le goff 2 rational animal

8/14/2019 Le Goff 2 Rational Animal

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Anne Le Goff

The Human Being as a Rational Animal1

Abstract. What is it to live a human life? I confront John McDowells suggestion

that it is to live the life of a rational animal with two literary texts. These texts

exemplify what Cora Diamond called a difficulty of reality. In such situations, we

lose our grip on reality. These cases provide important insight into what our accepted

and taken-for-granted relation to reality is. If our relation to reality is partly linguistic

and rational, as McDowell claims, I argue that he does not properly take into account

the animal side of our lives. Diamond, on the contrary, brings to light the complexity

of a life that is both rational and animal.

Animals and Rational Animals

In J.M. Coetzees story The Lives of Animals,2the main character Elizabeth

Costello is invited to give a lecture at the University where her son is employed. The

lecture is on our ill-treatment of animals in food industry. Costellos way of tackling

the issue is disconcerting and embarrassing to her audience. Her question is not only

the classical philosophical question of what animals are and whether, consequently,

we should grant them rights or not. She also questions what it is to be a human

animal. Her subject is the lives of animals in general. It shakes the impenetrable

border between human beings and animals set by philosophy on the criterion of

1

This article was published in French in the academic review Corridor, June 2010.2Coetzee, J.M., The Lives of Animals. The story was republished as chapters 3 and 4 ofElizabeth

Costello, 2003, New York: Viking.


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reason. Her audience does not see her point, as the hostile reaction of her daughter-

in-law, Norma, a philosopher of mind, shows particularly clearly. Norma thus says:

To say that rational accounts are merely a consequence of the structure of the human

mind . is shallow relativism that impresses freshmen.. Reason provides us with

real knowledge of the real world. (47) Her husband John tries to understand his

mothers point of view: Still isnt there a position outside from which our doing our

thinking and then sending out a Mars probe looks a lot like a squirrel doing its

thinking and then dashing out and then snatching a nut? Isnt that perhaps what she

meant? (48) Norma and John re-enact classical parts in an ancient debate about the

nature of reason and the specificity of human beings amongst animals. To Norma,

this obvious difference is enough to set the whole debate: they only live, we can think.

There is something deeply dissatisfying in this traditional rationalist view. John

voices it: the primacy we grant reason obscures our closeness to animals, or to some

animals at least. The question of animals brings us back to ourselves: what kind of

animals are we?

The classical answer to this question is that we are rationalanimals. It raises

but another question of how to understand this phrase. John McDowell takes over

this idea in a novel way and gives it a key role in its philosophy.3 He introduces it as

the answer to a difficulty in modern thought: modern science has led to a coming

apart of nature and reason. Reason as a source of norms is not accountable on the

criteria of natural science and it has become mysterious. According to McDowell, we

need to recapture the Aristotelian idea that a normal mature being is a rational

animal, but without losing the Kantian idea that reason operates freely in its own

sphere. (1996: 85) We need to see that reason is a second nature for human

3 Especially inMind and World, where he introduces it (Lecture IV).


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beings, that it is our way of being animal.

This conception of reason is extremely stimulating. It raises however more

questions than McDowell suggests. McDowell presents the idea of the rational

animal as something obvious, namely the fact that through education we are led from

a merely animal life to a rational life, and thus are genuinely natural and rational. But

the idea of a rational animal is actually an overly ambitious term and ultimately

difficult to conceptualize. For we need to be able to conceive of human life as both

rational and animal in a non-trivial sense. Is a rational animal an animal in the same

sense than other animals? McDowell does not seem to see a problem here and he

does not explore the tensions rising from the combination of the two ideas. I will

argue that the value in the idea of rational animal precisely lies in the tensions it

contains. Contrary to the appeased interpretation given by McDowell, the idea

reveals the complexity of our form of life. A reflection by Cora Diamond brings to

light this complexity through a phenomenon she calls the difficulty of reality.4

She

identifies this special sort of difficulty through various examples. Among them, I will

look at a poem by Ted Hughes, Six Young Men, and the above mentioned story by

Coetzee, The Lives of Animals. These cases exemplify a special type of difficulty,

where our whole grip on reality is jeopardized. In the story, Costello suffers in her

own flesh from the death and suffering we inflict animals we eat. As she says, there

are moments she is the knowledge of their death, and that knowledge is of her own

death also. In the poem by Hughes, we look at the impossible experience of death

through a photograph depicting six young men full of life and dead six month later.

