Leonardo Caffo / Human Fragility

/SPRING BREAK 2020/

Leonardo Caffo

Published by NASA / ISS039-E-005762 (March 29, 2014) One of the Expedition 39 crew members aboard the International Space Station on March 29 photographed a pre-winter storm off the coast of southwestern Australia.

This is the first chapter of the book Human Fragility a forthcoming translation for Lantern Book (New York) of Fragile Umanità (Einaudi, 2018) by Leonardo Caffo. Translation in English by Steven Ombrello, Università di Torino, Italy.

“The ethical axis: the first transformation
It is so difficult to find the beginning.
Or, better: it is difficult to being at the beginning.
And not to try to go further back”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

First Part: Transformation
Chapter 1

SHORT NOTE: What is speciesism?

Speciesism, or the discrimination by Homo sapiens of other animal species, is the first axis, and perhaps the most resistant and dangerous, of this powerful and complex set of phenomena that we call "anthropocentrism". Our whole society is built on the institutionalized exploitation of non-human animals: killed for food, clothing, entertainment of various kinds and scientific research. Non-humans are basically in the world to guarantee total well-being for the Homo sapiens species. Speciesism, a neologism by the psychologist Richard D. Ryder, is the idea that all this is justifiable through a series of arguments that are anything but easily falsifiable. The question of whether the chicken or egg came first, even in the case of speciesism, is clear: speciesism is a prejudice, as argued in the 1975 book Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, or perhaps it is a justificationist ideology of a phenomenon that has historically occurred? It matters little, speciesism is a phenomenon that becomes possible, at least conceptually, because a series of arguments widely spread, also in what is considered ‘common sense’, that makes our social possible. These are possible, but unfounded, as I will try to show. When philosophical justifications are sought for speciesism, it is a mistake not to refer to Descartes, who claimed that the animal is an automaton without language, or to Martin Heidegger, who even claimed that the animal is a poor subject of being-in-the-world and lacking in capacity to die. They are errors, but I will try to not make the same mistakes. Here, in fact, I prefer to understand just what speciesism is and why, for millennia, it has been regulating the lives of those who have never heard of Descartes or Heidegger, and who, in any case, live a mutually violent relationship with animals.

Being a speciesist means considering the life of one's own species as the only life that can be protected from a moral point of view even if there are - we think of how we treat a dog differently from a pig - different degrees of protection. I believe it is fundamental to understand this fact because, otherwise, we will continue to think of speciesism as a Cartesian phenomenon: animals all have no world and are not subjects. On the contrary, conscious speciesists know very well that animals are "subjects of a life", to use an expression by Tom Regan. Either way, adherents simply do not believe that this is a necessary and sufficient condition to radically change their lives. The image I would like to give of speciesism, however, is entirely conceptual[1] because it is part of a tripartite set aimed at composing my idea of anthropocentrism, that is, in our daily lives, animals simply do not "exist". In the United States of America alone, in a single year, and referring only to large mammals, fifty billion animals are killed for food reasons. Let me repeat it, fifty billion! This immense slaughterhouse, which is well hidden and allows us to define all this "civil society", is possible because animals are nothing but paradoxes: they are "non-existent entities". We know that they exist, and that they are precisely beings with biological characteristics not secondary to ours, but we do not know that these same animals are what make up the objects of our daily well-being.

The novelty of the speciesism that I propose here is above all the fact of understanding it as a forgetfulness: we have forgotten that we are not alone. Speciesism is the engine of the economy: with animals, and with what remains of their bodies, we literally produce anything - from films for cameras to wallpaper, from glue to hold the seams of shoes together to dyes used in gummy candies that are so loved by children. So, animals are everywhere but we cannot see them because, trivially, we have hidden them: speciesism is also a hiding. Of course, all of us will have the opportunity to see, but the potential of sight surrenders, often too easily, to the characteristics of the economic system that we live in.

