3 Welcoming Dogs: Levinas and ‘the Animal’ Question

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2011 37: 49Philosophy Social CriticismBob Plant

Welcoming dogs: Levinas and 'the animal' question

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Welcoming dogs:Levinas and ‘theanimal’ question

Bob PlantDepartment of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

AbstractAccording to Levinas, the history of western philosophy has routinely ‘assimilated every Otherinto the Same’. More concretely stated, philosophers have neglected the ethical significance ofother human beings in their vulnerable, embodied singularity. What is striking about Levinas’recasting of ethics as ‘first philosophy’ is his own relative disregard for non-human animals. In thisarticle I will do two interrelated things: (1) situate Levinas’ (at least partial) exclusion of the non-human animal in the context of his markedly bleak conception of ‘the state of nature’, and (2) draw-ing on Orwell, Wittgenstein and Gaita, argue that, despite his more positive evaluation of animality(specifically a dog named Bobby), Levinas is guided by a number of anthropomorphic prejudices;not least that the epithet ‘the animal’ can be used in the general singular.

Keywordsanimality, embodiment, ethics, Raimond Gaita, Emmanuel Levinas, George Orwell, LudwigWittgenstein

I thought some more about the animals. And this in turn made me think about humans. To be

specific, I wondered about what it is that makes humans, well . . . human? What is human

behaviour? For example, we know what dog behaviour is: dogs do doggy things. . . . So

what exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human?1

1 Introduction: . . . the most worthless of animals

In the early 17th century, Cambridge University hosted a debate on whether dogs

possessed the capacity for syllogistic reasoning2 – an idea that can be traced back at least

Corresponding author:

Bob Plant, Department of Philosophy, King’s College, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland AB24

3UB, UK.

Email: [email protected]

Philosophy and Social Criticism37(1) 49–71

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as far as Chrysippus, though it is perhaps better known from Sextus,3 and later

Montaigne.4 In Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus thus notes that dogs are frequently

thought to be ‘the most worthless of animals’.5 Prefiguring a number of the participants

in the Cambridge debate, he nevertheless proceeds to undermine this common assump-

tion, for Sextus wants to ‘draw comparisons between mankind and the so-called

irrational animals’.6 We are therefore assured that dogs possess ‘reason’,7 are ‘intelli-

gent’8 and even have ‘an art’.9 But what is interesting here is not merely Sextus’ estima-

tion of dogs’ cognitive faculties. Though we may share a considerable amount with our

canine companions in this regard,10 Gaita is surely right to suggest that, in both humans

and dogs, ‘cleverness is not the most important quality’.11 What is also striking then is

how Sextus proceeds to argue that dogs are not ‘devoid . . . of virtue’, for ‘if justice con-

sists in rendering to each his due, the dog, that welcomes and guards its friends and ben-

efactors but drives off strangers and evil-doers, cannot be lacking in justice’.12 (Plato

similarly praises dogs for being ‘by instinct perfectly gentle to people whom they know

and are accustomed to, and fierce to strangers’.13) There are two notable things about

Sextus’ characterization: first, his focus on a specific type of animal, rather than ‘the ani-

mal’ in general (I will return to this later), and second, Sextus’ suggestion that dogs’ nat-

ural ‘virtue’ lies in their ‘welcoming’ those who are familiar. While this latter claim

seems commonsensical enough, it is, I think, partial and misleading in an instructive

way. In this article I will argue that such partiality highlights important shortcomings

in Levinas’ engagement with ‘the animal question’. Moreover, I hope to show why these

deficiencies undermine his (allegedly) ‘radical’ re-thinking of ethics as ‘first philoso-

phy’. Before getting to Levinas, however, I want to set up the discussion by considering

some pertinent remarks on animality (specifically a dog) in Orwell’s essay ‘A Hanging’.

The relevance of these passages will become clear in due course.

2 Orwell: . . . a party of men walking together

In ‘A Hanging’ Orwell recalls a particularly cheerless morning in Burma. Outside the cells

of those awaiting execution, Orwell and his companions observed the squalor of these tiny

‘animal cages’. Soon enough one of the condemned was brought from his cell and

promptly bound, yielding himself ‘limply to the ropes’.14 As the morning bugle sounded,

the superintendent hurried the head jailer: ‘‘‘The man ought to have been dead by this time.

Aren’t you ready yet? . . . The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over.’’’15

Orwell’s account is characteristically vivid in showing the general ambivalence toward the

condemned man’s predicament. But what interests me here is what transpires next. Head-

ing toward the gallows, Orwell recalls something ‘dreadful’ happening. After the proces-

sion had moved only a short distance, it suddenly came to a halt, for ‘a dog, come goodness

knows whence, had appeared in the yard’. This eager intruder ‘came bounding among us

with a loud volley of barks and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at

finding so many human beings together’.16 This intervention was not ‘dreadful’ merely

because it interrupted the ceremony. Rather, as Orwell explains:

For a moment it pranced around us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash

for the prisoner, jumping up tried to lick his face. Everybody stood aghast, too taken aback

50 Philosophy and Social Criticism 37(1)



even to grab the dog. ‘Who let that bloody brute in here?’ said the superintendent angrily.

‘Catch it, someone!’ A warder detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog,

but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game.

A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but

it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail walls. The pris-

oner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another

formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog.

Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still

straining and whimpering.17

Upon reaching the gallows, the prisoner began ‘crying out to his god’, to which the dog

duly responded ‘with a whine’. Once the execution was over, Orwell likewise recalls:

‘I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when

it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where

it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us.’18 Finally, glancing at his watch,

the superintendent declared: ‘‘‘Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning,

thank God.’’ The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and

conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them.’19

Now, what is interesting about all of this is that Orwell does not explicitly attribute

any ethical significance to the dog’s untimely intervention. Rather, what provokes him

is the prisoner’s walk to the gallows immediately after the dog’s intrusion. As Orwell

explains:

I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily

with his bound arms, but quite steadily . . . [O]nce, in spite of the men who gripped him by

each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till

that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When

I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrong-

ness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. . . . He and we are a party of men walking

together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a

sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.20

For Orwell then, the humanity of the condemned man became palpable in his concern

‘even about puddles’.21 It is this banal manoeuvre – indeed, precisely due to its ban-

ality – that generates Orwell’s spiralling meditation on the commonality of the world,

the place of human vulnerability therein, and the ‘unspeakable wrongness’ of taking

another’s life.

Such moral awakenings are not uncommon in Orwell’s writings. Most famously

perhaps, in ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, he recalls an enemy soldier running

into full view over the top of the trenches. What prevented Orwell from shooting?

Not some abstract philosophical consideration of human dignity, respect for persons,

or the sanctity of life, but rather that this adversary ‘was half-dressed . . . holding up

his trousers with both hands as he ran’. As Orwell notes, he was there to kill fascists,

‘but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘‘Fascist’’, he is visibly a fellow-

creature’; namely, a concrete singular Other.22 Reflecting on this episode, Orwell thus

concludes:

Plant 51



What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing that

happens all the time. . . . I don’t suppose that in telling it I can make it moving to you who

read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to me, as an incident characteristic of the

moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.23

This diagnosis applies equally well to the aforementioned hanging, for there too Orwell

captures the ‘moral atmosphere of a particular moment’. In achieving this he does not

extrapolate arguments or theses (against capital punishment, for example), but rather

offers a narrative description of a specific, concrete event. Arguably, it is this literary

sensitivity to the singular that is lacking in the examples, thought-experiments and

intuition-pumps routinely employed by moral philosophers. But that is not my primary

concern here. Returning to ‘A Hanging’, what interests me is how, as he describes it,

Orwell’s full recognition of the prisoner’s humanity – and what it means ‘to destroy a

healthy, conscious man’ – was stirred by the latter’s own, more or less unconscious beha-

viour. It was, after all, the prisoner’s stepping ‘slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path’

that first moves Orwell to acknowledge the ‘mystery’ of human life. For how preposterous

to worry about wet feet when less than 40 yards from death! But what is even more striking

is how Orwell describes his own experience of their shared humanity: ‘He and we’ were ‘a

party of men walking together’.24 This remark is salient because a little earlier Orwell

similarly describes the dog’s intervention as betraying a ‘glee at finding so many human

beings together’.25 This woolly brute, oblivious to the gravity of the proceedings it had dis-

rupted, could immediately see what Orwell would only later reflect upon and articulate;

namely, ‘men walking together’. In its dumb enthusiasm for human contact, this animal’s

response was not, I think, lacking in goodness. To develop this claim, I now want to turn to

another canine intervention; this one recorded by Levinas.