In such experiences, Diamond says, we take something in reality to be resistant to

our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability. (45-46) These extreme

4 Diamond, C., The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy inPhilosophy and

Animal Life, Wolfe, C. & Hacking, I. (ed.)


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reported experiences will illuminate in a negative light our usual and taken-for-

granted relation to reality and way of being in the world.

McDowell also comments on this text by Diamond.5 He draws a completely

different picture of the kind of life we live, as rational animals. I will first explore

McDowell's suggestion that our way of being animal is to be linguistic and rational.

Such a view is faithful to part of our life, but I will argue that it is only partial.

Diamond, on the other hand, takes into account that in the cases of elusive reality the

suffering is double. As both examples insist, it is bodily (Costello and the poet suffer

in their own flesh) as well as linguistic and rational (language fails them).

Life in language

McDowell defends a conception of reasons and meaning assui generis, i.e. as

exemplifying a kind of normativity that cannot be reduced to anything else. It seems

that, in this view, the human being can be said to be an animal a rational animal

(as he says in Mind and World) or a speaking animal (as he says in the text on

Diamond) only in a trivial sense. For to become rational is precisely for human

beings to rise above the animal realm. They are no longer animals. If we take the

animal or natural part seriously, as McDowell acknowledges we should, the human

being as a rational animal seems to be torn between two realms that cannot be

reconciled. The threat is that an animal endowed with reason would be

metaphysically split. (1996: 108) Yet, the contradiction is only apparent. As

McDowell explains inMind and World, it comes from the conception of nature as the

realm of the scientific causality. In this conception, reason strictly speaking cannot be

5 McDowell, J., On Cavells Companionable Thinking inPhilosophy and Animal Life. Though

McDowell primarily comments on Cavells text about Diamond, he directly refers to her article.


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part of nature. However, this restricted concept of nature is a historical definition

given by modern science and it is not be conceptually mandatory. We need not

restrict our concept of nature to it. Because the human newborn is an animal, it does

not follow that her nature is integrally biological. Just as the young bird cannot fly

just after breaking from its shell, the human being cannot think just after being born.

But both may possess these capacities as potentialities that will be later developed by

the appropriate training. Our Bildung6 [i.e. our education] actualizes some of the

potentialities we are born with; we do not have to suppose it introduces a non-animal

ingredient into our constitution. (1996: 88) If we resist identifying nature to physical

nature, there is no reason for us to refuse that human nature is both rational and

biological. Reason, inasmuch as it needs to be actualized, is second nature to the

human being.

As McDowell makes clear, all animals and not only human beings possess a

second nature consisting in acquired abilities.7

Human beings second nature is

special as it is of a different kind than their biological first nature. Thanks to their

second nature, human beings access the space of reasons and meaning. Language is

their way of existing, just as the beavers own way of existing is to live in a semi-

aquatic environment where among other things it builds dams. McDowell himself

offers this analogy (2008: 134). It is all the more surprising that everywhere else he

insists on the radical difference between human life and all other forms of animal life.

For once, he uses the analogy to underscore their closeness, and he chooses for that

purpose a sophisticated animal technique. His point is not to claim that the beaver is

like the human being. Quite the opposite, it is to show that the human being is like

6 McDowell employs the German word for education,Bildung, for it has a larger extension (it

means education, but also formation and culture) and is a reference to German XIXth centuryphilosophy.

7 Responses in Willaschek, 98.


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the beaver, namely that she is also part of nature and inhabits the world in a specific

way. This human way of inhabiting the world is language. The beaver acquires

certain practices and abilities in response to the demands of its environment and in

interaction with its congeners. In the same way, the human (rational) environment

(with fellow humans) exerts a determining influence on the childs development. The

human being finds the institution of language in the world she was born in. She

learns how to use the concepts contained in language. At the same time that the child

learns how to behave in this world, she learns how to talk and think. The point of

analogy needs to be carefully dissected: the analogy shows that it is as natural (in the

full sense of the term) for the human being to talk and think as it is for the beaver to

build dams. It does not show that reason or linguistic capacities are of the same

natureas the beavers dam-building abilities. The beaver is an animal adapted to its

environment; the dam-building technique aims to provide a solution to a precise issue.

