Philosophy and Animal Life Book

Philosophy and Animal Life is a volume of essays which, along with Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal, continues the rich critical reflection on J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and on the peculiar depths and surface of its protagonist, Elizabeth Costello.

The core of this volume is Cora Diamond's studied and abundant The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy. Diamond begins with a descriptive account of a poem by Ted Hughes, "Six Young Men", wherein the speaker describes a photo of six smiling young men seated in a familiar spot. "He [the speaker] knows the bank covered with bilberries, the tree and the old wall in the photo: the six men in the picture would have heard the valley below them sounding with rushing water, just as it still does. [...] The men are profoundly, fully alive, one bashfully lowering his eyes, one chewing a piece of grass, one 'is ridiculous with cocky pride'." A photograph from 1914, of six young men, smiling, who, six months from when the picture was taken, were all dead. "In the photograph, then, there can also be thought the death of these men: the worst 'flash and rending' of war falling onto these smiles now forty years rotted and gone." Diamond says, after quoting the final stanza, "What interests me there is the experience of the mind's not being able to encompass something which it encounters." This coming apart of our everyday thinking, which Diamond illuminates in great detail, is what she finds in Coetzee's lectures and in the experience of Elizabeth Costello. This is the difficulty of reality with which Diamond is concerned. Then, drawing on the theme of deflection in the work of Stanley Cavell, Diamond questions what philosophy can say of these experiences. Unfortunately, what philosophy can and does do too often, as perhaps is best seen in Singer's response to Coetzee, is to deflect from these difficulties into an abstract philosophical problem in the vicinity. That is, as in Cavell's original use in his discussion of scepticism, philosophers will re-say the problem in terms of an abstract philosophical game of tokens and thus deflect from the real. But can philosophy practice itself without deflection?

Stanley Cavell's own contribution, Companionable Thinking, of which I'll say little only so as not to reduce it, is both a commendation and a criticism of Diamond's essay, but it is also a continuation of his engagement with Emerson, Wittgenstein, scepticism, and perfectionism.

John McDowell responds to Cavell's criticisms of Diamond's essay with a commentary of his own, characteristically singular and sharp, that engages with his own writings on Wittgenstein and "seeing aspects". He (McDowell) rehearses his own peculiar methods of resolution, which come through in performance not by way of unfolding new and grand systems in place of the old, but by attention to the delicate and the situation of obstacles that still, and have stilled, our flow of thought. According to McDowell, Cavell, in his own obtrusive way, "does not do justice to the wonderful way Diamond has found to throw light on Cavellian themes".

Cary Wolfe's Exposures, which introduces the volume, reads for closeness and situates the live work of Cavell and Diamond in the context of treatments of the human and the animal in a broader picture, while taking from the more conspicuously philosophical elements under consideration to draw comparisons between Diamond and Derrida - comparisons that work, rather than to disown or disparage one or the other, more to bring out their strange affinities .

Finally, Ian Hacking's Deflections is a roaming piece of commentary, decidedly more literary than philosophical and yet argumentative at its own pace, on all that came before it. "Roaming" is the word I use, because Hacking moves so swiftly and unsteadily from here to there. And yet, his vision is never hazy after a jump. He focuses, illuminates something the foregoing authors had missed in each other, and re-says in order to be faithful to them. He seems to capture, in his somewhat deliberate performance, the ordinary that had gone out of the world.