3 Levinas: . . . a wandering dog entered our lives

Reference to Levinas in the present context may at first seem odd, for despite his recast-

ing ethics as ‘first philosophy’, he is markedly ambivalent regarding ‘the animal’.26 For

example, when pressed on the question of whether non-human animals have a ‘face’ – in

the distinct ethical sense Levinas gives to that term – all he is prepared to say is ‘I don’t

know’.27 (I will return to the animal face later.) This hesitancy must, however, be under-

stood in the context of his more general, and much bleaker, views concerning the non-

human realm. For on Levinas’ account, the ethical face-to-face relation is not merely

restricted to the human, it constitutes a positive ‘overthrowing of the natural order’ (it

is, in fact, a minor ‘miracle’).28 As he explains:

Ethics is . . . against nature because it forbids the murderousness of my natural will to put

my own existence first. . . . [T]he face . . . calls for an ethical conversion or reversal of our

nature. . . . [T]he moral priority of the other over myself could not come to be if it were not

motivated by something beyond nature.29

So, only with the ‘apparition of the human’30 does an ‘ideal of holiness contrary to the

laws of being’31 emerge in the world. Indeed, the human, insofar as it ‘interrupts the pure




obstinacy of being and its wars’,32 is nothing short of a ‘scandal in being’.33 Derrida is

thus mistaken when he insists that there is ‘no concept of nature or reference to a state of

nature in Levinas’,34 for the latter is committed to a very particular vision of ‘the state of

nature’.35 As Wood rightly suggests, Levinas’ ‘entire focus on the ethical is an antidote

to what he believes to be man’s fundamentally murderous natural disposition’. ‘The ani-

mal’ therefore plays a crucial role in Levinas’ work; namely, as ‘the condition that man

must overcome’.36 Still, Derrida may be forgiven his misdiagnosis insofar as Levinas’

position on ‘the state of nature’ is not always transparent. Nowhere is this ambiguity

more tangible than in his essay ‘The Name of a Dog’, for here, as I will now explain,

rather different sentiments seem to find a voice.

Levinas begins ‘The Name of a Dog’ by considering Exodus 22.31: ‘You shall be

holy to me: you shall not eat the flesh of anything in the open country killed by beasts,

but you shall throw it to the dogs.’37 Meditating on this passage he proceeds to contem-

plate the domestic horror of ‘the family table, as you plunge your fork into your roast’.

This domestic act of ‘butchery that every day claims our ‘‘consecrated’’ mouths’ is

(almost, but not quite38) ‘enough . . . to make you a vegetarian again’, just as ‘Adam,

the father of us all, was one!’ Levinas then explains his fascination with this scripture:

‘It is the dog mentioned at the end of the verse that I am especially interested in. I am

thinking of Bobby.’39 Because he does not want to speak of the dog in a merely ‘figura-

tive sense’,40 Levinas proceeds in a more concrete autobiographical mood:

There were seventy of us in a forestry commando unit for Jewish prisoners of war in Nazi

Germany. . . . The French uniform still protected us from Hitlerian violence. But the other

men, called free, who had dealings with us or gave us work or orders or even a smile – and

the children and women who passed by and sometimes raised their eyes – stripped us of our

human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes. A small inner murmur, the strength and

wretchedness of persecuted people, reminded us of our essence as thinking creatures, but

we were no longer part of the world.41

Racism, Levinas goes on to suggest, is not essentially ‘a biological concept’, but rather

that which condemns people to become ‘beings without language’ (presumably like

dogs). Anti-Semitism – the ‘archetype of all internment’ – thus ‘shuts people away in

a class, deprives them of expression and condemns them to being ‘‘signifiers without sig-

nified’’’. He proceeds to ask: ‘How can we deliver a message about our humanity which,

from behind the bars of quotation marks, will come across as anything other than mon-

key talk?’42 These anxieties about voicelessness are in keeping with Levinas’ preoccu-

pation with the ‘verbal sound’ (the ‘proffered word’), and specifically his insistence that

the ‘sounds and noises of nature are words that disappoint us’.43 Just as Picard thinks that

the ‘greatest event’ is ‘the creation of the word’,44 and Benjamin likewise that ‘[s]peech-

lessness . . . is the great sorrow of nature’,45 so does Levinas contend that ‘[t]o really

hear a sound is to hear a word. Pure sound is the word.’ Indeed, it is in this context that

he refers to Robinson Crusoe, when ‘in the tropical splendour of nature . . . he experi-

ences in meeting Man Friday the greatest event of his insular life – in which a man who

speaks replaces the ineffable sadness of echoes’.46 The animal’s grunts, whimpers and

growls are therefore feeble substitutes for the human voice; indeed, it is as if animals

Plant 53



were here trying to utter a word and actually say something. Levinas would perhaps

agree with Picard that there is something tragic in the animal’s ‘desperate . . . vain

effort’ in this regard, for while ‘the raven croaks, the dog barks, and the lion roars’, such

‘animal voices are only chinks in the silence’. Indeed, as Picard concludes: ‘It is as

though the animal were trying to tear open the silence with the force of its body.’47

Despite his relentless criticism of western philosophy’s reduction of ‘every Other into

the Same’,48 Levinas remains as blindly anthropocentric as his philosophical predeces-

sors – not least Heidegger.49 Still, what is interesting in ‘The Name of a Dog’ is how

Levinas proceeds to describe his encounter with ‘Bobby’:

[A]bout halfway through our long captivity, for a few short weeks, before the sentinels

chased him away, a wandering dog entered our lives. One day he came to meet this rabble

as we returned under guard from work. He survived in some wild patch in the region of the

camp. But we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He

would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and

down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men.50

Some years later, Levinas similarly recalls:

In this corner of Germany, where walking through the village we would be looked at by the

villagers as Juden, this dog evidently took us for human beings. The villagers certainly did

not injure us or do us any harm, but their expressions were clear. We were the condemned

and the contaminated carriers of germs. And this little dog welcomed us at the entrance of

the camp, barking happily and jumping up and down amicably around us.51

Just like the nameless dog Orwell describes in ‘A Hanging’, Bobby lacked both the lin-

guistic and cognitive capacities required to ‘universalize maxims’. And yet, despite this,

Levinas celebrates this little dog as ‘the last Kantian in Nazi Germany’.52 Now of course,

Levinas is not immune to hyperbole. But we should, I think, take seriously the fact that

Bobby was, in an important sense, ‘the only one who recognized’ Levinas and his com-

panions ‘as men’.53 (For this dog ‘there was no doubt that we were men’.54) Bobby’s

boundless enthusiasm – his ‘happy nature’, ‘direct thoughts’ and ‘friendly growling’55

– did not derive from a chain of reasoning, syllogistic or otherwise. But it would be mis-

taken to conclude that in this Bobby tragically lacked something it would be better he

possessed. While his reactions may indeed be ‘primitive’,56 they nevertheless manifested

a certain level of goodness.57 Not, of course, the sense of ‘justice’ Sextus attributes to the

canine, which consists in welcoming only ‘friends and benefactors’.58 On the contrary,

both Orwell and Levinas bear witness to the way dogs (though not only dogs) often

unsettle such discriminations between the free and condemned, Gentile and Jew, neigh-

bour and foreigner, rich and poor.59 Thus, regarding Exodus 22.31 (cited above), Levinas

enquires: ‘So, who is the dog at the end of the verse?’ I think his first response is appo-

site: ‘Someone who disrupts society’s games (or Society itself)’.60 Might not this be

‘what the friend of man means’;61 namely, a being-for-the-Other without reserve, con-

dition or calculation? If so, then in Bobby do we not discover the archetype of Levinas’

‘‘‘goodness without thought’’’,62 ‘gratuitous . . . love without reward’63 or ‘goodness

without regime’ that is ‘exterior to all system’?64 Do we not here find the ‘natural




goodness’ of ‘[n]onindifference’65 that Levinas estimates so highly? To develop this idea

further, I now want to take a brief Wittgensteinian detour.

