The Beautiful Animal

Sincerity, Charm, and the Fossilised Dialectic

Michael Lewis

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786607560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Can philosophy conceive of a perfect animal? Can it think of the animal as anything other than an imperfect human? The book attempts to rethink the Hegelian dialectic so as to render it capable of assigning a proper place to the animal, and in particular the beautiful animal, and to rework the philosophy of nature so as to encompass the fossil. The fossil itself teaches philosophy and in particular the dialectic how it must modify itself in order to encompass the beautiful animal, in the form of what we term the fossilised dialectic, resistant to the spiritualisation which will always leave the animal behind.
If philosophy can admit the animal in this way, we might then ask what philosophy can learn from this animal that will have taken up residence in its home? What does a specifically domestic animal teach us? At the very least, it shows us that the function we give to the furnishings of the house is not the only one and perhaps therefore that there is no single unique function. In this way, animals teach us the most philosophical lesson there is: to see the world as it is in itself.

Chapter One

The Animal’s Sincerity: Wittgenstein, Levinas, Lacan

Sincerity: Wittgenstein, Levinas, Lacan

The charming is an experience which, on our account, links man and animal together in a new way; but before we can consider charm itself we need first to clarify that quality which we find charming: the animal’s sincerity. When we try to speak of such a thing philosophically, we immediately encounter an obstacle: the animal has been said by the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Lacan not to be sincere.

a) Wittgenstein

For Wittgenstein, it is a question of the correct use of language: we cannot be described as ‘sincere’ if we do not also have the capacity to be insincere: ‘A child has much to learn before it can pretend. (A dog cannot be a hypocrite, but neither can he be sincere [Ein Hund kann nicht heucheln, aber er kann auch nicht aufrichtig sein])’ (Wittgenstein 1999 [1953], 229).1 One must be capable of shuttling between both poles of a dichotomy in order for the ascription of either quality to make sense. An opposite is formed by the negation of that which it opposes: if the negation is to be genuinely informative then the negated must be a state in which the entity could potentially find itself. To describe a stone as ‘immortal’, we are told, is senseless because rock cannot under any circumstance die. Because an animal cannot be ‘hypocritical’ — deceptive or insincere — it becomes illegitimate to describe the lack of that insincerity as ‘sincerity’.

b) Levinas

That much we might have granted, but then Levinas opens up a way beyond the Wittgensteinian position. He does this by locating a moment of sincerity prior to the opposition between insincerity and sincerity in their usual senses.

For Levinas, to be sincere is to respond immediately, without the slightest ambiguity or indirection, to an appeal from another entity, or to make such an appeal. This would be a sincerity that precedes any determinate use of language, any proposition or word actually enunciated, which Levinas calls ‘the Said’ (le Dit) — the realm of language or the ‘signifier’. His concern is a more original sincerity, essentially earlier than the oppositions which structure the Said and hence more primitive than the opposition between sincerity and insincerity upon which Wittgenstein considered the attribution of either to depend. This would be a sincerity which reflexively indicates the very fact that something is being said (by us, here and now, in response to the presence of another), or that the entity facing us is capable of speaking, without our having translated this speaking or Say-ing (Dire) into some particular proposition that is said (dit).

Sincerity is a saying without a said, a Dire without a Dit, a speech (parole) in some way prior to language (langue) and all of its oppositions. It is the address that we make to the Other (Autrui) whom we encounter, in the merest pre-linguistic gestures that acknowledge their presence and humanity, the fact that we respond to another ‘speaking animal’, irrespective of what might eventually be said. Sincerity is an entirely straightforward welcoming of the other that cannot but remain utterly frank, even if our actual words are ultimately hypocritical or insincere.

According to Paul Davies, one of the most insightful commentators on the notion of sincerity,2

Levinas does, it seems, want to suggest that being sincere is not simply one type of linguistic behaviour among myriad others. The uttered (said) ‘Yes’ and ‘Hello’, once learnt, do not bring affirming and greeting into the language, nor do they only denote mastery of the language games of affirming and greeting, thereby adding to the stock of games at the speaker’s disposal [contra Wittgenstein]. Rather, in Levinas’s hands, they tell us about all language, any language game whatsoever. They provide (phenomenological) insight into what it is for there to be any said at all. ‘Sincerity’ is, perhaps, Levinas’s last word on what he calls the saying of the said, the saying of all the — de jure and de facto — systematisable, theorisable and describable saids. It permits us to speak of the sincerity of the always unsaid ‘yes’ or ‘hello’ presupposed in everything that is said. The subject thought in relation to the saying, and exposed as this relation, cannot avoid a sincerity that makes of every said, however violent or thoughtless, a bearer of the trace of its saying, a sign of the giving of signs. (Davies 2002, 163)

And yet, for the animal? Even in this sense, beyond Wittgenstein’s ken, sincerity as the enunciation of speech in its very taking place, prior to the assertion of any determinate proposition, remains beyond the animal. It is as if the beast’s vocal signals were restricted to a fixed and finite code, a determinate set of quasi-propositions emitted mechanically in response to a stimulus. The animal’s squeaks and chitters would always lack the infinite expressive range of the human voice which is somehow related to its reflexive ability to curve back upon itself and express the pure and unlimited potential to say, the signifiance prior to signification: ‘the philosophical thematising of signification [such as Wittgenstein seems to propose] is derived from [i.e., is derivative of] a thought of signification in its signifiance, its signifyingness — otherwise said, its sincerity’ (Davies 2002, 164).

