Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 4/7)

IV.

The doctrine of the rectification of names is present in a germinal state in the Analects. When Confucius is asked what should be the first priority of the sovereign, he replies, “Without question it would be to insure that names are used properly [必也正名乎]” (13.3). Here and in Confucius’s own analysis that follows, the care of language (as the exclusive prerogative of the state) is explicitly linked to social order. Xunzi will later systematize the rectification of names into a fully functioning etiology and cosmology:

Nowadays, the sage-kings have passed away, and the preservation of these names has become lax. Strange words have arisen, the names and their corresponding objects are disordered, and the forms of right and wrong are unclear. As a result, even officers who diligently preserve the proper models and scholars who diligently recite the proper order for things are also all thrown into chaos. If there arose a true king, he would surely follow the old names in some cases and create new names in other cases. Thus, one must examine the reason for having names, the proper means for distinguishing like and unlike, and the essential points in establishing names.[i] 

In this formulation, the emphasis switches from the knowledge and care of correct names, which has already been explicitly tied to the state and ruler in the Analects, to the act and privilege of naming itself, now envisioned by Xunzi as the originary function of sovereign power. This means that through the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names, “the animal,” because it remains unconstructed ontologically, is poised to become a kind of lacuna from which the construction of sovereign power is achieved through a systematized epistemology of relation.[ii]

Though Mengzi is less rigorous in argumentation than Xunzi, he often addresses the same or similar themes and topics in his collection. In one passage which is sometimes referenced in support of the ethical treatment of animals,[iii] Mengzi speaks with a king who saves an ox from slaughter by substituting a sheep for a particular ritual, having accidently seen the ox on the way to sacrifice and feeling compassion for it. While the king’s subjects misinterpret this action as “stingy,” Mengzi correctly deduces the deeper meaning behind the act and addresses the ruler candidly: “As for the relation of gentlemen [君子] to birds and beasts, if they see them living, they cannot bear to see them die. If they hear their cries, they cannot bear to eat their flesh. Hence, gentlemen keep their distance from the kitchen” (Mengzi 1A7).

Bai Tongdong summarizes what he takes to be the lesson of this passage: “For the Confucian, human beings should be compassionate about animals not because animals can reason or converse, not because they can suffer, and not because they treat each other humanely, but rather because we human beings perceive their sufferings….”[iv] While I generally agree with Bai’s surface reading, I would add that the passage also reveals a circular movement within Mengzi’s ethics that demands closer attention: The paradox is that the king’s “humanity” toward animals proves his innate humaneness (“humanity” is dependent on human-animal relation), yet humaneness must be afforded first to human beings rather than animals (“humanity” is only properly activated through human-human relation). In addition, the same methodology that connects language to reality, which by Mengzi’s time would have been codified, is again at play, for it is, after all, the “gentleman,” the junzi, to whom this statement exclusively applies; “humaneness” as such is only possessed by those within the proper social category (the implication being that whoever works in the kitchen or slaughter house is not a “gentleman” and is therefore exempt from any feeling of ethical responsibility toward the animal).

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[i] Xunzi, trans. by Eric L. Hutton, in Readings in Chinese Philosophy, 293.

[ii] For a concrete discussion of this process, see the second chapter of Sterckx, “Animals and Officers,” 45-68.

[iii] See, for instance, Bai Tongdong, “The Price of Serving Meat—On Confucius’s and Mencius’s Views of Human and Animal Rights,” Asian Philosophy 19.1 (2009).

[iv] Ibid., 94.

Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 3/7)

III.

A short, well-known text written by Gongsun Longzi, “On the White Horse,” provides an illustration of this aporia by logically demonstrating that a white horse is not (the equivalent of) a horse. Gongsun writes, “‘Horse’ is that by means of which one names the shape. ‘White’ is that by means of which one names the color. What names the color is not what names the shape. Hence, I say that a white horse is not a horse.”[i] Though playful, this text must be understood as more than a mere word game. Gongsun’s discourse problematizes the equivalence of the horse as a relational category with the horse as an ontological singularity by posing the descriptor “white” in opposition to the biological existence of the horse.