"Speciesism" is a moral term, therefore internal to the encyclopedia of ethics, and shifts our attention from how we behave (descriptive ethics) to how we should behave (prescriptive ethics). Do we eat animals? We should stop. Why? Because there are no good arguments to continue to do so after realizing that it is not necessary, as would happen to obliged carnivores such as felines, and that the animals we feed on have equal rights as us eaters.

Anti-speciesism, which I will shortly say, is in its general connotations one of the most complex theories to be questioned: there are no good reasons for the daily massacre of millions of animals. Or, at least, they no longer exist.

Which kind of humanity follows from speciesism?

Speciesism proposes an idea of a humanity that, more or less transversely, crosses the planisphere, epochs, and geopolitics even if obviously it has not always been an explicitly chosen metaphysics. It suggests that Homo sapiens may dispose of what is not inside the fence that defines it, an imaginary fence however, or at least fleeting within its borders as we know from Charles Darwin, which is that of "our species". Where there is a bipedal body, we see otherness there, otherwise it is emptiness: the search for Emmanuel Lévinas' face-to-face relation stops at the human body, and the rest is outline. Yet "the body conceals", writes Deleuze, and "contains a hidden language"[2]. This humanity that follows speciesism is what I propose to call "blind solitude": we killed one life form born to blossom together with the others to create another, deeply alone, and unconsciously blind. Being a speciesist, an essential or better necessary characteristic of the strongly anthropocentric human, means believing that pain can only be found in those who behave as human. But thinking of oneself as the only sufferers really seems the only possible justification for the anomaly of life as continuous pain. Here, more or less, the idea of the animal as an automaton was born: for the animal, hence for those outside the enclosure, we essentially feel envy. We think, and sometimes we hope, it does not suffer, and upon it we enact the senseless violence that is speciesism as an business. This humanity, which emerges from the ethics of speciesism, feels special because it is suffering: what does not have the anguish of living on two legs must be punished. But everything, as it should be, is complicated - because "what the caterpillar calls the end of the world," says Lao Tzu, "the rest of the world calls a butterfly."

Speciesism has a fallacious logical structure that forces everyone, once they understand the catch, to put their nose out of this circle that we call humanity: if X is not the same species as Y, then it does not enjoy the same moral treatment. It is fallacious because it immediately brings to mind analogies, and so, as Peter Singer already said in his first books: if X does not have the same sex as Y, then they do not enjoy the same moral treatment, and so on, but let's stop here with the comparisons. Thus, from speciesism, a humanity built on the borders emerges: what is outside, precisely because it is outside, does not deserve respect and curiosity. Thus begins the first profile of anthropocentrism: a lonely person, poor in the world, who only makes a question of the metaphysical diversity of living - there are flowers, stones, and strange creatures around us. The consciously speciesist humanity asks few questions, and accepts strange answers due to blindness: where does our food come from? Why is the planet increasingly massacred by pollution? What are our clothes made of and who are our drugs tested on? There is a submerged world, invisible because we choose not to see it, which is what supports the visible world.

The human who follows speciesism, trying to go from the physical to the metaphysical, is the human who denies and represses animality starting with their own. But what is it, animality, if it is something (intuitively: the property of being animals)? Jacques Derrida, at least in his last phase of thought, as his famous speech for the Adorno Prize in 2001 shows, argued that it was the fundamental entity with which the philosophy of the future should have confronted. About fifteen years later, here we are doing it. I define, prima facie, animality as the necessary, but hidden (opaque) property of specialized human life forms; secondly, a topic that will accompany all the pages of this book. I define animality as the presence of oneself. The human has repressed its animality, and has denied animals their own; supporting the lawfulness of the "human and animal" conjunction - a conjunction, often understood as a (exclusive) disjunction that simply is not there. Why? Simple answer: because there is nothing to divide, and the animal, first of all, as the word "animal", compresses everything within itself, distorting the perception of biodiversity. Difficult answer: because logically one of the two conjuncts is false, and therefore the conjunction disintegrates. The first paradox is that, if the conjunction also compressed us, who pretend to be inside the enclosure, things would not be so terrible: being all animals, before starting to differentiate the species with articulated taxonomies, is an excellent point of departure. On the contrary, speciesist humanity places itself in a privileged ontological condition by living, de facto, the social world built by Homo sapiens as the only possible world (social ontology coincides with the whole ontology). The limit of philosophy, when it tries to face an articulated topic like this, is that it is not enough in itself and requires an expected intruder: as that ancient Chinese proverb says "An ant may well destroy an entire dam"[3]. The second paradox is that humanity that consciously chooses speciesism is deeply rational; not so much because it exercises reason properly, but because it makes reason its distinctive feature. Reason, within the image of ‘human’ that I am exploring here, is technically the cut, the divide, in the living: we think, therefore we are. And what is that human activity with which reason is exercised as an end in itself? Philosophy. It turns out therefore, that philosophy, while opposing speciesism, essentially attacks itself. Or, at least, attacks western philosophy (and I will return to this philosophical geography later).

