The Philosopher's Dog

Raimond Gaita

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315474755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this beautifully written book Raimond Gaita tells inspirational, poignant, sometimes funny but never sentimental stories of the dogs, cats and cockatoos that lived and died within his own family. He asks fascinating questions about animals: Is it wrong to attribute the concepts of love, devotion, loyalty, grief or friendship to them? Why do we care so much for some creatures but not for others? Why are we so concerned with proving that animals have minds?

Reflecting on these questions, and drawing on the ideas of Descartes, Wittgenstein and J.M. Coetzee, Gaita pleads that we ask ourselves what it means to be creatures of 'flesh and blood.' He discusses mortality and sexuality, the relations between storytelling, philosophy and science and the spiritual love of mountains.

An arresting and profound book, The Philosopher's Dog is a triumph of both storytelling and philosophy.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a substantial new introduction and afterword by the author.

Creatureliness

When I was a student I had three female cats who, on one occasion, fell pregnant at the same time. Suddenly there were fourteen kittens in the house that I shared with other students. Sadly, within less than a week cat flu reduced their number to one. I could not tell whether the surviving kitten was lucky or cursed to have three neurotic mother cats caring for her. Whenever she wanted to do anything—even just to walk down the passage—she had to run the gauntlet of their frustrated affection. The first mother licked her so hard that she was flattened to the floor. After she picked herself up, her fur matted and wet, she would be lucky to walk half a metre before the second and then the third mother cat did the same. Sometimes she was lucky to get away with just her triple-licking. At other times it started all over again with her first mother coming in again after the third had exhausted herself satisfying her maternal urges. By this time the kitten looked as though she had been thrown in a pool of sticky fluid. She was not in good humour about it.

The four of them slept in a cupboard under the stairs. One day a blind woman visited with her dog, Jedda, a wonderfully good-natured and well-disciplined labrador. The cupboard door was open. Trained though she was, Jedda could not resist sniffing around it to confirm her suspicion that she had smelled cats. Three cats in mid-air with their teeth bared and their claws out was the first I saw of the calamity to come. They had sprung as one from the dark at the back of the cupboard. The frustrated maternal instinct that showed itself in their unrelenting licking now showed itself more dramatically in the ferocity of their attack on the dog. Clearly they intended to do as much harm to her as they could. Poor Jedda had no chance. Perhaps it was what remained of her discipline that caused her to hesitate or perhaps she was too shocked to move. At any rate she stood at the cupboard door long enough for the cats to wound her badly. When she fled howling out of the house and down the street she left her owner shaken and spattered with blood. The cats went back to the cupboard, looking annoyed that I had not protected them from the need do this.

More than anything else, perhaps, the sight of animals with their mothers inspires in us the wonder—in some people the disgust—of seeing ourselves in animals and seeing them in ourselves. Often we describe what we see in common between human and animal mothers as the expression of a maternal instinct, but in our ordinary ways of speaking we do not, I suspect, attach technical significance to that expression. We mean nothing much more definite than that it belongs to their creaturely nature to do this. But when we come to reflect on what we mean, deep cultural pressures drive us to say that the behaviour and feelings we referred to as common to human and animal mothers are the effect of biological causes of the kind that evolutionary theory looks into. And that, as is well-known, has generated fierce controversies, driven by political as well as theoretical considerations, about the relative roles played by nature and nurture in the explanation of human behaviour.

Presupposed but hardly ever questioned in that debate is the belief that the sciences of nature would deepen our understanding of whatever we should assign to nature, and that the social sciences would deepen our understanding of whatever we should assign to nurture. That belief is not, of course, groundless, but I think that there is much less truth in it than was assumed and certainly much less than either group of scientists hoped to discover. Indeed, in my judgment, the narrowed sense of possibilities that are entailed by it distorted our understanding of our creatureliness and so we lost more than we gained.

In part that was because the ideological drive behind some of those discussions led the sciences, especially the more popularising evolutionary theorists, in stridently reductionist directions. Both sides had their reasons for wanting to demystify values that many people had taken to be sui generis, and to see them instead as serving biological or social functions. The aggressive vulgarity of Desmond Morris’s reminder that even astronauts have to piss is of a piece with the debunking spirit of his book The Naked Ape, common in the social-evolutionary literature of the time and since. This prophet from Regents Park Zoo in London undertook to rebuke us for taking ourselves and our cultural achievements too seriously and for forgetting that we are animals. The rhetorical point of much of the debunking was not merely to say that we are animals, some of whose behaviour can be explained by biological theories. It was to insist that we are animals in our essence.

