What is it to be in disgrace? I am going to take J. M. Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures, The Lives of Animals (Coetzee, 1999a, henceforth Lives) as a protest against the rationalist tradition by which we judge actions right or wrong, and persons good or bad in accordance with rules which both give order to society and frame our conception of the world in general. The rules, appealing to our "rational" side, set us apart from animals, which are seemingly beyond the horizon of our active moral sympathy. Less obviously but equally important, there is tied into this the concomitant attitude of dominance and control in general over nature, over others. It is this that throws a blanket of suspicion over the whole approach of the rationalist moral tradition.

Many have taken Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (published in the same year as The Lives of Animals) as simply an overly pessimistic account of post-Apartheid South Africa. But I will try to show that each book can illumine the other, and together throw light on our question. Disgrace, I will argue, only makes sense against the background of a sense of the value of all life, human and animal, as living lives on their own terms. In abstracting from this dimension, I argue, the rationalist tradition would be correctly censured.

In the first part of this paper I introduce Coetzee’s argument (or rather the argument of his protagonist Costello, in the dramatic dialogue form of the book) that it is the animal living a life of value on its own terms that is a proper object of our moral respect. At the same time I deal with the first of the two objections to this idea, namely the question of the very possibility of intelligent empathy with non-human animals. In the second part I deal with Coetzee’s critique of the rationalist tradition in general. Finally, I ask in what exactly consists the ethical significance of empathy with animals, bringing in the underlying moral journey undertaken by the central character in the novel Disgrace. I argue that only if such empathy is, indeed, warranted and called forth by the kind of connectedness we have to all living creatures, could rules of moral behaviour be objectively binding on the free conscience. For only then could the latter express the modalities of our participation in an order of which we are a part and in which we find our deepest selves. Inadequate development of this capacity for empathy (a mark of our own society) would constitute an undesirable state of being cut off from the springs of truly human and communal life, and would, therefore, be an issue of central importance in ethics.

Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee’s protagonist, speaks of :

the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean. (Lives, 35)

 

Coetzee appeals to the natural life of the animal. He imagines the situation of the psychologist Wolfgang Koehler’s captured Tenerife ape, Sultan. Koehler was studying ape mentality. Can the ape make the connections between the stick thrown into the cage and the inadequate length of his arm to reach the bananas just outside the bars. Coetzee points out that the situation of being caged, without food, is however much more likely to give rise to the thoughts, Why is he starving me? Where has he gone, since I can still smell him? This, however, is the "wrong" thought; the "right" one is, How do I use the stick to get the bananas?

In his deepest being Sultan is not interested in the banana problem. Only the experimenter’s single-minded regimentation forces him to concentrate on it. The question that truly occupies him, as it occupies the rat and the cat and every other animal trapped in the hell of the laboratory or the zoo, is: Where is home, and how do I get there? (Lives, 30)

 

The life as revealed here as deeply part of the creature is of value in itself, and it is a conscious or ‘felt’ life.

The ethical implications of this are worth noting. In the Cartesian framework there can be no truck with the idea that that one can approach value through understanding and affirming the natural life of the animal (without this implying reductionism). There, consciousness (and hence value, the determinations of the free conscience) is cut off from and opposed to ‘nature’. Thus humans (defined by thinking, cogitation) are cut off from non-human animals. This brings us to the first objection to Coetzee’s approach, namely the Cartesian strictures on any attempt to describe the conscious life of the animal.

Coetzee/Costello mentions the behaviourist taboo on considering the subjective mental states of animals, and refers to Thomas Nagel’s celebrated article, "What it’s Like to Be a Bat?" (Nagel, 1979) For Nagel, we cannot get any closer to knowing what it is like, because we cannot imagine ourselves into a bat-like existence. We do not have the sense equipment to do so. Coetzee disagrees. We can and do imagine ourselves into any number of situations in which our sense-experience is not fully shared. Coetzee/Costello appeals to the reception of his novels. We praise his fiction partly because we judge it to have captured the reality of a certain person – say, a woman. Coetzee’s argument here appeals to a performative self-contradiction in those who evidently see themselves as appreciating fiction judged "good", namely those who invited Coetzee/Costello to give the lectures on values. It would not, however, seem to apply to those who have no such pretensions. We need, therefore, to give an argument in more general terms.

