A Wind Blowing Towards The World

Why would my memories be like this? Why would they show themselves to me in such a way that my ownership of them should sometimes strike me as a “faintly surreal discovery”? When I remember, I am – so I’m told – aware of the content of my memories – of what my memories depict. And, far from making me what I am, I suspect the content of my memories really is not part of me at all. The French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, reached a similar conclusion.

In his classic investigation of the nature of consciousness, Sartre defended a rather remarkable claim, one that, I am beginning to suspect, few since have really understood. He wrote:

“All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness that is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no ‘content’”.

Consciousness has no content – there is nothing in it. Consciousness is nothing – a little pocket of nothingness that has insinuated itself into the heart of being. Sartre’s rather large book, Being and Nothingness, is, I think, nothing more than an attempt to work out the implications of these two sentences.

“All consciousness is consciousness of something”. This has a clear, but striking, consequence: nothing I am aware of can be part of my consciousness. Everything I am aware of is outside my consciousness. At one time, many years ago, I would have been standing on a beach with Brenin and Nina, watching them run around in the teeth of an Irish gale, as I donned my wetsuit and got ready to climb into some of the best surf of the winter. Obviously, Brenin and Nina are not part of my consciousness. But Sartre’s idea applies much more generally. Not only are Brenin and Nina outside my consciousness, so too is my memory of them.

What would it be to remember Brenin and Nina on the beach at Inchydoney? Does an image flash before my mind, like an old photograph? But the image, in itself, could mean anything at all. This was a theme championed by the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein:

It is not common to think of Wittgenstein and Sartre as having the same ideas or concerns, but I think there is close connection between them. Wittgenstein would have pointed out that the image might depict two dogs on a beach. It might depict play. It might depict happiness. In principle, the image might mean any number of things. Nothing much is changed if we replace a static image, like a photograph, with a moving one – such as a film. Certain possible ambiguities would be closed off, but others remain; yet others might be engendered by the transition from static to dynamic images.

Sartre would have put the issue in these terms. Whether static or dynamic, the image has no intentionality. Taken in-itself it is not about anything. It can be about something – it can mean or signify something – but not in-itself. What it means is a function of how it is interpreted. And, for Sartre, what provides the interpretation is consciousness.

Consciousness is intrinsically of or about something. It is, as philosophers call it, intentional. But the content of memory is not about anything – not taken in itself. The conclusion, Sartre realized, is that the content of memory is not part of consciousness. And, if I am consciousness, this means the content of my memory is not part of me. The same point applies to anything I am aware of.

Think of Sartre as supplying a challenge: try to point to consciousness – try to point to something that is in consciousness. As you say “Here it is!” – mentally pointing to something you remember, or something you think, or believe, or feel – this becomes an object of your consciousness and so is, if Sartre is correct, precisely not a part of your consciousness; it is not part of you. The entire world is outside you – for the world is simply a collection of things of which you are aware; or, at least, of which you can be aware if your attention is suitably engaged. Therefore, consciousness can be nothing at all. Consciousness, Sartre concludes, is simply a pure directedness towards the world – a “wind blowing toward the world” as he once put it. Consciousness is a directedness towards things that it is not and it is nothing more than this. If I am consciousness, then everything I am aware of is outside of me, irreducibly alien to me. If am aware of the content of my memories, then they cannot be part of what I am.

Nothing Brightly Embossed on Them …

These passages advert to the relative persistence of the form of memories over their content. Even when their contents are no longer available to us, memories have a form that continues to guide us, to shape our lives in various ways, for good or for ill. This is what Rilke meant when he wrote of memories becoming part of our blood. There is, however, more to it than merely the persistence of form. There is also an issue of ownership. I suspect the form of my memories is mine in a way that their content can never be. The form of my memories belongs to me in a way their content never can. This, again, was a theme of The Philosopher and the Wolf.

'Often my memories of Brenin are tinged with a strange sort of amazement. It’s as if the memories are made up of partially overlapping images: one senses that the images are connected in an important way, but they’re too blurred to make out. And then they suddenly converge – snap into focus – like images in an old kaleidoscope. I remember Brenin next to me, striding the touchlines of the rugby pitch in Tuscaloosa. I remember him sitting next to me at the post-match party, when pretty Alabama girls would come up and say: I just love your dog. I remember him running with me through the streets of Tuscaloosa; and when the Tuscaloosa city streets transformed into lanes of an Irish countryside I remember the pack running next to me, easily matching its stride to mine. I remember Brenin, his daughter Tess and his friend Nina, bouncing like salmon through the seas of barley. I remember Brenin dying in my arms in the back of the Jeep. And when the convergence of images happens, I think: is that really me? Was it really me that did those things? Is that really my life?