4 Wittgenstein: . . . a dog cannot be a hypocrite

In On Being with Others, Glendinning recalls a game he used to play with his mother’s

dog, Sophie. Situated one on either side of the family pond, his objective was to catch

her, while hers was to avoid his advances:

Sometimes we would find ourselves facing each other, almost motionless, on either side of

the pond, each of us watching the other for movements indicating a direction of pursuit or

flight. I would try faking a movement; starting to the left but running to my right. Sophie

would sometimes be foxed, but would always correct her run when she saw me coming the

other way. Sophie has a lot of Collie in her and I never caught her. But one day while we

(we) were playing this game I slipped as I tried to change direction too quickly on damp

grass. Almost immediately Sophie ran straight up to me. I was unhurt, but she licked my

face anyway.66

There is nothing remarkable about Sophie’s behaviour; it is, to borrow Orwell’s phrase,

‘the kind of thing that happens all the time’.67 Moreover, Glendinning is right to make

the following appeal: ‘I do not see why this cannot be counted as a case of ‘‘mutual intel-

ligibility’’. The dog could see my distress and I could see her sympathy.’68 There is,

I think, no compelling reason to resist such a description.69 Analogously, there is no rea-

son to sneer at Levinas’ declaration that Bobby ‘was the only one who recognized us as

men’.70 Neither claim needs to be read as anthropomorphic or sentimentalizing. For here

both Glendinning and Levinas simply remind us of something we are familiar with

between human beings; namely, that it is also ‘a primitive reaction to tend, to treat, the

part that hurts when someone else is in pain; and not merely when oneself is’.71 To

assume that such behaviour requires reasoning – let alone the capacity for language-

use – misrepresents the situation within (some) inter-human and inter-animal relations,

and between (some) humans and animals.72 None of this is to deny that rational and lin-

guistic capacities enable human beings to make much finer-grained discriminations than,

for example, our canine companions. Indeed, it is due to these capacities that only the

human – though not every human – can fully enter the realm of ‘justice’ or ‘Institutions’,

where ‘one must compare, weigh, think’ and use ‘theory’.73 Neither is it to deny that

(most) human beings, by virtue of their reason, language and the forms of life these make

possible, have a more complex behavioural-conceptual repertoire than (most) animals.

Wittgenstein draws attention to this latter point when he notes: ‘We say a dog is afraid

his master will beat him; but not, he is afraid his master will beat him to-morrow . . . ’,74

and likewise: ‘One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled.

But hopeful? And why not? A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also

believe his master will come home the day after tomorrow?’75 (As we will see later, the

generic use of ‘animal’ here is misleading.76) But what this also means is that, just as a

‘child has much to learn before it can pretend’, so too a ‘dog cannot be a hypocrite, but

neither can he be sincere’.77 What Wittgenstein is here emphasizing is presumably what

Plant 55



Levinas has in mind when referring to Bobby’s ‘animal faith’,78 and what Picard is

driving at when he claims that, unlike (most) humans, in animals ‘there is no discrepancy

. . . between being and appearance’.79 Indeed, at this juncture it is worth noting what

Levinas says of the human infant: ‘Children are often loved for their animality. The child

is not suspicious of anything. He jumps, he walks, he runs, he bites. It’s delightful.’80

Much like the young child’s trusting behaviour then, there is no ulterior motive in

Bobby’s welcome, because he is not the sort of creature to whom one can meaningfully

attribute ‘ulterior motives’; Bobby is simply delighted to encounter this pathetic rabble of

human beings. Of course, this also implies that Bobby’s delight cannot be characterized

as issuing from his ‘generosity’ – unless, that is, we are also prepared to accept that

mean-spiritedness (or something equivalent) is a live possibility here.81 Bobby’s

response is, as it were, prior to such distinctions, just as an infant’s trust in her principal

carer(s) does not represent the triumph of reason or common sense over scepticism.82

The reactions of both Bobby and the infant lie ‘beyond being justified or unjustified’;

they are ‘something animal’.83 But the primitivity of Bobby’s responses need not blind

us to their significance for thinking about human intersubjectivity, for these reactions are

the very building blocks of moral life. Neither Bobby nor the dog Orwell describes acted

‘morally’ in any weighty philosophical sense, for this would presuppose too much other

conceptual baggage – not least that full-fledged immorality was possible. (Even if

Orwell’s dog had mauled the prisoner, we would not accuse it of having acted immo-

rally.) But the significance of their actions does not ultimately hinge upon this additional

baggage. Here, I think, Wittgenstein’s caution is pertinent:

Reason . . . presents itself to us as the gauge par excellence against which everything that

we do, all our language games, measure and judge themselves. – We may say: we are so

exclusively preoccupied by contemplating a yardstick that we can’t allow our gaze to rest

on certain phenomena or patterns. We are used, as it were, to ‘dismissing’ these as irrational,

as corresponding to a low state of intelligence, etc. The yardstick rivets our attention and

keeps distracting us from these phenomena, as it were making us look beyond . . . 84

While such a ‘distracting’ picture is not wholly absent from Orwell’s ‘A Hanging’ or

Levinas’ ‘The Name of a Dog’, both texts nevertheless highlight the broadly ethical sig-

nificance of those behaviours which are neither rational nor irrational. Indeed, one might

here go further and suggest that Orwell’s horror at the dog’s ‘dreadful’85 intervention

was prompted by a sense of shame; that is, the (albeit tacit) recognition that the prisoner

was another human being just as worthy of canine attention as the rest of them. (Much

the same can be said about Levinas’ captors.) This is not implausible, even though

Orwell explicitly claims that his recognition of ‘a party of men walking together’86

emerged only later.87 In any case, the crucial point in both Orwell’s and Levinas’

accounts is that it was precisely the dogs’ lack of discrimination between all these human

beings that ultimately bore witness to the latter’s commonality.

Now, according to Levinas, an animal (such as a dog) is ‘something that is attached to

being, to its own being’,88 and is thereby engaged in a ‘struggle for life’.89 Of course,

within each human organism90 this attachment to ‘being’ is far from absent. (It is not

incidental that one normally needs reasons for taking one’s own life, but not for




continuing to live.) To this limited extent then, Levinas can admit the correspondence

between the animal and human. Nevertheless, as previously noted, he contends that with

the ‘appearance of the human’ in nature a truly remarkable event occurs. For here there

can be ‘something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other’. While

we often think of social relations in more or less reciprocal terms, and in one sense

Levinas would see this as perfectly ‘rational’, for him ethics is not ultimately governed

by or grounded in reason. Indeed, ‘fearing for the other’91 more than oneself is dis-

tinctly ‘unreasonable’.92 (Thus, the ‘mother who fears for the child’93 over herself acts

unreasonably.94) Such prioritizing of the Other is nothing short of a ‘scandal’,95 a

‘reversal’96 or ‘overthrowing of the natural order’.97 The ways in which we can, and

do, put the Other first are therefore, for Levinas, ‘extraordinary possibilities with

regard to nature’.98 In this crucial respect then, the human is an ‘unreasonable ani-

mal’;99 even an ‘irrational animal’.100 But if genuine being-for-the-Other is outside the

remit of both calculation and the demands for reciprocity, then it is unclear why an ani-

mal like Bobby does not qualify as ‘ethical’ in Levinas’ sense.101 Bobby may lack the

cognitive abilities to ‘universalize maxims’,102 but why should that matter to Levinas?

Is not Bobby’s behaviour indicative of his being an ‘unreasonable animal’ too? Why

then cannot his intervention (or that of Orwell’s dog) be described as ‘an act of good-

ness exterior to all system’?103 As Levinas himself observes: ‘There are acts of stupid,

senseless goodness’,104 and for this we should presumably be thankful. I want to sug-

gest that although Bobby may, in one sense, be a ‘stupid’ animal, he is none the worse

for that. Of course, tensions arise between the ‘reactions’ and ‘primitive behaviours’

Wittgenstein alludes to and the governing moral and social norms of a given situation.

However, it is a happy fact that the former sometimes ‘disrupts society’s games’,105

and even occasionally ‘wins over morality’.106

As I have tried to show, Levinas takes for granted that animal life is inherently

and brutally self-serving. Indeed, even the world of inanimate nature strikes him as

impoverished insofar as its sad ‘echoes’107 never amount to (human) speech. Given

Levinas’ gloomy conception of ‘the natural’, his final assessment of Bobby’s beha-

viour remains ambiguous. For while he evidently has great affection for this welcom-

ing ‘little dog’,108 Levinas does not explain how, if at all, Bobby fits into his deeply

anti-naturalistic conception of ethics. I now want to develop this point by focusing

on Levinas’ remarks on the ‘face’.

