Justin Erik Halldór Smith

A Note on G. E. Lessing on Animal Tales

G. E. Lessing, the great critic and philosopher of the German Enlightenment, noted in his 1759 essay ‘On the Use of Animals in Fables’ that “the great majority of fables feature animals, and still lesser creatures, as acting persons.”[1] Lessing wanted to know what we could learn from this. My own view is that his conclusions are dead wrong, but that the question itself is one that it took a certain kind of genius to ask in the first place, and one that remains as urgent as ever to answer, not just for the sake of literary theory, but above all for the sake of our understanding of what animals are, and of the way our moral commitments to them flow from this understanding.

Lessing gives two primary reasons for the replacement of human beings by animals in fables. The first is that we all tend to recognize more readily the sort of character represented by an animal species than by a particular human being.  If one were to relate the historical tale of Nero and Britannicus, for example, it was already quite likely in the 18^th century --and is all the more so today-- that most listeners will have no idea what these characters are meant to represent. But if a fable has as its primary function the imparting of some moral principle or other, as Lessing supposes, it is far better to replace Nero with a wolf, and Britannicus with a lamb. Everyone, we might suppose, down to the most ignorant yokel, knows what these creatures represent, and how they stand in relation to one another. If the purpose is to communicate a moral principle rather than a history lesson, why let background knowledge of individual human actors stand as a prerequisite? It is the wolf and the lamb that require the least in the way of shared background knowledge, and thus that serve most directly the fable’s function of universal moral edification. 

Lessing adds another reason for the casting of animals in fables, one that he claims derives from his ‘sensibility’ --a common trope of the distinctly German reception of Enlightenment values-- rather than from logical conclusions. He maintains that nothing gets in the way of the teaching of a moral lesson moreso than the passions. He brings up the example of the avaricious priest in 2 Samuel 12, who wishes to take away a poor man’s only lamb. Lessing maintains that in this tale our passion of sympathy for the poor man is great, as is our passion of hatred for the priest. But if we substitute animals for the relevant actors, then, in so far as these creatures are ‘lesser’ than we are, the arousal of the passions in reading about them is thereby reduced, and we are better able to focus on the moral lesson at hand. “We sympathize with the lamb,” Lessing writes, “but this sympathy is so weak that it has no noticeable impact upon our intuitive knowledge of the moral principle.”[2] 

I find the first argument interesting, and the second one deplorable. I also find that Lessing’s engagement with the topic leaves a great many considerations completely unexplored.

The second argument seems to me patently false: even though we have strong species-based loyalties in our reasoned moral commitments, these loyalties are most likely to be suspended when, as in a fable, an anthropomorphized animal occupies a role that in another genre of story-telling would be held by a human being. The substitutability of an animal for a human in a fable brings with it, I think, the transferability of sympathy, as well as the other passions that some people, including Lessing, might ordinarily reserve, at least in their strongest form, for members of their own species.

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[1] G. E. Lessing, “Von dem Gebrauche der Thiere in der Fabel,” in Literaturtheoretische und ästhetische Schiften, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1996, pp. 43-47, p. 43.

[2] Ibid., p. 47.

The Delights of Disgust

From the Chronicle of Higher Education. To read the entire essay, go here.

Martha Nussbaum's book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (Inalienable Rights Series) (Oxford University Press, 2010) appears to have been written for a high-school civics course. Implicit already in its title is the idea that disgust is inhuman, or perhaps pre-human, that it is a stage to advance out of on the way to humanity. For Nussbaum it's all very simple: Disgust is immature, and well-adjusted adults should grow out of it.

As an effort to shape law and public policy in the United States, Nussbaum's approach makes sense. But it's a sad fact of public debate in America that words intended to influence public debate must sound like they are intended for adolescents. From Disgust to Humanity is in large part a riposte to the argument made by Leon R. Kass, head of President George W. Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, that disgust (for example, at the thought of anal sex) has its own inherent "wisdom," which may serve as a "natural" basis on which to develop a sexual ethics. Nussbaum argues against Kass, but the two are united by a sort of anthropological obtuseness. He is wrong to suppose that what disgusts us in sexual matters can simply be read off of nature, and that nature writes in the same idiom in all times and places. She, in turn, is wrong to suppose that just because disgust is culturally variable and thus to some extent arbitrary, and because it can result in oppressive social relations, it is therefore somehow inhuman.

