This article addresses the embodied nature of laboratory human—animal practices in order to understand the notions of care that take place within an institution of domination — the apparatus of animal experimentation. How is it possible to both love and harm in this context? Building on animal studies and feminist ethics, the theme of emotionality is explored in the section ‘loving animals’. Here it is demonstrated that empathy and affection for individual animals, as well as species, are strong components of (...) an experimental ethos expressed by the informants. The second empirical section deals with the issue of ‘killing well’. The good kill is supposed to be done with care: quickly and compassionately. This is performed by way of bodily measures of care, technological refinement and personal skills and, sometimes, with the help of a division of labour. In the concluding section, the empirical findings are read through the framework, where the feminist theoretical analysis of love, dependency and care from an embodiment perspective understands the dialectics of instrumentalisation and exploitation of — and care for — animals, not as something that goes on above or outside of relations, but rather as something that can be understood from within. ‘Mortal love’ is the attempt to capture and theorise this dialectic, arguing that emotions of love and friendship are not mere justifications for the harm and killing performed, but rather intrinsic dimensions of the embodied animaling of experimental human—animal relations. (shrink)

Although a conventional environmentalism focuses on the health of ecological systems, Pope Francis’s 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Sí invokes St. Francis of Assisi to emphasize God’s love for the individual organism, no matter how small. Decrying the tendency to regard other creatures as mere objects to be controlled and used, Pope Francis urges our enactment of a ‘universal communion’ governed by love. I suggest, however, that Laudato Sí’s animal ethic, as focused on ordering human and animal need, is inadequate to (...) its overarching vision of cross-species communion. This vision requires the sort of cross-species relational bridge implicit in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view of agency as an irreducibly ‘animate’ expression of choice and afforded further definition in Kenneth J. Shapiro’s conception of a ‘kinesthetic empathy.’ As the phenomenological epistemology underlying both discourses makes possible a rough correspondence, I put these in conversation to demonstrate that a Merleau-Pontyan and reciprocal agency is a constitutive aspect of the fullest sort of cross-species relation, such that recognition of this agency can both deepen our understanding of ‘universal communion’ and foster engagement in its practice. (shrink)

This article discusses the notion that the invisibility of the animalness of the animal constitutes a fundamental obstacle to change within current production systems. It is discussed whether housing animals in environments that resemble natural habitats could lead to a re-animalization of the animals, a higher appreciation of their moral significance, and thereby higher standards of animal welfare. The basic claim is that experiencing the animals in their evolutionary and environmental context would make it harder to objectify animals as mere (...) bioreactors and production systems. It is argued that the historic objectification of animals within intensive animal production can only be reversed if animals are given the chance to express themselves as they are and not as we see them through the tunnel visions of economy and quantifiable welfare assessment parameters. (shrink)

German phenomenologist and sociologist Max Scheler accorded sympathy a central role in his philosophy, arguing that sympathy enables not only ethical behaviour, but also knowledge of animate and inanimate others. Influenced by Catholicism and especially St Francis, Scheler envisioned a broad, cosmic sympathy forming the hidden basis for all human values, with the “higher” religious, artistic, philosophic and other cultural values enabled by a more basic regard for non-human nature and insights gained from the human situation within the non-human world. (...) Sympathy for the non-human is thus both integral and fundamental to the cultivation of other values in the development of both the human person and humanity in general. Scheler’s concept of sympathy is valuable for contemporary animal ethics because it insists on acknowledgement of and respect for difference as constitutive for the experience of sympathy. By thus allowing for sympathy to occur in the absence of complete knowledge of other subjectivities, Scheler’s phenomenology of sympathy eliminates the need for complete understanding of the consciousness of other animals as a prerequisite for interspecies sympathy. Despite their inability to completely inhabit non-human perspectives, humans can thus sympathize with other creatures. While Scheler is a foundational thinker and, to a large degree, maintains hierarchical structures contested by many contemporary animal theorists, he remains a valuable source for contemporary theory insofar as he acknowledges a “fundamental basis of connection” between species and affirms that all animal bodies are communicative. The occasioning of sympathy by gestural signification opens a path of insight that can increase human openness to non-human others. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

Some bioethicists have proposed a legalized market in human organs as a solution to transplant waiting lists and global poverty. Solutions to organ procurement problems that are solely market-based would unfairly shift the burdens of medical procedures onto developing nations. Market advocates base their claims on the understanding of organs as property, a position that should be problematized. Instrumentalizing people in this way is part of the broader commodification of animals and the environment. Combating the market mentality requires a return (...) to the holistic view of bioethics that led to the founding of the field. (shrink)