5 Levinas and Gaita: . . . via the face one understands a dog

According to Levinas, the ‘face’ is poorly understood as an object possessing certain

attributes. Of course, in one sense, the face is an ‘assemblage of a nose, a forehead, eyes,

etc.’.109 But what ultimately interests Levinas is how, through its active dimension of

facing, the face of a concrete Other affects and challenges my complacent being-here.

Through the face, the Other ‘is the most naked’ (even ‘nakedness itself’110), and as such,

the face that faces me is the paradigmatic expression of vulnerability.111 This, roughly

speaking, is why Levinas maintains that ‘access’ to the Other is ‘straightaway ethical’.112

I have discussed some of the finer details of Levinas’ account of the face elsewhere and

do not want to rehearse that here.113 What is important to note is that all of this applies

Plant 57



exclusively to the human face; on the question of the non-human face, Levinas is notably

evasive.114 Thus, while he concedes that it is ‘via the face that one understands, for

example, a dog’,115 Levinas nevertheless insists that this ‘access’ is an imaginative

‘transference’116 from the human to the animal. In short, the ‘priority’ is unequivocally

‘the human face’.117 (There is a striking similarity here between Levinas and Husserl, for

not only does Husserl think that ‘abnormality’ is parasitic on a given ‘normality’, he

explicitly links this to the question of animality: ‘Relative to the brute, man is, constitu-

tionally speaking, the normal case. . . . Brutes are essentially constituted for me as abnor-

mal ‘‘variants’’ of my humanness, even though among them in turn normality and

abnormality may be differentiated.’118 And similarly: ‘Among animals, human beings

stand out, so much so, in fact, that mere animals have ontic meaning [as such] only

by comparison to them . . . as variations of them.’119) On Levinas’ account then, the dog

‘has a face’120 in a restricted sense, but not in the full ethical sense he bestows upon that

term.121 When pressed on the question of the animal, Levinas therefore becomes increas-

ingly tentative, claiming to simply not know if and when one can truly say of another

creature that it deserves the epithet ‘face’.122 He proceeds: ‘The human face is com-

pletely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don’t know

if a snake has a face. I can’t answer that question. A more specific analysis is needed.’123

Precisely what sort of ‘analysis’ Levinas has in mind remains unclear. But we should not

be overly surprised that he dances around ‘the animal’ question. For, as we have begun to

see, this hesitancy is very much in keeping with Levinas’ insistence that ‘the human is a

new phenomenon’124 which breaks with the natural order of cruel self-preservation and

the ‘struggle for life’.125

Having said all of this, there is something in Levinas’ previous remarks worth consid-

ering further; namely, his avowed uncertainty as to whether a snake (though many other

animals could be included here) can be said to have a ‘face’. On a more charitable read-

ing, one might agree that specific types of animal life pose specific problems for our ethi-

cal sensitivities. We might therefore reconstruct Levinas’ avowed uncertainty as follows:

the question as to whether a snake has a ‘face’ is not reducible to whether this creature

possesses the recognizable collection of organs (eyes, mouth, and so on) we normally

take as constituting ‘a face’. Surely the snake, like the dog, does possess these discernible

bodily features.126 Rather, what is at issue here is whether the general embodiment of

specific animals facilitates our ethical ‘access’ in terms of concrete relational possibili-

ties.127 What I have in mind here is nicely illustrated in Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’,

for there he simply observes: ‘Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.’128

This is not, I think, a trivial remark. Though it is rarely acknowledged by philosophers,

our attitude toward different animals frequently depends upon such mundane factors as

their relative size. (Elephants are an obvious case, for what we customarily describe as

their ‘dignity’ and ‘majesty’ are directly bound up with this.129) Some animals, due to

their size, fragility, longevity and/or behavioural repertoire, inhibit our relational possi-

bilities quite dramatically. With these sorts of animals we can certainly have a more dis-

tanced relationship of curiosity, fascination, or aesthetic appreciation,130 but not one of

interactive companionship. Indeed, here we may not even be able to enter into a relation

of care (which, of course, does not need to be reciprocal). It is, after all, unclear what it

would mean to have ‘affection’ for a common house-fly or garden beetle in its




individuality, though we have little trouble saying, thinking and feeling such things about

dogs, cats and many other creatures.131 It is far from obvious what, if anything, it

would mean to manifest Wittgenstein’s ‘attitude towards a soul’132 toward certain

kinds of non-human animals.133 These differences between such relational possibilities

are inadequately explained by reference to the respective cognitive abilities of flies,

beetles, dogs and cats. What is at least as important here is how embodiment (form,

size, fragility, longevity, behavioural repertoire, and so on) both facilitates and inhibits

meaningful interaction. As Gaita rightly notes of goldfish and insects: ‘[I]t is not their

objective differences in themselves that matter to us so much as the relations those fea-

tures make possible for us.’134

Levinas’ aforementioned hesitancy may now seem less troubling, for it could plausi-

bly be argued that the snake represents just such a borderline case.135 I say ‘borderline’

because some people clearly do have relations of (at least) care with specific snakes they

consider to be singular and irreplaceable. This attachment to singular Others is, of

course, most evident in our inter-human relations, for again, as Gaita observes, we have

an ‘unfathomable need for particular human beings’; a particularity that is poorly cap-

tured by ‘appealing to individual features’136 or collections thereof. Even where the Oth-

er’s individuality seems very limited (newly born infants, for example), we do not

normally consider them to be a mere ‘instance of humanity’,137 ‘specimen of a spe-

cies’,138 or an ‘individual of a genus’.139 A woman who tragically loses her baby in

childbirth, but who later conceives and gives birth successfully, does not normally think

that this latter child merely replaces the former. Less dramatically, it is commonplace

that many of one’s friends are ‘replaced’ over time with new ones. But this does not

imply that such friends were/are interchangeable. What then of non-human animals?

According to Gaita, the ‘difference in our responses to animals is a function of the

degree to which . . . individuality is attenuated in them’.140 This is correct insofar

as some animals’ singularity is not accessible to us.141 But Gaita’s point seems rather

stronger, for elsewhere he insists that ‘animals lack the individuality that is internal to

our sense of human preciousness and which is, therefore, internal to our sense of what

it is to wrong another’. In other words, ‘[a]nimals emerge from their species character

in only an attenuated way’.142 This then is a claim about non-human animals per se.

But such a broad-brush allegation should, I think, provoke us to ask ‘Which animals?’

It is unfortunate that ‘the animal’ (‘spoken of in the general singular’143) is commonly

used to refer to all non-human creatures, despite their immense internal diversity.144

Recalling what I said above about the singularity and irreplaceability of human beings,

it remains unclear why one cannot say, think and/or feel the same sort of things about

specific non-human animals. Indeed, of those animals with whom we commonly share

our domestic space (dogs and cats, for example) we often do say, think and feel such

things. There is no obvious reason to dismiss such responses as inherently anthropo-

morphic, sentimental, or otherwise wrongheaded.145

Returning to Levinas then, one might defend his aforementioned hesitancy insofar as

the snake constitutes what I called a ‘borderline’ case. It may be true that sufficient

familiarity with such animals extends the kind of relational possibilities open to us, but

it is not unreasonable, in specific cases, to find others’ animal-attachments deeply per-

plexing. Perhaps then Levinas’ reluctance to affirm that the snake has a ‘face’ is due

Plant 59



more to personal bewilderment than anything inherently ‘faceless’ on the part of snakes,

or, for that matter, his own temptation to ‘assimilate every Other [animal] into the

Same’.146 But even this more charitable reading does not get Levinas entirely off the

hook. The reason for this is that Levinas here chooses to interpret ‘face’ in a rather

‘narrow way’147 – something he unequivocally warns us against with regard to other

human beings.148 Now, the ‘narrow’ interpretation Levinas himself rightly cautions

against pertains to the reduction of the ‘face’ to a collection of ‘plastic forms’149 or,

to borrow Wittgenstein’s phrase, the ‘distribution of matter in space’.150 But this is not

the only sort of narrowness to be wary of here. For Levinas explicitly extends the

meaning of ‘face’, not only to ‘the hand one shakes’, but even to the ‘whole sensible

being’,151 ‘the whole . . . body’.152 The term ‘face’ therefore encompasses embodi-

ment more generally. (Here we might recall Orwell’s dog ‘wagging its whole body’,153

and Bobby’s ‘jumping up and down amicably’.154) As such, it becomes even less clear

why non-human animals – certainly Bobby, but perhaps even the snake – cannot be

said to have a ‘face’ in the relevant ethical sense.