This realization sometimes strikes me as a faintly surreal discovery. That I am in these memories at all is not given: sometimes it is a fortuitous bonus that must be discovered.'

The Philosopher and the Wolf, p. 242

Memories have both form and content. Their content is something I recall, something of which I am aware when I have the memories. But there is nothing brightly embossed on this content that reads: “Property of Mark Rowlands”. Often, the most I can hope for is that some forgotten hand will have scrawled something on the back.

Although I wasn’t familiar with the work of Rilke at the time, this idea was a continuing theme of The Philosopher and the Wolf. There, I argued that when we think of memory, we fall victim to what I called the “prejudice of conscious recall”. We might equally call it the “prejudice of content over form”. There is, I argued, a deeper way of remembering than the mere recall of content:

'But there are different ways of remembering. And when we think of memory, we overlook what is most important in favor of what is most obvious. A bird does not fly by flapping its wings: this is merely what gives it forward propulsion. The real principles of flight are to be found in the shape of the bird’s wings, and the resulting differences in air pressure on the upper and lower surfaces. But in our early attempts to fly, we overlooked what is most important in favor of what is most obvious: we built flapping machines. Our understanding of memory is similar. We think of memory as conscious experiences whereby we recall past events. But this is just the flapping of wings. These memories are not particularly reliable at the best of times, and are the first to fade as our brains begin their long, but inexorable, descent into indolence; like the flapping of a bird’s wings that gradually fades in the distance.'

The Philosopher and the Wolf, pp. 45-6

The raggedy absence through which Tess announces her presence to a time before she was born is a reminder that there is another way of remembering. Here, again, The Philosopher and the Wolf:

'But there is another, deeper and more important, way of remembering: a form of memory that no one ever thought to dignify with a name. This is the memory of a past that has written itself on you, in your character and in the life on which you bring this character to bear. You are not aware of these memories: often they are not even the sorts of things of which you can be conscious. But they, more than anything else, make you what you are. These memories are exhibited in the decisions you make, and the actions you take, and the life that you thereby live. It is in our lives, and not fundamentally in our conscious experiences, that we find the memories of those who are gone. Our consciousness is fickle, not worthy of the task of remembering. When someone is worth remembering, then being a person they have helped fashion and living a life they have helped forge: these are not only the ways in which we remember them; they are the ways in which we honor them.'

The Philosopher and the Wolf, p. 46

Glance and Gesture, Nameless

A couple of years after Nina had joined us, Brenin unilaterally decided to augment the pack on his own. Tess joined us 63 days plus around five weeks later. When this photograph was taken, when this memory was frozen, Tess did not yet exist. And yet here she is. There is an absence – a raggedy absence – that you’ll see if you turn your attention to the top right hand corner. When you’re there, if you track left, you’ll also see some scratches and indentations. And if you track all the way to the left of the picture you will see some more. I rescued this photograph from the jaws of Tess – one of many items that I rescued, or failed to rescue from the jaws of Tess. This raggedy absence is Tess, present as absent. It is Tess, Brenin’s daughter, impinging on a time before she was born. It is Tess saying, “I am here too”, even though she was not yet a glint in her wolf-father’s eye.

When she chewed away at this photograph, Tess didn’t ruin it: she augmented it, added immeasurably to it. If this photograph were a memory, frozen in time, when Tess gnawed away at it, and thus encroached onto a time before she was born, she did not do so by altering the content of the memory but by altering its form. The content of the memory is what the memory is about, what it depicts. And this is till the same: it is still a depiction of two friends, charging around a beach on a rare sunny Irish day. If this photograph was a memory, Tess would have altered its form – transformed it into a raggedy memory. Every memory has not just content but a form. Every memory has a shape. The memory theory – which I mentioned at the beginning of this talk – claims that our memories make us who we are: distinct, unique people who persist through time. Perhaps the theory is right – although I suspect not – but it is certainly ambiguous. If my memories make me who I am, is this “I” to be found in the content of my memories or in their form?

The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke once said something that I think is both profoundly beautiful and profoundly true about memories:

“But it is still not enough to have mem­o­ries. One must be able to for­get them, if they are many, and have the great patience to wait for them to come again. For it is not the mem­o­ries them­selves. Only when they become blood in us, glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves, only then can it happen in a very rare hour, the first word of a line arises out of their midst and strides out of them.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

 Rilke is talking here of the importance of memory for a poet, the role that memory plays in artistic creation. But I think his insight is true more generally. The most important memories are the ones that come again, and for this they must first be forgotten. When they come again, when they return to us, it is not in their original way. The memories that come again are the ones that have become part of our blood, “glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves.” Their content has gone, but their form remains. This form shapes us. 