In fact, speciesism is a use of reason as a not indifferent virtue: the human speaks, the animal does not; the human thinks, the animal does not; the human is self-conscious, the animal is not. The circus of stereotypes, although falsified on several occasions by specialist literature regarding studies on animal cognition[4], is not afraid of anything. But there is also a side of speciesism that uses reason precisely to undermine the stereotype that reason distinguishes us from animals, and which has even more speciesistic outcomes that we must face immediately This is because it is the first difference that I will bring out between the posthuman model - which I will defend at the end of this text - and other models of overcoming humanism; among the latter, the most famous is obviously the Übermensch or superman.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a great critic of a certain anthropocentrisms (although while being a defender of a kind of superantropocentrism), as well as a theorist of animality and its recovery in various, and not always happy, forms. His idea is that the human being must recover animality before turning to the superman by learning the use, without filters, the will to power like those of birds of prey: hit and terrify the prey, eliminate morals. Nietzsche's argument helps to give a further characterization to the image of man that emerges from speciesism: if you recover animality, opening the fence of anthropocentrism, you do it always and only for a recovery of instincts and basic functions of the animal that we are therefore. Being a speciesist, according to Nietzsche, means acting according to nature: everything is prey and predation, we eat and are eaten. Likewise, every form of asceticism (such as vegetarianism, which Nietzsche mocks several times in his The Gay Science) mortifies the essential structure of our form of life. Thus speciesism becomes a two-faced Janus: either solitary and without animals, or animal among animals - homo homini lupus, and that the weaker also succumbs among humans. Speciesism is a narrative: it describes and prescribes our behavior. We have always slaughtered animals and technology has only increased the quality and quantity of this massacre. Similarly, continuing to do so is right, noble, and, as in Nietzsche, it could even be a preferential passage for the humanity that is to come. Thus emerges a humanity that distances itself by philosophical choice from everything that cannot be said to be human: the planet is not our home, the planet is ours. Without this awareness, anthropocentrism would be nothing because, trivially, nothing would coherent: to act as we act we need a frame that orients our actions and speciesism is the frame of all the frames. The great ethical challenges that characterize the present, from deep ecology to radical feminism that rightly wants to definitively eradicate the position of inferiority of women in many of contemporary societies, all have the same limit: what is not human is simply absent. Speciesism, honestly, is the limit of all morals; all is well among those with whom you must be, of course, but what about those tens of billions of animals massacred every year? The conscious speciesist closes his eyes, keeps his back straight, and is still in anthropocentrism: we are everything.

Yet one day, sooner or later, they happen to meet the gaze of an animal, or to feel that a tree is more than a source of timber, and something breaks. Philosophy becomes wider, it takes on a point of view that does not belong to it, and "the animal looks at us and we are naked in front of him. Thinking, perhaps, starts right here »[5].

SHORT NOTE: What is antispeciesism?