6 Conclusion: . . . this little dog welcomed us

According to Derrida, for Levinas ‘there is no face without welcome’. That is to say: ‘It

is as if the welcome . . . were a first language, a set made up of quasi-primitive . . .words.’155 Derrida is right; Levinas does indeed think that a tacit ‘bonjour . . . underlies

all the rest of communication, underlies all discourse’.156 Indeed, this pre-performative

‘bonjour’ has ‘primacy’, for ‘[e]ven if there is ill will on the part of the other, the atten-

tion to and welcome of the other . . . marks the anteriority of the good over and against

evil’.157 On Levinas’ account then, hostility itself presupposes an (albeit minimal) hos-

pitable ‘welcome’. The question that arises here is this: assuming Levinas is correct that

the ‘nakedness of the face’ constitutes ‘the meaning prior to ‘‘things said’’’,158 then why

insist so resolutely that the ‘sounds and noises of nature’ (and here let us think especially of

animal ‘noises’) ‘disappoint us’?159 What Levinas seems to be implying is that the ‘mean-

ing prior to ‘‘things said’’’ is only significant insofar as ‘things’ are indeed eventually (or

perhaps potentially) ‘said’. But while it is trivially true that ‘speech’ comes from the face

(‘The face speaks’160), so do many other things; groans, whimpers, moans, laughter and

screams, to name just a few.161 Does then Levinas really want to insist that a human’s cry

of pain is only ethically significant insofar as she could replace her non-linguistic expres-

sions of agony with saying ‘That hurts!’ or ‘I am in pain!’, or some propositional equiva-

lent?162 This seems highly implausible for at least two reasons. First, it sits uncomfortably

alongside Levinas’ preoccupation with the ‘Saying’ which cannot be ‘absorbed into the

Said’,163 but which rather signifies a ‘non-indifference to the other’.164 Second, the dichot-

omy between the linguistic and pre/non-linguistic Levinas here takes for granted is far

from self-evident. We might, after all, take Wittgenstein’s advice and instead see our

language-games as an ‘auxiliary to’ or ‘extension of primitive behaviour’,165 not as some-

thing different in kind.166 Thus, if ‘the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does

not describe it’,167 then we must ask what, ethically speaking, distinguishes the human’s

cry of pain from the animal’s?168




A final point: it might be objected that throughout this article I have failed to

distinguish between ‘response’ and ‘reaction’. That is to say, one might argue that only

other humans can genuinely ‘respond’ to me, whereas animals are merely able to ‘react’.

Levinas himself would presumably endorse such an objection, for it seems to be this

dichotomy which motivates his discrimination between the ‘mechanical solidarity’ of

‘compassion’, and genuine ‘one-for-the-other’ ethical responsibility. Thus, while

Levinas concedes that compassion is a ‘natural sentiment’, he immediately qualifies this

by adding ‘on the part of him who was hungry once, toward the other and for the hunger

of the other’.169 It is notable that in his own reflections on ‘the animal’ Derrida poses

exactly the aforementioned question: ‘how to distinguish a response from a reaction’?170

How then should we answer this? Again, I would suggest in a broadly Wittgensteinian

way; namely, that there is no neat, morally relevant distinction to be made here, just as

there is no such firm distinction between expressions of pain and linguistic declarations

of pain. Rather, there is a continuity between our language-game responses and our ‘pri-

mitive behaviour[al]’171 reactions. As such, there is no reason to think that ‘reactions’

and ‘responses’ are different in kind. Simply put, this is a false dichotomy.

Llewelyn speculates that, for Levinas, it would be ‘a crucial question whether Bobby

merely barks or whether in so doing he can say ‘‘Bonjour’’’.172 This diagnosis seems

broadly correct, for as we have seen, Levinas clearly does prioritize both the ‘word’ (over

the ‘sounds and noises of nature’173), and the tacit ‘bonjour’174 underlying all human

(linguistic) communication. But here we should also recall what Levinas actually says

about Bobby’s intervention:

In this corner of Germany, where walking through the village we would be looked at by the

villagers as Juden, this dog evidently took us for human beings. The villagers certainly did

not injure us or do us any harm, but their expressions were clear. We were the condemned

and the contaminated carriers of germs. And this little dog welcomed us at the entrance of

the camp, barking happily and jumping up and down amicably around us.175

Bobby, we are thus told, welcomed these pitiable human creatures, as ‘[f]or him, there

was no doubt that we were men’.176 This remark deserves to be taken more seriously

than Levinas ever intended. For again, it remains very unclear why we should elevate

the linguistic (though pre-performative) ‘bonjour’ so far above the pre-linguistic (though

manifest) ‘welcome’ offered by both Bobby and Orwell’s dog.

Notes

1. Douglas Coupland, Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 9.

2. See Andrew Aberdein, ‘Logic for Dogs’, forthcoming in Steven D. Hales (ed.) What Philoso-

phy Can Tell You about Your Dog (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2008).

3. See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R. G. Bury (London: William

Heinemann, 1967), 1:69.

4. See Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth, Mx:

Penguin, 1991), p. 517.

5. Sextus, Outlines, 1:63. As Derrida observes: ‘The poor man is a dog of society’, for ‘the dog is

the fraternal allegory of social poverty, of the excluded, the marginal, the ‘‘homeless’’ . . . ’

Plant 61



(Jacques Derrida, Given Time, vol I, Counterfeit Money, trans. P. Kamuf [Chicago, IL and

London: University of Chicago Press, 1992], p. 143). For a more recent and detailed discus-

sion of dogs, see Raimond Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog (London and New York: Routledge,

2003). Although I am primarily concerned with dogs in this article, what I say will also apply

to many other animals.

6. Sextus, Outlines, 1:62.

7. ibid., 1:65.

8. ibid., 1:68.

9. ibid., 1:66.

10. See Stephen Clark, ‘Good Dogs and Other Animals’, in Peter Singer (ed.) In Defence of Ani-

mals (New York and London: Perennial Library, 1986). See also Montaigne, Complete

Essays, pp. 514–15, 517–18, 520–1, 524.

11. Gaita, Philosopher’s Dog, p. 18. On the cost of our (human) capacities, see Montaigne, Com-

plete Essays, pp. 514, 540, 542.

12. Sextus, Outlines, 1:67. Montaigne cites this passage in Complete Essays, p. 525.

13. Plato, The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 65.

Cornford nevertheless assures us that Plato’s remarks were ‘not seriously meant’ (ibid.,

n. 1). See also Montaigne on dogs ‘telling friend from foe’ (Complete Essays, p. 521) and

their ‘faithfulness’ (ibid., p. 531). For a summary of attitudes towards dogs in ancient

Greece, see Steven H. Lonsdale, ‘Attitudes towards Animals in Ancient Greece’, Greece

and Rome (2nd series) 26(2) (October 1979): 146–59. Sextus’ description of the dog is in

keeping with Pyrrho’s own numerous appeals to animality to illustrate his prescribed atti-

tude of ataraxia (unperturbedness). Thus, Diogenes recalls how Pyrrho admired Homer

‘because he likened men to wasps, flies, and birds’. Indeed, we are further told that when

Pyrrho’s ‘fellow-passengers on board a ship were all unnerved by a storm, he kept calm and

confident, pointing to a little pig in the ship that went on eating, and telling them that such

was the unperturbed state in which the wise man should keep himself’ (Diogenes Laertius,

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks [London: Heinemann, 1925], p. 481).

The non-human animal therefore provides the Pyrrhonist with an existential ideal; namely,

a life liberated from the aporias of belief, and guided instead by the dictates of natural

impulses and subjective phenomenological ‘appearances’ (Sextus, Outlines, 1:19; see also

Bob Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas: Ethical and Religious Thought [Oxford and New

York: Routledge, 2005], ch. 1). Montaigne praises animals for not making slaves of each

other (Complete Essays, p. 516), and for not minding each others’ ‘physical defects’ (ibid.,

p. 539). On the relative advantages of being an animal as regards suffering, see Arthur

Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2004),

pp. 44 ff.

14. George Orwell, Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), p. 9.

15. ibid., pp. 9–10.

16. ibid., p. 10.

17. ibid, pp. 10–11.

18. ibid., p. 12.

19. ibid., p. 13.

20. ibid., p. 11.

21. ibid.




22. Gaita refers to this episode in Philosopher’s Dog, pp. 205–6 and in Raimond Gaita, A Common

Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London and New York: Routledge,

2000), pp. 48, 261–2, 272–3, 275, 282.

