Seminar Summary

God, animals and embodying beliefs
Summary of talk given by Dr Pamela Anderson
13 February 2007 Mansfield college, Garden Building, Seminar Room East, Oxford

In a blurb for Professor Colin Blakemore’s forthcoming public lecture, ‘Animals in Medical Research: Magic or Tragic?’ certain questions are raised to attract debate with and attendance at Blakemore’s high profile talk as the Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council on Friday of this week. Most of these questions on medical research and funding for alternatives to use of animals in this research are beyond my area of expertise. In fact, in this light the thought of speaking to the present seminar on ‘Animal experimentation for medical research: issues and perspectives’ is hugely daunting. Nevertheless, I take heart from the following claims in the blurb advertising Blakemore’s lecture:

The existence of an extreme element in the animal rights movement, willing to resort to violence, property damage and intimidation, has seriously inhibited balanced debate on animal research. Extremism is often quoted as the reason for unwillingness to engage in such debate. Now that there are promising signs that extremism is being reduced we must seize the opportunity for real engagement and greater openness on all sides. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~science/details/ht07.html

As a philosopher and a feminist I welcome such opportunities for real engagement and greater openness, especially in discussions of certain meta-ethical issues and of epistemic issues related to religious belief. Bear with me if this sounds ambitious and overly abstract: I’m trying to find a constructive angle from which I can enter this timely area of debate.

Now turning to my contribution to this seminar on God, animals and embodying beliefs

Cruelty to non-human animals is and has been of indirect moral concern to me – or it has been, at least as long as I have called myself a Kantian moral philosopher and a feminist philosopher of religion. Cruelty in any human form, including ritual or bodily practices, says something about the beliefs which we have embodied – that is, those beliefs which are implicit in our actions, becoming like a ‘second nature’, in their pervasiveness and resistance to change.

Now, the invitation from Katherine Morris to speak in this seminar today has given me the opportunity to think more explicitly about animals in relation to beliefs about God, especially those beliefs which have become like second nature as part of our Christian inheritance. However, my theoretical and practical interests may still be more apparent in the question of how embodying beliefs generates both ethical and unethical practices than in any direct comments about animals or God.

The very idea of ‘embodying beliefs’ (in the seminar’s title) has been derived from my readings of Pierre Bourdieu (in The Logic of Practice) and from contemporary feminist philosophy of religion, especially Amy Hollywood (on Handout): I am drawn to the idea that our beliefs are formed as part of an embodied history. More on this later.

I have been exploring Bourdieu’s claim that ‘practical belief is not a “state of mind”, still less a kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines [as] (“belief”) but rather a state of the body’ (Bourdieu 68); in brief, certain beliefs are a state of our body as evident in bodily and ritual practices (whether about purity laws, eating or not eating the meat of animals; including or not including women in religious rituals) – and implications of this idea of belief as a state of the body interest me. Bourdieu also gives us pause to think about the limitations of our practical knowledge insofar as we have internalized certain norms, values, prohibitions and possibilities, risks and responsibilities. In other words, I am keen to consider certain sorts of bodily practices and beliefs, in order to understand better how we arrive at animal experimentation or not! Bourdieu makes the further intriguing claim that: ‘It is because agents never know completely what they are doing that what they do has more sense than they know’ (69).

It might help in understanding my angle today for you to know that, in presenting some work-in-progress on ‘God, animals and embodying beliefs’ I draw upon four areas of my current research:

1. moral epistemology
2. the philosophical imaginary
3. the logic of ritual and bodily practices in embodying belief
4. the cultural mythology which has instituted (un)ethical practices in Christian societies, or at least those still dominated by patriarchal values

A critical question takes us to the heart of my concerns in this area: Why have we embodied beliefs about impurity in Christian – or more generally western – ethical practices? Or, is this fair, are ‘we’ preoccupied with learning how to avoid impurity (or at least its appearance) rather than how to avoid cruelty?! One danger of embodied beliefs about purity is perpetuating self-deception and ignorance in ethics. Whatever the case, in talking about God, animals and embodying beliefs, we might consider a more positive ethical task: learning to ‘care’ which would mean not being cruel. But for me this would have to mean ‘care’ in a fairly distinctive sense (see my article later on reading list): minimally, this would mean being more responsive and responsible in our epistemic relations to animals, to nature and to our social and political world. Epistemic questions include: whose authority? knowledge? What about the trustworthy authority? In line with the latter, the imagery of the snake might be reconsidered in order to inform, or transform, our practices in relation to animals: we might gain ethical knowledge from interaction with animals.