This photograph was taken at Inchydoney beach, in County Cork, Ireland. On the back, some forgotten hand tells me that it is February 1998. It’s an unusual photograph. Shadows are something you don’t very often see in Ireland, certainly not in February. Shadows need sun. I lived there for more than five years, and I swear it rained every single day.

I love this frozen memory for so many reasons. To begin with, you get a good idea of the size and power of Brenin. He would have been around seven and a half years old, when this photograph was taken. Nina was roughly eighteen months old at this time, grown to full size, and significantly larger than most female German shepherds or malamutes. As you can see, Brenin dwarfs her. He was probably a little heavy, and the lean and clean angularity of his youth had considerably softened. I’ve found out that middle age tends to do that to you.

I love this frozen memory also because it provides a useful antidote to a certain – dominant – way of thinking about happiness. We tend to think of happiness as an inner state or process: something that occurs on the inside – in here. If another person is happy, that is not something we can see or know, but only infer or guess. But in this picture, you can – at least I can – see the happiness of these two friends. I don’t think happiness is necessarily an inner process at all. I like to think of it more as a field through which we can, if we are lucky, walk or run. I am trading on the on the ambiguity of the word ‘field’. There are Irish fields of barley, and French fields of lavender; and Brenin and Nina would run through many of these. But there are also magnetic fields and gravitational fields. The happiness of these animals radiates out from them; it reverberates across the open space – the clearing between us. I am immersed in a field of happiness; surrounded by it, embraced by it. Happiness warms me from the outside in, not the inside out.

But for the purposes of this evening’s talk, the most important thing about this frozen memory is not what is in it but what is not – what is absent and yet still present.

When we moved to Ireland, Brenin had to go into quarantine for six months. This was back in the days before pet passports and the like, and the British and Irish governments apparently had not had time to catch up with the recent invention of a rabies vaccine by Louis Pasteur in 1885. When he was released, I vowed to make the second half of his life as good as it could possibly be, and so decided to get him a friend: one with more legs and a colder nose than I. The result was Nina, a German shepherd/malamute mix. Here she is in Knockduff Lodge – the tiny, drafty cottage in the middle of nowhere that we all shared. She’s still quite a young dog (her muzzle went prematurely grey), and here she’s in full on “take me for a run or I might just have to kill you” mode.

As a result of having to share a life with a rootless and restless philosopher, Brenin became not only a highly educated wolf – the recipient of more free university education than any wolf that ever lived – but also, I suppose, a rather cosmopolitan wolf, moving with me from Alabama to Ireland, on to Wales, England, and finally to France. Here is a memory that is recorded in Running with the Pack: the memory of a run that took place a few days before we moved from Alabama to Ireland.

This is a run of sadness…

… a run of times that have gone and will never come again. This is a run of fear: a run of times as yet unknown. I will soon, in a few short days, be putting Brenin on a plane to Ireland, and quarantine, but at this moment he floats along beside me as we run through the early morning streets of Tuscaloosa. I was twenty-four when I moved here, fresh out of Oxford, and starting my first real job. I began Oxford-style. I went to work in blazer and flannels. I ended up grunge: t-shirts, shorts, flip-flops and a ponytail. I didn’t anticipate my first job turning into a seven-year party, but sometimes things have a funny way of turning out. After seven years, over a hundred rugby games, thousands of tequila shooters, and more 25c longneck beers than I can number, I am ready to leave Alabama. When I arrived here, I was younger than many of my students. So, it was perhaps not particularly surprising that I found my way into the University’s student rugby team, and the rather surreal sub-culture that surrounds it. But before I knew it I am thirty-one. I’m too old, and the party has moved on. There is only so long you can turn up at student parties – even student rugby parties – without it getting first a little sad, and after that a little creepy. I suspect I have already transgressed the borders of sad, and want to get the hell out of Dodge before I cross over into creepy. No one comes back from creepy.

It is an early Sunday morning. We had a game the previous day, followed by the inevitable festivities, and so I am running off the party of the night before. My memories of those streets are pallid. In this respect they are not inaccurate, for the streets were also pallid. Once the blinding white porched-and-pillared abodes of respectable southern gentility, this part of town has been taken over by the students of the University of Alabama, and the houses are grey and cracked and peeling from all the young lives that have burned brightly within them. But my memories are pallid and peeling for another reason. They were made in a time when I had little need for them. Age is not, in fact, the destroyer of memories; that belongs to youth. Age is the preserver of memories, the reverer of memories. The memories I make become stronger as I get older. The memories I made when I was young are sickly children.

Running with the Pack

On that note, here is a passage from The Philosopher and the Wolf that records a memory of running. The visual backdrop (not given here) is the Black Warrior River along which Brenin and I would run most mornings.