23. Orwell, Collected Essays, p. 208.

24. ibid., p. 11.

25. ibid., p. 10.

26. Here I am in agreement with David Wood, The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Decon-

struction (New York: State University of New York, 2005), p. 57; David Wood, ‘Thinking

with Cats’, in P. Atterton and M. Calarco (eds) Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity

(London: Continuum, 2004), p. 131; and also Peter Atterton, ‘Ethical Cynicism’, in P. Atterton

and M. Calarco (eds) Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 61.

27. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Paradox of Morality: an Interview with Emmanuel Levinas’, trans.

A. Benjamin and T. Wright , in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds) The Provocation of

Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 172.

28. Emmanuel Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins

(Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 59; see also p. 111. When Levinas refers to

the ‘miraculous’ he is not denoting something supernatural, but is rather concerned with those

‘scenes of goodness’ (ibid., p. 81) that punctuate everyday life. For an interesting – though not

unproblematic – naturalistic reading of Levinas, see A. T. Nuyen, ‘Levinas and the Ethics of

Pity’, International Philosophical Quarterly XL(4)(160) (December 2000): 411–21. I discuss

Nuyen briefly in Bob Plant, ‘Apologies: Levinas and Dialogue’, International Journal of Phi-

losophical Studies 14(1) (March 2006): 79–94.

29. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite’, in Richard Kearney (ed.) Dialogues with Contem-

porary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 60–1.

30. Levinas, Righteous to Be?, p. 119.

31. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. M. B. Smith and B. Harshav

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 114.

32. ibid., p. 231.

33. ibid., p. 115. And likewise: ‘The human pierces the crust of being’ (Levinas, Righteous to Be?,

p. 90). Curiously, Levinas associates Heidegger’s Dasein with the Darwinian ‘struggle for

existence’ (ibid., p. 136; see also pp. 145, 191; Levinas, ‘Paradox of Morality’, p. 172).

34. Jacques Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 90; see also pp. 48–9, 86 ff.

35. See Wood, The Step Back, p. 60. Wood wonders whether, if we ‘reject this account of the state

of nature, doesn’t the appeal of his [Levinas’] ethical philosophy wane too?’ (ibid.; see also

pp. 61–2; Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas, pp. 159 ff.).

36. Wood, ‘Thinking with Cats’, p. 132.

37. All biblical quotations are from The New English Bible (Oxford and Cambridge: Oxford and

Cambridge University Presses, 1970).

38. Although Gaita (like Levinas) wants to maintain a moral distinction between the human

and animal realms (see Gaita, Philosopher’s Dog, pp. 170, 197–8), he nevertheless insists

that our ‘concepts of conscious states . . . are formed in responses to animals and to

human beings together’ (ibid., p. 60). (David Cockburn suggests something similar in

‘Human Beings and Giant Squids’, Philosophy 69[268] [April 1994]: 135–50 [147].)

Alphonso Lingis makes a rather stronger claim: ‘Is it not animal emotions that make our

Plant 63



feelings intelligible? . . . It is when we see the parent bird attacking the cat, the mother

elephant carrying her dead calf in grief for three days, that we believe in the reality of maternal

love’ (Alphonso Lingis, ‘Animal Body, Inhuman Face’, in C. Wolfe [ed.] Zoontologies:

The Question of the Animal [Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003],

p. 169; see also pp. 170–1).

39. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand (Baltimore, MD:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 151. On Genesis, and specifically the role of ‘nam-

ing’ animals therein, see Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Fol-

low)’, trans. D. Wills , Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369–418 (385–9); see also

Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby

(Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 53. Note also Wood’s

remarks on naming animals (‘Thinking with Cats’, p. 135).

40. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 152.

41. ibid., pp. 152–3.

42. ibid., p. 153.

43. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. M. B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1993),

p. 148.

44. Max Picard, The World of Silence, trans. S. Godman (London: Harvill Press, 1948), p. 100.

45. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings

(Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2004), p. 72. On Benjamin and the alleged ‘sad-

ness’ of the animal in its ‘muteness’, see Derrida, ‘The Animal’, 388–9; Jacques Derrida,

‘‘‘Eating Well,’’ or the Calculation of the Subject’, in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994,

trans. P. Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 277.

46. Levinas, Outside the Subject, p. 148.

47. Picard, World of Silence, p. 111.

48. Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Peperzak, S. Critchley and

R. Bernasconi (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 13.

49. See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude,

trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,

1995), pp. 176 ff.; Atterton, ‘Ethical Cynicism’, p. 61; Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, pp. 268,

279; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K. Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2004), pp. 49–62. As Atterton rightly notes, whether Levinas himself does

justice to the non-human realm is a separate question from ‘whether a Levinasian ethics ought

nevertheless to include the other animal’ (‘Ethical Cynicism’, p. 52). My feeling is that it

should, but that in order to do this one would have to drop Levinas’ anti-naturalism (see Plant,

Wittgenstein and Levinas, ch. 7).



52. Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 152. On this allusion to Kant see John Llewelyn, ‘Am

I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)’, in R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley

(eds) Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991),

p. 236.

53. Levinas, Righteous to Be?, p. 90; see also Atterton, ‘Ethical Cynicism’, p. 52. This claim

should not be taken too literally. While it is often said that in the Nazi death camps prisoners

were not viewed as ‘human beings’, this cannot be quite correct. Those practising torture,




sadism and programmed mass-murder recognize (albeit tacitly) that the victims are worthy of

being ‘victims’, and are thereby at least minimally ‘human’. Likewise, we should remember

that the gas chambers were not constructed merely for reasons of efficiency, but also to protect

those doing the killing from being moved by sympathy or compassion for those being killed.


55. ibid., pp. 152–3.

56. Namely, ‘this sort of behaviour is pre-linguistic’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed.

G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [Oxford: Blackwell,

1990], § 541). See also Caputo’s remarks on pain (John Caputo, Against Ethics: Contri-

butions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction

[Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993], pp. 205 ff.) and instincts

(ibid., p. 218).

57. The sort of ‘primitive virtue’ I have in mind here corresponds to what Bennett describes in his

discussion of Huckleberry Finn, and specifically how, in Finn’s treatment of Jim, we witness

the triumph of ‘sympathy’ over ‘morality’ (Jonathan Bennett, ‘The Conscience of

Huckleberry Finn’, Philosophy 49 [1974]: 123–34 [126]).

58. Sextus, Outlines, 1:67.

59. See Atterton, ‘Ethical Cynicism’, p. 56.


61. ibid., p. 152.

62. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity & Transcendence, trans. M. B. Smith (London: Athlone Press,

1999), p. 108.

63. Levinas, ‘Paradox of Morality’, pp. 176–7. See also Gaita, Philosopher’s Dog, p. 200.

64. Levinas, Righteous to Be?, p. 81. Levinas also describes this as ‘responsibility . . . prior to

deliberation’ (ibid., p. 216), and similarly as ‘[e]thics without ethical system’ (ibid., p. 81).

65. ibid., p. 55.

66. Simon Glendinning, On Being with Others: Heidegger – Derrida – Wittgenstein (London and

New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 142.


68. Glendinning, On Being with Others, p. 142. See also Montaigne, Complete Essays, pp. 506,

525.

69. Or at least, the only reason for such a denial would be one based on an unhealthy obsession

with talking about the satisfaction of ‘criteria’ (Glendinning, On Being with Others, p. 142). In

a similar vein, Midgley claims that the ‘grounds’ one has for aiding ‘an injured human being’

are not ‘of a different kind’ from those one has for tending to ‘an injured dog lying writhing in

the road after being hit by a car’ (Mary Midgley, Animals and Why they Matter: A Journey

Around the Species Barrier [Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1983], p. 31). Interestingly, Witt-

genstein remarks: ‘What is the natural expression of an intention? – Look at a cat when it

stalks a bird; or a beast when it wants to escape’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Inves-

tigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [Oxford: Blackwell, 1958], § 647).


71. Wittgenstein, Zettel, § 540; see also §§ 541–2, 545.

72. On Wittgenstein and animals see Nigel Pleasants, ‘Nonsense on Stilts? Wittgenstein, Ethics,

and the Lives of Animals’, Inquiry, 49(4) (August 2006): 314 –36; David DeGrazia, ‘Why

Wittgenstein’s Philosophy Should Not Prevent Us from taking Animals Seriously’, in Carl

Plant 65



Elliott (ed.) Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and

Bioethics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2001).

73. Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. B. Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1998), p. 82. One might attempt to defend Levinas by arguing as follows:

insofar as there is never a pure ethical (face-to-face) relation, we are always already in the

realm of justice or politics. (Levinas suggests this in Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 73; in

God Who Comes to Mind, p. 82; and in Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis [Pittsburgh,

PA: Duquesne University Press, 1996], pp. 212–13.) As such, if one does not qualify for mem-

bership of the latter, then one does not qualify for the former either. One obvious problem with

this defence is that it seems to prioritize the political over the ethical, whereas Levinas clearly

wants the order of priority to work in the opposite direction. Aside from that, if the political

did have priority over ethics in this way, then the moral status of (for example) human infants

and the mentally disabled would be just as problematic as non-human animals.

74. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 650.

75. ibid., p. 174. Likewise, though rather more cryptically, Wittgenstein writes: ‘Why can a dog

feel fear but not remorse? Would it be right to say ‘‘Because he can’t talk’’? . . . Only someone

who can reflect on the past can repent’ (Zettel, §§ 518–19; see also §§ 520–2, 524, 526;

DeGrazia, ‘Why Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’).

76. See Jacques Derrida (with E. Roudinesco), For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue, trans. J. Fort

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 66.

77. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 229. On animals and children see also Mon-

taigne, Complete Essays, p. 511. Wittgenstein similarly remarks: ‘[Someone] might surely

be taught e.g. to mime pain. . . . But could this be taught to just anyone? I mean: someone

might well learn to give certain crude tokens of pain, but without ever spontaneously giving

a finer imitation out of his own insight. . . . (A clever dog might perhaps be taught to give a

kind of whine of pain but it would never get as far as conscious imitation.)’ (Zettel, § 389);

‘Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain?

Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even

when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behaviour to be real simula-

tion are missing’ (Philosophical Investigations, § 250); ‘A dog might learn to run to N at the

call ‘‘N’’, and to M at the call ‘‘M’’, – but would that mean he knows what these people are

called?’ (see Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von

Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M Anscombe [Oxford: Blackwell, 1999], § 540). Interest-

ingly, Wittgenstein also suggests: ‘We do not say that possibly a dog talks to itself. Is that

because we are so minutely acquainted with its soul? Well, one might say this: If one sees the

behaviour of a living thing, one sees its soul . . . ’ (Philosophical Investigations, § 357; see also

DeGrazia, ‘Why Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, pp. 107–9).


79. Picard, World of Silence, p. 109.

80. Levinas, ‘Paradox of Morality’, p. 172.

81. As Glendinning suggests, canine ‘sympathy’ is a legitimate term to use in certain contexts;

namely, where antipathy is also possible.

82. For a pertinent discussion of the mother–child relation, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophi-

cal Occasions: 1912–1951, ed. J. Klagge and A. Nordmann (Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge:

Hackett, 1993), p. 383.




83. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 359. Wittgenstein thus remarks: ‘The squirrel does not infer by

induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well. And no more do we need a law of

induction to justify our actions or our predictions’ (ibid., § 287; see also Montaigne, Com-

plete Essays, pp. 508–9, 527, 543). (More cryptically, Wittgenstein writes: ‘Animals come

when their names are called. Just like human beings’; see his Culture and Value, ed.

G. H. von Wright, trans. P. Winch [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994], p. 67.) Interestingly, Derrida

speaks favourably of Bentham’s prioritization of the question ‘Can they suffer?’ (‘The

Animal’, pp. 395–6), and even suggests that the response to this question ‘leaves no doubt.

In fact it has never left any room for doubt; that is why the experience that we have of it is not

even indubitable; it precedes the indubitable, it is older than it’ (ibid., p. 397; see also Wood,

‘Thinking with Cats’, p. 140).

84. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, p. 389. See also Montaigne, Complete Essays, p. 509.


86. ibid., p. 11.

87. Derrida speaks of feeling ‘ashamed’ (even ‘ashamed for being ashamed’) when ‘face-to-face’

his cat observes him naked (see ‘The Animal’, pp. 372, 380, 382, 388, 390). Derrida proceeds

to ask whether the capacity for nakedness is what is ‘proper’ to ‘the human’ (ibid., pp. 373 ff.)?

On human nakedness see also Montaigne, Complete Essays, pp. 509, 539.



90. For a provocative description of our (human) internal workings see Lingis, ‘Animal Body’.




94. See also ibid., p. 111.

95. Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 115.


97. ibid., p. 59.

98. ibid., p. 106.



101. Of the touch of the caress Levinas remarks that it ‘does not know what it seeks’; it is ‘like a

game . . . absolutely without project or plan’ (Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans.

R. Cohen [Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987], p. 89). That is to say, the caress

is non-teleological in orientation, and therefore – much like the ‘love without reward’ (‘Par-

adox of Morality’, p. 176) Levinas celebrates – does not seek recompense or reciprocity. But

then, as Lingis notes, there is an enormous amount within the natural (including animal)

realm that is not obviously ‘goal-oriented’ (‘Animal Body’, p. 168).



104. ibid., p. 89.


106. Bennett, ‘The Conscience’, p. 126. Along similar lines we might reconstruct Levinas’ claim

that ‘politics must be held in check by ethics’ (Righteous to Be?, p. 132; see also Emmanuel

Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R. A. Cohen

Plant 67



[Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985], p. 90). Here Bennett is discussing the

tension between ‘morality’ and ‘unargued, natural feeling’ or ‘sympathy’ (‘The Conscience’,

p. 126) in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As he proceeds to note, however: ‘moral

principles are good to have, because they help to protect one from acting badly at moments

when one’s sympathies happen to be in abeyance’. Although it is often useful to check ‘one’s

principles in the light of one’s sympathies’, Bennett does not think we should give our ‘sym-

pathies a blank cheque in advance’, for in a ‘conflict between principle and sympathy, prin-

ciples ought sometimes to win’ (ibid., pp. 132–3). The difficulty, of course, lies in knowing

when to let one’s sympathy or morality rule the moment.


108. Levinas, Righteous to Be?, p. 41. Indeed, Levinas even says that ‘[t]here is a transcendence in

the animal!’ (Difficult Freedom, p. 152).


110. Levinas, Alterity & Transcendence, p. 163.

111. One might ‘describe the human body and especially the human face as a moral space, that

is as the locus of the possibility of all those expressions that are the basis of moral life’

(B. R. Tilghman, Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics: The View from Eternity [New York:

State University of New York Press, 1991], p. 115).

112. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 85. Levinas remarks that the soul ‘shows itself in the non-

reified face . . . in expression’ as the ‘glimmer of someone’ (Emmanuel Levinas, God,

Death, and Time, trans. B. Bergo [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000], p. 12).

In a similar vein Wittgenstein writes: ‘The human being is the best picture of the human soul’

(Culture and Value, p. 49), and likewise: ‘The face is the soul of the body’ (ibid., p. 23).

Moreover, Wittgenstein extends the concept of ‘soul’ by claiming that one ‘sees’ the ‘soul’

of ‘a living thing’ in its ‘behaviour’ (Philosophical Investigations, § 357).

113. For example, Levinas also characterizes the face as simultaneously an ‘authority’; indeed, it

is ‘as if God spoke through the [Other’s] face’ (‘Paradox of Morality’, p. 169). On the face in

Levinas, see Plant, Wittgenstein and Levinas, pp. 131 ff.

114. As Llewelyn puts it, for both Levinas and Kant, ‘[t]he only face we behold is the human face

and that is the only face to which we are beholden. Ethically, that is all that matters’ (‘Am

I Obsessed?’, p. 237).


116. ibid., p. 172.

117. ibid., p. 169. See also Atterton, ‘Ethical Cynicism’, pp. 58–9. According to Levinas, in the

dog’s brute animality there are other forces at work; namely, a ‘pure vitality’ (‘Paradox of

Morality’, p. 169) – which is not, however, without its ‘attraction’ (ibid., p. 172).

118. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans.

D. Cairns (The Hague, Boston, MA and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 126.

119. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,

trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 227. Wittgenstein

remarks that ‘only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human

being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’

(Philosophical Investigations, § 281; see also Montaigne, Complete Essays, p. 541). This

may seem to parallel Levinas’ allusion to ‘transference’ (‘Paradox of Morality’, p. 172) from

the human to the animal, but I take Wittgenstein’s more modest point to be this: what counts




as a form of embodiment (rather than mere materiality) is not unbounded. So, for example,

there is nothing peculiar about rescuing a fly from a spider’s web (see Philosophical Inves-

tigations, § 284), but ‘rescuing’ a chair from the ‘violence’ of being sat on (or a stone from

the ‘indignity’ of being kicked, and so on) would require considerable explanation. More-

over, Levinas’ ‘transference’ sounds overly analogical (on the basis of what I know of human

beings I imaginatively project onto the non-human animal). Wittgenstein is describing some-

thing more ‘primitive’ and spontaneous.