Language is a fully different ability that lets us access a fully different space, the

space of reasons or meaning. Human beings differ from other animals because their

Bildung, instead of giving them control over their environment, opens the world to

them.

The examples identified by Diamond as difficulties of reality also bring to

view, in a negative light, that language and reason are our second nature. While the

person in the poem looks at the photograph, while Costello feels the animals

suffering, their ordinary sense of reality enters into a crisis. Its very failure makes

visible their usual relation to reality. In such cases, according to McDowell,

something we encounter defeats our ordinary capacity to get our minds around

reality, that is, our capacity to capture reality in language. (2008: 134) Language


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fails us. On the photograph, the men we can see are young and full of life, they are

the very image of life. Yet, we know that all of them are dead six months later, that at

the time of the photograph, they were already on their way to death. We are

confronted by the contradiction of death at the core of life, one of the many

contradictory permanent horrors evoked by the poet. We are not able to account for

it, and we cannot even give an expression for it in our language. What we experience

is not a defect of language that can be curedby making up a neologism to name

something that had no name before; we experience the limits of language. The mind

is no longer able to grasp reality, which suddenly is revealed as alien. The mind faces

its own finiteness. To regard this photograph might well dement, says the poet, that

is literally take one's mind away, drive one mad. Moreover, the absence of words

causes a suffering. The person who looks at the photograph is not a sheltered

spectator looking at the photograph from a distance in space and in time. He feels

emptied from his own life. He is questioned in his very existence. For language is

not for us an accessory property. It is at the core of what it is to be human. As

McDowell puts it, we are speaking animals, animals who can make sense of things in

the way the capacity to speak enables us. (2008: 134) Our way of being in the

world, of leading an animal existence, is linguistic and rational. If this capacity fails

us, our very existence as human beings is jeopardized.

Costellos example might be the best illustration for this ordinary relation to

the world in language. This is exactly what she lost. This shows clearly in the

dialogue with her son at the very end of the text. To her son who says he has not had

time to make sense why [she] ha[s] become so intense about the animal business,

Costello replies:


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A better explanation. is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I think of

the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the

ground like King Midas. (69)

Her familiar words, her life-long allies, have become outrageous, unrecognizable.

What she sees and tells is the horrible way we daily treat our fellow creatures (as

Diamond comments). But obviously no one else understands the words she

pronounces: she does not speak the same language as the others. Her own son does

not understand her in this last discussion as his choice of neutral words such as the

animal business proves. They do not talk about the same thing. As Costello loses

common language, the world collapses for us the only world possible, the one of

the shared meaning. She faces a difficulty of reality that dislodges [her] from

comfortably inhabiting [her] nature as speaking anima[l], (2008: 134) McDowell

comments. This is all the more true of she who is an aged writer: her familiar world

is language. Her words obviously do not say what she means and she cannot trust

them anymore. Costello, dislodged from her home, is unhinged,8says McDowell.

(2008: 136) She literally is like a door out of her hinges and lying on the ground. In

this word there is also the Wittgensteinian concept of hinge propositions. 9 Hinge

propositions are the certainties around which all our other beliefs revolve, precisely

because they remain fixed and never questioned. Costello's most intimate certainties

collapse as she witnesses a crime of stupefying proportions (69) being committed

with everyone else's agreement. All that is left to her is to note with despair: I no

longer know where I am. (69)

8 Diamond first uses the term about Hughes poem, 58.

9 See Wittgenstein, L., On certainty, 341-346; 150-153.


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Irreducible Animality

To say that we are rational animals means that at the core of our contingent,

animal existence there is language. Far from being an additional activity that would

come on top of our animal existence, exercises of spontaneity belong to our mode of

living (1996: 78), as McDowell puts it. However, McDowell tends to go beyond this

fruitful thesis to claim that exercises of spontaneity make upour mode of living. To

be sure, reason and language are a key element in any human life. Yet, to identify our

specific mode of living and our possessing language is very questionable. It leads

McDowell to overlook some elements in the examples analyzed by Diamond. He is

mistaken on the real nature of the difficulty, and, by way of consequence, on what our

way of being in the world really is. McDowell brings all reality on the side of

language. Are we only hurt in our being linguistic?

