Philosophy: On sight of this book, a person not unconnected with these pages coined an elegant if politically incorrect aphorism: "Animals," she said, "are the new blacks." John Banville reviews The Philosopher's Dog by Raimond Gaita.
Certainly there has been an increasing trend recently to bring to the subject of animals and our treatment of them the same kind of sentimentality and wishy-washiness that marked so much of liberal attitudes to racial injustice in the past. It is good to be able to report, then, that Raimond Gaita is as hard-headed in his way as any NAACP or anti-apartheid activist.
This is not immediately apparent in the opening chapters. So animal-friendly are they that as I read them there came irresistibly to my mind, in protest, as it were, that episode of The Simpsons in which Bart crosses the railway line running through the centre of Springfield and finds himself, literally and figuratively, on the wrong side of the tracks. With him on this adventure is the family dog, named, with typically Simpsonian incongruity, Santa's Little Helper. As the day wears on Bart enjoys many new experiences, but by evening he is so distressed and tired that he passes out and falls down on the pavement, clutching his last cookie. The street is deserted, and no one comes to Bart's aid. Santa's Little Helper stands over the boy, baffled and, it seems, concerned. Then, with a furtive glance over his shoulder to make sure no one is looking, he leans forward his snout and very delicately extracts the cookie from Bart's fingers and runs off with it. So much for a boy's best friend.
The Philosopher's Dog, the author tells us in his introduction, "is a mixture of story- telling and philosophical reflection on the stories I tell", and overall is "about our creatureliness". Most of the stories concern animals, usually domestic pets Gaita has kept or known, but there is also a chapter about mountains and mountain-climbing. Although there are passages of some complexity and, indeed, a few that are very nearly impenetrable, the book possesses a peculiar charm and at the same time displays a welcome, sinewy toughness in its thinking.
Raimond Gaita is Professor of Moral Philosophy at Kings College, London, and Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University. He has written two books on philosophy, and a celebrated biography of his father, Romulus, who makes a number of telling appearances in The Philosopher's Dog. It is obvious that Gaita fils learned much of what he knows about animals, about people, and about morality from his father, who ran a small farm in the Australian outback. The Philosopher's Dog opens with an account of two pets that father and son shared: Jack, a white cockatoo, and Orloff, a mongrel greyhound. There are affecting anecdotes about the tender relations between the animals and the adult. Jack the cockatoo would often wriggle in under the blankets on Romulus's bed, "poking his head out occasionally to kiss my father".
How does a cockatoo kiss? Like this. He puts the upper part of his beak onto your lips and, nibbling gently, runs it down to your lower lip, all the while saying "tsk tsk tsk". That, at any rate, is how Jack did it to my father, with unmistakable tenderness.
The same kind of regard and respect existed between Romulus and Orloff, Raimond's dog. When a neighbouring farmer, suspecting Orloff of molesting his sheep, wounded him with a rifle shot, "my father tended his wounds with his remedy for anything external or liable to infection: methylated spirits, lanolin and spider's web". At last the suspicious neighbour managed to poison the dog, and Romulus buried him in the backyard, and father and son stood by the graveside and wept for him.
All this, as sketched here, may seem a little cloying, but Gaita is remarkable in the fearlessness with which he wears his heart on his sleeve. He is acutely aware of the fine line that runs between sentiment and sentimentality, and never, or hardly ever, crosses it. Although this is a book about emotion, about its importance in our lives and the peril in which we put ourselves by denying it, Gaita, as one would expect of a trained philosopher, resists the trap of mere emotionalism, and maintains a reasonable and admirably uninsistent tone throughout. He believes that man has much to learn from animals, and from his dealings with and, sometimes, dependence on them: "The need we have - often unfathomable - of other human beings is partly what conditions and yields to us our sense of their preciousness. The same is true of our relations to animals . . . Humbled acknowledgment of our need is our best protection against foolish condescension to both human beings and animals."