Morris hoped to encourage us to embrace the fact that animality is at the heart of our human identity, but nothing in evolutionary theory can compel acceptance of what is animal in our nature. When Swift lamented, ‘Celia shits,’ he was not ignorant of the fact that she was obedient to a biological imperative and that she would die if she seriously resisted it. To tell him that the imperative is a fact of nature is like telling someone who visits his wife’s grave each day that there is no point in it because the dead are dead and do not appreciate that one goes to their grave even when it is cold and raining. Neither is so much the compelling basis for an attitude, as just the expression of an attitude. In the one case the person could reply that he knows that his wife is dead, for why else should he be visiting her grave? In the other Swift could say that he knows Celia must shit, that there are good biological reasons for it, but that it is disgusting nonetheless.

Swift’s visceral response was part of a larger web of meaning, just as disgust with sexuality was part of a view of the ‘flesh’—a concept for which few people can find a place any more, and those who do have often been compelled to acknowledge that the language which would reveal its use to be anything but morbid has gone dead on them. The plausibility for us of psychological theories that make disgust with the body look necessarily like a pathology depends, I think, on a radical rearrangement of the conceptual space in which we make meaning of the body, rather than on an allegedly neutral account of the facts of our psychological and biological nature that would underwrite that rearrangement.

Does evolutionary theory have much to teach us about our feelings and behaviour? Because we are an evolved species, it is tempting to think that it must have. But there is no must about it, I believe. The only sensible thing to do is to look to see what it has achieved, but, of course, one’s judgment of that will be a function of one’s sense of its task. A very thin conception of what altruism is will make even the behaviour of soldier ants look altruistic. Descriptions of what needs to be explained can be tailor-made to suit even the thinnest explanatory concepts available. Never mind the discussions, for hundreds of years, of what it means to love one’s neighbour. Those discussions, people like Morris think, are just the kind that need to be brought to earth by reminders about the biological necessities that operate even in astronauts. Or rather, to be fair, that’s what one half of him thinks. The other half contemplates with impressive humility the complexity of animal behaviour and the uncanniness of the recognition of how often what we do seems just like what they do.

As an example of what I have in mind when I criticise the reductionist tendencies in much social-evolutionary theory, take the concept of behaviour modification. It’s a good example because the concept straddles work in the biological sciences and in psychology. Does one understand better what one is doing, when one disciplines a child who selfishly makes family life impossible, by thinking that the child has behaviour problems and that one should try to find the best means to modify his behaviour?

Shall I punish him, bribe him, or ostracise him? Each of these descriptions refers not merely to an instrument which I might use to modify his behaviour, but to actions and what they can mean. Each implies a radically different relationship with the child, and the differences are in part moral. If I am his father I may have a right to punish him: if I am not, I may not. Either way, I would be likely to corrupt him if I bribed him, and I would corrupt his understanding of what he has done and the responses it may legitimately provoke if I encourage his brothers and sisters to ostracise him. And I would corrupt them too. These are, of course, moral considerations, but one should not think of them just as principles which would govern the choice of which behaviour modifying techniques I might deploy, thus leaving the concept of behaviour modification as the salient one with which to understand the task before me.

If, after reading an influential professor of educational theory, I decided to encourage his ostracism, someone might accuse me of having a corrupt and shallow understanding of family life. He might point out the baleful consequences for children of such ostracism, but to understand fully what it means to suffer those consequences and for a father to inflict them on his child, to understand the wrong as well as the harm I have done him, I must think in that realm of meaning where the content of what I consider will not be separable from its form. If the professor of education were to say that at bottom what I want is to modify his behaviour, I would deny it. What I want is for him to understand what he is doing and to understand what it means to other members of the family, to understand what obligations and what constraints his thoughtlessness imposes on me, his father. And more of course, but that is, I hope, enough to show that understanding proceeds in the direction of the particular, and by elaborating distinctions rather than blurring them. When it carries the connotations it possesses in ordinary English, the expression ‘behaviour modification’ implies manipulation, which is almost always unjust. When it tries to slough off those connotations, hoping to become a neutral term in a science of behaviour, hoping thereby to find in generality the deepened understanding that generality delivers in the hard sciences, then it impedes rather than advances understanding.