Let us come back to the examples. In the case of the photograph as well as

Costellos, the difficulty faced is not only intellectual but it is also a real physical

experience in the flesh and spirit of the person. McDowell agrees to a point, when he

writes:

For Costello, it becomes a problem to live her particular case of the lives of animals: a life in

which words are not just a distinguishing mark, as they are for human animals in general, but

the central element. Her being as the animal she is, which is her bodily being, becomes a

wound. (2008: 134)

On the face of it, McDowell agrees with Diamond: Costello does not only suffer for

the animals but also herself as an animal. But what does the wound consist of

according to him? The wound is inflicted to her as a speaking being, and all the more

severe for Costello who is a writer, the most extreme form of the speaking animal. It

is because the wound affects her at the core that her being as a whole is affected. In


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McDowells reading, it is only because she also is an animal that Costello

consequently and secondly is hit in her body and life.

This is not what Coetzees text says. Costellos wound is not a consequence

of her linguistic incapacity. The wound is double-sided: it encompasses our whole

being in the world, both as bodily and linguistic, our life. As Diamond remarks,

Elizabeth Costello suffers as a wounded animalherself. She describes herself as an

animal exhibiting but not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound. (47) The

texts repeatedly lays bare her animality and her wound. For instance, the initial

description of her only mentions her being fleshy and white-haired (16). The text

shows us a woman who looks more and more fragile as the story goes, the woman

with the haunted mind and the raw nerves (Diamond: 48). In the end, she cannot but

collapse in tears. To be sure, part of her suffering is her inability to find herself in

language. But this inability is inseparable from her vulnerability as an animal. A

strong moment in her lecture is when she says:

From instants at a time, I know what it is to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It fills me

with terror; I shy away from it, I refuse to entertain it. The knowledge we have is not

abstract: All humans are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortalbut embodied.

(32)

Even though words are lacking her, she has a knowledge and a particularly clear one.

It has the devastating clarity of pain. It is too hard to examine it by thought, our

words are weak; but we can undergo itmore exactly, we cannot help undergoing it.

Ted Hughespoem voices the same idea. It closes on these lines:

To regard this photograph might well dement,

Such contradictory permanent horrors here


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Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out

One's own body from its instant and heat.

McDowells comment on it is ambiguous. He remarks that in cases of difficulty of

reality, the special kind of animal life we lead comes into question, the life of

speaking animals. (2008: 134) Just after that, he mentions Hughes' last two lines

without commenting on them. Yet, they should precisely lead him to modify or

relativize the definition he gave of the human being. They show the weight of our

being a body, of our animality. We are a mind, a mind that might well vanish, as

the word dement suggests in an etymological and clinical sense. The mind, just like

the verb dement standing at the end of the line, stands on the verge of nothingness

and is threatened to fall any moment. But the mind does not pull along the body in its

fall: it is rather in one single move that these horrors throw us out of our mind and

body. The concrete meaning of the word shoulder out makes clear the materiality

of the process. We are thrown out of our own life, that is, as the last lines of the poem

resonate with the t-alliteration, out of its instant and heat. A time-limited existence

and animal heat, the life of the animal organism, is also what we are. McDowell, on

the contrary, gives excessive weight to the term contradictory. The logical,

intellectual, contradiction is only one side of the problem. Such a contradiction is also

a horror: it provokes an animal, visceral reaction in us. The problem of meaning has

its root in the problem of life. By looking at the photograph, we understand

something and it cast a chill on us, in the proper sense. Moreover, these difficulties

are not rare and unexpected hazards: they are constants in our existence (such

contradictory permanent horrors here). McDowell does not take up the adjective

permanent when quoting this line. Yet, it is essential: these horrors are part of our

reality. We are constantly confronted by them in an irreducible here, and yet we


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cannot make sense of them. These contradictions are by no means accidents at the

surface of language, they are at the core of our existence as rational animals.

Philosophy and Poetry

The idea of the rational animal opens rich perspectives to escape an abstract

conception of reason. But McDowell, in advocating it, is blind to the complexity of

human life. He exemplifies what Diamond describes as deflection.10 To be

deflected consists in moving from the appreciation, or attempt at appreciation, of a

difficulty of reality to a philosophical or moral problem apparently in the vicinity.

