was starting to think about animal rights issues. Now, I mostly found most of it irritating. I like thinking about these issues, and discussing them, but how they were presented in this book is not my style, and usually not my current way of thinking either.

The writing is fine, and my amusement at the Singer piece and enjoyment of the Smuts piece, particularly when she is talking about her dog, make this book okay. So 2 stars it is.

Now I’ll have to read other reviews (and hope that my book club members like it better than I did) because I swear this book had high average ratings. Once again, could it be me, in this space and time?? Perhaps. If I’d known what it was before I started it, I might have enjoyed it more. Luckily, it’s short, and while the print is small, the contents are not as dense as I’d feared. It’s a quick read, just not a particularly fun one for me. Someone who read my library copy at some point (the book is old enough that it still has the attached slip where they used to stamp due dates) must have read it for school because there is a lot of underlining throughout the book. Kind of annoying, kind of interesting to see what someone else found important. show less

Really a short story with some commentary on the short story, Coetzee's work is still interesting and thought-provoking. The story is about a fictitious author asked to give a speech to a college audience on any subject she chooses to focus on. Naturally, it's assumed she would discuss her work. Instead, she discusses animal cruelty and issues. Complicating the matter, her adult son and daughter-in-law are members of the faculty for the host college and they don't agree with the stance.

It's worth a read if you're interested in questions regarding treatment of animals, or even just philosophical arguments.

Schrijfster Elisabeth Costello houdt gedurende twee lezingen over dierenrechten en vegetarisme aan de universiteit waar ook haar zoon en schoondochter doceren. Kafka ('Verslag voor een academie'), Rilke ('der Panther'), Hughes ('The Jaguar', 'Second Glance at a Jaguar') en hele reeks andere namen en werken komen daarbij ter sprake. Haar vegetarisme komt voor'uit een drang om haar ziel te redden. De standpunten van de spreekster maken het voor de zoon, maar vooral ook voor de schoondochter, tot een beproeving.