On Our Runs Together …

I realized something both humbling and profound: I was in the presence of a creature that was, in most important respects, superior to me. My realization was fundamentally an aesthetic one. When we were running, Brenin would glide across the ground with an elegance and economy of movement I have never seen in a dog. When a dog trots, no matter how refined and efficient its gait, there is always a small vertical vector present in the movement of its feet, and this movement of the feet will transmit itself to the line of its shoulders and back. A wolf uses its ankles and large feet to propel it forwards. As a result there is far less movement in its legs – these remain straight and move forwards and backwards but not up and down. So, when Brenin trotted, his shoulders and back remained flat and level. From a distance, it looked like he was floating an inch or two above the ground. When he was especially happy or pleased with himself, this would be converted into an exaggerated bounce. But his default motion was the glide. Brenin is gone now and when I try to picture him it is difficult to furnish this picture with the details necessary to make it a concrete and living representation. But his essence is still there for me. I can still see it: the ghostly wolf in the early-morning Alabama mist, gliding effortlessly over the ground, silent, fluid and serene.

The contrast with the noisy, puffing and leaden-footed thudding of the ape that ran beside him could not have been more pronounced or depressing. I wanted to be able to lope. I wanted to glide across the ground as if I were floating an inch or two above it. But no matter how good at running I became – and I became very good – this was always going to escape me. If you want to understand the soul of the wolf – the essence of the wolf, what the wolf is all about – then you should look at the way the wolf moves. And the crabbed and graceless bustling of the ape, I came to realize with sadness and regret, is an expression of the crabbed and graceless soul that lies beneath.

The Philosopher and the Wolf, pp. 84-6.

When I was twenty-seven, I did something really rather stupid …

Actually, I almost certainly did many stupid things that year – I was, after all, twenty-seven – but this is the only one I remember because it went on to indelibly shape the future course of my life. When I first met Brenin, I was a young assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, and he was six-weeks old, a cuddly little teddy bear of a wolf cub. At least, he was sold to me as a wolf, but it is very likely that he was wolf-dog mix. Whatever he was, he grew up.

Brenin had certain – let us call them – idiosyncrasies. If I left him unattended for more than a few minutes, he would destroy anything he could lay his jaws on – which, given that he grew to be thirty-five inches at the withers, included pretty much everything that wasn’t screwed to the ceiling. I don’t know if he was easily bored, had separation anxiety, or claustrophobia, or some combination of all of these things. But the result was that Brenin had to go everywhere I did. I took him to lectures with me at the University. He would lie down and sleep in the corner of the lecture room: most of the time anyway – when he didn’t things would get interesting. For example you can probably imagine the circumstances that caused me to append this little cautionary note to my syllabus:

Note: Please do not pay any attention to the wolf. He will not hurt you. However, if you do have any food in your bags, please ensure that those bags are securely fastened shut.

I can’t be certain of this, of course, but I strongly suspect that this was the first time these three sentences had ever appeared on a philosophy syllabus.

Any socializing I did – bars, parties, and I did a lot of that stuff when I was in Alabama – Brenin had to come too. If I went on a date, he would play the lupine gooseberry. For more than a decade Brenin and I lived our lives in each other’s pockets.

Allied to his destructive proclivities was his boundless energy. When Brenin was a cub, and then a young wolf, he liked to play a game: he would grab a cushion off the sofa or armchair on which I was sitting, and tear off out the garden, with me in hot pursuit. It was a game of chase, and he loved it. But when he started getting big, he decided to modify the game. One day, sitting in my study – no doubt thinking about something very boring – my reflections were interrupted by a sequence of loud thuds coming from the room that led out to the back yard. Instead of taking a cushion from the armchair and going out the garden, Brenin had decided that it would be far more rewarding to take the rest of armchair too. The thuds were made by the chair, locked firmly in Brenin’s jaws, being repeatedly slammed against the doorframe. I think it was at precisely this moment I decided that, all things considered, it would be a really, really good thing if Brenin were constantly exhausted. And so our daily walks together became daily runs. That thud-thud-thud of an armchair against a doorframe marked the beginning of a life of almost daily running.

Several people have asked me to make this lecture available online. I'll do in bite sized bits-minus the ad lib stuff, of course. Here's the first installment. I had a wonderful time in the Bluegrass Country. Thanks to all who made it happen, and who came to hear me speak. And thanks especially to Minh Nguyen, Matthew Pianalto, and Bruce McLaren for sharing a beer or two with me afterwards. 

Introduction

I would like to thank the Department of Philosophy and Eastern Kentucky University for the invitation to speak here this evening. I have been invited to talk about a book I wrote a few years ago, The Philosopher and the Wolf. This is the US version.