However, I hasten to add that this caring is not to be equated with the eco-feminist conception of ‘care’ as grounded in a woman’s biology. I am not arguing for (nor do I hold a form of essentialism which links biology and gender) making ‘care’ a woman’s distinctive capacity for ‘mothering’ (cf. Deane-Drummond 230).

Instead I would advocate learning to care which would be rooted in both political and ethical (or social) discursive practices. It could be said that in this ‘caring,’ justice and charity come together. For the Christian, it might be said that the caring of God for creation is reflected in human forms of caring which are working out the purposes of God’s creation in filling the world with goodness…

Or, in the words of the political and social (feminist) epistemologist, Hilary Rose: ‘we see feminism bringing love to knowledge and power. It is love, as caring respect for both people and nature that offers an ethic to reshape knowledge and with it society ‘(cited in Deane-Drummond 193; cf. Rose 1994, 33). In turn, feminist moral epistemology has links with the social movement for ecology (cf. Code 2006).

One of my objectives in rethinking the ethical task, as a learning to care, is to challenge a patriarchal formation of subjects which has resulted in certain locations at least, in cruelty due to the domination of nature, animals, women – and so the subordination of human and non-human subjects. But I am willing to admit that this (still) implies only an indirect moral concern when it comes to animals. Nevertheless, this indirect concern would have direct relevance for the embodying of beliefs which have been pernicious and cruel, including cruelty to animals… prejudice or dangerous thoughtlessness in experimentation….

To make my point about the link between God, animals and embodying belief, I would like to turn to the cultural mythology which reflects an embodied history of cruelty (but of course, not only cruelty… but I’m teasing the negative at this stage). This means a direct ethical challenge to those (interpretations of) the myths of the Fall which justify cruelty.

Rather contentiously, I suggest that this cruelty follows from mythical interpretations of human and non-human relations to a God-character whose lying, deception and selfish possessiveness are privileged over and above the author(ity) of truth-telling, trustworthiness and life-giving care; that is, the myth about God and the Fall of Adam (and Eve) have (unwittingly or not) ratified cruelty and deception. Arguably, this is instead of exploring the knowledge of good and evil gained by eating ‘the forbidden’ fruit: Eve has been blamed both for her desire and for her ethical knowledge, while men and women reacting against Eve have sought to avoid defilement, to seek purification, rather than to seek ethical knowledge, truth-telling or life-giving care. The danger is clear: religious practices of purification easily fail to acknowledge cruelty to women, to nature, to creation, and so fail to acknowledge the rational authority of women – especially as portrayed by Eve - the legitimate role of the creatures created by God and named by man – especially the snake as perhaps ironically a truth-telling subject – and hence, failing to embody beliefs of reciprocal care and concern for life, for human and non-human flourishing.

Admittedly this contentious alternative could appear as stereotypical, that is, as a feminist response to a masculinist bias against women and for the domination of nature (including animals)… Yet it may still be worth considering this contentious area of debate, in order to tease out those residual forms of epistemic injustice which continue to haunt Christian ethics.

Myths By Which We Live: or, the Philosophical Imaginary

Bear with me while I offer more theoretical background to my view of the process of embodying beliefs. My philosophical writings include teasing out ‘the myths by which we live’ – myths which are part of our ‘philosophical imaginary’ – and in turn, shape a habitus (Le Doeuff; Code 2006). The notion of habitus helps to locate our bodily practices within highly specific social and spiritual worlds. In Bourdieu’s words:

The habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present… The habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history in mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects ‘without inertia’ in rationalist theories (Bourdieu 1990, 56).

… the habitus is what enables the institution to attain full realization: it is through the capacity for incorporation, which exploits the body’s readiness to take seriously the performative magic of the social, that … the priest [is] the Church made flesh (ibid. 57)… the purely social and quasi-magical process of socialization, which is inaugurated by the act of marking that institutes an individual as an eldest son, an heir, a successor, a Christian, or simply as a man (as opposed to a woman), with all the corresponding privileges and obligations, and which is prolonged, strengthened and confirmed by social treatments that tend to transform instituted difference into natural distinction, produces quite real effects, durably inscribed in the body and in belief (58).