Antispeciesism is the opposite of speciesism, in the sense that the emerging world is literally a reversal of the speciesist one. Antispeciesism is said to deal with the "between" of things[6] - from the ethical point of view, more simply, it is the position that denies speciesism’s solid arguments of resistance. The idea is that belonging to a species different from ours is not, in itself, the ratification for a different moral treatment: the arguments for which we respect humans, if they are good arguments, then apply to all other animals. The boons of this theory, in its first formulation espoused by thinkers such as Peter Singer, Paola Cavalieri, and Tom Regan, is all in the ability not to be a simple moral animalism - that is to take care, in a more or less sophisticated way, of the fate of non-human animals. Antispeciesism is the crisis of anthropocentrism in its ethical connotations, as Tiziano Terzani explains better: "All society is built to give a chord to violence: and violence generates violence. For this reason, even my vegetarianism is a moral choice »[7]. If you want to go against violence, a typical expression of anthropocentrism, you need to question violence as such; one of the most heinous, but perhaps the most senseless, is the one that Homo sapiens dedicates to animals.

Being antispeciesist means considering one's own life less "proper" than we are used to thinking: life exists, and then its infinite and passing forms. We think of antispeciesism as the idea that the life of others cannot be abused, we think of others, within antispecismism, as of the body regardless of the animal form it assumes: "the animal was the other, the stranger […] did not appear individual»[8].

Which kind of humanity follows from speciesism?
The humanity that follows antispeciesism is an open construction site. I have proposed a weak approach to this theory[9], according to which the conceptual assumption of the animal's point of view, leaving the human one, is needed to break the barrier of anthropocentrism. Consciously antispeciesist humanity (it is rare, but it exists) lives the world with the awareness of being one of the countless living beings, not qualitatively superior to others, but strong of its specific responsibility. Unfortunately, we are the only ones to consume this planet for many more resources than would be needed. When Singer first uses the term in a technical way he believes he must attack a prejudice: species diversity leads to thinking about moral diversity. A prejudice that Singer analyzes by analogy with sexism or racism, and which has in its structure the vice of considering extrinsic or biological qualities as ethical qualities. The history of antispeciesism as a narrative is a recent history, too recent, and is therefore a history of islands: humanity organized in pockets of containment of the violence that is contested at the root. A history of associations, animal shelters, demonstrations and regulation of personal behavior that have no value other than that of civil disobedience. Antispeciesism makes manifest the practical and revolutionary value of certain forms of thought. In this case, however, unfortunately, the criticism exercised towards the social world is complex. The humanity that emerges is uncertain because it is unpredictable: we have always built ourselves in opposition to animality - our story inevitably coincides with our distancing ourselves from animals and nature. Antispeciesism, in this sense, is the demolition of the fence whose exterior we have never seen, except through mental experimentation. At this point, it's up to you to imagine it.

The possible rightfully falls within our field of investigation: in what way could a humanity that respects the animality of others and its own live? Without this imaginative passage, anthropocentrism remains firm because it is passes from human actions, and it is the limits that we give to our possible actions to be the limits of our possible worlds. The idea we call antispeciesism has some practical consequences that should never, however, be mistaken for causes.

From this moment on we will begin to define the contemporary posthuman through images and suggestions, which only at the end will be outlined in a complete way through a path that will intentionally depart from previous models. We think, by stereotype, of the image of the Zen monk and immediately move away from the image of the posthuman as a half-robot human that emerges from a philosophical literature that has confused posthumanism and transhumanism[10]. Antispeciesism attacks anthropocentrism, and contributes to the development of posthumanism, through an ethics that is not only, as too often has been said, unbalanced on customs and consumption but also, and above all, attentive to the observation of animality as "presence to oneself". Antispeciesism is not only denial of the species boundary as a moral boundary, but is the recovery of animality in an equal and opposite way to that of Nietzsche.