The book is about many things – not just a philosopher and a wolf. Fundamentally, I suppose, it is a book about growing up. I’ve just finished – a few weeks ago – a sequel of sorts. It’s called Running with the Pack, and it’s book about growing old. I shall also weave elements of that book into this evening’s talk.

         The Philosopher and the Wolf is what’s known as a memoir: a book of memories. I shall talk about this book tonight, but I am also going to talk with it. I shall not talk not just about the memories the book contains but use these to examine the idea of memory: of what it is to remember someone. Some people say that it is our memories that make us who we are. Indeed, there is a well-known philosophical theory that says just that: what makes me the person I am, the same person today as I was yesterday, a different person from anyone else – it is my memories that do this. This is known as the memory theory. This evening, I am going to talk about The Philosopher and the Wolf. That is my primary aim. But it is well worth keeping the memory theory in the back of your mind – it is a kind of secondary target.

http://www.eku.edu/news/philosopher-and-wolf-author-rowlands-present-chautauqua-lecture-dec-1

In particular, I am going to use the book to explore the idea of remembering. This connects up with some remarks I made in this blog - many moons ago - on the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's idea that the most important memories are the ones that become part of your blood. I've finally worked out what I want to say about all of this.

If you are in the vicinity, come and say hello.

Date/Time/Venue:

Woodburn Hall, room 120 Friday, November 4th, 2011 4:00p to 6:00p

If you are in the area, come and say hello.

I am very pleased to say – I’ve said it before, but this time it’s true – that I have now finished Running with the Pack. Definitely. Sometimes, I seem to think of the books I’ve written in the same way that Plato thought of the written word more generally: as orphaned children sent out into the world, with no one to protect them. Some times it is difficult to cut the ties. But they are now cut – it is in production, and will be out some time in the second half of 2012.

The Philosopher and the Wolf was, in essence, about growing up. Running with the Pack is about growing old, and so is a sequel of sorts. There is, I suppose, a natural trilogy here, but I hope I don’t have to write the third part for a long time yet.

Fiske-Harrison’s second suggestion seems to be that, as the recipient of an unfavorable review from him, I should not be allowed to review his book. I find this charge puzzling. First, on a purely factual matter, I do not remember his review being especially unfavourable. He said some nice things, and some rather less nice things – with the latter admittedly more numerous. But I have had much worse. I did think his objections were curiously off target, and this was almost certainly the result of his not understanding the claims I made in that book. But I sensed he had put a lot of thought into the review, and had done his best. And that is all one can ask of a reviewer. I did feel a little guilty that I was dispensing such a negative review – never something one likes to do anyway – to an author who had been kinder to my own work. However, when I am commissioned, and paid, by a publication like the TLS to review a book, I take on an obligation to do so as honestly and impartially as I can. My negative review of his book was not the result of personal animus, but of the fact that, in my view, the book is not very good.

Of course, this assessment is not something I plucked from nowhere and left undefended. I supported it by arguing that Fiske-Harrison’s arguments in defence of bullfighting were not very convincing because they fell victim to numerous, serious, logical fallacies. My five minutes are up. More on this at some future date – possibly, if I don’t get too bored.

Needless to say, his talk garnered a huge audience.

In the first paragraph of his response, Fiske-Harrison seems to claim that (a) as a proponent of vegetarianism, I should not be allowed to review a book on bullfighting and (b) as the recipient of an unfavorable review from him, I should not be allowed to review his book. Today, I shall deal with (a).

The general principle underwriting (a) seems to be this. One writes a book that defends a given thesis. Only people who agree, or at the very least do not disagree, with this thesis should be allowed to review this book. The writer in me loves this idea – only people who already agree with me should be allowed to review my books. Unfortunately, it does seem to take away the point of reviewing, and I assume the silliness of this idea is evident to all.

Notice, this is not an attack on Fiske-Harrison but on his argument. I do not abhor Fiske-Harrison. I abhor his views. We live in a rather sad age where people routinely overlook the distinction between a person and the views they hold, so an attack on the view is seen as an attack on the person. I reject this inference. When I criticize, I see only arguments and views, not people.

Sir, – It seems the TLS has chosen a reviewer for my book, Into the Arena (September 16), who not only dislikes its subject, bullfighting (Mark Rowlands is a proponent of vegetarianism and once tried to make his pet wolf into one, as described in The Philosopher and the Wolf), but also its author (I reviewed his book elsewhere, unfavourably, and he has published his views on this). Overlooking his personal tone, I will focus some of his errors of fact and logic.