Phenomenology has remained a sheltering place for those who would seek to understand not only their own “first person” experiences but also the first person experiences of others. Recent publications by renowned scholars within the field have clarified and extended our possibilities of access to “first person” experience by means of perception (Lingis, 2007) and reflection (Zahavi, 2005). Teaching phenomenology remains a challenge, however, because one must find ways of communicating to the student how to embody it as a process (...) rather than simply to learn about it as a content area. Another challenge issues from the fact that most writings on applied phenomenology emphasize individual subjectivity as the central focus, while offering only indirect access to the subjectivity of others (for example, by way of analyzing written descriptions provided by the individual under study). While one finds in the literature of psychotherapy plentiful elucidations of the “we-experience” within which therapists form impressions of their clients’ experience, there is still need for a more thoughtful clarification of our rather special personal modes of access to the experience of others in everyday life. This paper will present “second person perspectivity” as a mode of resonating with the expressions of others and will describe class activities that can bring students closer to a lived understanding of what it means to be doing phenomenology in the face of the other. (shrink)

Taking up the body turn in sociology, this paper discusses scientific practices as embodied action from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenological theory of the “Body”. Based on ethnographic data on a biology laboratory it will discuss the importance of the scientist’s Body for the performance of scientific activities. Successful researchers have to be skilled workers using their embodied knowledge for the process of tinkering towards the material transformation of their objects for data production. The researcher’s body then is an instrument (...) of measuring as well as a kind of archive of knowing. Their body becomes a disciplined instrument which has its own place and function inside the laboratory. Furthermore, the appresentational apperception of Bodies (Husserl) is being discussed as a basis for the emotional and ethical concerns towards laboratory-animals. Attitudes towards animals in the laboratory setting (as well as elsewhere) are highly emotional. Nevertheless, following the literature of the sociology of the body, those emotional reactions still follow certain cultural patterns which themselves can be understood as embodied ways of knowing “right” or “wrong”. Besides as an instrument, the scientist’s body can also be understood as a resource of emotional attachment towards animals. It is an instrument for performing transformation as well as one for caring. (shrink)

The large-scale, intensive production of meat and other animal products, also known as the animal-industrial complex, is our largest food system in terms of global land use and contribution to environmental degradation. Despite the environmental impact of the meat industry, in much of the policy literature on climate and environmental change, sustainability and food security, meat continues to be included as part of a sustainable food future. In this paper, I present outcomes of a discourse analysis undertaken on a selection (...) of key major international and Australian reports. After highlighting common themes in the ways that meat and animals are discussed, I draw on the animal studies literature to critically analyse the assumptions underpinning such policy documents. My analysis illustrates that animals are effectively de-animated and rendered invisible in these bodies of literature by being either aggregated—as livestock, units of production and resources, or materialised—as meat and protein. These discursive frames reflect implicit understandings of meat as necessary to human survival and animals as a natural human resource. A critical examination of these understandings illustrates their dual capacity to normalise and encourage the continuation of activities known to be seriously harming the environment, climate and human health, while at the same time obstructing and even denigrating alternative, less harmful approaches to food. In response, I offer some conceptual and analytical modifications that can be easily adopted by researchers on climate change, sustainability and food security with the aim of challenging dominant discourses on meat and animals. (shrink)

After the publication of Jaques Derrida’s book, L’animal que donc je suis, anti-speciesism has been looking for a theoretical foundation for its ethical content. In my opinion, the defect of all these philosophical perspectives is that they still reduce animals to objects of human philosophy. Here, I develop a new framework in which animals are considered as subjects of their own philosophy. In analogy to the concept of ethnophilosophy, the concept of speciophilosophy is here introduced. The different ways of thinking (...) between humans and other animals are outlined, by explaining the difference between verbal reasoning and thinking through images. Human philosophies are shown to be anthropocentric ideologies, related to carnivorism. Subsequently, animal speciophilosophies are discussed and a dialogical symphilosophein among all living beings is proposed to be the extension of the so-called philosophy of dialogue. Finally, it is shown how this perspective was present in the original Christian ethics. (shrink)

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice, “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” When Alice questions this license, Humpty Dumpty replies, “The question is … which is to be master — that’s all.” The present article offers a lexicon of words that are used by human beings, however unintentionally or ingenuously, to maintain their mastery or prerogatives over other animals. A motivating (...) assumption of the article is that putting on display the verbal menagerie in animal agriculture, animal experimentation, and the rest of the industries and institutions that use nonhuman animals, could go a long way toward eliminating these enterprises, since they are built as much on equivocation as on exploitation. (shrink)