Let's start from afar, from the proposition 6.4311 of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus, with a clearly mystical flavor: “he who lives in the present lives eternally”. But who is it that lives in the present, mysticism aside? He who, devoid of memory, or at least of long-term memory, does not enjoy consciousness that allows him to think about himself in the past or to project himself into the future. Children would be good candidates, but they have eternal time counted: they grow up, become adult humans, remember and hope - they are mortal and therefore doomed to despair. Martin Heidegger, where Wittgenstein saw a resource, complained of a limit: only the animal lives an eternal present, without the temporality added to the being that is the basis of being-there, the animal cannot die. But the limit, if we put the two arguments together, is quickly circumvented: the animal does not die because it lives in the present and is therefore eternal. Like the Borges tiger, “in his world there are no names and no past, nor future, only a true instant”[11].

We overlook the fact that there are many animals, and some (think of primates) as we know from cognitive ethology, have the ability to represent themselves not only in space but also in time, and we rather consider animality as the property that I have called "absolute presence to oneself". The problems of anthropocentric humanism, and of humanity which this therefore expresses, derive largely from the inability to live the "here and now"; antispeciesism is grafted on the resolution of this inability, not as an ethical movement for its own sake, but as part of the metaphysical process that leads to the posthuman. Why is the Zen monk the model? For the form of life it expresses: it seeks peace in the awareness of the moment, and accepts its limit. The question is what we learn from animality. And the answer is the negated: that nature, which is common to the living with humanity, as a concept, has been eliminated by humanity.

Human beings carry out their lives within a narrative that allows simplifying a justification for our current actions and for what we plan to do. If speciesism is paradoxically a positive narrative - you can do this or that without caring about the fate of animals because they lack moral status - antispeciesism is a narrative that is absolutely negative if it is an end in itself: you cannot do this, and you cannot do that, because the animals suffer. The idea of the world that is expressed by antispeciesism, in its various forms, is simply incorrect: we don't need something that expresses a more or less articulated set of totems and taboos, we need to know a possible alternative world compared to the one that is criticized. In this sense, the image of humanity that emerges from antispeciesism is useful here as part of a larger whole, but useless if left to its solitary destiny. The antispeciesism that I will use is the weak one: it is necessary to weaken arguments that are not aimed at eliminating the pain of the animals (for example, respecting them for ecological, political, health-giving reasons, etc.). In this way, the power of the conclusion is strengthened: animality must be unleashed, like the dancing star of Nietzsche, beyond any possible forecast.

The first transformation

The antispeciesist pill has a bitter taste and an apparently devastating effect, once taken. First of all, it acts on sight: what was invisible is now evident - the social world, regulated by us, is basically a slaughterhouse: everywhere around us lies the meaningless death authorized by speciesism. If you understand that it is possible to live without harming the billions of animals that we slaughter every year, what leads us to continue? The economy, politics, tradition, of course, but that's not enough. Our image of humanity, a recent invention of social sciences according to Michel Foucault, is a hologram projected on a wall without shadows. Being a speciesist helps happiness, a bitter topic that no antispeciesist philosopher has ever wanted to analyze: the simple awareness of being unique and special, and that everything else is ontological furnishing, is wonderful. The flavor of meat, which from prehistory to contemporary times makes the human being a more noble descendant than the cannibal in fur, is much more than a panacea for the palate: it is an anesthetic of the soul. The image of the monk, therefore, returns, because if you move the axis of happiness from needs, where it has always been, you need to find another place to orient it. A simple meal, a humble life and in harmony with nature do not seem to be able to compete with the manager's American dream of enjoying his hamburger while watching an NBA game on TV. And yet, if philosophy, even the most speculative and theoretical, does not pass by an overall revolution of the image of humanity that we call "western well-being", but which is actually a massacre of every living thing and every free space in this world, philosophy itself is useless. Without exemplary actions[12], progress is simply impossible[13].

The happiness of speciesism, however, is an empty happiness that has nothing to do with Wittgenstein's argument that “he world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man”[14]. Unfortunately, our world is common and always following Wittgenstein “the life of knowledge is the life that is happy despite the misery of the world”[15]: nothing more pertinent. Speciesism is the misery of the world that refuses the life of knowledge, refuses to know what exists beyond the muffled and false world in which humanity has locked itself up, that is, beyond our apparent order until it is disorder to knocking from the outside: a nuclear power plant that explodes, as in Fukushima in Japan in 2011, a truck carrying pigs for slaughter that stalls on the highway showing us the removed, or a blanket of smog that floods Delhi in the morning and that does not allow you to see anything between city traffic.

