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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Animalist Thinking from Lucretius to Temple Grandin

Author : Donald Wesling

Published in: Animal Perception and Literary Language

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Chapter 4 is long because each of twelve major thinkers receives his or her own exposé, and each of the essays is preceded by pages that survey one work or many works, combing through to find how each animalist thinker shows the four attributes of Creativity, Embodied Mind, Dialogism, and Amplification of Affect. In the first instance, those attributes taken as a set are what identify the thinkers Donald Wesling puts forward as animalists. This is to invent a tradition where, apparently, no tradition existed. Wesling shows that Lucretius (ancient world), Michel de Montaigne (renaissance), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (romanticism), John Muir (the 19th century), Alphonso Lingis (with the next three, contemporary), Laurie Shannon, Brian Massumi, and Temple Grandin were always there with the attributes of membership.

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previous chapter Attributes of Animalist Thinking

next chapter Perception and Expectation in Literature

Stacey O’Brien, Wesley the Owl (New York: Free Press, 2008); Helen MacDonald, H Is for Hawk (New York: Grove Press, 2014); Charles Foster, Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016).

Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 120–121. In basic agreement with Wolfe on life beyond self and species: Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013).

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993; reprint 2008), all quotations from p. 102.

Catherine Osborne, Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 97.

Except where noted, I shall quote passages longer than a phrase or line from the translation of David R. Slavitt, De Rerum Natura: The Nature of Things (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2008). I use this poetic translation with some reservations, because Slavitt cuts about a tenth of the poem for presentation to modern readers, and that missing tenth contains a lot of the natural history that I am arguing is the chief glory of the poem; Slavitt re-numbers the lines of his translation, so going by line numbers, it is hard to find some of the famous passages that he does include. A fine and somewhat more literal translation that includes and numbers exactly all the lines of the original Latin—in pentameter, unlike Slavitt’s hexameters—is the version of Frank O. Copley, Lucretius: On the Nature of Things (New York and London: Norton, 1977).

Cyrillus Bailey, Lucreti De Rerum Natura Libri Sex, Recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit (Oxonii: Oxford University Press, 1900).

Joseph Farrell, “Lucretian Architecture: The Structure and Argument of the De Rerum Natura,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, p. 91.

Gilles Deleuze, “Lucretius and the Simulacrum,” Appendix 1.2, in The Logic of Sense, Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, Edited by Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).

The atom in quantum physics is different from the atom in ancient physics, but we can nonetheless mention an event of Summer 2012: scientists at CERN, using the Large Hadron Collider, proved the existence of the Higgs Boson particle, showing again how (imagining unseen atoms) we connect with Epicurus who anticipated us.

Elisabeth de Fontenay, Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité (Paris: Fayard, 1998), Chapter 4, “Lucrèce… L’esprit des chevaux,” pp. 117–131: all quotations in my translation.

“A new figure: an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher!”: from the translation used here, by Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, Apology for Raymond Sebond, by Michel de Montaigne (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), p. 108; “Mutual monkey-tricks,” is an alternative reading from a later publication date of the Apology, translated and edited with an Introduction and Notes by M. A. Screech, An Apology for Raymond Sebond by Michel de Montaigne (London and Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 17 n.

Philip Ford, “Lucretius in Early Modern France,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, p. 237.

Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, Edited by Seamus Perry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 58.

Coleridge’s Notebooks, p. 15.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 16, Poetical Works—Reading Text, vol. 1, Edited by J. C. C. Mays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 392.

Kenneth Burke, Perspective By Incongruity, Edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman with the assistance of Barbara Karmiller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), pp. 43, 35.

All quotations of the “Essay on Method” come from The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4, The Friend, vol. 1, Edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 450.

Coleridge’s Notebooks, p. 28.

On intermittence of the sense of self in Coleridge, see Angus Fletcher, “‘Positive Negation’: Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge,” in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, Edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 54, 58.

The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 65.

The first quotation from Mary Hesse is from her article in Peter Achenstein and S. Baker, Editors, The Legacy of Logical Positivism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 104; the second quotation is from her article in Lyndhurst Collins, Editor, The Use of Models in the Social Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1976), p. 8.

I have lost the source of Elizabeth Sewell’s words. See also Justus Buchler, paraphrasing Coleridge in The Concept of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 67: “Method is primordial judgment become cohesive, deliberate, and qualified within a specific perspective.”

From John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, Edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1938; reprint Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 153–154, 438.

See John Muir, To Yosemite and Beyond: Writings from the Years 1963 to 1875, Edited by Robert Engberg and Donald Wesling (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), especially the Introduction and Notes on the selections.

A twentieth-century geologist with a phenomenological cast of mind, who taught at University of California, Berkeley, would phrase this legibility as a program for a whole discipline: “The thing to be known is the natural landscape. It becomes known through the morphology of its forms…. Behind the forms lie time and cause. The primary genetic bonds are climatic and geognostic, the former being in general dominant, and operating directly as well as through vegetation.” Carl Ortwin Sauer, “The Morphology of Landscape,” in Sauer, Land and Life, Edited by John Leighly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 337.