It is so with the understanding of people and also, I believe, with the understanding of animals. That is implied in the descriptions I have given of my relationships to animals and of what they do. It is why I endorsed and elaborated Vicki Hearne’s suggestion that disciplining a dog is ‘educating’ it ‘into citizenship’, a process which requires one to distinguish commands given with rightful authority from those that are not and both from force. That distinction requires a substantive concept of respect for the dog’s dignity, respect of the kind beautifully illustrated in Rush Rhees’ account of his failure to discipline his dog, Danny. It is the respect I implied when I said that we disciplined Gypsy to make her trustworthy rather than just predictable. Hearne says that trainers who are committed to behaviouristic theories of what they do succeed despite those theories rather than because of them. When training becomes more or less accurately describable in behaviouristic terms, then it brutalises the animal. To see that none of this need be sentimental I will quote Hearne quoting with approval the great animal trainer William Koehler on ‘humaniacs’ who are:

‘kindly’ people, most of whom take after a ‘kindly’ parent or an aunt ‘who had a dog that was almost human and understood every word that was said without being trained’ . . . They often operate individually but inflict their greatest cruelties when amalgamated into societies. They easily recognise each other by their smiles, which are as dried syrup on yesterday’s pancakes. Their most noticeable habits are wincing when dogs are effectively corrected and smiling approvingly when a dozen ineffective corrections seem only to fire a dog’s maniacal attempts to hurl his anatomy within reach of another dog that could maim him in one brief skirmish. Their common calls are: ‘I couldn’t do that—I couldn’t do that,’ and ‘Oh myyyy—oh myyyy.’ They have no mating call. This is easily understood.

My discussion of the concept of behaviour modification is not intended to prove anything. I offer it only to suggest, firstly, that much of our understanding of human and animal behaviour cannot without serious distortion be abstracted from the realm of meaning into an impersonal realm of factual/scientific inquiry, and, secondly, that understanding in the realm of meaning often proceeds by moving to more particular and discriminating descriptions than to more general ones as happens in the natural sciences.

To answer the question of whether social evolutionary theory has helped us to understand ourselves and our relations to animals and to nature more generally, it is worth carrying that suggestion into other examples. Will the concept of pair-bonding help us to understand what we have celebrated in fidelity or, for that matter, in certain forms of promiscuity? Will the concept of territorial instinct show us what love of country can be and enable us rightly to distinguish it from jingoism? Will evolutionary theories of altruism tell us even a little about the nature of compassion for the severely afflicted, of its purity when all traces of condescension are absent from it, or of its power to reveal the full humanity of those whose affliction has made their humanity invisible? In any of these examples, can it help us to distinguish the reality of the virtue from its many false semblances? When someone calls upon us to reflect on what we have done when we have betrayed a faithful partner, or supported murderous policies because of a jingoistic allegiance to country, or when we gave money to a homeless person with undisguised condescension, will we turn to evolutionary theory to help us to understand?

It is inconceivable to me that there should be support in evolutionary theory for Socrates’ claim that it is better to suffer evil than to do it. The Socratic ethic is an ethic of renunciation. It requires that we be prepared to renounce the only means to safeguard what is most precious to us and what we most deeply need if those means are evil. Socrates was told by almost everyone to whom he professed his ethic that he must be shameless to renounce not only the means to protect himself, but also the means to protect those who depend on him. Even if we do not agree with it, the Socratic ethic often shows itself in the ways dilemmas present to us. Our deliberation about the Socratic horn of those dilemmas will be unaffected by whether evolutionary theory speaks for or against it. If it speaks against—as in a way it has in the voice of Nietzsche—nothing compels us to take much notice. If it speaks for it, then it will always be for the wrong reasons. But in this matter acting for the right reasons, or perhaps better, in the right spirit, is of the essence.

Civilisation, said G. K. Chesterton, is suspended on a spider’s web of fine distinctions. The spider’s web is the realm of meaning. Debunkers of all kinds long to tear it down. When presented with many and fine distinctions they grow impatient. There are many reasons for this and they depend on intellectual and moral temperament as much as on more theoretical considerations. One important reason is that many debunkers—people for whom an impulse to reductionism is second nature—long for something robust and they believe they will have it if they can reduce things to a commonsensical social purpose or ground them in a theory of their universal biological origins. These are ‘at bottom’ type of aspirations—at bottom all human beings are the same, at bottom what is sensible in morality aims at the human good, and so on. That is why many people have turned to social-evolutionary theory in the hope of finding there a trans-cultural, universal ethic.