If you are interested in further philosophical discussions of the imaginary and habitus in terms of epistemic locations, I suggest you turn to Lorraine Code (see Ecological Thinking); Code has drawn on feminist philosophers notably Michèle Le Doeuff. Code helps to demonstrate how the philosophical imaginary functions as ‘those signifying norms, expectations, values, prohibitions and permissions into which members of a habitus are nurtured, which they internalize, affirm or reject, as they make sense of their place, possibilities and prohibitions, risks and responsibilities, in a social, physical and spiritual world, conceptions of whose nature and meaning are also formed by imaginary significations’ (Code 2006, 28-29, 244-247). An example of the functioning of this imaginary is the Christian mythology of the Fall in and so the expulsion from Paradise: as already mentioned, the danger is that this mythology both represents the knowledge of the snake – as representative of animals – before the Fall and informs the subordination of women and a woman’s knowledge after the Fall due to an inherently unfair (patriarchal) situation in Eden.

In less complicated, theoretical terms, the contemporary British philosopher, Mary Midgley, defends the existence of myth as “symbolic stories which play a crucial role in our imaginative and intellectual life by expressing the patterns that underlie our thought.”[1] She maintains that anyone who denies that myth underlies their thinking simply has not become aware of “the general background within which all detailed thought develops.”[2]

The way in which myths work is often very obscure to us. But, besides their value-implications – which are often very subtle – they also function as summaries of certain selected sets of facts (Midgley 1994, 117)
… When we attend to the range of facts that any particular myth sums up, we are always strongly led to draw the moral that belongs to that myth. But that range of facts is always highly selective. It is limited by the imaginative vision that lies behind that particular story. This vision can, of course, generate actual lies, which is what makes it plausible to think of the myth itself as a lie. Thus, myths about the inferiority of women, or of particular ethnic groups, have supported themselves by false factual beliefs about these people (ibid., 117-118)

Midgley also employs myth and its symbolism to make sense of the significance of philosophy in her own personal life.

God and the snake: mythology and cruelty to animals

I would like to reconsider with you one cultural source – in Christian mythology – for excluding women from rational authority and animals from ethical concern (and the opposite): that is, one could read Genesis 2 and 3 as containing a narrative in which truth-telling is not acknowledged and ethical knowledge is obscured for the sake of a deceitful and possessive God. Admittedly this implies a perverse understanding of the Genesis story- yet this may be precisely the problem… with our practical beliefs about animals.

Even if we might object to this (roughly speaking) ‘patriarchal’ reading of the Genesis story of the Fall, it is significant to give voice to the perverse nature of cultural mythology which can be and has been employed to justify cruelty (and enmity) between (hu)man and animal.[3] To cite the Old Testament scholar Debra Rooke in her recent feminist criticism of God in the cultural mythology read out of Genesis 2-3:

The vast majority of interpretations of Genesis 2-3 assume that God is in the right and the humans and the snake are in the wrong; but surely that, like the readings of female subordination that seem to follow all too inevitably from it, is also a culturally (or at least dogmatically) conditioned reading. God tells the (hu)man that on the day that he eats fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he will die (Gen 2:17); the snake, however, tells the woman that she and the man will not die, but will be given knowledge (Gen 3:4-5), and the snake is right. And since God knows straightaway what has happened from the humans’ reaction after they have eaten the fruit (Gen 3.11), God must have known that they would not die if they ate, despite telling them that they would. So why did God lie? The picture of God that this presents is not very complimentary.

To my mind, this is to say the least: how does this interpretation of the Genesis myth shape our ritual and other practices related to animal experimentation – as much as our treatment of non-human and human creatures more generally! One scholar mentioned by Rooke suggests that this mythological picture of God in Genesis utilizes a motif familiar from ancient Near Eastern mythology whereby deities determine to prevent humans from obtaining eternal life in order to preserve their own divine status (cf. Rooke 163n7).

Arguably the snake (as the representative figure for animals) is punished as much for unmasking God’s lie as for causing the humans to sin – since without the snake telling the truth, the humans would never have thought to disobey or question the instruction they had been given about the tree, and so would never have learned the truth about the tree, or about God (Rooke 164).