First, Álvaro Múnera was not a “prominent bullfighter”; he never even achieved the rank of matador, retiring while still a novillero,'novice bullfighter'. Múnera himself said in an interview on Radio Netherlands International that he became an anti-bullfight lobbyist because a friend’s aunt told him he was evil for killing bulls, just as he said he became a novice because his father told him to. So I do not find it “startling arrogance” to describe him in his own terms. And the former matador Eduardo Dávila Miura was not “at this time, giving lessons for a modest E35 an hour” but for E1,000 an hour, the fractional price being an exceptional offer to a friend of friends.

Rowlands also misleadingly edits a sentence by the taurine author Barnaby Conrad, so that the hundreds of deaths of bullfighters in the arena - and one in six of the three hundred or so major matadors - in the past three centuries, becomes a mere “fifty-two matador deaths in the arena since 1700”.

Moving from facts to reasoning: having accepted that “the lives of fighting cattle are better than beef cattle, and death in the ring is no worse than death in the slaughterhouse”, he then claims that I am trying to justify one wrong by pointing out another. I never argued this. My thesis is that we are dishonest about our true views on the moral status of animals and that the evidence of this is our complicity with the meat industry, most of the output of which is of nutritionally negative value. And when I point out the veganism and anti-pet owning stance of the animal rights campaigner Jordi Casamitjana, I am offering it as evidence of the endpoint of the road these two polemicists would have us go down with them.

Rowlands also notably ignores my argument that if you ban bullfighting then the ranches will become farms for the meat industry, thus actually diminishing animal welfare in Europe (to say nothing of the environmental cost as wilderness is converted to pasture).

Finally, I am well aware that many animal rights philosophers try to evade the consequence of their theories which necessitate intervention in animals’ natural lives, especially predation. Rowlands himself argued in Animal Rights that since predation reduces starvation and disease in prey species, we have no duty to prevent it. However, as there are more humane culling methods than “death-by-predator”, this is simply wrong. In Rowlands’s schema, we have a duty to intervene in the lives of wild animals – tofu for wolves, protective fencing for elk – and in their deaths (lethal injection).

It is ironic that a corollary of Rowlands’s philosophy is that he should be in favour of bullfighting, not against it. His ethical system relies on a Rawlsian “original position” according to which we should make the world into the best it could be for all, given that we don’t know who we will be when we are put in it; for Rowlands – but not Rawls – this includes being incarnated as animals. After research, I can say it is better to be a toro bravo than a meat cow in a factory farm in the United States or a buffalo on the African plains subject to disease, the elements, and a terrible death. A truth known to the 20,000 Spaniards, but not the handful of protesters they filed past, while leaving the Plaza de Toros in Barcelona last Sunday as its gates closed forever after ninety-seven years.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

My response will follow shortly.

Another thing I do not have is time. I am certainly not going to devote more than five minutes a day to the ideas of Fiske-Harrison - that would be a ridiculous waste of my time. So, these posts will be short and sweet – I shall permit myself nothing that takes me more than five minutes to formulate, write and post.

Here is a penultimate version of the review – it is what I sent to the TLS, without the minor copyediting that the TLS used to construct the final version.

Tomorrow I’ll post Fiske-Harrison's response. After that, some critical analysis – to be continued until ennui gets the better of me.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, Into The Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight, Profile Books, 284 pp. £15.99. Tristan Wood, How to Watch a Bullfight, Merlin Unwin Books, 218 pp. £20.

 Into the Arena is an account of Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s progressive immersion into the world of the Spanish bullfight. Tristan Wood’s How to Watch a Bullfight does what it says on the cover: tells you what to expect and how to evaluate a bullfight.

Oxford educated Fiske-Harrison saw his first bullfight in 2000, when he was twenty-three, on holiday with his parents in Seville. This, for reasons that are not made entirely clear, sparked a fascination with the activity. He wrote, for Prospect magazine, a defence of bullfighting that, he frequently hints, many people read. He decided to write a book. In his estimation, his combination of ‘a little biology, a little philosophy, and a measure of intellectual honesty’ … put him ‘out in front of the common pro-and anti-bullfighting commentators’. However, he wants to go further. So, in 2008, he moves to Spain, availed of some contacts, and insinuated himself into the world of bullfighting, becoming friends with, among others, the famous bullfighter, Juan José Padilla. After a year of this, he decided he now had a ‘clear lead over the pack’. Nevertheless: ‘I decided that I must represent the world of the bullfight as it is. And the only way to do that, I decided, was to go over the horns, sword in hand.’ Happily, Eduardo Davila Miura, ‘one of the greatest matadors of all’ is, at this time, giving lessons for modest €35 an hour, and Fiske-Harrison trains with him three to four days a week for several months. He never makes it as far as the public arena, but eventually does manage to kill a juvenile bull – somewhere between one half and two thirds of the size of a bull that typically dies in the arena – watched by a hundred or so people, including family, friends and, apparently, ‘the great and good’ of Seville.