The first transformation is an invitation to look elsewhere before it is elsewhere, with an aspect that will be that of a monster, to come to us: philosophy is the only strategy of salvation. Our body begins to appear different: our legs don't seem so different from the legs of a pig, and our existence united by a common fate with all the other life forms already appears less special than before. The path is long, because something keeps us firm and it is often not enough to take care of the animals to begin the change: speciesism, pretending to be liberation, can keep us firm and anchored in the center. Yet it falters and we realize that it cannot be truly justified to produce the life of animals only to benefit from vices, tastes, and flavors, which are the same as those of a primitive human who should have disappeared millennia ago. And perhaps, in fact, it is not a question of reasoning in terms of consumption, but of the consumed; this is the perspective that we never succeed in assuming in change. Antispeciesism pushes out, but alone is not enough: the therapy is long, and until it is completed Deleuze will be right in saying that "the satisfaction of his [man's] desire is for the benefit of the only species, he has worked with dedication to an end that was not at all his»[16]. As long as it is as a human species that we think about it, without understanding that every living being is first and foremost a monad overlooking the outside, the construction site will remain open.

1. Obviously, in the past, I thought it important to also give an ethical illustration: cf. L. caffo, The pig does not make the revolution. Manifesto for a weak antispeciesism, Sonda, Casale Monferrato (al) 2013

2.  g. deleuze, Logic of sense (1969), Feltrinelli, Milan 2005, p. 247.

3.  P. Apsein, Chinese Proverbs. The ancient oriental wisdom to meditate, Biesse - Brancato, Catania 2009, p. 15.

4.  On the subject I refer to L. Caffo, In the Corridors of Animal Minds, in "Journal of Animal Ethics", IV (2014), n. 1, pp. 103-8.

5.  J. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am  (2006), edited by M.-L. Mallet, Jaca Book, Milan 2006, p. 68.

6.  For this notion, see chapter i of G. Clément, The environment alternative (2014), Quodlibet, Macerata 2015.

7.  Anam the nameless. The last interview with Tiziano Terzani, edited by M. Zanot, Longanesi, Milan 2005.

8.  C. Pavese, The job of living. Diary 1936-1950, Einaudi, Turin 2014, p. 301.

9.  On several occasions, but for a quick articulation of his assumptions: L. Caffo, Weak antispecism, in m. Andreozzi, S. Catiglione and A. Massaro (ed.), Animal emotions. Research and disciplines compared, led, Milan 2013, pp. 77-88.

10.  A happy island in this sense, where the distinction is clear, is G. Leghissa, Posthuman by choice, Mimesis, Milan-Udine 2015.

11.  J. L. Borges, The other tiger (1960), in id., Poems (1923-1976), trad. by L. Bacchi Wilcock, Rizzoli, Milan 1980, p. 121.

12.  See in this sense the analysis of M. Ferraris, Emergenza, Einaudi, Turin 2016, in which the "Pharisaism" typical of a philosophy that preaches good and scratches badly is contested, and a philosophy of the future in which political thoughts and actions correspond.

13.  On the subject I argued extensively in the lesson dedicated to the Future in L. Caffo, Everyday life. Five philosophy lessons to learn how to stay in the world, Einaudi, Turin 2016.

14.  L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1922), in id., Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Quaderni 1914-1916, edited by A. G. Conte, Einaudi, Turin 2009, 6.43.

15.  Id., Notebooks 1914-1916, ibid., aphorism of 13 August 1916.

16.  G. Deleuze, Instincts and institutions (1955), Mimesis, Milan-Udine 2014, p. 62.

Leonardo Caffo is philosopher and curator. Currently, he is co-curator of the Public Program at La Triennale Milano and professor of Ontology at Politecnico, in Turin. He is professor of Philosophy of Art at NABA, in Milan.