Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World

14. On Animal Immortality: An Argument for the Possibility of Animal Immortality in Light of the History of Philosophy

285 14 On Animal Immortality An Argument for the Possibility of Animal Immortality in Light of the History of Philosophy johanna tito Had a dog named Blue… Come on Blue, you good dog you… When I get to heaven first thing I’ll do, is shake off my bones and whistle for Blue, together we’ll run in fields of air, but I don’t want to go if Blue’s not there… —from the aspca humane education video Throwaways THE ISSUE Had a dog named Blue… Broadly speaking, the collection of essays in this volume deals with the moral and ethical treatment of nonhuman animals as a cultural studies issue. “To my mind,” writes the editor of the series in a call for papers, “these concerns [of the ethical treatment of animals] are germane to cultural studies with its focus on other aspects of culture such as racism, sexism , ageism, etc.” The editor implies that in certain respects our relation to animals may have something in common with racism, sexism and ageism. The latter are all instances of prejudices, of overgeneralizations, pejorative in nature, often produced and sustained by uncritically accepted platitudes . The editor is correct in her implication: as a culture, much of our behaviour towards nonhuman animals is the result of uncritically accepted, commonly held beliefs, many pejorative, about the nature of animals. “They aren’t aware of death the way humans are” and “They don’t experience pain the way humans do” are just two examples of such platitudes. It cannot be denied that as a society we show a great deal of insensitivity to nonhuman animals: factory farming, commercial slaughter of seals, our unwillingness to control pet overpopulation resulting in the killing of millions of unwanted cats and dogs every year, the failure of our legal system to protect nonhuman animals from even the most horrendous instances of torture, are all cases in point. Part of our insensitivity towards animals is undoubtedly based on prejudices such as those listed above. Another commonly held prejudice concerning nonhuman animals is the belief that they are excluded from the possibility of immortality. While at face value this belief seems innocuous enough—after all, many humans do not believe in human immortality either—when we examine more closely the position that denies nonhuman animals the very possibility of immortality, we find that it consists not only of a number of sub-beliefs expressive of human chauvinism, but that it also reflects prejudices concerning human nature as well, prejudices well worth challenging. ON KNOWING When I get to heaven… The belief that attributes immortality exclusively to the human soul, and more specifically to only the rational part of the human soul, is a long-standing one in the history of Western thought. It is part of a philosophy or culture of knowing that harks back to Plato, the father of philosophy. Plato observed that the soul perceives Ideas. In order to perceive them, he concluded , the soul must be like the Ideas: immaterial and simple. Because it is simple and immaterial, the soul can never be broken down or destroyed the way composite material things can be. Hence, the soul’s immortality. But the Ideas the soul perceives stand in relation to each other—they are related hierarchically, logically or rationally. (The paradigm of this would be the science of mathematics in which all truths are derived from basic axioms.) The soul is at home with Ideas, and with their logical, rational relation , so much so, according to Plato, that prior to birth the soul lived in the realm of Ideas and knew the Ideas. But birth is a fall through forgetfulness and the soul’s task in this earthly life, Plato maintains, is to recollect the Ideas and relate them back to the highest Idea, that of the Good. In short, the soul’s task is to be rational. The more rational the soul is, the 286 Johanna Tito more it expresses its immortal nature. The highest expression of this rationality would be philosophy, according to Plato. It has been said that all philosophy is but a footnote to Plato, and it certainly is true that some version or other of Plato’s theory of the immortal soul has informed not only Western philosophy but also Western culture in general. The tradition has, by and large, stressed a philosophy of knowing or science and has...