The animal can never merely and sincerely welcome the Other and thus falls short of the most elementary gesture of ethics; it can react, but never truly respond. The latter is reserved for human beings alone.

And yet, despite the appearance of a rather traditional anthropocentrism on Levinas’s part, about which Derrida, among others, has expressed reservations, the most fundamental thrust of Levinas’s discourse is perhaps pushing in the opposite direction. Levinas has removed sincerity from the realm of language proper, which is to say from the province traditionally reserved for human beings — the house of language from which Wittgenstein’s dog was shut out. This opens up the possibility of assigning the sincerity of a spontaneous welcome not just to humans, caught up in the web of oppositions that constitutes language, but also to animals. And sure enough, a great advocate of both Levinas and dogs, John Llewelyn, has attempted to chart this very route, with and beyond Levinas himself.

Llewelyn on Levinas and animal sincerity

In The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience, in a chapter titled, ‘Who Is My Neighbour?’, Llewelyn ascribes to Levinas, at least temporarily and hypothetically, a position quite on a par with Jeremy Bentham’s when it comes to the animal’s right not to suffer through human instrumentalisation and whim, to the point of comparing animal slaughter with genocide:3 ‘he [Levinas] all but proposes an analogy between the unspeakable human holocaust and the unspoken animal one’ (Llewelyn 1991, 50).

Let us, then, introduce Levinas’s most renowned animal: a dog, Bobby by name, of whom Llewelyn and, in turn, Derrida, will speak, with the aim of demonstrating the presence in Levinas of something which he himself never fully develops: the animal’s sincerity understood as an ethical welcoming of the Other. The dog’s textual home is ‘The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights’ (1975) from Difficult Freedom, and apart from the question of vegetarianism and the killing of living things, the precise problem addressed by the text is whether the animal must be confined to such a home.

Bobby, the literal dog

In an interpretation of a verse from Exodus (22:31), regarding the eating of animal flesh — in the King James edition, ‘And ye shall be holy men unto me: neither shall ye eat any flesh that is torn of beasts in the field; ye shall cast it to the dogs’ — Levinas investigates the tenuous possibility of understanding a figure from a biblical text in a literal fashion, free of ‘theology’ (DF, 151/214) and ‘allegories’ (DF, 152/214). A literal, straightforward which is perhaps to say a sincere reading. Not unlike ourselves, Levinas appears to be engaged in a pursuit which is attempting to live up to the sincerity of its quarry.

In any case, this figure is a dog. The importance of the arduous nature of the journey from the metaphoric to the literal, as well as the ultimate impassibility of the path, will steadily become apparent, but if there is one definite conclusion to be drawn from this attempt, it is that dignity and a certain sincerity can — for Levinas — be attributed to animals only in an analogical sense, however doggedly one might probe the limits of these notions.

And yet Levinas initially asserts quite forcefully — though in whose voice is as yet unclear — that the dog is here being spoken of in a literal fashion, and not as a metaphor for anything else: ‘this biblical text, troubled by parables, here challenges the metaphor: in Exodus 22:31, the dog is a dog [A locution we shall encounter elsewhere, as if the animal encouraged it. The dog referred to here is the beast unholy enough to be a carnivore]. Literally a dog!’ (DF, 152/214).

Levinas goes on to state that ‘[h]igh hermeneutics’, with its ‘word-for-word’ approach, will uncover another invocation of the canine, in Exodus 11:7, where ‘forgotten dogs’ lie, Egyptian dogs which fall silent in honour of Jewish slaves, once subhuman, now freed and restored to their humanity. ‘But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast: that ye may know how that the LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel’. These apparently more analogical dogs, in recognising the humanity of the human, show themselves to be capable of ethical behaviour or at least teach us a lesson regarding what it means to be human (DF, 152/214–15).

According to a venerable Hegelian tradition, to be free one must be recognised as free by another who is as free as we are (but who therefore stands as much in need of recognition as we do). Is the animal’s recognition worth as much as a human’s recognition? Does this recognition amount to anything more than a metaphorical anthropomorphisation, read into the dogs’ behaviour in order t...