Moreover, arguably both God and Adam set up the conditions for the Fall first, in God creating the snake and second, in having the man name the snake – as part of the animal kingdom that is created by God - and this includes naming all of the beasts of the field (Gen 2:19; 3.1). Gen 3: 14-15 also implies an original similarity between snake and humans. Subsequently, the curse breaks this connection once and for all: best friends become bitterest enemies. To cite from Rooke again:

What this all means is that God and the (hu)man between them are responsible for creating the conditions where something is bound to go wrong, and that moreover they do it before the woman is created; so to put the blame on her when things do go wrong is to say the least unfair. But although the conditions for a ‘fall’ are set up before the woman arrives, she is not just a victim of circumstances. Rather, her depiction has a number of surprisingly positive elements in it. Having weighed what the snake says and evaluated the tree, she is prepared to take and eat, in the hope of gaining knowledge and becoming like God (Gen 3:5). She is not content simply to wander round in the garden; she wants to know what else there is to life. As it turns out, she is the one who becomes most like God, in that she is given ability to bear children (cf. Gen. 3: 15), that is, to produce new life; and although this godlike ability is marred by the punishment (Gen. 3: 16), it is not removed (Rooke 2007, 167 emphasis added).

Our cultural mythology, notably this patriarchal formation of subjects in Christian texts, helps to make sense of the place, possibilities and prohibitions, risks and responsibilities, in our social, physical and spiritual world(s) – when it comes to women and animals. The dialectical formation of signifying norms, our ethical values and expectations, marks our religious tradition, as a history of embodied beliefs. Again, Bourdieu’s term, habitus, captures the notion of “an embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history” (Bourdieu 1990, 56; cf. Mahmood 2005, 134-154), which marks any religious social or philosophical tradition, instituted by its own imaginary significations, its locations, its social and spiritual formations.

Crucially, Amy Hollywood takes the role of habitus and its recognition further, in order to push forward the transformation of embodied beliefs with new practices:

Recognition of the learned nature of one’s habitus can begin to open spaces for understanding, yet it is the very nature of the habitus to cover over its own learned status. Belief successfully inculcated through bodily practice renders itself ‘natural’ and hence resistant to critique and change. .. Even if we begin to recognize the learned nature of many of our most deeply embedded dispositions and beliefs, new practices that enable a re-formation of the self will be required for their transformation. (Hollywood 2004, 237; emphasis added)

Recognition and Transformation of our Cognitive Dispositions: New Practices

Cultivating a cognitive disposition of ‘care-knowing’ as a reliable response to one’s world and to others. Elsewhere I have admitted that ‘care’ is often employed to stand for much of what is today called ‘care ethics’, whose meaning is not at all clear; or if clear, it can have negative associations. Equally, the ideal of the ‘carer’ can have negative associations in the all-too-clear stereotype of a woman bound up with an oppressive construction of femininity. There is the self-destructive stereotype of the overly self-sacrificing woman whose ‘care’ allows her to be clearly exploited by her husband, or by other men with whom she may have a social or personal relationship. We cannot deny that religious ethics have often reinforced the exploitative, stereotypical case of the caring woman. Nevertheless, self-critical reflection, or … caring about caring, should ensure our crucial assessment of the relationships governing the lives of both the carer and the cared for (Anderson, 2004, 93).

Nevertheless, as a cognitive disposition, care-knowing requires for its development a process of self-revelation and self-making. At the same time, this disposition is shaped intellectually by imaginatively listening to and reflexively registering the perspectives of others, especially as developed by one’s interactive practices with these others: both human and non-human others. To transform our beliefs and bring about new practices, we might consider caring as a five-facet disposition, establishing the possibility of an interactive, cognitive practice between the one caring and the cared for. The five-facets include caring about, caring for, taking care, care reception and caring about caring (see Anderson 2004). Yet as an acquired (like a practical belief, in Bourdieu’s terms, perhaps), this cognitive disposition is suited to the feminist agenda of effectively challenging traditional stereotypes which have been oppressive to women. In ‘Dogged Loyalties: A Classical Indian Intervention in Care Ethics,’ Vrinda Dalmiya takes two classical examples (from the Mahabharata): to illustrate the way in which the carers – in one parable, a parrot, and in another, a male warrior – each resists following the instrumental reason of the ancient supreme Vedic god, Indra (Dalmiya 2001, 294-7; cf. Anderson 2004, 93). Indra is the ‘self-styled opponent’ to the voice of care in both parables. In this context, the principle of loyalty has a categorical force: it is rationally compelling. This rationality is incompatible with ethical principles that strictly follow utilitarian rules or simply fulfil a social agreement, yet this does not make loyalty any less rational. The parrot, in remaining loyal to ‘its tree’ as its shelter, even when that tree ceases to flourish, resists any utilitarian appeal to follow a rule for achieving its own health and preserving its own life. Similarly, the male-warrior acts out of loyalty to a dog, even if the dog represents the most unworthy beast, because of a deeper debt to life, calling for repayment: this ethic takes as its norm a fundamental aspect of social and inter-species relationships. This norm constitutes a powerful reason for bringing about an inclusive sort of care-knowing, of both human and non-human subjects (94).

