Plant-Thinking and Plant-Eating

I'm working this week on a talk and paper about animal welfare and genetic engineering--specifically, on the idea that perhaps we ought to "disenhance" livestock so as to prevent unnecessary pain and suffering--that I will be presenting next week at EKU's Animal Studies conference, Living with Animals.

In the process, I've been thinking and reading about the range of sentience among the animals that people eat, particularly at the "lower" end--shrimp, molluscs, and so forth. Then I receive an e-mail ad promoting Michael Marder's recent book, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. There's plenty to read on Marder's website, and I just had to see what "Is it ethical to eat plants?" was all about. It's a (willfully?) odd title, given that most readers will think that the answer had better be "yes!" (or what's left?). And although I like the spirit of what Marder is doing--fundamentally, he's reminding us that plants are more than a mass of tissue to eat--I found myself at times wondering who exactly he's reminding of this. Perhaps vegans and vegetarians, insofar as he wants to appeal to recent studies on plant intelligence to get us into a sense of wonder about plants, a sense of wonder which may lead to some discomfort with the idea that we will now rip from the ground and ingest this wonderful being. Marder's main idea is that the ethics of eating must take into account not only what we eat, but also how:

If there were a single recipe for respectful eating practices, it would have prescribed the following: to remember at all times that the beings we eat or experience are much more than storehouses of calories or of information and that they have a whole range of other potentialities irreducible to providing us with nourishment, including everything that falls under the category of ‘food for thought’. (33)

I am reminded here of the discussion of dietary prohibitions in Romans 14, in which Paul suggests that although in his view "all food is clean" (contra, presumably, Jewish law), we should respect the dietary restrictions others impose on themselves, and more importantly, that we must not "destroy the work of God for the sake of food." Again, how we eat is as important--if not more important--than what. Animal rights advocates may bristle at this, and argue that "Eating animals the nice way" is still less nice than Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin want to believe it is. But I'm not so sure I agree, and I'm certainly less inclined to make trouble for people who try to live close to the land and to eat locally, etc.

Marder wants to leave the "is it...?" question open. It is to stand as a never-wholly-resolved point of "food for thought":

Ethical concerns are never problems to be resolved once and for all; they make us uncomfortable and sometimes, when the sting of conscience is overwhelming, prevent us from sleeping. Being disconcerted by a single pea to the point of unrest is a metonymy for ethics as such, for the obsession that it is, inexpressible in the language of moral axioms and principles of righteousness. (36)

I agree with the implicit idea that we should be suspicious of the idea that we have sorted everything out, have solved all of our ethical problems, and may now rest. But I wonder about "obsession." To be "obsessed" with ethics, or the pea, seems problematic, unhealthy, unless what one has in mind is the kind of "obsession" Socrates exhibits in always wanting to discuss piety, courage, justice, and so forth. I guess what I'm thinking is that it would be bad if this ethical sensitivity caused one to be unable ever to feel at home and to enjoy a meal. We see, I think, where this can lead in Coetzee's The Lives of Animals.

Reading and Hoping

I've been lying low lately, taking in many ideas, preparing to write (the first draft of) what I hope will be the final chapter of my book on patience. (Don't get too excited; there's still a long road of revision ahead.) I've also been trying to make sense of the literature on "theory of mind" in chimps and other non-human primates, which is an altogether different story.

I just finished a very nice paper by Matthew Ratcliffe, "What is it to lose hope?" In it he distinguishes between forms of hope that have clear propositional (or, intentional) content and a kind of hope that is "pre-intentional" and which he also characterizes as an "existential feeling." This kind of hope--which it seems to me could also be described as a fundamental attitude or orientation--is a sort of background against which it makes sense to have any hopes of the other, intentional/propositional sort. What he's doing seems good, and useful, too, as he points out that these different forms of hopelessness vary in severity, and it's not clear that the Beck hopelessness scale (used in psychiatry) really measures those important differences.

Ratcliffe's distinction suggests that we could lose most, perhaps even all of our hopes, without necessarily losing hope. He suggests this might be a way of understanding Plenty Coups, or Lear's reading of Plenty Coups. But it's not that Plenty Coups musters up a new, radical kind of hope (as Ratcliffe reads Lear) but rather that he manages not to lose his grip on the pre-intentional sort of hope.

One might ask: how is pre-intentional hope different from what we call optimism? Ratcliffe doesn't address this.

In "Sketch of a Phenomenology and Metaphysic of Hope," Garbiel Marcel suggests that the optimist "is he who has a firm conviction, or in certain cases just a vague feeling, that things tend to 'turn out for the best.'" Thinking of Liebniz, he also says that "the optimist is essentially a maker of speeches," and the general upshot of his characterization is that the optimist is superficial: "the optimist, as such, always relies upon an experience which is not drawn from the most intimate and living part of himself, but, on the contrary, is considered from a sufficient distance to allow certain contradictions to become alternated or fused into a general harmony."

Well, what's wrong with that? one might ask. Marcel distinguishes different sorts of hope, and notes that hope can be degraded, but also suggests that the higher or more ideal sorts of hope don't involve the distance, abstraction (or rationalism, as it were) that he associates with optimism. He also says that true hope contains "humility...timidity...[and] chastity," and I suppose that means that true hope is not the sort of thing one could make a big speech about.

The hope Marcel idealizes looks like a kind of pre-intentional hope, insofar as the kind of hope he sees as most genuine has a kind of flexibility; it doesn't pin itself on specific states of affairs coming to be, and seems connected to a kind of commitment not to "capitulate" in the face of life's trials. This is, he says, related to patience, both with life and with others. (And one kind of loss of hope is when we give up on another person in some absolute sense, deem them useless, etc. This is also connected to a loss of patience.)

Of course, there seems to be a question here about whether one can sensibly always retain such hope. At least, as I started reading and thinking, I thought that was the question. But I'm less sure now. There are practical questions about how long we should try to fix a relationship or teach something to another person (before giving up on that particular relationship or task), but giving up on those things isn't necessarily impatient and doesn't have anything to do with this pre-intentional hope. The loss of this sort of hope in major clinical depression suggests both that it's very important for any sort of decent life and that it's not something that can obviously be summoned on demand. And so how? seems like the wrong question. It might, however, be that it's this kind of hope that serves also as the background of the possibility of patience (and, of course, the exercise of any kind of skill or virtue that places some hope in the future or in the immediate meaningfulness of life's activities).

I'm just pondering (rambling), so I'll stop. How are you? I'll leave with this bit from Marcel's essay, which caught my attention, and reminded me quite a bit of things that William James says:

Perhaps the human condition is characterised not only by the risks which go with it and which after all are bound up with life itself, even in its humblest forms, but also, and far more deeply, by the necessity to accept these risks and to refuse to believe that it would be possible--and, if we come to a final analysis, even an advantage--to succeed in removing them. Experience teaches us, as a matter of fact, that we can never refuse to take risks except in appearance, or rather that the refusal itself conceals a risk which is the most serious of all, and that it is even possible for us finally to condemn ourselves in this way to lose the best of the very thing which by our avoidance we had intended to safeguard. (pgs. 54-55 in the Harper & Row (1962) edition)