Many times in this book I have emphasised that the realm of meaning cannot be underwritten by reason, that it is not ‘part of the fabric of the universe’, not a solid part of nature that must be acknowledged by anyone who has a concern for truth and a capacity to find it. Nothing makes claims to meaning true or false in the way that the fact that it is raining makes true the assertion that it is. F. R. Leavis said that the form of a critical judgment of a poem or novel is, ‘It is so, isn’t it?’ and that the form of the response to it is, ‘Yes, but . . .’ It’s a fine way of characterising the essentially conversational nature of judgments in the realm of meaning, their objectivity as well as their necessary incompleteness. Always, it is assumed, the text would be before the conversationalists, and the never-ending ‘Yes but . . .’ requires that one remain open to it, in a responsiveness that is both vital and disciplined by the critical concepts constitutive of thought in the realm of meaning. That is why Leavis was right to resist philosophers who said that it should be possible, a priori, to list the criteria that distinguish good from bad critical responses. It is no different in life. We cannot tell in advance what is possible in the realms of meaning, because we cannot say what vital responsiveness, disciplined by and disciplining a language ‘used at full stretch’, will reveal to us.

The fineness of the web irritates some people. Its fragility unnerves them.

Attempts to explain and also to reconstruct our deepest values by looking to evolutionary theory belong to a family of ethical theories that assume that those values serve purposes. It is a natural thought, especially if one takes those values to be prescriptive in their essence, to guide conduct by means of rules or principles to the achievement of an assumed end—the human good, for example. Natural though that assumption is, there is a simple, and to my mind decisive, objection to it. Put in a slogan, it is that morality does not serve our purposes but is the judge of them. It ‘supervenes upon purpose as an additional principle of discrimination’ said the Welsh philosopher J. L. Stocks. If, for example, one’s purpose is to live with as little conflict as possible, then one will devise strategies for doing so. Which of these one chooses will in the first instance be determined by one’s assessment of their value in achieving one’s purpose. That—judging efficient means to ends—is the application of one principle of discrimination, the one that is part of the very concept of purpose. There will be others, but when they have had their say morality enters as judge. Some means are efficient but cruel; some are less efficient but bring additional pleasure in their train, which would be fine except that the pleasures may be corrupt. But in order to determine which means are decent to use one cannot look to the end which decency serves, for there is no such end. Were one to suggest, for example, that the essence of decency is to serve the end of social co-operation, then one will discover that it is decency—or more generally morality—that is the judge of which forms of social co-operation can decently be enjoyed And so it is with any end that morality is alleged to serve, be it individual flourishing or happiness, the collective good, or even the survival of the species—morality will judge which forms of them, and which means for their achievement, are acceptable to a decent conscience.

Reflecting on M will again be instructive, I hope. Evolutionary ethics can at best deal only with what M acknowledges as existing in common between her and the Vietnamese. She knows she belongs to the same species as they do, but that does not give her reason to find depth in what they do and suffer. The sense of common humanity from which she excludes them is constituted not by facts of a kind available to socio-biological inquiry, but by meaning, by what it means to have and to lose children, to love and to mourn someone faithfully.

‘Don’t you see what you are doing!’ M might say to someone whom she acknowledges as ‘one of us’ but who is superficial enough to try to have another child in just the spirit M attributes to the Vietnamese but finds impossible for herself. But in calling that woman to seriousness about what it means to be a mother who has lost a child, M would not remind her of the biological facts that she knows to be common between her and ‘her kind’ and the Vietnamese. And she would see no point in rebuking the Vietnamese because, unlike her white friend who is contingently shallow, they (she thinks) are intrinsically incapable of understanding how degrading it is to be someone who can ‘just have more’. Evolutionary theory may have something to say about why we are creatures who become attached to one another in ways that partially condition the kind of individuality that transcends the distinctions we make when we refer to people’s individuating features, but from M’s point of view that could not explain why we grieve, really grieve, whereas they ‘grieve’. Her sense of her difference from the Vietnamese, a sense that depends on her seeing them as being incapable of fully appreciating the kind of individuality that deepens her grief as for someone who is unique and irreplaceable, is a sense of difference that depends on what culture rather than biology has made of that individuality.

Even if it were true, therefore, that one could derive simply from consideration of w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION
• Friends and Companions
• For a Dog?
• The Philosopher’s Dog
• Sitting on Her Mat Gazing Out to Sea
• Gypsy Is Old Now
• The Honour of Corpses
• The Realm of Meaning
• Stories, Philosophy and Science
• ‘Poor Living Thing’
• Sacred Places
• Arrogance?
• Creatureliness
• Human Beings and Animals
• AFTERWORD FOR THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION