EcoLit ESem

My dear freshman friends, final week is coming and stress seems to be unavoidable. Just like you, I have been buried in work, papers and exams. However, perhaps such busy schedules also signal the time for us to take a break in order to achieve full power for the fight.  I am recommending one way to do so is to attend to nature. We all are lucky to be living in this wonderful green campus, so why don’t we just go out and experience a bit of ecological happiness? It is a precious state of the mind that needs to be maintained by protecting the environment.

On the blind field shuttle tour of Bryn Mawr Campus, Carmen showed us that being blind does not mean being impaired but possessing a different way to perceive the world.

I was first at the back of the line. I could feel (or I thought I felt) the girl behind me shaking as we walked in the woods. I could hear a big humming engine right beside me as we crossed the street. Any small vibrations turned into big swings in the back of the line, as I consistently stepped on and off the paved trial onto the grass during the “peaceful” later part of the shuttle. Though I didn’t open my eyes during the whole trip, I couldn’t keep myself from aimless waving one of my arm for branches or imaginary obstacles. My shoulder is now a bit sore from all the sketching and waving in the air.

On the way back, I was at the beginning of the line. Knowing the route I was going to walk on, I felt easier and paid more attention to the flickering of lights on my eyelids.  I even noticed that the paved trial on front of the English house was more “rough” than the paved trail parallel to senior row. However, it was still terrifying when I heard a car shooting through my front as Carmen called everyone to cross the street again.

My daughter-in-law, who is a psychiatry resident @ Penn (and a graduate both of Haverford and of The Story of Evolution/The Evolution of Stories), sent me this NYTimes opinionator piece on Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination. It put me in mind of some of our earlier conversations about language, and how we read it. Thought it might interest some of you, of the more poetic bent....

When I was trying to come up with something to write on Tuesday night, I saw, in the corner of Ecological Imagining's homepage, the title of a new blog post that sounded interesting. It was about smoking and Bryn Mawr, which are things that I just read about in the book about Bryn Mawr, Offerings to Athena: 125 Years at Bryn Mawr. So, I was really excited to write about this, and I did. But when I went to comment on the post, I realized that it had been made on a different part of Serendip, for a class called "Walled Women." Serendip seems like a little corner of the Internet, just for me and Ecological Imaginings, but it isn't, and I wish I could meet and comment on the posts of all the lovely Mawrters who are also on Serendip. But, since that is unlikely, I will just post the link to the article I read and my response.

/exchange/smoking-bryn-mawr-colleges-campus-representing-power-student-participation-student-government-associ

Elizabeth Costello claims that because she was able to "think" herself into one of her fictional characters that, before, had never existed, then she should be able to think herself into any being. This claim does not sit well with me, as I find that there are many intrinsic problems that make it untrue. First, Costello's ability to think herself into another human character doesn't necessarily mean much; it would have been much easier to put herself into another character's shoes given that the character was another human being. Part of the reason she was able to think herself into the character was because she was able to empathize with human emotion. Another flaw with her statement is that she really isn't thinking herself into an entirely new being; after all, she may have invented the fictional character, but it was, essentially, of her own entity. My question is therefore, why is it more difficult for humans to empathize with animals (which is what we are in all actuality)? When answered "consciousness", Elizabeth Costello replies, "They have no consciousness, therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?" I find this to be the more important question, and statement. What is consciousness, and how are we able to differentiate between the consciousness of another human being and the consciousness of an animal?

In The Lives of Animals, Coetzee adressed the question: “If we are capable of thinking our own death, why on earth should we not be capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat?”

As the question was being addressed with intensity, it could not be easily be explained by a simple sentence saying--"we are not bats"--although this is what I was thinking right after I read this question.

And the question could extend to--Are we capable of thinking from the perspective of another animal, live or dead?

I believe that some of us are capable--and I mean psychics. Like Oda Mae Brown in Ghost, psychics could embrace another soul into their body. Also, when we are caught by a spell, we could become little mouse, birds, etc.

Back to "reality", under many circumstances, when the "animal side", or shall I say, the beast-like part, of our soul is activated, we are thinking like any other animal--like the Nazi example in this book. So yes, we are capable of thinking as an animal, but not a nice one. We could never think like a nice, innocent little rabbit (unless we are infants) because I think the only intersection of cognitive process between human and other animal is that related to the same type of desire we have, not virtue, not ethics.

Today we had a brief discussion about consciousness and animals, but I think the real ethical dilemma that plagues Elizabeth and the reason for her deep empathy and concern is the question of whether or not all animal life forms (includes humans, excludes plants) have an "immortal soul". I am leaning towards the opinion, assuming that evolution of animals and humans is historically the same, that all animals and all humans either have immortal souls or they do not. This is idea equates humans and animals, essentially placing them on the same level. So, then, is is morally right to systematically slaughter beings with immortal souls? This is Elizabeth's primo concern. But do we agree? Animals eat other animals, animals have been known to eat us. Is Elizabeth advocating against the killing of all animals, or just the ones that we actively farm? Is farming and domestication morally objectible, even if the process is "humanely" excecuted? What is the difference between domestication and slaughter, if we are talking about things with immortal and feeling souls?

The book The Lives of Animals is ingeniously written and surprising compelling, although Coetzee used a lot of layers to “cover” his true feelings toward contemplation of animals.

Besides human’s cruelty toward animals, I see another “tension” in this book: the alienation between vegetarians and meat-eaters. In the books, the ageing mother’s ardent vegetarian conviction put a lot of tension on her son and her daughter-in-law. In some parts of the books, to me, it almost seemed like the mother and her meat-eating daughter-in-law had nothing in common to discuss about. However, at the end of the book, the son consoled the distraught mother, “There, there. It will be over soon.” Could it mean that the tension between the vegetarians and the meat-eaters will be over soon? As meat-eaters learn to respect animals more ardently, there will be a bridge that will connect in the gap between vegetarians and meat-eaters?

In Coetzee's novel there seems to be the controversy over whether or not animals are on the same level as humans. Whether they have the same type of conscience as us or whether or not they think as we do. Elizabeth Costello seems to think that since we are all beings that we should be able to put ourselves into the thoughts of an animal and understand how it is thinking. This way we can understand where certain animals are coming from and how they think. I do not agree with this. How do we know that animals have a conscience that is simlar to ours? Couldn't they have a conscience except it is structured differently than our own? Are we as humans so closed to other possibilities that animals may in fact actually have a conscience that we just cannot understand. Just because we cannot prove something does not mean it was true. In Elizabeth Costello's speech she proposes that Descarte did not have sufficient information about Apes and Dolphins and was therefore only capable of making his assumptions based on what he had. In the future we may in fact prove that animals have a conscience adn can think, except they may just think differently than us. It is possible that we just haven't prgressed that far to prove it.