Admittedly ethical practice informed by care-knowing would tend to give ethical value to animals indirectly… but perhaps interpersonal relationships more generally are crucial to any re-evaluation of our ethical knowledge. The indirect moral concern for animals may tackle one of the greatest obstacles to successful care-knowing: that is, self-reflexivity is a prerequisite to the transformation of our ethical practices from excessive cruelty and obsessive purification to care for goodness, truth-telling and epistemic forms of justice.

References and Further Readings

Anderson, Pamela Sue. ‘An Epistemological-Ethical Approach to Philosophy of Religion: Learning to Listen.’ in Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack. Eds. Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings. London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 87-101.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
Code, Lorriane. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Dalmiya, Vrinda. ‘Dogged Loyalties: A Classical Indian Intervention in Care Ethics’, in j. Runzo and N. Martin. Eds. Ethics in World Religions, vol. III, in Global Ethics and Religion, Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2001, pp. 293-308.
Deane-Drummond, Celia. The Ethics of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Genesis 2-3.
Hollywood, Amy. ‘Practice, Belief and Feminist Philosophy of Religion.’ in Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack. Eds. Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings. London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 225-240.
Midgley, Mary. The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality. London: Routledge, 1994.
Rooke, Debra. ‘Feminist Criticism of the Old Testament: Why Bother?’ Feminist Theology 15/2 (2007): 160-174.
Rose, Jacqueline. Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.
Williams, Bernard. ‘The Human Prejudice.’ Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Selected, edited and with an Introduction by A. W. Moore. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 135-152.

Further readings on myth, gender, ritual and bodily practices

Haslanger, Sally. ‘“What Good are Our Intuitions?” Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds: I.’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2006): 89-117.
Le Doeuff Michèle. The Philosophical Imaginary. Translated by Colin Gordon. Continuum. London, 2002.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Midgley, Mary. The Myths We Live By London: Routledge, 2004.
Mulhall, Stephen. Philosophical Myths of the Fall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univeristy Press, 2005.

Footnotes:

1. Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality (London: Routledge, 1994), 109: Midgley asserts that “Myths are not lies, nor need they be taken as literally true,” and gives a highly useful, philosophical definition of myth; this basic, relatively uncontentious treatment renders mythical symbolism a necessary addition to scientific facts. For her initial use of the term, see Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 10-12 and 162. For the more technical use of myth, see Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 109, 117-118; the latter is repeated and elaborated ten years later in, Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By, (London: Routledge, 2004), xi, 1, 2, 5.
2. Midgley, The Ethical Primate, 117, more generally 109-120.
3. The crucial elements here are: Genesis 2 the creation of man, naming of animals, and Genesis 3 the Fall; myths of the fall and the desire to be God (divinisation) or the longing for God; doctrines of redemption: the perversity of human being is constituted by sinful action and requires redemption which cannot be achieved by human powers alone; truth, deception, possessiveness, ‘rational’ authority each are meta-ethical issues; animals : represented by the snake whose truth-telling and trustworthy knowledge are eclipsed for the sake of the ultimate authority of God. Arguably, the snake speaks the truth but is punished it for this by a deceitful and possessive god. The curse is on the ‘beasts of the field’. The woman exhibits a lack of rational authority, even though Eve desired knowledge and gained it before Adam did. We consider further the following: The snake’s knowledge of right and wrong, the snake’s integrity in telling the truth; the snake’s unfair treatment, being blamed for telling the truth and speaking to the woman about the knowledge of the tree of good and evil. In this cultural mythology, we find grounding for a serious form of epistemic injustice, and a moral epistemology which wrongly blames the woman and the animal for their actions, while falsehoods spoken by God go unacknowledged – roughly, the criticism is that God remains guilty.