In what follows, I will use the linguistic problematic posed by Gongsun as an indirect point of departure with which to examine subsequent Confucian and Daoist discourse. Gongsun’s purely linguistic construction of language exposes the conceit of the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names, which proposes an originary relation that triangulates signification, reality, and sovereign power. Conversely, Zhuangzi develops and radicalizes Gongsun’s insights into language in a project that has profound ramifications for the relation of humans to animals.[ii] This will lead to a concluding discussion of these philosophical perspectives as they relate to (and might inform) the contemporary discussion of human-animal relation and the notion of “animal rights” more generally.

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[i] Gongsun Longzi, “On the White Horse,” trans. by Bryan W. Van Norden, in Readings in Chinese Philosophy, ed. by Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 364.

[ii] Zhuangzi seems to explicitly reference “On the White Horse” in the second chapter: “To use a horse to show that a horse is not a horse is not as good as using something other than a horse [非馬, literally “non-horse”] to show that a horse is not a horse” (The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. by Martin Palmer [New York: Penguin, 1996], 13).

Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 2/7)

II.

The question of the animal has been taken up by various scholars and philosophers in recent years, and some of the insights of these thinkers are important as intellectual background for the present study. I would like to single out the contributions of two major continental philosophers, Giorgio Agamben and the late Jacques Derrida, who have written and spoken on the subject in the last ten years. In the playful The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida takes as his starting point the sense of shame (and “shame at being ashamed”[i]) at being seen (and “having been seen seen”[ii]) naked by his own cat and asks, “Can one speak of the animal? Can one approach the animal? Can one from the vantage of the animal see oneself being looked at naked? From the vantage of the animal before evil [le mall] and before all ills [les maux]?”[iii]

Derrida arrives at a conclusion congruous to that of Agamben, who argues in The Open: Man and Animal that one must “let [the animal] be outside of being.”[iv] In other words, one must avoid founding any relational epistemology in an ontology of animalness, since animalness, by its very definition, points to a place beyond the reach of Being. Agamben continues, “Insofar as the animal knows neither beings nor nonbeings, neither open nor closed, it is outside of being; it is outside in an exteriority more external than any open and inside in an intimacy more internal than any closedness.”[v] For both Agamben and Derrida, the animal is construed as an “other” so absolute that, by virtue of its radical alterity, it must be elevated to some sort of ethical status; paradoxically, it is the fragility of the biological boundary that separates human from animal that becomes essential to the human’s ethical responsibility to let the animal be.

One shortcoming of the two recent monographs by Agamben and Derrida is that they approach the question of “the animal” with exclusive reference to European conceptualizations of nature, even though the ultimate goal of these thinkers has been to overturn such conceptualizations. These thinkers implicitly code the problematic of human-animal relation as a specifically “Western” problematic and consequently overlook the various ways other cultures have constructed the distinction between humans and animals. For the present study, it is important to realize that biological and/or philosophical distinctions between humans and animals as such need to be reconsidered in the context of classical China, in which such distinctions were differently configured in philosophy and politics.

In the only book-length academic work of which I am aware that brings the insights of animal studies to bear on the question of the animal in pre-modern China, Roel Sterckx argues, “[T]he classical Chinese perception of the world did not insist on clear categorical or ontological boundaries between animals, human beings, and other creatures such as ghosts or spirits…Consequently the animal world, in several ways, provided normative models and signs for the guidance of human society,” which were in turn interpreted by the “human sage” or “ruler-king.”[vi] Therefore, animals were less often the objects of proto-scientific inquiry and were more often “subjected to predominantly cultural and social classifications” that emphasized change and transformation.[vii] This clearly indicates that in Chinese philosophy and politics there was little or no sense of a prediscursive ontology of “the animal” in the singular tense.

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[i] Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. by Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 21.

[ii] Ibid., 13; emphasis original.

[iii] Ibid., 21.

[iv] Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. by Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 91; emphasis original.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Roel Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 5. Though I do not believe that this cultural difference in perception can be reduced to linguistic difference, language is an obvious point of departure between European and Asian contexts and must be considered for the role it plays in constructing social perceptions. Since, as Sterckx points out, “the notion of definition itself needs to be qualified in the Chinese context” (20), I am obliged to note that no single Chinese sign refers to the animal—there are, in fact, several words that can refer to animals or “beasts” generally, though these words usually function polysemantically and can thus simultaneously refer to specific groups or types of animals. For an excellent discussion of the problem of definitions in Chinese in relation to the question of the animal, see Sterckx, 16-21.