(Diamond: 72) McDowell seems to view the cases of difficulty of reality as mere

accidents in an otherwise smooth relation to reality. For, as he writes in Mind and

World, we are at home in the world and the layout of reality is open to us by our

accessing the space of reasons. The cases of difficulties of reality seem to be, in his

interpretation, quite circumscribed to the unhinged Costello and to the extreme

horror of the first World War. In these abnormal cases, people encounter a difficulty

with what is at the core unproblematic. He does not acknowledge that these cases

actually reveal something that is widespread and characteristic of way of being in the

world.

His deflection is to mak[e] our own bodies mere facts. (Diamond: 59)

Diamond remarks this is a typical assertion among philosophers. It is certainly true of

McDowells conception of the human being. He defines our nature as speaking

animals. (2008: 134) Where we are at home is, according to him, in the space of

reasons. (1996: 125,passim) Our body is a non essential and peripheral fact. On the

10She borrows (2008: 56 ff.) the concept from Stanley Cavell (1969: 247, 260).


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contrary, Diamond explains that Coetzees lectures ask us to inhabit a body. (59)

Poets and writers show us that we are bodies. Our body is one (not the only one) of

the places where the never-ending debate between the animal and its world is at play.

If life and death of animals can unhinge our reason, it is not as facts that will be

judged relevant or not, but as presences one cannot escape. It should be

emphasized, as it is by Diamond, how much this coming apart of thought and reality

belongs to flesh and blood. (78) The difficulty is that the awareness we have of

being a living body, being alive to the world, carries with it exposure to the bodily

sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share

with them. (Diamond, 74) Exposure is another of Cavell's concepts (1979: 433,

439) used by Diamond. To be exposed means that my assurance in applying the

concept isn't provided for me.(Diamond: 71). This idea that we are in a situation of

exposure flies in the face of McDowells concept of being at home in reality. We

have no assurance on reality. It can surprise us, disconcert us. We are always at risk

to lose our (bodily as well as linguistic) grip on the world.

One can object that this exposure is limited to a few pathological cases, cases

where we are exposed to our death and our relation to reality collapses. Yet, other

types of difficulties of reality confirm that it is a deep feature in our life. The

difficulties of reality are not necessarily threats on us. They can also be cases of

extreme goodness or beauty, as Diamond quickly shows by a few examples. It is

wholly inexplicable that it should be; and yet it is. (60) Another word for it is the

sublime. According to Kant (2007), the sublime is of two kinds, mathematical and

dynamic. In the first case, like the Egyptian pyramids or the starry sky above us, we

cannot grasp the immensity of it. In the second case, for example if we stand in the

midst of a tempest while still being protected, the sublime is terrifying and wonderful


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at the same time. We think it and feel it (in our heart-beats) at the same time. In

contemplating the sublime, our imagination reaches its limits, and we draw from it a

mixture of pain and satisfaction. The human being discovers her finitude, but also the

infinity beyond her.

The awareness of our exposure is as over-acute in Costello as it is buried in

other people. Diamond and the poets she brings show us our exposure, as other poets

or painters depict it through the feeling of the sublime. Though mind is unable to

fully grasp the contradictory reality it confronts, it is not completely impossible to tell

it. This is exactly what the poets do, Coetzee-Costello or Hughes: they show it,

without pretending to solve it. They alone let us see head-on these difficulties

philosophy risks to ignore.


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References:

Cavell, Stanley. 1969, Knowing and Acknowledging. InMust We Mean

What We Say?, New York, Scribner's, pp. 238-66.

1979, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and

Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

2008. Companionable Thinking. In Hacking, Ian, Wolfe, Cary (ed.).

Philosophy and Animal Life, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 91-126.

Coetzee, John Maxwell. 1999. The Lives of Animals, ed. A. Gutmann

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2003.Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking.

Diamond, Cora. 2008. The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of

Philosophy. In Philosophy and Animal Life, pp. 43-89.

Kant, Immanuel. 2007. The Critique of Judgment, trans. J.C. Meredith & N.

Walker, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hughes, Ted, Six Young Men. 1957. The Hawk in the Rain, London: Faber

& Faber.

McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World, Cambridge (MA): Harvard

University Press.

2000. Responses. In Willaschek, M. (ed.),Reason and Nature, Mnchen:

Lit. Verlag, pp. 91-114.

2008. On Cavell's Companionable Thinking. In Philosophy and

Animal Life, pp. 127-138.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On certainty, trans. D. Paul & G.E.M.

Anscombe, New York: Harper.

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