I confess I am disgusted by a great many things about people (and about myself, but let's put that aside). I do not believe it is particularly urgent for me to overcome my disgust, even if I recognize that this emotion must remain entirely separate from my thinking about which laws would be most just. I am disgusted by other people's dandruff, facial moles, food stuck in their beards, yet I do not accept that in feeling this way I am judging those people to be subhuman. I take it rather that humanity, while endearing, is also capable of appearing disgusting.

In fact, one great problem with Kass's approach, which Nussbaum does nothing to refute, is that disgust and its various opposites—relish, delectation, delight—seem ever so delicately close to each other, and always ready to slide unawares over to the other side. This is not some abstruse psychoanalytic paradox, but a simple observation of an obvious condition of human bodily experience. The same things that excite our desire most—the naked bodies of other humans, the bright red shell of a boiled lobster, a cigarette glowing in an ashtray—are the things that always, simultaneously, threaten to excite our revulsion. Kass should be suspicious of his "wisdom" regarding the various uses of the anus, lest he find his revulsion crossing over all too suddenly into a very different sort of passion.

Cicero observed that the greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust. Nussbaum no doubt knows that, even if she prefers in the present work to focus on the Roman orator's more elevated treatment of the concept of humanitas,"a responsiveness to others that prominently included the ability to imagine their experiences." Could it be, though, that Cicero did not consider this responsiveness to the humanity of others as incompatible with being grossed out by them? Such a presumption of compatibility may, in fact, be truer to the spirit of humanitas than any version that results from an effort to isolate this responsiveness in its pure, other-embracing form.

That last point has generally been best understood in the arts; novelists and poets are often much better than theorists at appreciating the complicated ways in which disgust and desire work together, even conspire together, and at appreciating the ways in which this conspiracy, far from being an impediment to our humanity, is constitutive of it.

Rabelais, to cite one extreme example, pounds away with instance after instance of the disgusting ways human beings appear: in gluttony, in bestiality, in massaging one's groin with the downy head of a duck. The giant Gargantua is disgusting, and hilarious: a pair of closely related, perhaps inseparable adjectives. It is hard to imagine how one could operate freely in the humorous mode without courting disgust. Risibility, as the medieval philosophers understood, is a trait found wherever there is humanity. Rabelais courts disgust, but the reader never loses sight of the fact that it is humanity's marvelous, over-the-top disgustingness that is under consideration. In real life, too, the food in the beard would not disgust me if it were on a plate, and that is because the beard is on a human, and it is precisely his humanity I am recognizing when I am disgusted by him.

Nor would I reproach a culture, should one be discovered, that considers food in the beard a fitting tribute to a host after a fine meal. There are a number of historical examples of culinary practices that today seem no less repulsive. For example, French explorers among the Huron in the 17th century found it difficult to enjoy one of the local delicacies: a sort of cornbread, whose batter, before baking, was mixed with saliva in the mouths of the tribe's elder women.

Is that intrinsically disgusting? Well, it might help to recall that, biologically speaking, all cooking is a form of extrasomatic predigestion, beginning a process of breaking down raw food through dicing, boiling, etc., that is subsequently continued by our digestive system. That might explain why communal eating is potentially a source of great disgust. Like sex, it is a sharing of the stuff of life, and who you do it with determines to no small degree who you are. That is also why communal eating is so crucial for the establishment of social bonds, and thus why the French explorers in the end forced themselves to swallow the cornbread.

There is nothing categorically more disgusting about the Huron recipe than there is about the sort of predigestion that precedes communal eating in all cultures, yet this does not mean the French were simply being fickle when they felt disgust. Neither Kass nor Nussbaum, however, if they had been talking about cooking rather than sex, would have had the conceptual resources to come to that simple, and obvious, conclusion...