[vii] Ibid., 6.

Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 1/7)

[Full title: Lo(o)sing “the Animal”: Classical Chinese Philosophical Literature and Contemporary Discussion]

I.

This essay investigates the integral role of the animal in two contexts: the classical context of Chinese philosophical literature, in which the animal often functions as a site for the (de)construction of relational epistemologies, and the present context of the globalization of animal welfare initiatives and activism, in which the animal often functions as an object of debate in discussions about rights.

For the animal to become the singular point of transaction that yokes these two contexts together, the displacement of each context by the other is essential. Therefore, classical Chinese philosophy can inform contemporary debates about human-animal relation, while the basic issues and terms of contemporary debates can guide a contemporary reading of classical Chinese philosophy. This displacement will, I hope, open up for investigation paths and ways of understanding that have, until now, been inaccessible or obscured by the sedimentation of juridical and implicitly imperialistic frameworks evoked by such notions as “animal rights.” My final goal in bringing these seemingly unrelated contexts into conversation with one another is to establish the necessary ethical center for a new politics of human-animal relation, a center that I argue is present in an emergent form in the Zhuangzi.

Some further reflections on Caputo’s On Religion

The guiding question of Caputo’s book, “What do I love when I love my God,” is complicated for several reasons, the least of which is not Caputo’s insistence that religious truth is a kind of “truth without knowledge” (111); in other words, the entire concept of a final, definite answer based on a concrete set of propositions and/or suppositions needs to be qualified.

“God,” it turns out, is approachable from many (one might even say infinite) perspectives (112), and, from the de-capitalized postmodern perspective, no one method of approach can be considered “Really Real” (126). Therefore, just as Derrida argued that “justice” is not deconstructable, Caputo, who himself equates God with justice (138), argues that what we call “God” or “the love of God” is not deconstructable (113). To put it differently, Caputo’s question is, at his own insistence, impossible to answer as it is phrased. Caputo would rather see the interrogative pronoun shift from “What” to “How” (134), which would allow “justice” to become a verb rather than a noun, and “God” to become another word for an enacted responsibility toward others rather than a misunderstood artifact of religious belief.

As Caputo writes, “We do not know who we are…and that is who we are” (128). Following this statement, Caputo’s answer to the question that haunts and guides his entire book seems to be, “We do not know what we love when we love our God, and that is what we love.”

However, this radical unknowability necessarily places Caputo and his postmodern faith at odds with fundamentalism. For Caputo, the various global fundamentalist movements (Protestant, Catholic, Islamic, etc.) are paradoxical reactions to a radically decentered, technologized world. Fundamentalist movements utilize the very technologies and apparatuses of media(tion) that they condemn in order to sustain their ideologies and disseminate their messages; therefore, Caputo argues, it is inevitable that fundamentalisms meet some sort of “explosive” end (106). The faith of the postmodern subject, meanwhile, presents itself vaguely as a “truth without Knowledge” (115) that takes as its starting point the undecidability of metaphysical questions and consequently revels in the hyper-reality of not knowing who one is or (in) what one believes (127).

Through Caputo’s writing style is, as always, engaging, I find that Caputo’s a/theological analysis confuses the real issue here. Caputo’s analysis might have been more relevant and clear had he situated both the various fundamentalisms and postmodernisms as symptoms of the socio-economic processes of late capitalism, as many Marxist scholars have done. Though Caputo would likely shrug this suggestion off as resorting uncritically to a base/superstructure metanarrative, it is clear without reference to any sort of historical teleology that world capitalism represents the fundamental problem faced by the contemporary ethical subject.