121. Levinas does not deny that cruelty towards animals is wrong (perhaps even, unlike Kant,

directly wrong [Atterton, ‘Ethical Cynicism’, p. 59]), but ‘the prototype’ of such concern is

nevertheless ‘human ethics’ (Levinas, ‘Paradox of Morality’, p. 172). Derrida refers to the

‘unprecedented proportions’ of humanity’s recent ‘subjection of the animal’ – not to mention

our ability to ‘dissimulate this cruelty’ and thereby ‘hide it from ourselves’ (‘The Animal’,

p. 394; see also pp. 395, 416; Wood, ‘Thinking with Cats’, pp. 141, 143–4). For more or less

critical readings of Derrida on ‘the animal’, see David Wood, ‘Comment ne pas manger –

Deconstruction and Humanism’, in H. P. Steeves (ed.) Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and

Animal Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Wood, ‘Thinking with Cats’.


123. ibid., p. 172.

124. ibid. Picard writes: ‘Animals seem to have dropped out of a human dream’ (World of Silence,

p. 103), whereas ‘man could never have come straight out of animal into human nature’

(ibid., p. 104).


126. See Cockburn, ‘Human Beings’, 142; Montaigne, Complete Essays, p. 539.

127. On ‘the human form’, and especially ‘facial expression’, see David Cockburn, Other Human

Beings (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 66 ff., 118–20.

128. Orwell, Collected Essays, p. 20. On elephants, see Montaigne, Complete Essays, p. 522.

On elephant grief specifically, see Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans.

E. F. J. Payne (Providence, RI and Oxford: Berghahn, 1995), p. 179.

129. No matter how fond of mice or stick-insects we might be, I suspect they could not qualify as

‘dignified’ or ‘majestic’.

130. On the relative beauty of animals and humans, see Montaigne, Complete Essays, p. 538.

131. See Atterton’s remarks on ‘singularity’ in this context (‘Ethical Cynicism’, p. 54).


133. There are complications here of course, for it seems possible to have some level of care for

even the common house-fly. Thus Wittgenstein appears to think that even with the

‘wriggling fly’ the concept of pain can get a ‘foothold’ (Philosophical Investigations, §

284). See also Cockburn’s discussion of the squid (‘Human Beings’).

134. Gaita, Philosopher’s Dog, p. 37.

135. While Wood acknowledges that ‘compassion has its limits – marked perhaps by Levinas’s

doubts about the face of a snake’, he suggests that we ‘propose instead an objective compas-

sion, which tries, as far as possible, not to be limited by our actual capacity for fellow-feeling,

and recognizes ‘‘life itself,’’ in each of its forms, as addressing us’ (Wood, ‘Thinking with

Cats’, pp. 140–1). The plausibility of this suggestion seems doubtful if applied to (for exam-

ple) bacteria and viruses.

Plant 69




137. Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 174.

138. John D. Caputo, ‘The End of Ethics’, in H. Lafollette (ed.) The Blackwell Guide to Ethical

Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 118.

139. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 166.


141. This is not, of course, to say that they cannot discern each other’s singularity (see Clark,

‘Good Dogs’, p. 48). One might argue that this merely indicates a psychological limitation

on our part, and as such has no obvious moral significance.

142. Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London and New York: Routledge,

2004), p. 117.

143. Derrida, ‘The Animal’, p. 409; see also pp. 415–16, 418.

144. See ibid., pp. 397 ff., 402, 408; Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 269; Derrida, Of Spirit, p. 57;

Wood, ‘Thinking with Cats’, p. 133. Derrida also maintains that ‘animal’ is an ‘appellation

that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to

give to another living creature’ (‘The Animal’, p. 392; see also pp. 398, 399). Indeed, Derrida

suggests that the animal/human dichotomy is instituted by the latter ‘in order to identify

themselves, in order to recognise themselves’ (ibid., p. 400). See also Montaigne, Complete

Essays, pp. 505, 522.

145. So, for example, a particular snake may die and another subsequently be purchased ‘in its

place’, but this does not necessarily mean that the former was replaceable. Derrida refers

to the ‘singularity’ (‘The Animal’, pp. 378–9) and ‘absolute alterity’ (ibid., p. 380) of ani-

mals, and the failure of philosophers (including Levinas) to acknowledge that ‘what they call

animal could look at them and address them from down there, from a wholly other origin’

(ibid., p. 382; see also p. 383; Wood, ‘Thinking with Cats’, pp. 134–5).

146. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 13.

147. Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 231.

148. Levinas insists that the face cannot be given ‘an exact phenomenological description’

(‘Paradox of Morality’, p. 168) because ‘appearance’ is not its primary ‘mode of being’

(ibid., p. 171).

149. Levinas, God Who Comes to Mind, p. 175.

150. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 82.


152. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 97. Indeed, the ‘best way of encountering the Other is not

even to notice the colour of his eyes!’ (ibid., p. 85). Levinas even suggests that the ‘face’ can

issue its command ‘from a bare arm sculpted by Rodin’ (Righteous to Be?, p. 208).



155. Derrida, Adieu, p. 25.


157. ibid., p. 212; see also p. 55.

158. Levinas, God Who Comes to Mind, p. 13.


160. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 87.

161. See Montaigne, Complete Essays, pp. 507–8.




162. See Wood’s remarks on Derrida and the possibility of being ‘addressed’ by the animal

(‘Thinking with Cats’, pp. 134–5), and Derrida’s own reflections on ‘man’ as (allegedly) the

‘only speaking being’ (‘Eating Well’, pp. 284–5). Llewelyn asks whether, contra Bentham,

Levinas is ‘of the opinion that the question is, Can they talk?’ (‘Am I Obsessed?’, p. 235).

Later he remarks that both Levinas and Kant ‘require an obligating being to be able to make

a claim in so many words’ (ibid., p. 241).


164. ibid., p. 142. I realize that, for Levinas, there is no Saying that is not the Saying of a Said (the

Saying is ‘not reducible to the thematization and exposition of a Said’); as he rhetorically

enquires: ‘There is, it is true, no Saying that is not the saying of a Said. But does the Saying

signify nothing but the Said?’ (ibid., p. 141). Nevertheless, one might wonder why he thinks

this, for there are many forms of expression that are poorly represented as an exchange of

‘information’ (Basic Philosophical Writings, p. 80).

165. Wittgenstein, Zettel, § 545.

166. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the continuity between pre-linguistic (‘primitive’) behaviour and

fully fledged language use clearly problematizes his often quoted remark: ‘If a lion could

talk, we could not understand him’ (Philosophical Investigations, § 223). Given how much

we already share with the lion (and numerous other animals) at the pre-linguistic level, there

is no reason to think that, were he capable of speaking, the lion’s utterances would be entirely

alien to us (see DeGrazia, ‘Why Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, p. 110). On human–animal

communication, see also Montaigne, Complete Essays, pp. 506–7, 512.


168. Again, it is worth recalling Derrida’s positive remarks on Bentham here (‘The Animal’,

pp. 395–7). On the unifying power of suffering, Caputo observes: ‘Disasters . . . have an

ominous sameness, which invariably involves spilled blood, limp bodies, broken minds,

damaged lives’ (Against Ethics, p. 41), and it is these disasters which have ‘the effect of bind-

ing us together’ (ibid., p. 54). Note also his remarks on pain, how it severs ‘every worldly tie’

(ibid., p. 205), and, not least, the ‘power emanating from powerlessness’ (ibid., p. 214). If

there is such solidarity in suffering, then there is no reason to think that this solidarity does

not/cannot apply to our relation with non-human animals.

169. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, p. 173. Although I will not discuss it here, this seems to me a

grossly over-rationalized understanding of compassion.

170. Derrida, ‘The Animal’, p. 377; see also p. 400.

171. Wittgenstein, Zettel, § 545.

172. Llewelyn, ‘Am I Obsessed?’, p. 240.



175. ibid., p. 41.


Plant 71



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3 Welcoming Dogs: Levinas and ‘the Animal’ Question

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