Nagel adverts to the Cartesian appeal to the experience of subjectivity, and in particular to the sheer reality of having conscious experience. His argument is that our conscious experience, our experience of ‘what it’s like’ (i.e. to me) has an ineluctably subjective character, which cannot be captured by physical descriptions of the phenomenon. You can give a scientific, objective, account of the bat’s visual mechanism, but this will not capture what it’s like to live in a bat-like way. "It is unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of the experience by leaving behind the particularity of its point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could only imagine what it was like to be that organism."(Nagel, 1979a:174) "Facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism," says Nagel, "are accessible only from one point of view".(1979a:172) Now while it is true that we do experience a reality circumscribed by the sense-capacities unique to our species, still, I will now argue, this is just one patterning of experience among others. It cannot be identified with ‘subjectivity’ since we can also have the subjective experience of coming to an objective understanding of things, for example when we affirm our understanding of something as probably true (we are not saying it is probably true to us, but really so). Let me explain what I mean here.

It is common to refer to intentional actions as "mental events", suggesting that they are simply there, as "physical events" are. This, however, is misleading in the case mentioned above, namely, the experienced fact of sometimes actively ‘standing by’ certain standards of reasonableness as apt for the purposes of considering rival claims to truth. In taking responsibility for one’s own contribution to the common growth of knowledge and understanding, one is becoming more present to oneself as being under certain normative demands – basically, to make something of one’s intelligence. Nagel’s example is, therefore, a special case of conscious experience, not definitive of it.

The key to my argument lies in the notion of "patterns of experience", which I take from the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan, and which enables us to account for the data brought forward by Nagel, while not giving the impression that such experience exists alongside physical reality. What Nagel understands as the ineluctably subjective character of experience, Lonergan describes in terms of the idea of the biological pattern of experience which is characterized by extroversion, knowing through sense and imagination.(1970:181-184) Various patternings of our experience can be distinguished, according to how we are intentionally oriented.

But the dichotomy is not however of relevance to another patterning of experience, the intellectual, which aims at another kind of knowing, through experiencing, intelligent understanding and finally passing a reflective judgment on the adequacy or otherwise of one’s grasp of the subject at hand. In the latter case, "sensible", "realistic" concerns of the biological organism are put aside in favour of the exigencies of the enquiring mind. "Objectivity" now comes to mean the goal of dealing with (raising and answering) all the questions relevant to the question posed to the understanding, and is not ineluctably contrasted with subjectivity.

Talk about "what it’s like for . . ." does, indeed, make sense (can aim at objectivity) and is important. Sympathetic understanding of non-human animals (the same would apply for women understanding men, or vice-versa) is possible – of course this is a matter of degree.

The second main point of contention in Coetzee’s approach centres on the problem of rational criticism of the tradition of rational criticism. Coetzee/Costello points out that reason only operates in conditions of some basic agreements about value or "what makes sense".

Discussion is possible only when there is common ground. When opponents are at loggerheads, we say: Let them reason together, and by reasoning clarify what their differences are, and thus inch closer. They may seem to share nothing else, but at least they share reason. (Lives, 66)

 

But, Costello argues, certain notions of what is reason would seem to so misrepresentative of what gives dignity to the person, that it will not be worthwhile engaging in discussion. He is thinking of the long tradition – he says it goes back through Descartes to Aquinas and to the Stoics and Aristotle – in which "reason" is opposed to "nature", cutting us off from the animal kingdom. We can see this illustrated in the contemporary social sciences, very largely premised on a procedural notion of reason, and very often an attendant physicalist, and reductionist, picture of reality. The whole domain of our values, commitments and concerns, whereby we are connected to society and to nature, is, since it is seen as ineluctably experiential and subjective, unable to get a foothold in the academic enterprise. As Coetzee says, "reason" seems a vast tautology: accept its premises (the Cartesian dichotomy) and the conclusion follows (value is co-extensive with human self-consciousness or rationality). But Coetzee suggests taking this concept of reason as applicable only to narrowly defined purposes within the range of uses of human thought. Reason is, then, simply "one tendency in human thought . . . the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking." (Lives, 23) Disengagement, a dimension of reasoning, has its place only within the framework of the subject first engaging themself in the task at hand. And this brings to the fore the role of our emotional development, our capacity for empathy.