The way Caputo constructs the two phenomena reveals that, in a way, fundamentalism and postmodernism are not altogether distinct since they both respond directly to “the abyss within” (108). It is ironic, then, that Caputo, for whom all choices conceal a false binary, can sincerely choose postmodern faith and ask his readers to follow suit. Does not Caputo’s postmodern insistence that objective truth is impossible have the capacity to become just as dogmatic and harmful to a possible future as the fundamentalist’s strongly-gripped Bible? Caputo, in his mocking analysis of fundamentalism and earnest appeal for a postmodern faith, certainly shows that it can be just as normative and judgmental!

Can Caputo’s postmodern faith lead to an ethical life, that is (to use Spinoza’s definition of ethics), a happy life? This question seems the most pertinent. Caputo’s collapse of all motivating utopias or possibilities of collective action into “undecidability” has the troubling capacity to pave the way for the unabated continuance of state power and world capitalism. In the final analysis, neither fundamentalism nor postmodernism can be a site for mourning or celebration but must instead be understood as concrete challenges or obstacles on the path to a better world.

Some reflections on Caputo’s On Religion

Including a 143-word sentence.

The best and the worst aspects of John D. Caputo’s On Religion are perfectly encapsulated by his thesis, “Religion may be found with or without religion” (3). This is a playful statement, distinctively deconstructive in its dislocative operation, that announces the concealed objective of this book, which is to rewrite Paul Tillich’s Dimensions of Faith for the postmodern truth*-seeker.

Though Caputo does not cite or mention Tillich anywhere in this book, and though he may have a radically different conception of what he is doing (see 128), I would like to take a page from his postmodern, post-authorial authority playbook and let the similarities speak for themselves: both authors, though separated by a substantial spatiotemporal gap, attempt to redefine (and recoup) faith—over and against the objections of “pusillanimous curmudgeon[s]” everywhere (3), as well as, I might add, “the elbow-patched tweedy membership of the American Academy of Religion” (69) and “secular intellectuals, [the] poor things” (78), with their stratified epistemological paradigms and their awfully shortsighted endeavors—in order to resolve the conflict between the crippling relativism of advanced capitalism on the one hand and the uncritical intolerance of “fundamentalisms” on the other (which, in the final analysis, may be two co-dependent processes).

More to the point, both authors redefine faith or religion as something impossible to detect or study, whether in Tillich’s case as “the state of being ultimately concerned”—the numerous critiques of which I do not feel the need to rehearse—or, as in Caputo’s, whose definition of religion could be glossed as “loving unreservedly the unknowable” (see, e.g., 13, 28, 36, etc.).

Though this definition may well fulfill the needs of a postmodern philosopher (or the low expectations of a “weak theist”), it goes without saying that many of those engaged in what is called “religious studies” may wish for a more practical thesis, since Caputo’s definition of religion, as it is currently stated, would wreak further havoc on a field that is already unsure of just what it is studying. I, however, always welcome a further wrinkle on the whole enterprise, provided it also fulfills the ethical responsibility of all scholarship to think through the political implications of its own argument; this is something that, when lacking in any text, one should not be willing to overlook.

And it is precisely in this political capacity where Caputo falls short: though his ideas are engagingly expressed in his inimitably witty prose style, Caputo’s conception of the current state of religion and religious people in the twentieth/early twenty-first centuries, especially in his simplifying discussion of fundamentalism (101-108), lacks all historical credibility and theoretical rigor, while his dreams of a future of religion (without religion), though nominally anti-capitalist (the word “justice,” after all, fills the pages of this book, see esp. 136-138), will not be all that useful in fashioning valid social critique or working toward a collective solution to the political and ethical crises facing the world today.

John D. Caputo’s numerous contributions to the discourses of philosophy, a/theology, and religious studies (including, perhaps, the most accessible discussions and applications of “deconstruction” known to humankind) constitute a singular, indeed enviable, intellectual achievement. Unfortunately, On Religion, a far too celebratory reflection on postmodern “religion without religion” (132ff.), is a relatively minor work in his otherwise illustrious career, a work that, ironically, embodies both the greatest strength of his style, namely his bold attempt to think beyond the generic constraints of writing on religion (academic or otherwise), and its fundamental weakness, which is that Caputo, having left behind all trace of scholarly rigor and responsibility, has begun celebrating the demise of “Truth” (yes, even with the dread capital T) far, far too soon.