A reader’s reaction to these books is likely to depend decisively on how one thinks of bullfighting. If one thinks there is little wrong with the activity, one may read Fiske-Harrison’s book as an engaging adventure story of a young man pursuing a dream with determination and courage. If one thinks bullfighting is vicious or depraved, it is unlikely one will be able to look beyond that; and one would no more want to learn how to watch a bullfight than how to watch a snuff movie. A significant portion of Fiske-Harrison’s book is, accordingly, concerned with arguing that bullfighting is not morally pernicious.

The moral case against bullfighting is straightforward: making an animal suffer unnecessarily is morally wrong. Opinions vary concerning when suffering qualifies as necessary, but it is widely accepted that suffering undergone in the name of entertainment is unnecessary. This is the primary justification for the banning, in much of the developed world, of a wide variety of blood sports, including, dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bear-baiting, bull-baiting, deer-coursing, and fox-hunting.

Fiske-Harrison’s first argument: bullfighting is art. ‘There’s something tragic about a bullfight. It’s like a piece of theatre – it’s even in three acts – and I think it is its artistic quality which mitigates and justifies the undeniable suffering the bull undergoes in the ring.’ Bullfighting may be art. Ever since Marcel Duchamp attached a urinal to a wall and named it ‘The Fountain’, the boundaries of art have been disputed. But whether or not bullfighting qualifies is irrelevant. Costa Rican artist, Guillermo Vargas, once (reputedly) starved a dog to death in a gallery in Nicaragua. He claimed this was art. Even if correct, this is no justification. The point is not that bullfighting is just like starving a dog to death. Rather it is that if an activity is seriously morally wrong, then it should not be done even if it is art. Therefore, Fiske-Harrison’s appeal to art will work only if we assume that bullfighting is not seriously morally wrong. In other words, his appeal to art is question-begging.

Fiske-Harrison’s second argument: we do things that are as bad, or worse, to other animals. The life of a fighting bull is better than that of beef cattle, and death in the ring is no worse than death in a slaughterhouse. Let us accept this premise. The obvious response is that two wrongs do not make a right: one cannot justify one wrong by pointing to the existence of another wrong. Fiske-Harrison counters with a charge of hypocrisy: ‘How can you dare to say this? If you live in a developed country, you live with mechanized death factories whose products – both carnal and financial – pervade every strata of your life and economy.’ A charge of hypocrisy is, however, clearly irrelevant to the issue in question, viz. whether or not bullfighting is morally wrong. Judging this issue has nothing to do with the character or actions of people who condemn bullfighting. Let us suppose that Smith, a murderer, condemns Jones for being a murderer. Jones responds: ‘How dare you condemn me, you are just as bad – hypocrite!’ This may be true, Smith may be just as bad, but in no way alters the fact that what Jones did was morally wrong.

There is a well-known logical error: the ad hominem fallacy. This is the fallacy of thinking that one can undermine the status of a claim or argument by undermining the motives or character of the person who makes it. The charge of hypocrisy could only be thought relevant by someone who is in the habit of relying on ad hominem fallacies and, unfortunately, examples of this litter Fiske-Harrison’s writing. In the course of a rather bad-tempered exchange with the anti-bullfighting activist, Jordi Casamitjana, Fiske-Harrison cannot refrain from noting that, ‘I was unsurprised when I found out some time later that he is a vegan and also against the keeping of pets’. When writing about the first papal attempt to ban bullfighting, he notes that that Pius V was heavily implicated in the Inquisition. And he manages to combine ad hominem argument with startling arrogance when he writes of Albaro Munera – a prominent bullfighter who later came to condemn his former profession – that he ‘became an animal rights protester because other people told him to.’ The deployment of ad homimem fallacies is both logically inept and morally distasteful.

The ‘argument’ he levels against the animal rights position is also misguided. If we have duties to animals, he writes: ‘our duty would include, for example, stopping lions from killing antelope in so far as we are capable.’ This is a surprising claim given that almost all the major figures who have written in support of animal rights have been very clear both that and why their position does not entail this.

In the case of morality, some have argued, logical argument is always secondary. What drives morality is not rationality but sensibility: sentiment, emotion. In this regard, Fiske-Harrison’s raises, although does not answer, a good question: ‘Why is anyone willing to tolerate watching an animal damaged and damaged and damaged again, and then killed, no matter the beauty of the dance that leads to it?’ I think certain important clues emerge in the course of his writing. First there is an odd sort of emotional detachment on which Fiske-Harrison himself remarks. ‘It seems odd now that I could be so cold about the animal, but I was already immersing myself in my subject’. A bull crying out as a picador’s lance is driven in to it is treated as an opportunity for intellectual speculation rather than empathic identification. What is going on in the bull’s mind?