Coetzee suggests, then, that human thought should more properly be understood in the context of our fundamental human capacity for sympathy, its prime use being to help the heart. So, the question should not be, as with Nagel, do we have something in common with other animals – reason, self-consciousness, a soul (Nagel suggests we don’t have enough of these in common). Rather, the question should be: How would it be were I in their place? This is a shift in orientation from a purely theoretical standpoint for discussion, to a practically oriented one. And the latter question challenges us subjectively, i.e. challenges our habitual value-orientation. To refuse the question is to close one’s heart:

The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object, the ‘another,’ as we see at once when we think of the object not as a bat (‘Can I share the being of a bat?’) but as another human being. There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it. (Lives, 34-35)

 

A book which illuminates much of what Coetzee is saying is Mary Midgley’s Beast And Man (1995). She refers to her own respect for the "great Western tradition" of using reason, but remarks that what needs investigating is, rather, the conditions that need to obtain if reason is to operate at all – and that much of this can be discerned from a sympathetic study of animals. (1995: 253-254) Midgley wants to argue that rationality "includes a definite structure of preferences, a priority system based on feeling." (1995: 256) And that kind of structure is found in the higher animals, too. Appreciating our own nature is one with appreciating the life of animals.

Reason, in the philosophic tradition she and Coetzee are criticizing, has been sharply opposed to feeling or desire.

This has determined the attitude of most respectable philosophers to the related subjects of animals and human feelings. They have usually just dismissed animal activities from all comparison with human ones, on the general ground that, in man, decision is a formal, rational process, while animals have only feeling, which is a kind of wholly contingent slop or flow, bare matter without form, so that its analysis cannot concern philosophy. (Midgley, 1995: 256-7)

 

"In fact," continues Midgley, "it can be our duty to feel in one way rather than another – something for which the tradition has little room. (Criticism of ‘the undeveloped heart’ is moral criticism.)" (1995: 259) So some preferences are more rational than others. "Rationality includes having the right priorities."

Midgley notes the influence on the rationalist tradition of the perceived need, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, to counter nature worship. She refers (1995: 18, n.) to the detailed study of this attitude by John Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1971). Kant, too, she argues, in saying that only rational beings could evoke in us a necessary feeling of respect, was misled here by the Christian tradition. Respect for life in general, says Midgley, is not simply an inclination but "a feeling that we must not destroy certain things" (1995: 218). She continues,

Christianity, anxious to destroy primitive paganism, had made great efforts to exclude plants and animals from the area proper to such feeling by positive propaganda. (1995: 219)

 

Kant was thinking within this Stoic and Christian tradition when he made it a positive duty for man to recognize his superiority over and lack of indebtedness to nature. "As the singular being on earth that possesses understanding, he is certainly titular lord of nature." (in Midgley, 1995: 219) "If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind." (in Midgley, 1995: 221)

At any rate, the higher animals also have a structure, the mark of our true humanity, of deep, lasting preferences. Both Midgley and Coetzee/Costello point out that Descartes had no access to the ethological studies, so revealing in this regard, of Jane Goodall, Konrad Lorenz, and so on. (Midgley, 1995: 231-232)

So what is the structure of human nature, and the place of feeling in it? Midgley quotes Bishop Butler, who refers to "the whole system, as I may speak, of affections, including rationality, which constitute the Heart". Reason as growing out of and completing a natural balance of parts. (Midgley, 1995: 260-1)

Coetzee now applies this critique of the rationalist tradition to the philosophy of ecology. Ecology managers, he argues, have their mind on the system of interactions of which the individual creature is the earthly, material embodiment:

An ecological philosophy that tells us to live side by side with other creatures justifies itself by appealing to an idea, an idea of a higher order than any living creature. An idea, finally – and this is the crushing twist to the irony – which no creature except Man is capable of comprehending. (Lives, 54)

 

‘Reason’, he seems to be suggesting, is biased towards a kind of reductionism, whose aim is the uncovering of the forces which operate in a mechanistic way, and which is, therefore, incapable of appreciating the actual being of the animal itself.