John Muir, The Mountains of California (Garden City and New York: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 11.

John Muir, Nature Writings, Selected by William Cronon (New York: Library of America, 1997), see pp. 865–867.

Lingis translated Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous, unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible, a text of over 100 pages, with a long section of Working Notes (1964). One early article and seven books by Alphonso Lingis are the basis of my commentary: “Merleau-Ponty and the Primacy of Reflection,” in The Horizons of the Flesh: Critical Perspectives on the Thought of Merleau-Ponty, Edited by Garth Gillan (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), pp. 92–113; Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Abuses (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994); Foreign Bodies (New York and London: Routledge, 1994); Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1996); The Imperative (Bloomington and Indianapolis: 1998); Body Transformations (New York and London: Routledge, 2005); The First Person Singular (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007).

“The Philosopher and the Geisha: Alphonso Lingis and the Multi-Mediated Performance of the Philosophical Text,” Discourse 22, No. 2 (Spring 2000), pp. 92–103; http://www.edu/~clumberr/Lunberry/Publications_files/Lingis.pdf.

Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2005), p. 59.

For Lingis, force and violence may open the doors of perception, so must be explored: “Eroticism is the inner experience of being violated, and of violating another…. For this zone of decomposition of the world of work and reason, the zone of blood and semen and vaginal secretions and corpses, this zone too of proliferating, uncontrollable, nameless fetal life, which disgusts and horrifies us but also summons us, is the zone of the sacred.” Abuses, p. 148.

Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 30. Putting the animal body onto the page, Shannon calls her Preface the book’s Face, and there she offers a carnal-perspectival summary of the book’s intent: “Tracing early modern frameworks for cosmopolity across species, [the book] opens historical horizons for imagining a quadruped’s perspective—even as it, in turn, eyes the concept of humanity from its unvaunted dorsal side” (28).

For Shannon, the point would be to learn how to think from the early moderns, and the closest we have come is a sentence she quotes from Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, where we can sense how to defeat the modern sense of “the animal” as humanity’s ontological opposite. She says: Derrida’s sentence is the closest approach philosophy makes “to the premodern, natural-historical, and scripturally informed vision of a zootopian constitution, where the possession of animated and cognizable interests is not yet the monopolistic property of a more singularized humanity” (53).

In all studies listed, Shannon’s note on Erica Fudge applies: “I agree with Erica Fudge’s note in Brutal Reasoning to the effect that while ‘nonhuman animal’ has a distancing and scientistic quality, ‘animal’ (however homogenizing) has the force of an appeal” (xv). See Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 2000); Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006); Karen L. Raber, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Charlotte Scott, Shakespeare’s Nature: From Cultivation to Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Mark Payne, The Animal Part: Human & Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Aaron M. Moe, Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).

Quoted from the Series description at the front of the fourth book of the series: Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011). Other works by Brian Massumi consulted: “The Brightness Confound,” in Sarah J. Rogers, Organizer for Wexner Center for the Arts, Body Méchanique: Artistic Explorations of Digital Realms (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University: 1998); Brian Massumi, Editor, “Introduction: Like a Thought,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); What Animals Teach Us About Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014); Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015); Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2015). Also consulted: Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).

Thus Massumi; but there were earlier wars against Native Americans that were preemptive.

Laura Schriebman, The Science and Fiction of Autism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 2.

Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism, Introduction by David Mitchell, Translated by KA Yoshida and David Mitchell (New York: Random House, 2013). No page numbers; these statements taken from the answer to Question 10.

Oliver Sacks in the Foreword to Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (New York: Vintage, 2006; this is the second edition, with important Updates: henceforth abbreviated TinP), p. xvii. Other books by Temple Grandin used for this account of her life and writings: Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, written with Catherine Johnson (Orlando, FL: A Harvest Book, Harcourt, 2005; henceforth AinT); Making Animals Happy: How to Create the Best Life for Pets and Other Animals, written with Catherine Johnson (London, Berlin, and New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Mind Succeed, written with Richard Panek (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; henceforth AB).

Barbara Olins Alpert, The Creative Ice Age Brain: Cave Art in the Light of Neuroscience (Foundation 20 21: 2008): See, on symmetry and two-headedness, pp. 44–49. Also valuable on ice age cave art: E. O. Wilson, chapter “On the Origins of the Arts,” in The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008); Jean Clottes, What Is Paleolithic Art? Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity, Translated by Oliver Y. Martin and Robert D. Martin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016; original French edition 2011).

James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979).

Examples of recent works in poetry, fiction, and film that present the cultural power of the cave painters: Clayton Eshleman’s poems in Hades in Manganese (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Books, 1981); Werner Herzog’s documentary film on Chauvet cave, featuring the use of a moving camera to show how the painted animals move as we move, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010); Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel that imagines the apprenticeship of a paleolithic painter of animal images, Shaman (New York: Orbit Books, 2013).

Title: Animalist Thinking from Lucretius to Temple Grandin
Author: Donald Wesling
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Animal Perception and Literary Language
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04968-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-04969-0

Copyright Year: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04969-0_4