It is not easy - and why should it be? - to pin down Gaita's argument in this book. He is dealing with high matters here, some of the highest, indeed - how to live decently, how to behave toward our fellow men, how to treat animals - but at certain points he pauses to rehearse his main concerns, like a mountaineer stopping to point out the view to climbers behind him. It is obvious that he is a follower of the later Wittgenstein, wary of the tendency of language to reify silently our fondest illusions and present them back to us as unchallengeable truths. Like Wittgenstein, he has the humility to recognise that there are matters beyond the rational which are no less real or significant for being so.
Many times in this book I have emphasised that the realm of meaning cannot be underwritten by reason, that it is not "part of the fabric of the universe", not a solid part of nature that must be acknowledged by anyone who has a concern for truth and a capacity to find it. Nothing makes claims to meaning true or false in the way that the fact that it is raining makes true the assertion that it is.
What is here being proposed is not as self-evident as it might seem. Gaita is refashioning in a subtle, post-Wittgensteinian mode the Pascalian point that the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. He grants that the things the heart alone understands are not things "that can accumulate throughout the ages and become settled in the great encyclopaedias of our culture", but that does not mean these things cannot add up to a genuine form of understanding. Of course, Gaita is fully aware of how dangerous it is when a philosopher begins talking about the heart in opposition to the head, yet he insists on the fact that it is a fiction that at some point in the past humankind managed to stand back from its assumptions about itself and others and to insist on having hard evidence instead.
"Only then, we think, did we make ourselves worthy hosts to the gift of reason. It is an edifying narrative, but it is, I believe, fiction."
As well as being aware of language and its treacheries, Gaita, again like the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations, recognises that language when employed poetically can be a web in which to catch things that seem, paradoxically, beyond expression.
Perhaps someone will object that I am saying that poetry can tell how things are. I am. This objection expresses a failure to understand how the critical language works when it works in the realm of meaning and how it is interdependent with a substantial conception of "how things are", of trying to see things as they are rather than as they often appear to us when we have succumbed to the almost infinite forms of seduction practised by [what Iris Murdoch called] the "fat relentless ego".
But where are the animals in all this? Gaita quotes what he considers one of Wittgenstein's more radical passages, to the effect that our responses to other human beings are not a matter of reflection or intellection, but are far more immediate and of primitive origin. When I believe that a person is suffering this does not mean that I must reflect that he is not an automaton. "My attitude toward him," says Wittgenstein, "is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul".
The same applies, Gaita argues, to our responses to animals. Accusations of anthropomorphism, "that we illegitimately apply to animals concepts of conscious states that we have legitimately developed in relation to human beings", misses the point that we have formed these concepts in relation to humans and to animals together. When Fido reacts to our moods or anticipates our intentions, waiting to see if we will take him for a walk, for example, "he does not assume that we are sensate beings with intentions. I imagine that it was the same for us in our primitive state. Out of such unhesitating interactions, between ourselves, and between us and animals, there developed - not beliefs, assumptions and conjectures about the mind - but our very concepts of thought, feeling, intention, belief, doubt and so on."
Talk of "primitive states" brings us back to Bart Simpson. In his chapter on mountaineering, Gaita is refreshingly sceptical about the nature-mysticism in which so many climbers tend to indulge. He recognises clearly, for example, the double thinking involved when a man who is quite prepared to lose his life on K2, thereby depriving his family of a husband and father, talks of the high moral issues that the climber must confront in relation to his companions on the mountain, and in his attitude to the mountain itself. Gaita does not believe "that an interest of any kind in nature or animals is essential to a full development of one's humanity"; such a belief would inevitably condemn as wicked, or at least as wickedly unfulfilled, a very great many people who love only the city and find animals repellent.
In opposing the myth of the ennobling capacity of nature - worship Gaita tells of seeing a film of a British attempt to climb Everest.
Two climbers were making a bid for the summit, without oxygen. The lead climber dropped onto the slope from exhaustion. His friend, who had climbed with him for many years, thought he was dead. He searched the pockets of his fallen comrade, looking for cashew nuts. Since he was dead, he thought, he may as well have his nuts. That's all. He thought nothing and felt nothing else.
Just like, no doubt, Santa's Little Helper. Tsk tsk tsk.
John Banville's most recent novel, Shroud, was published last year
The Philosopher's Dog. By Raimond Gaita, Routledge, 214pp. £14.99