Again in a discussion parallel to that of Midgley, Coetzee/Costello refers to Jonathon Swift’s satire, Gulliver’s Travels. If humans are more than Yahoos, they are not quite Houyhnhnms – neither beast nor god. If the horse stands for reason, Coetzee argues, then man stands for physical (one cannot say ‘brute’) force. This capacity for control by force both gives him his cosmic status but also brings a curse down upon him.(58)

What is meant here? To be cursed is to have one’s efforts, whatever they may be, all come to nothing. Coetzee is suggesting that our power of intelligence is circumscribed by our whole value orientation. Growth in understanding cannot simply be generated by an act of will, but depends on habits of interaction with others, habits formed through the influence of others, by the extent to which one is "connected in". The "control" attitude can work to one’s own disadvantage.

There is, then, a reason to be critical of the dominant intellectual tradition of reason. In modern epistemology, the kind of analysis suggested above is being systematically suppressed. In his critical attitude towards "reason", Coetzee is drawing upon a line of thought well known as far back as Nietzsche and the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer and Adorno point to the connections between an exploitative attitude to nature and the more general devaluing of human life, beginning with women:

For rational beings . . . to feel concern about an irrational creature is a futile occupation. Western civilization has left this to women. Women have no personal part in the efficiency on which this civilization is based. It is man who has to go out into an unfriendly world, who has to struggle and produce. Woman is not a being in her own right, a subject. . . . She became the embodiment of the biological function, the image of nature, the subjugation of which constituted that civilization’s title to fame. For millennia men dreamed of acquiring absolute mastery over nature, . . . Where the mastery of nature is the true goal, biological inferiority remains a glaring stigma, the weakness imprinted by nature as a key stimulus to aggression. (1972: 247-8)

 

I want to suggest here that the possibility of the rules of moral behaviour having an objectively binding force on us is intimately bound up with the fact of our connectedness to all living creatures in a way that warrants and calls forth our recognition and our empathy. This is not, except obliquely, at issue in The Lives of Animals. However, both Coetzee and Midgley point to the fact that the loss of empathy with the natural lives of animals, and, in the case of Midgley, also with the tendencies of our own nature as shared with the animal kingdom, does have an impact on our capacity to be moral. Coetzee suggests (and Costello argues) that empathy – for animals or else for fellow humans – is indivisible. Midgley points out that demonizing the beast without is connected to demonizing the beast within, which sets up an effective obstacle to moral learning. It is our bestial tendencies that make up an integral part of our shared reality, defining our needs and providing the foundation for our recognition of value in itself – simply there, to be recognized and followed.

The plot of the novel, Disgrace, now well-known, revolves around the fall from respectability of Professor David Lurie at the Cape Technical University, formerly University of Cape Town, as a result of his ill-considered affair with a student, and his subsequent stay with his daughter on her small-holding in the Eastern Cape. As mentioned above, many people have found the novel overly pessimistic, in particular the rape of the central character’s daughter, her acceptance that there is really no recourse to justice, and the connivance of her "co-proprietor", a new black farmer, in the deed; likewise the pathetic attempts at doing something for the neglected, abandoned dogs in the area, David Lurie assisting first to euthenize them and then to transport them to the incinerator.

This is a dysfunctional and immoral society. What propels Professor Lurie into the journey he undertakes in the book is the self-righteous Disciplinary Committee of the university who want him to make a show of contrition and public confession of the wrongness of his action. In the refusal of the central character to connive at this hypocritical pretence, couched in the religious language that still haunts the edges of our society, there are hints of something beyond. In this refusal to conform to the good person as delineated by "rational moral norms", we have a link with the critique of Professor Costello in The Lives of Animals.

The humanisation of South African society is a theme that pervades the narrative and seems linked to the deeply humanist approach in Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures on Values. Is there a link? I asked the author earlier this year. He refused to be drawn out, but did say that the evocative cover photograph on the novel, of an abandoned, malnourished dog set against the backdrop of a bleak landscape indicating human neglect or decay, was chosen by the publishers, not himself.

David Lurie does not deny the wrongness of his actions. But the university Disciplinary Committee wants more, an expression of contrition, and he objects. "To a secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular appeal," he explains. Again this is a comment on the lack of grounding, in contemporary culture, for the genuine inner goodness which the Disciplinary Committee is purporting to hold forth as a model. Is Lurie really ‘in disgrace’ or simply shocking the Mother Grundy feminist activists of the university? He stands, he says, "for the rights of desire. For the god who makes even the small bird quiver." What must he confess?