There is also a curious reluctance to engage in critical moral self-scrutiny. For example, in connection with the demeanour of the bullfighter Miguel Angel Perera, Fiske-Harrison writes: ‘I cannot help but remember research done on bullfighters by the Madrid psychiatrist Jose Carrasco, finding much lower than average levels of monoamine oxidase, a similar neurochemical being found in those members of the prison population who have been classified as clinical psychopaths. Whatever the truth, the twenty-five-year-old Perera is a fascinating study in tranquillity, although I did not seem him smile once at that table.’

Suppose that you are an admirer of an activity that a sizeable majority think is morally monstrous. You believe you know better. More than an admirer, you are entertaining the idea of becoming a practitioner. You then discover that the successful practitioners of the activity tend to have the neurochemical profile characteristic of clinical psychopaths. Would this not set the alarm bells ringing? Would you simply dismiss your new-found knowledge, as Fiske-Harrison apparently does, with ‘Whatever the truth ...’? Would you not just a little more concerned with what the truth actually is?

After being present at the killing of a bull in practice, Fiske-Harrison gets blood on his hands. He writes: ‘I went straight to Flaherty’s, Seville’s Irish pub … and ordered a large glass of Johnny Walker, sitting staring at it with the blood from the great, dead bull staining my hands pink and my nails black. It took days to wash out.’

This does seem a little narcissistic. Admittedly, I was primed for this reading of the passage by its vicinity to some gratuitous account of women – married and unmarried – throwing themselves at him: ‘Was she really making a pass at me in front of her furious husband? I was pretty sure she was – and was half-fascinated (sic) to confirm it.’ While having no direct experience of the blood of a recently deceased Spanish bull, I would be very surprised if it were that difficult to remove from one’s hands. And, so I cannot allay the suspicion that Fiske-Harrison is sitting in the bar with blood on his hands because he enjoys it, his little red badge of courage.

Recent studies have suggested that the decisive factor in determining one’s emotional response to bullfighting is the accompanying narrative. Children are naturally averse to the spectacle, but if you accompany it with a suitably upbeat narrative they grow progressively more comfortable. In their descriptions of foxhunting, writers such as Surtees and Trollope were frequently guilty of vainglory, portraying the fox as a ’noble adversary’ and the hunt as a ‘Homeric contest’. It is difficult to allay the suspicion that vainglory also infects Fiske-Harrison’s account. He admits that bullfighting is not a sport. The statistics are unequivocal. The World Society for the Protection of Animals estimates that around 40,000 bulls are killed each year in Spain’s 600 bullrings and 3,200 bullfights. Around 210,000 bulls die annually in Latin American bullfights. There have, reportedly, been 52 matador deaths in the arena since 1700 – five matadors have died in the ring since the mid 1990s and some ten in the last fifty years. The ratio of dead bulls to dead bullfighters is generally understood to be several hundred thousand to one.

Yet, the language Fiske-Harrison employs throughout the book seems designed to give a quite different impression. The Miuras are ‘the bulls of death’. He apparently endorses Hemingway’s (silly) claim that no land mammal beside man could survive in the ring with a bull. Padilla, his bullfighter friend, will kill some bulls in Pamplona – ‘or die trying.’ Injuries are not uncommon, but the statistics suggest that Padilla is more likely to die trying to get to the arena than in it.

Bullfighting has recently been banned in Catalonia, and has been banned in the Balearic Islands for some time. In Spain, recent surveys suggest that 70% of the population are uninterested in the activity and, in the 15-24 demographic that figure climbs to 82%. Hopefully, this is an indication that bullfighting will eventually be consigned to the dustbin of history, along with the other blood sports. No matter how much one tries to spin a narrative of heroism, culture, art, tradition; no matter how many ad hominem manoeuvres one makes, the truth is always the same. Bullfighting is the deliberate and gratuitous inflicting of suffering and, ultimately, death on a creature that is essentially helpless – done in the name of spectacle. No matter how much you try to dress it up, that can never be a good thing. 

http://www.zlot.obf.edu.pl/

In particular, thanks to Jakub Matyja for the beers, and to Jan for a lightning fast drive up to the Baltic to get me there in time for my wife's brother's wedding.

San Sebastian is a breathtakingly beuatiful place, with fantastic surf for those so inclined, and I heartily recommend a visit. I would like to thank Antonio Casado da Rocha and the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Coutry for their wonderful hospitality. 

http://www.stateoftheocean.org/index.cfm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13814508

Barring mishap, the book should be out in late 2012.