The Philosopher鈥檚 Dog by Raimond Gaita, Routledge, 拢14.99, ISBN 0415309077
AN ENTOMOLOGIST I know reckons his career path was set by a fateful encounter with a butterfly at the age of three. For philosopher Raimond Gaita, a childhood shared with a parrot may well have been the determining fact.
The bird, a cockatoo called Jack, was his father鈥檚 pet and had the run of their house on a chicken farm in central Victoria, Australia. After a night spent sleeping on the well-chewed kitchen door, the bird would prise open the bedroom door, jump under the blankets and kiss Raimond鈥檚 father with unmistakable tenderness, murmuring softly 鈥渢sk tsk tsk鈥�.
Advertisement
Alas, the bird lavished all his affection on the father, and treated the young Raimond with an indifference verging on hostility. 鈥淚f I moved to stroke his crest he was as likely as not to bite me, just because he felt like it,鈥� recalls Gaita. All the same, the boy never quite gave up hope that one day they might become comrades.
Perhaps it was the elusiveness of this decidedly non-human animal 鈥� 鈥渢he conditional closeness of a creature that spends only part of its time earthbound鈥� 鈥� that helped to nudge Gaita towards an academic career in moral philosophy. Even before Jack, there had been a significant other, a dog called Orloff, who gave the motherless boy the physical affection he lacked, and more. In Gaita鈥檚 view, he and the dog forged a relationship with distinctly moral qualities, grounded on mutual trust and fidelity.
Gaita argues in The Philosopher鈥檚 Dog that there is much to learn about our moral relations to animals by philosophical reflections on our lives with domestic pets. He tells stories about the animals he has known, and uses them as starting points for wide-ranging philosophical discussions. He is at pains to explore both what we share with other animals and what makes humans so different.
On the question of animal consciousness, Gaita takes a distinctly Wittgensteinian stance. It is simply nonsensical, he argues, to suggest 鈥� as, for instance, Jeffrey Masson does in his book When Elephants Weep 鈥� that spiders might have a rich inner life. To do so would be to 鈥済o against what one can intelligibly say, what one鈥檚 words can intelligibly mean, given the life those words have in our language鈥�, he asserts. Such questions are not open to empirical investigation. There is room for scientific thought and experimentation on animal minds, he concedes, but only in a conceptual space demarcated by philosophical ground rules. Spider subjectivity, it seems, is forever off-limits.
All the same, Gaita agrees that we may still want to rescue a spider in danger of being washed down a plughole. In fact, we may even take exception to the pleasure he says some men find in peeing on spiders trapped in urinals. The important point to understand, he claims, is that 鈥渟peculation about the inner lives of insects [sic] plays no part, and should play no part, in the pity we sometimes feel for them鈥�. We can, however, acknowledge that spiders have a life that we can take an interest in.
In the end, though, it is dogs that most strongly arouse Gaita鈥檚 moral sympathies, and this he attributes to their striking individuality. In fact, he argues, our ethical sense itself springs from a concept of individuality that is formed from our attachments to people and to animals. But the individuality of animals, even dogs, is 鈥渁ttenuated鈥�. Gypsy the dog is a member of his family, yet Gaita winces when his vet gives him the family surname. Only humans qualify for fully-fledged individuality, he claims. Each of us is 鈥渦nique and irreplaceable in a way that nothing else in nature is鈥�.
When Orloff died, he and his father solemnly buried him, but they did not mark his grave, and Gaita concludes this was fitting. Sentimentality about animals, not anthropomorphism, is the enduring danger.