The Australian professor Costello has, I am told, resurfaced more recently at a public lecture of Coetzee’s – "The Future of Humanism" – at the University of Cape Town, with this time, a sister who has been for many years a religious at Marianhill near Durban: the plot thickens! Marianhill is the Benedictine establishment, representing the premodern world, challenging the technocratic, instrumental rationality of modernity, the reasoning of "control".

The person to whom David Lurie has given his unconditional love is his daughter. But he has difficulty communicating with her. She becomes pregnant as a result of the rape and decides to keep the child, an act, as they say in the bleak corridors of the liberal, individualistic ethics of our Western tradition, of supererogation. "I am determined to be a good mother, David. A good mother and a good person. . . .You should try to be one too." "A good person. Not a bad resolution, in dark times." And it is only when he faces the fact that he really doesn’t understand her – and so also his own deepest longings – can he begin to grow. The growth process is not part of the plot. What is in the plot is the disturbing feeling that one cannot but pose this kind of question as to the possible reality of an overarching norm unifying one’s desires.

Right to the end it is largely the Cartesian self, cut off from his feelings, that is the narrative voice, resisting learning ("I am not a child."), but playing imaginatively with the idea of ‘being disgraced’ – as he repeats to Bev Shaw, and to the Isaacs family in George. I take it that the work with stray, abandoned dogs is pivotal in the book. David Lurie helps in the clinic each Sunday to euthanize the dogs, but his own special job is to transport the corpses in their black bags to the incinerator. This service, if one wants to call it that, Lurie does, he says, "for himself. For his idea of the world." (Disgrace, 146) It is probably best termed "sacramental", that is to say, a symbolic action which is also intended to bring about or effect what it symbolizes.

The person he is helping is Bev Shaw. She is upholding standards of a decent life, without sentimentality; these dogs by no fault of their own do not make the grade. She accepts that, for now, society has that limited, dysfunctional, aspect to it. She is saying, "At least let us prevent cruelty, that would be going too far." Standards of behaviour, in this conception, refer to more than just our particular rules for living together – Lurie’s world is one in which our well-being and the well-being of all living creatures are intertwined, person and world falling under one ultimate standard. A good person, then, is one who fills the need that is simply there. In saying, "No, not this", David Lurie is having his emotional strings retuned to this conception.

In the classical premodern tradition it is our nature as rational that founds morality. What is suggested by the writers discussed here, however, is rather the reverse: it is because we are morally – virtuously, intelligently, compassionately – connected to what is of value in itself – for ourselves, for others – that our rationality is possible. Recognizing common objective standards of enquiry for the exercise of our capacity for intelligence – what we understand by rationality – is part and parcel of such recognition of standards for behaviour in general. So we do not have to connect moral value with our difference from non-human animals, with our rationality understood as the capacity for detachment. This reified notion of a special place for man in the hierarchy of the universe is what is objected to in the contemporary philosophy represented by Midgley and Costello. We can now see how a slightly different foundation for objective moral standards can be given, in which the idea is that it is, as we have been arguing, precisely our capacity for sympathy, for feeling with other living creatures – not for rationality – that lies the foundation of the moral dimension of our lives. Here it is the givenness of the natural universe that generates moral imperatives. Indeed working sympathetically with animals could be part of this recapturing of that connectedness (with what is truly of value, for humans, for animals), and, conversely, it would be entailed by the acceptance of the objectively binding nature of moral rules.

Because we are inter-dependent, "value" takes on the meaning of not simply what is chosen, but also what is there by nature (we can’t just get away with anything). The recognition of what is by nature of value can lead, over time, to a common agreement on common values, giving an objectively binding force – in general – to rules of moral behaviour.

Coetzee, J.M. 1999a The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Coetzee, J. M. 1999b Disgrace. London: Secker and Warburg.

Horkheimer, M. and T. Adorno [1944] 1972 Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. J. Cumming. London: Allen Lane.

Lonergan, B.[1957] 1970 Insight. A Study Of Human Understanding. 3rd Ed. New York: Philosophical Library.

Midgley, M. 1995 Beast and Man. Revised Edition. London: Routledge.

Nagel, T. 1979a "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" in Nagel, Mortal Questions. Cambridge: CUP:165-180.

Nagel, T. 1979b "Subjective and Objective," in Nagel, Mortal Questions. Cambridge: CUP:196-214.